Blessed Are the Autism Moms Who Make Themselves Poor

To choose to set yourself aside and serve a child with autism is to anchor yourself to ‘the vulnerable’. Our kids are vulnerable, no two ways about it. When we become their defenders, we stand in front of them and take the hits that were meant for them.

When we physically protect them from injuring themselves, sometimes we end up in the emergency room.

When we bear their emotional burden of not having friends, we feel their pain, sometimes as intensely as they do.

When we spend our retirement money getting the best treatment and services we can afford, we decrease their chance of having to live in an institution by increasing our chance of having to one day live in an institution.

When we pour our limited resources into the bottomless pit called autism, we choose to make ourselves poor.

And when we do that, we become the people that God came for when He humbled Himself, put on flesh and came to earth.

When Jesus began his public ministry He said this:

Luke 4:16-20
And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read.

And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Jesus came for the poor, because He knew that those were the people whose pride had been broken, who needed Him and who could hear His message.

Most of us are educated, middle class, Americans, and have lived better than the vast majority of people in the history of the world. Had autism not entered our lives, would we be ‘the poor’?

During a particularly hard time I had the history channel on while I was working on something and there was an archaeologist reading ancient Hebrew carved into the wall of an underground cave written by a jewish slave who probably spent most of his time there digging out stone for his Egyptian slaveholders. It read “God, please don’t forget me down here”.

When he read it began to cry and pray the same thing. There is not a chance that 10 years ago I would have identified in any way with a slave trapped underground.

Because those of us who are broken are the people he came to reach out to, we have chances to understand things that few people do, and become what we may have never become otherwise.

So let us not be afraid to empty ourselves out for our children.

Matthew 5:3
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Autism in God’s Economy: The Least of These

Autism Awareness month 2007 has been one like we have never seen before. It has seen Oprah do a show on Autism, for the first time after decades on the air. It has seen the CDC announce that Autism now affects 1 in 150 in this country. It has seen controversial Senate hearings to decide where the hundreds of millions of CAA money will go. It has seen a prominent autistic come out of the closet. Finally, and most heartbreaking, it has seen the worst shooting in US history perpetrated by Cho Seung-Hui who was reportedly autistic but never received the help he needed to live in a neurotypical world; and the irony of trying to cover up his autism during Autism Awareness month.

Because so much is at stake, the autism discussion and debate grows louder and more fevered, often making it difficult for those involved to really take in various perspectives. Even when we do, they are all still flawed human perspectives. Even the best, brightest, wisest and most experienced of us do not have the whole story.

But God does.

So in “Autism in God’s Economy” over the next six days I will discuss a few things that the Bible tells us about God’s perspective on those with Autism and on the rest of us. This series is predicated on the deity of Christ and the inerrancy of Scripture, which may be controversial ideas to some of my regular visitors. If they are to you, I invite you to read on none the less, and take a look at what God of the Bible says. If you are a professing Christian, then this is an important series for you to read no matter how autism affects you.

The Least of These

God’s economy turns the world’s economy upside down. Jesus brought with Him the radical message that the last shall be first, the meek shall inherit the earth and the poor will get the Kingdom of Heaven. We tend to hear these verses and think of them as nice thoughts, but Jesus did not intend them to be taken so lightly. He intended them as a window into His mind and a look into the future. And to prove it, he lived it out.

Jesus was God. He was the very same God that created the world and all of us that roam it. Everything belongs to Him. Yet when He put on a mortal body and came to walk in His creation, He didn’t come as a king, but a servant. He owned no property but the cloths He wore, He held no office, and He did not show up and order the governments to start doing His bidding. He had the right to all of it, but He laid claim to none of it.

Instead He chose lowly fishermen as his friends, socialized with social outcasts, spent His time touching lepers, gave relief to demon possessed psychotics and cleared out hospitals.

He did not ‘climb the ladder of success’. He lived a life that was oriented toward the broken and excoriated those in power who would not do their duty to serve them.

In God’s economy, the weak, the marginalized, the disenfranchised, the overlooked, the voiceless, the vulnerable, the sick, the oppressed, the grieving, the bullied, the exhausted, and those at the end of their rope are the ones who get into the VIP section. They are the ones who gain the attention and compassion of the God of the Universe.

If you have any doubt of this, and even if you don’t, read Matthew 25:31-46. It is one of the most important passages of scripture that any of us in the Autism community will ever read, and now that 1 in 150 are being diagnosed with it, almost all of us are in the Autism community.

Take a moment to read it.

It tells us that what we do in the lives of “The Least of These”, we do to Jesus Christ Himself.

If those of us who claim to be Christians want to know if we really are, and be clear, just saying you are a Christian don’t make it so, then examine what you have done in the lives of the most vulnerable people in your world.

In God’s economy, they are to be our highest priority. He has chosen them to represent Him for the purposes of His judgment in this world.

Matthew 25 is not an empty metaphor, it is one of the very difficult truths that our destiny hinges on, and it was the last thing that Jesus stressed before He started His walk to the cross.

If you know anything about autism and you are not of the belief that those with autism who cannot advocate well for themselves are among The Least of These in this society, then pay closer attention.

Next: Those With Autism

Autism in God’s Economy: Those with Autism

One of the wonderful things that the internet has done is that it has given a voice to those with autism. Those who once were a complete enigma to those of us who just could not understand them, now have a platform to share their gifts and frustrations with a world that did not know how to listen to them.

What we have come to hear now is all too often surprisingly sad. Story after story of misunderstanding, mistreatment and abuse is told by those who were only able to advocate for themselves after the fact.

