If the only way to confront is to keep things hidden until church leadership allows you to bring it up publicly, what about the following:
- Jesus called attention to religious leaders publicly for leading others astray. He called them hypocrites, because they boasted about their works and their righteousness.3
- Jesus also made a whip (per John's record) and was violent in the place of worship, overthrowing tables (though not harming any of the animals) when the temple leadership was causing people to not worship.4
- Paul confronted Peter in front of the church, not privately, when Peter's sin was leading others astray.5
- John wrote to churches about an individual bad leader who was misleading people and trying to keep some believers out of fellowship. John wrote that he'd also call them to account when he came to visit.6
I've read accounts of teachers in the church saying any public confrontation would be sinful7. Of course as the leader of the church they simply never allowed the charge to come against them which is in violation of Matthew 18 anyway.
Public confrontation of spiritual leadership is modeled for us by Jesus. More specifically, after Jesus left, and the church began to exist, his apostles modeled how it should be done in a local church setting.
Footnotes:
3 This occurs several times in the Sermon on the Mount. See Matthew 5, 6 and 7
4 "On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple courts and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts. And as he taught them, he said, "Is it not written: 'My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations'? But you have made it 'a den of robbers.'" - Mark 11:15-17
5 When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong...The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray.
When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, "You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? - Paul, Ephesians 2:11,13-14
6 I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to be first, will have nothing to do with us. So when I come, I will call attention to what he is doing, spreading malicious nonsense about us. Not satisfied with that, he refuses to welcome other believers. He also stops those who want to do so and puts them out of the church. - The Apostle John, 3 John 1:9-10
7 Google Matthew 18 or "biblical confrontation" and you'll find people's accounts of this.
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