Accountability - Answering to members of the Body

Last night at VCF we had some clarification (debate sounds too academic) on what Christian accountability means. One of the members insisted that Christians should be open and willing to share everything about himself or herself to everyone in the body of Christ, on the basis that we are all saved and are brothers and sisters in Christ, thus there should be absolutely no secrets, no fear, and no pride, no witholding in approaching and confiding in each other.

After all, James said "Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other" (James 5:16) There are numerous texts in the bible that speaks of accountability i.e. answering to others, whether in terms of confessing sins, encouragement, spurring on to good deeds, rebuking, interdependency within the church etc, whether the word "account" is being used explicitly or not.

The absolute terms he used immediately raised my eyebrow (not that I hate absolutes, but because this is a complex issue requiring wisdom in applying its truth rather than one absolute statement). Let me say the good point first: I fully and wholeheartedly understood why he made such a claim that Christians must share everything to everyone. I do not disagree with the theology behind his claim. After all, Jesus did pray for us to be one. It is true that often times Christians do hold back from sharing and from doing so, miss out on the blessing of advice and wisdom one could possibly gain from each other. So I perfectly understood his concern, and to this point I think we could all encourage each other to share. Also, the young today has little grasp of the concept of accountability as submission to leaders, and accountability is necessary.

The difficulty is with the narrowness of his application of truth. Everyone must share everything to everyone. I immediately thought of scenarios as well as real life experiences that suggested that this cannot be true. Scenario: Say for example, a man has just committed adultery, and wishes to repent sincerely. He cannot be looking for a 13-year old youth group member who has recently joined the church and confess to him! He should seek the Pastor or church leaders for help.

This of course means that as much as we should strive to share as many things as we can to people, we do not only need to reckon with truth #1: we are one body of Christ. That is too narrow. We must also reckon with other truths: the ravages of sin in the church of God, that there are judgmental people or gossipers in church that you do not wish to share to, that there are varying degrees of spiritual maturities in a church that make accountability a tricky business. Which is why I told him that there should be different levels of accountability within the church, not one and the same. With love as an analogy, we ought to love everyone as commanded, but we cannot love our wives with the love of God - that's idolatry. Neither can we love our female friends with the love of our wives - that's adultery. There are different types of it.

So I think it is legitimate to say that sometimes fear, lack of trust, immaturity, sin and pride do prevent us from sharing our deepest thought to one another, and we should graciously allow for that.

He disagreed. "But a church should be like this...." I think we ought to realize that total accountability is impossible. The only person we can confess every single thought, deed, and action to is God, the one we finally must account everything to, the only one who is perfectly righteous, perfectly trustworthy, perfectly gracious, perfectly gentle, perfectly holy. We need to recognize that the bible's command for the body of Christ to be united and accountable to each other is a standard to strive to, not a standard already achieved. D.A. Carson would call this "overrealized eschatology". We think we are beyond the end times, perfect and sinless, when we are not! We think we are in the "already now", when in fact we are in the "not yet". Therefore a narrow application of truth can be avoided with the reckoning of our sins, together with God's high calling.

There is still a lot of striving to do to reach God's standard. Until then, saints on earth will share and account to each other imperfectly, but we look to the Day when we all have perfect communion in heaven, with God and with the redeemed people of God.