What Matthew 25 means to you whose autism has allowed you to be mistreated is profound. It means that not only does The God of the Universe see what happens to you, He stands behind you at all times taking careful note of all your interactions with others. He records who victimizes you, who ignores you and who works their butt off to get to know you give you what you need.

He does not stop there; He actually steps into your place. Jesus literally takes on your burden and shares it equally with you. ‘If you ignore him, you ignore Me. If you bully him, you bully Me. If you violate her rights, you violate My rights. But if you love her, then you love Me. One day, you will answer for it all.’

God could not take what is done to you or for you any more personally!

Imagine if every time 5th grader Teddy Willis was bullied on the playground, that George Bush stepped out from behind the slide flanked by the Secret Service and said, “Hey Jimmy. Com’mere. You know that name you just called my boy Teddy? Well as far as I am concerned, you just called me that name. You can either tell him you shoudn’t a dunnit, say you are sorry and give him one of your Sweet Tarts and I will forget this ever happened, or you can keep it up and see if I don’t make your life as miserable as an armadillo in a twister starting a 12:01 A.M. on your 18th birthday. Now what is it gonna be?”

That pales in comparison to what is going on in God’s economy.

With your ‘disability’ to function like the neurotypical do in this world, you are given a special position and a peek into who gets God’s pleasure and who will ultimately exhaust God’s patience and earn His judgment. It all happens right in front of your eyes.

Yours is a high honor. Take care to receive it with humility.

There is another important truth that has to be explored here, and that is the much discussed identity of the autistic individual. In this broken worldly economy, those with autism and those around them spend a lot of time and energy trying to define autism and autistics, and trying to make value judgments; because as we are all coming out of the dark, we are trying to give meaning to this autistic life that is so difficult and has been so devalued.

Allow me for the moment to sweep all those volumes of debate to the side and tell you who God says you are and who you are not.

You are not your autism, even if you want to be.

You are not your hair color, your eye color, your height, your weight, your race, your gender; you are not what you look like. You are not your personality, your education, your verbal ability, your popularity, your intelligence, your math skills, your DSM diagnosis, your addiction to chocolate, your favorite hobby, your blog hit count, your family history, your genetic code, your physical ills, your highest accomplishment or your worst failure.

None of these things add anything to your value, none of these things take away the slightest bit from your value.

You are not what you seem to be compared to the next guy.

You are not who your parents say you are, you are not who your school mates say you are, you are not who your friends say you are, you are not who your love interest says you are, you are not who you say you are, and you are not who I say you are.

You are who God says you are. He made you and He is the one who gets to defines you.

Here is who He says you are:

You are someone whose whole life was planned out by God long before you were born.

You are someone who God put together with delicate precision in your mother’s womb.

God says you are, “wonderful”.

You are someone that God thinks about constantly and preciously.

You are God’s “workmanship” created for a very specific job. There are tasks that only you can do.

You are someone that God is jealous over. He hates it when other things distract your attention away from Him.

You are so valuable to God that you were worth dying for. Have you seen The Passion? He did that for you.

Max Lucado describes Jesus’ decision leave the quiet life of a carpenter and begin his public ministry, knowing that it would lead to his death so that he could get you back, like this:

…”If there was hesitation on His part of humanity, it was overcome by the compassion of His divinity. His divinity heard the voices. His divinity heard the hopeless cries of the poor, the bitter accusations of the abandoned, the dangling despair of those who are trying to save themselves.

And His divinity saw the faces. Some wrinkled. Some weeping. Some hidden behind veils. Some obscured by fear. Some earnest with searching. Some blank with boredom. From the face of Adam to the face of the infant born somewhere in the world as you read these words, He saw them all.

And you can be sure of one thing. Among the voices that found their way into that carpentry shop in Nazareth was your voice. Your silent prayers uttered on tear-stained pillows were heard before they were said. Your deepest questions about death and eternity were answered before they were asked. And your direst need, your need for a Savior, was met before you ever sinned.

And not only did He hear you, He saw you. He saw your face aglow the hour you first knew Him. He saw your face in shame the hour you first fell. The same face that looked back at you from this mornings mirror, looked at Him. And it was enough to kill Him.

He left because of you. He laid his security down with His hammer. He hung tranquility on the peg with His nail apron. He closed the window shutters on the sunshine of His youth and locked the door on the comfort and ease of anonymity.

Since He could bear your sins more easily than He could bear the thought of your hopelessness, He chose to leave. It wasn't easy. Leaving the carpentry shop never has been.”

God loves you. He does not love you for what you can do, He loves you because He made you, and you are His child. Because you are His child, and I can attest to this as the mother of an autistic child, He absolutely LONGS to know you and be known by you.

And what ever your language is, He speaks it.

Additionally, you can know God in a way that I can’t while I am on this earth. Ii have a beautiful friend who is on the spectrum, while I am no where near it. I have found that when we talk about God he has a perspective on Him that I just don’t have. While I see and relate to the part of God’s personality that is the Father, he most appreciates His role as the creator and feels closest to Him when he is creating and building.

Who ever you are reading this right now, you can understand God and worship a part of Him that other people can’t. He is vast and infinite and each of us only gets to see a little part of Him while we are in this life.

I figure it this way, if the neurotypical mind has such trouble understanding the autistic mind, because you see the world from such a different vantage point, then I probably could only faintly guess at the part of God that can appreciated by you.

Who ever you are is the you that God is in love with. It does not matter if you are a high functioning Aspie or if your autism is so severe that no one in your life even believes that you are cognizant of the world around you. The world might value you for your contributions, but God values you for you.

God does not need you to be anything, except His.

The bottom line is this: You are valuable because He says you are valuable and He is the one, the only one, who sets the standard for absolute value.

No ability or disability that you have can touch that.


Next: Parents of Autistic Children

Autism in God’s Economy: Parents of Autistic Children

“Disabled children are a blessing”.

It is something that we have all heard, even long before we were parents of disabled children. It usually is offered in a way that makes it seem like if you have a disabled child, you also have some indefinable, magical fairy dust kind of ‘blessing’ where an angel waves his hand and, poof, you are blessed.

Once you become the parent of a disabled child, you begin to see what that ‘blessing’ really means in concrete terms, because one of the first things that happens to you, in your early grief, is that you become grounded. All of the trivial distractions, the petty rivalries, the BS ego trips, the vain ambitions and the frivolities of life suddenly become very unimportant. The crap in your life starts to fall away and it is replaced by seriousness about things of true value.

Diagnosis brings with it a choice, to continue to serve yourself, or to take a hard look at your life and begin making greater and greater sacrifices for the wellbeing of your child. Because we love our children, very few of us choose the former.

In light of Matthew 25, this is the blessing of the autistic child. God eases you into falling in love with the Least of These, just like He is, so that when diagnosis comes, the choice to serve them is automatic.

For our children’s welfare, parents in our community give up their careers, their houses, their retirement, their health, their relationships, their free time, their dreams, their pride and a hundred other things that typical parents ‘get’ to hold on to. When we discuss the sacrifices that parents make, it is usually from the perspective that parents are loosing out on the better life that should have been theirs.

Making this even more painful, some of these families will turn their lives upside down for children who may not ever ‘get better’ or live independent lives or even be able to acknowledge their parents at all. Some fathers will never be greeted with excitement by their child when they come home from work. Some mothers will never hear, “I love you, Mom.”

But Matthew 25 puts this phenomenon in a whole different light. What Jesus is telling his followers, just as He is about to leave them, is that whatever they sacrifice for the vulnerable in their world, they sacrifice for Him.

In the Bible, God asks believers to give just 10% of their income to Him. What do you think it means to God when a family who has lived all their lives in one place, tear up their roots and move across the country to a state that has better services for their disabled child?

Read Matthew 25:31-46 again and pay particular attention to verses 35 and 36.

For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink;

We don’t just feed our children, many of us feed them gluten free, casein free, organic, hormone free, dye free, non-allergen, supplement enhanced diets that cost more money and take more effort than we would ever dream of spending on ourselves.

I was a stranger, and you invited Me in;

Our children are strangers to us in so many ways, yet many of us spent much of our time working hard to draw our them out; to know them and to be know by them. The invitation is constantly being extended.

…naked, and you clothed Me;

If the time and energy that we spend clothing and diapering our children were invested in the space program, we could have colonized Mars by now.

I was sick, and you visited Me;

How many hours have you spent in doctor’s offices, at conferences, in training seminars, listening to lectures, and reading books so that you could attend to your autistic child's health? How many nights have you stayed up trying to comfort your little one who could not sleep?

I was in prison, and you came to Me.

How many times have you looked at your child who would not or could not respond to you and longed for him to be free enough to tell you what was going on inside his mind? How many times have you held your little one and cried because you just missed him?

All the love, all the acts of service, all the sacrifices, all of the other plates that you have let go of so that you could keep just this one spinning… He sees it all, and He says:

“You did it to Me”.

Remember that night that you were up cleaning poop off the wall in tears at 3 AM after eight consecutive months of broken sleep? That injury you sustained trying to save your child’s life for the third time that week? That beloved thing that you gave up because you needed those resources for your child? He was right there, He saw it all, and as far as He is concerned, you did it all for Him.

When your child was diagnosed with autism, or with any disability, God put you on a new road. It is rocky and dangerous and to journey on it is hard. It humbles you and strips away pride that would have been yours had you not gotten the diagnosis. But Jesus said that He can only use broken people. People whose egos have melted away, people who have been brought to the end of themselves and had the love of the world’s economy squeezed out of them. People who are dieing to themselves. It is only then that they can begin to see, and to love, God’s economy.

Your child’s autism lays the ground work for God to be able to make you into a person who really knows Him and understands the world the way that He does.

The Corps has to strip away much of the man that showed up on their door step before they can build a Marine. My first three years as the parent of an autistic child have been a spiritual Paris Island. I am having the crap in my life stripped away by trying things based on the old paradigm, failing and having to go back and relearn the basics.

It has brought me back to a faith in God that I have not known in 15 years. A more child like faith that was less concerned with how I appeared and more concerned with just trying to learn from God how to get it right. His ‘Right’, not the world’s right. It is a faith that is removing my independence and accomplishments and taking me back to the dependency and instability that I knew when I first met Jesus. As I am pushing forty, I am learning how little I really know, how weak I really am, and how much the smallest thing that I give to God really counts.

And God has used Chandler to do it.

THAT is the blessing of the disabled child.


Next: Friends and Family

Autism in God’s Economy: Friends and Family

“Congratulations! Some one you love has autism!

You have just been given a chance to serve The Creator God, up close and personally! Run… do not walk… to your loved one and seize the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the little life that is on the fast track to stardom in God’s Universe!”

If we lived in God’s economy, this is how we would get the word that someone in our lives has been given an autism diagnosis. As it stands we live in the world’s economy and an autism diagnosis is typically met with fallen hopes, grief and mourning for the things that could have been and will probably never be. It was for Scott and me, and sometimes it still is.

But those friends and extended family who can clearly see through God’s eyes, see the chance they have been given to do good in the life of someone who is as close to an actual “innocent” as they will see in this world.

I was in an autism parenting course, and my friend Robin who was sitting next to me made an interesting comment. She had been thinking about the why of the autism epidemic. Not the mechanical ‘how’ so many children have become sick and delayed, but the ontological “why” that seeks the purpose behind it. She decided that it is because, through their uber-focused brain power, they are going to save the world.

I think she might be right about them saving the world, but I don’t think it will be through their brain power, I think it will be through their innocence. It is their innocence and vulnerability that God stands behinds and uses to judge those who come into their sphere of influence. It is precisely because they are so easy to dismiss and mistreat, that God watches closely to see which of us have extracted ourselves from our own self-centeredness and selfish ambitions to notice someone who is need and to bear their burden with them.

I think that God may be sprinkling them all around the world to give many of us a chance to show Him who we really are. Do we really serve Him, or do we serve ourselves?

The first question asked of God in the Bible was asked by Cain. He had just murdered his brother, and God came looking for him. God asked Cain where his brother was. Cain replied:

“Am I my brother’s keeper”?

It has been said that God spent the rest of the Bible answering that question. For the sake of brevity, I will sum it up for you.

Yes. You are your brother’s keeper.

You are responsible for holding up the weakest people in your world. You are responsible for grieving with the saddest people in your world. You are responsible for providing for the financially struggling people in your world. You are responsible for protecting the most innocent and vulnerable people in your world.

And every time you either live up to or shirk that responsibility, God says, “what you have done unto the Least of These, you have done unto Me”.

Let me tell you what my beloved friend Julia Fikse did for Jesus.

In January of 2004, I knew something was up with my 23 month old Chandler. The world ‘autism’ had passed through my head, but I decided I was being paranoid and that I should set it aside for now and consider it again after his 2nd birthday.

One day my friend, and Chandler’s God Mother, Julia, was over in my kitchen just hanging out and she asked about how Chandler was doing. She told me that she wanted to be able to get to know her God Son better and she was having trouble. She said, “you know… I have a friend whose son had some issues going on with him, and she got him some extra help and he is doing great now.” When she said that I felt like I an elephant had just sat on my chest. I thought, “Damn, someone else sees it too”.

I asked her if she meant autism, and told her that I had considered it, and that I would discuss it with my pediatrician at our next appointment in a few weeks. I spent those weeks reading and evaluating and by the time the appointment rolled around I didn’t have to ask him anything. I already knew. And so did he. Within a few minutes of examining Chandler he started asking me the autism screening questions, with out me mentioning anything about it.

The morning we got the diagnosis, I called Julia to let her know. By dinner time she was at my house with copy of “Facing Autism”. She had not bought it for me to read, she had gone out to the store that morning as soon as she got my phone call, and bought it for HER to read.

She was going to read the whole book and digest it in one day so could help me with what I was going through.

She had gotten through two thirds of the book when she came to something that she knew I needed to hear immediately, so she drove over and showed it to me. And let me know all the other stuff she had been learning. It turns out that before she had mentioned it to me in my kitchen that day, she had been doing her own research, and even called CARD to solicit their input and advice on whether or not her concerns were valid and how to approach me.

A few weeks later I got a call from her letting me know that she had decided that she was supposed to get people together to have a yard sale for us to raise some money so we could start Chandler’s treatment. She got 15 families to fill our entire back yard with stuff on a Friday night, and on Saturday morning the yard sale stretched across four front lawns (we had nice neighbors). She raised $3000 and we used it to start Chandler’s DAN! protocol and Sensory Integration Therapy.

She didn’t just do big things, she did lots of things. She sat with me and cried. She took me out when I needed a break. She spent a couple hundred dollars on Tomas Trains for HER house so that Chandler would enjoy being there. One morning I opened my curtains to find her pruning my roses that were a wreck because I never even noticed them any more.

This is how I know Julia loves Jesus:

When she thought Jesus might be sick, she looked into it and let his care givers know so that they could tend to him properly; she researched his illness and how to support him and his caregivers; she bugged all her friends to give up their stuff so that his care could be paid for; she cried with him when he was sad; she celebrated with him when he started to get better; she took him to dinner when he was hungry and lonely; she comforted him when he was scared; she entertained him when he was discouraged; she bought him toys and clothes; she made her home a welcome place for him; and she even tended Jesus’ garden when the regular gardener lost her marbles.

Is this how you have treated the autistic family in your life?

The reason that she was lead to do any of this is because she was paying such close attention to a very quiet boy in the first place. She was paying closer attention than even his own mother was. She wanted to get to know him better. She was paying attention to Jesus.

Who knows how much more time would have been lost in Chandler’s life if not for Julia paying attention.

Are you paying attention to the least of these in your life?

Or are you distracted by your own problems, pleasures and ambitions?

What have you done for the autistic family in your life? Have merely wished them well and told you would say a prayer for them, and then back to life as usual? If so, take a look at James 2:15-16:

If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and be filled," and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that?

Are you a Julia Fikse who tangibly bears the burdens of your disabled friends? Or are you a ‘be warm and filled” person who ultimately does nothing to lighten their load?

If you are taking a good hard look at yourself and are just now deciding that you are the latter:

“Congratulations! Some one you love has autism!

You have just been given a chance to serve The Creator God, up close and personally! Run… do not walk… to your loved one and seize the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the little life that is on the fast track to stardom in God’s Universe!”

Welcome to God’s Economy!

Autism is expensive. Go tell that family that you want to pay the cost of their B12 shots for their son for the rest of the year. Get ten friends to split up the cost of their groceries and supplements.

Autism is exhausting. Take a Saturday and care for an autistic child so that their family can just rest.

Autism is isolating. Figure out how to connect with the autistic person in your life. What do they love? Do it with them! Learn their language! Ask their family for help.

Autistic people are fascinating. Take some time, just sit with them and see what there is to see.

Autism wrecks marriages. Get the support system together to make sure those parents have free child care and dates paid for every Friday night.

Autism takes diligence. The autistic child in your world not getting all the services he should? Hit the pavement. Find out about what resources are out there and start making appointments for her parents. They spent the day cleaning up the 12 rolls of toilet paper that their daughter used to decorate her room while mom was making lunch and didn’t have the chance to get on the internet. Read the school system’s disability rights policy and go to IEP meetings to make sure that they are not being violated. Advocate for the autistic person in your life.

Autism makes people vulnerable. Protect them. Run into traffic to keep them from being hit by a car. Let it be known that, “If you mess with my boy Teddy, then you mess with me”. Put yourself in harms way for them. Be like Jesus.

You will never regret it.

Next: Those in Power Over Those With Autism

Autism in God’s Economy: Those in Power over Those with Autism

Pilate, Pharisee, Jesus.

For those who hold positions of authority over those with autism and autistic families, Matthew 25 is a wake up call as loud as a siren. I want to take care to re-emphasize this again, it is not empty metaphor. It means the difference between heaven and hell. It is the litmus test of our salvation. It is one of a very small number of questions on our final exam, and getting one answer wrong is enough to fail the test.

If you have taken responsibility for any part of the life of someone with autism, or even if that responsibility has been thrust upon you, take this time to measure yourself. Have you lived up to the responsibilities that you have been given to the innocent and vulnerable lives that Jesus has chosen to represent Him for the purposes of His judgment in his absence?

This is one of the last questions any of us wants to spend much time considering, because if we think long enough about it, we will stumble onto something that we just don’t want to remember that we did or didn’t do. For many, taking any time to ask this question is too upsetting, and some who begin this won’t read this past the first paragraph. But you have made it this far, so decide whether or not you believe Socrates to be right when he said that, “An unexamined life is not worth living,” and take the next step.

If you have decided to examine your life in light of Matthew 25 then, congratulations, you have cleared a hurdle that few people do.

So… if you hold power over an autistic person have you fed, clothed, housed, visited, comforted, educated, and healed them?

If you have power over a family with an autistic child, have you mourned and rejoiced with them? Have you made sure they had everything they need to raise that child to the best of their ability?

Have you advocated for them?

Proverbs 31 was written by King Lemuel. He was not a King of Israel, but believed to be either Egyptian or Babylonian. In it God gives us instructions on how to live, and how to lead. These instructions apply to anyone who considers himself a part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and are more stringently applied to those in leadership. The higher up in leadership you go, the more strictly you will be judged on this command.

Open your mouth for the mute,
For the rights of all the unfortunate.
Open your mouth, judge righteously,
And defend the rights of the afflicted and needy.

These verses are meant to apply to the voiceless in society, but they literally and specifically apply to autistic people. People who are literally mute and cannot advocate for themselves, they are afflicted with physical illness and developmental delay, and are needy. “Special Needs” means that they REQUIRE more than the rest of us do in order to get along in this world. In the U.S. and elsewhere, they are given legal rights that the rest of us don’t have.

If you are in a position to dispense services and justice to someone with autism or to their families, do you open your mouth for them, or do you give them the shaft? Because, from your position, there is no middle ground. In this fallen, worldly economy, either you advocate for them, or they will get the shaft.

There was no middle ground for Pontius Pilate. He was the man who had to make the decision as to the life or death of Jesus. Pilate knew that He was not guilty; he knew that Jesus’ rights were being violated, but he did not want to deal with the political pressure being put on him by those who wanted Jesus dead, so he just went with the flow.

If you are in authority over someone with autism, and you just do what is easy, you will end up failing them, because doing the right thing in the life of an autistic person usually difficult in this worldly economy.

They take up too much time and resources and you don’t get a lot for your money, right? The cost-benefit analysis on these people and their families is wholly unfavorable so wouldn’t your resources be better spent elsewhere?

Unless, of course, you love them.

Unless seeing them make an inch of progress thrills you. If him saying a new word, hugging his mom, eating a new food, asking for something, making a friend, going to prom, getting a job, or living on his own brings tears to your eyes and makes your heart burst; if you believe it was worth all the grief and energy it took to bring it to fruition and you can’t wait to be a part of a miracle in another disabled person’s life, then you have the heart of Jesus! You are following the leadership model of Christ.

You live in God’s economy!

Are you a parent that is not living up to your responsibilities to your child? Are you a teacher who just wants the mainstreamed autistic kid out of your class so you can teach the way you want to teach? Are you the head of the PTA that does not want your normal child to have to deal with that needy one? Are you popular middle management who blamed your mistake on the weird guy in the IT department because you knew you could get away with it? Are you the school superintendent who forces families to spend their limited resources on lawyers to sue you for the services that the law says it is their right to have? Are you the head of a government health agency who is not making public all you know about the causes and treatments of autism?

Are you Jimmy?

If you are, be afraid.

God sees it all, even the thing that you think that no one knows. Even the thing you think you got away with. He looks into your heart and knows what motivated you to do it. There is no way to put this nicely… for you, Matthew 25 is a death sentence.

And God does not accept excuses. “But I did the best I could under the circumstances. I was under tremendous pressure. I just didn’t have enough resources to go around. I had to make a judgment call.” does not fly.

You either did the right thing in the life of The Least of These, not matter what it cost you, or you didn’t.

Leaders who go with the flow and lead the way Pilate did have a grim fate awaiting them.

But there are those who face an even worse fate.

When Jesus walked on this earth, there were very few people who had anything to fear from Him. He healed the sick, dined with the humble, taught the unlearned, and forgave the adulterous. But Jesus was not kind to everyone.

Jesus excoriated the Pharisees.

These were men who didn’t just hold social, political and legal authority, these where men who held God’s Authority. They were entrusted with God’s Word and God’s Power and told to use it to serve God’s people.

But instead they used it to serve themselves.

They traded on God’s Authority to serve their fame, their fortune, their desire for control, their ease, their appetites and their pride. They had signed up to carry out the command to “Open their mouths for the mute”, but instead of advocating for the powerless, they ignored their needs and even stole from them.

And the consequences for them were dire. Matthew 23 is the passage of scripture where Jesus lays out most clearly their offenses and the consequences. It ends with Jesus placing the blood of all the martyrs, going back to the first murder of Able by Cain, on their heads. 2 Peter 2 discusses false teachers who claim to serve God, but serve themselves. It tells us that they earn a worse hell than the one they would have gotten if they had never known God at all. The bible is filled with frightening warnings to ministers tread very lightly in the exercise of their duties.

If you are a pastor or priest reading this, it may be one of the most important moments in your life. Taking time to think about how you have treated the most vulnerable lives that God has entrusted to your care, is imperative to the rest of your life here, and to the next life.

If you are a pastor who has ignored or taken advantage of the most vulnerable of God’s sheep, the crippled lambs, then don’t just be afraid of God.

Be terrified.

In your ordination, you took on the mantle of Jesus and told Him that you would be His hands in this world. That you would walk in his steps, speak his words, heal the way he healed, love the way he loved, and sacrifice yourself for the least of these, the way that He sacrificed Himself for the Least of these. You have told God that you will die for his children. Die to your wants, needs and desires. Die to your flesh.

You have committed to consider ALL things in your life loss for the sake of knowing Jesus and doing his will. Your money, your career, your popularity, your reputation, your pride in your accomplishments, everything.

And the proof of your fulfillment of that commitment is what you do in the lives of the Least of These.

In the flock that God has entrusted to you who are “The Least of These.” Do you even know?

It does not matter if you shepherd a church of twenty or twenty thousand. You have taken responsibility for, and will give an account for every single life in it.

Do you have autistic families that you are to be serving? Are you serving them? When is the last time you talked to them? What do they need right now? What are they struggling with? Do you even know?

Couples with an autistic child face an estimated 80% divorce rate. Teens with Asperger‘s Syndrome are a higher risk for suicide. Did you know that?

Here is a test for you.

Go get a piece of paper, right now, and draw a line down the center. First, on the left side, write down the names of the ten most wealthy, powerful, influential, popular people in your care. Next, on the right, list the names of the ten Least of These in your care.

Which list was harder for you to write? Which took longer? Did you have to stop and look up names? Who do you know more about? Make those notes on the page. Which people to you spend more time talking to or thinking about? Which do you spend more money on reaching? Which of these people do you hold the most affection for?

Are you oriented toward the poor like Jesus?

In this exercise, you have just told yourself whose economy you live in. If there are more words on the left side of the paper, be afraid; be terrified, you live in the world’s economy and you just might be a goat.

If there are more words on the right side of the page, if you are loving and defending the least of these, mourning and celebrating with them, then you are likely a sheep who has been given the heart of Jesus Himself.

So how do you pass this leadership test?

Are you a Pilate, who just goes with the flow and does what he wants?

Are you a Pharisees, who trades on the power in the name of Jesus to serve himself?

Or

Are you a Jesus, who serves and defends the autistic, even if it costs you your whole life?



Next: For All of Us Who Have Failed in Our Duty

Autism in God’s Economy: For All of Us Who Have Failed in Our Duty

There is no offense that you can commit that is outside of that which God will forgive.

Again:

There is no offense that you can commit that is outside of that which God will forgive.

When those of us with autistic people in our lives take a hard, honest look at ourselves, we realize the question is not have we failed them, it is how often and how big have we failed them.

I am in love with Chandler. It is difficult to describe well the feelings that I have for him because they are so powerful. I have changed my whole life around to make his better. Yet I fail him on a daily basis. Ten times a day he asks me for things that I don’t give him because I can’t understand him. Ten times a week he needs something that I don’t give him because I am fried from the 90 things I did give him. At least ten times since his regression I have completely lost my mind and collapsed into a pile of sobs or screams in front of him because I just couldn’t take it any more. Once I even locked myself in the bathroom to get away from him because I knew I was close to loosing it.

What was it that you did, that you know was wrong?

Are you short tempered with your child? Are you a parent who has mentally and emotionally checked out from their child because trying to connect is too painful and too hard? Are you a caregiver who ignores the autistic person entrusted to your care when no one is looking? Have you lied about someone with autism because you knew they couldn’t set the record straight? Are you an employer who is taking advantage of your autistic employee because you know you can get away with it? Are you a private school director who has gotten rid of an autistic student illegally because you knew their family wouldn’t have the resources to sue you? Are you a priest who has sexually assaulted a child who you knew could not tell?

God has seen it all.

What you have done to them, you have done to Jesus Christ himself.

What you have done was not just an offense against that autistic person, that was an offense against God and has earned you a death sentence.

But…

There is no offense that you can commit that is outside of that which God will forgive.

So then, in this black and white issue, where is the line? If failing the Least of These results in goathood, and if even the most well intentioned of us have failed them, then how in the world are any of us ever considered sheep? What is it that will allow those of us who have failed in our duty to gain forgiveness for it?

Repentance.

Good old fashioned repentance.

It is the only thing that stands between receiving God’s mercy and earning God’s justice.

So just what is repentance exactly? You don’t often hear a good definition of what God actually means for us to do in his command for us to “repent”. Is it feeling bad about what you did or didn’t do? Saying you are sorry? Both of those things are part of it, but that is not really what repentance is.

Here is how God defines repentance:

Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying,

"Speak to the sons of Israel, 'When a man or woman commits any of the sins of mankind, acting unfaithfully against the LORD, and that person is guilty,

then he shall confess his sins which he has committed, and he shall make restitution in full for his wrong and add to it one-fifth of it, and give it to him whom he has wronged.

'But if the man has no relative to whom restitution may be made for the wrong, the restitution which is made for the wrong must go to the LORD for the priest, besides the ram of atonement, by which atonement is made for him.”

Repentance requires three things:

1. Guilt.

Internal conviction of legitimate wrong doing. In this, “I’m OK, Your OK” world, guilt has become a bad word. In God’s economy, guilt is a GOOD thing. It means your conscience works correctly. It motivates you to govern yourself appropriately. Guilt over the things you have done wrong is a gift granted to you by God.

If you did something wrong, and you don’t feel bad about it, worry. How did you get to the place that you can mistreat people, shirk your responsibility and feel fine about it? Once you ignore your feelings of guilt long enough, without addressing what you have done wrong, you begin to sere your conscience, and you can commit bigger and bigger offenses and feel no guilt at all.

2. Confession.

Saying out loud, to the person whom you have wronged, “I have wronged you and what I did wrong was _______________. What I should have done was ________________.”

One of the reasons that God requires this is because confession heals. James 5:16 says, “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed”... Confession heals all involved.

Remember a time when someone came to you in humility and finally admitted to treating you badly. Remember how much better you felt when they did?

Remember a time when you went to someone in humility and admitted to treating them badly. Remember how much lighter you felt afterward?

Speaking the truth heals. It frees you from secrets and lies.

3. Restitution.

Clean up your mess.

True conviction brings the desire to set things right. To tell the truth to the people you lied to. To give back the thing you stole. To heal the person that you hurt. To advocate for the person you have ignored.

It changes you from a taker into a giver. It turns you into someone who wants to serve the person you have wronged. It drives you to invest in them.

And restitution done right does not only bring things back for that person to the way they were before you made that selfish decision, it makes it 20% better. It is going over and above what you took!

Repentance that does not cost you, is not repentance.

Repentance that is forced on you is not repentance.

Repentance that requires conditions from the person that was wronged is not repentance.

Repentance that does not free you from guilt is not repentance.

Saying, “If I did anything to upset you, I am sorry,” or ,”Sorry if you are angry”, is not repentance.

If it does not include confession of sin and restitution and it does not heal, it is not repentance.

Repentance will cost you your pride. For some it will also cost you your social standing, your reputation and your friends. For some it will cost a lot of money. For some it will cost you your jobs and even your careers. For some it will cost you your family. For some it will cost you your freedom. For a few it will cost you your lives.

But what does a man profit if he gains the whole world but looses his soul?

So everything in this series leads up to this question:

Will you repent of what you have done to the Least of These... of what you have done to Jesus?

Some of you will not, because you don’t really believe Matthew 25 is true.

But for those of you who do believe:

Go back into the other room to your autistic child, who you don’t even believe can hear you, confess to him how you have wronged him and start to set things right. It does not matter if you think he understands the apology or even the offense.

Find that weird guy from high school that you picked on in the early 1960’s and tell him what you did was wrong and ask how you can make it right. If he can’t figure out a way, you think of something to make restitution. What did you take from him (friends, dignity, self-esteem) and how can you give it back to him?

Stand up in the staff meeting and admit to everyone that the mistake was yours, not the mistake of the geek in the IT department.

Publicly apologize for the rumors that you started to cover your ass.

Call the family that you denied services to and tell them that they had a right to things that you didn’t want to give them. Give them 20% more than they were legally entitled to.

Walk into the school board meeting and tell them that you lied about that child to get them out of that class, and send a written apology to the family. Give that child extra help that they didn’t have before you lied.

Call Child Protective Services, tell them what you did, tell them that you are at the end of your rope and demand help.

When the family in your church is ready to tell everyone about their child's diagnosis, stand in the pulpit and preach Matthew 25 to the flock that God has entrusted to you. Apologize to them failing them in letting them ignore the disabled family in their community. Congratulate them on the chance they have to serve God directly and DARE them to out do each other in serving that family. Challenge the teachers in your congregation to offer them educational services, the lawyers to give them free advocacy, the wealthy to pay for their child's treatment, the patient mothers to give respite care, the neat freaks to clean their house, those with culinary talents to deliver GFCF/SCD meals to them, the woman with the green thumb to cultivate their gardens, the book worm to research treatments for them, and on and on and on... Create competition to serve that child. Don't stop until the families tell you that they don't want any more help. Show up at their house every week, put your hands on that family and pray for them. Bring that church into God's Economy.

Hold a press conference and give the media and the medical community the information that you have been withholding on the environmental causes and possible treatments of autism. No matter the fall out. Announce your plan to properly investigate those avenues, and then raise that budget by 20%.

Walk into a police station, tell them what you have done to disabled children, and tell them you don’t want to do it any more. Tell them who your victims are and demand that they get help.

If you can't find the person that you have wronged to pay it back, repent to God by paying it forward. Find someone like them and give to them what you owe to the person you have wronged.

Repent. Do it no matter how big or how small the offense. Do it no matter how long ago the offense. Do it no matter what it costs you.

And repentance WILL cost you. It is hard. Confession of sin does not free us from the consequences of sin in this world. Often it sets them into high gear.

But true repentance to Christ always results in forgiveness. As a matter of fact repentance and forgiveness are inseparable in God’s economy. They are two sides of the same coin, and you will never find one with out the other.

There is no offense that you can commit that is outside of that which God will forgive.

There is no offense that you can commit that is outside of that which God will forgive.

An Open Letter of Rebuke to Dr. Mark Brewer of Bel Air Presbyterian Church

December 26th, 2007: This is a letter written to our former pastor. I am posting it as part of a discussion that I have been having with Jonathan, on the question, "Why doesn't God just cure autism".

I am backdating it to the date that it was sent to Mr. Brewer as I don't really want it at the top, but it does need to be up on the blog for reference. For the record we never received a response to this letter or to the letter of complaint that we subsequently filed with the elders of the church (Mr. Brewer's bosses).

The school continues to deny our right to access our children's school records in violation of California law.

Since it has been 6 months since we sent the letter, I think it is safe to assume that they will not be responding to us and 1 Timothy 5:20 (a Christian's obligation to publicly correct church leaders who continue in wrong doing) is now in full effect.

Heads up. It is a very long letter that lays out our case against this pastor in religious terms and may not up the alley of my regular readers.

Ginger

UPDATE: 1/15/08

After submitting a new request to Bel Air's new church director (who replaced Mike Hooper) I have been told by him that they are sending me the files. I will update if they do arrive this time.

After having a discussion with someone this week, I learned that one charge that we had filed with the charge may not be true, so I have removed it from our letters (and noted the edit) to err on the side of caution. We want to make sure that we do not publicly air accusations that are in doubt.

I am adding the Letter that we had filed with the Bel Air Elders on Session. We have never received a response to that letter either.

It was reported to us this week that after receiving our letters that instead of following God's direction in Matthew 5:23-26 to come to us, befriend us and work toward reconciliation, that Bel Air turned the letters over to their lawyers. Our understanding is that the unbiblical and illegal counsel that their lawyers offered them was to ignore the letters, to not turn over our records to us, and not respond to them in any way.

This is God's counsel on the matter:

Matthew 5:23-26

Therefore if you are presenting your offering at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your offering there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and present your offering.

Make friends quickly with your opponent at law while you are with him on the way, so that your opponent may not hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the officer, and you be thrown into prison. Truly I say to you, you will not come out of there until you have paid up the last cent.

So we wrote to Mark in part to correct him on his disobedience to Matthew 5, and he responded by again disobeying Matthew 5. Irony upon irony.

UPDATE: 1/26/08

So three weeks after we made our demand for our records to the new church director, we received them. A fraction of them that is. They cherry picked a few relevant documents and left out the bulk of the record.

But the most telling feature about the package that we received, was that it was evident from the presentation that Andrea Petche herself had prepared it! We write to Bel Air, repeatedly, and tell them that Ms. Petche has falsified our children's school records to cover up her wrong doing and committed perjury in a state investigation, and the charge is not only dismissed with out so much as contacting us and asking for details, but they apparently allow HER to compile the records to send to us!

We wrote back to the director almost a week ago demanding the ENTIRE record. We have not gotten a response.

This is beyond ironic. It is hubris.

Mark Brewer
Bel Air Presbyterian
16221 Mulholland Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90049
June 21, 2007

Dear Mark,

This letter contains a lengthy and harsh rebuke of you. It is not for lawyers or your staff to handle, the charges in this letter are directed solely at you. We strongly encourage you, before you read any further, to spend time alone with God and let Him prepare your heart to hear what we have to say.

It has been more than a year since our last contact with you and during that time we have done much soul searching, meditating on scripture and seeking God’s wisdom on what to do in our broken relationships with you and the rest of the staff of Bel Air with whom we have been in conflict. We have come to the conclusion that God’s best in this is to walk through a Matthew 18 process with you personally, confronting the sin in your life that is having such a destructive effect at Bel Air, in our former community, in Scott’s extended family, in our family, and most importantly in the life and development of our autistic son Chandler.

Three times during 2005 and 2006 we sat with you and described in detail the sin and corruption that was going on among the staff at Bel Air Presbyterian, including the unethical and illegal treatment of four disabled and at-risk children in Chandler’s class. On all three occasions, we asked you for direction on how to address this on our end, as well as asking for correction on anything that we might be doing wrong that could get in the way of progress and growth. You took responsibility for addressing the misbehavior of your staff and said that action would be taken.

We are writing to you now, in frank and clear language, to confront you on your failure to live up to those commitments, your failure to practice biblical ‘shepherding’ of the flock with which God has entrusted to you, and your failure to repent of your sin, and we do this in accordance with Matthew 18:17, before the Elders on Session at Bel Air.

During our last year at Bel Air, we found that two staff members, Mike Hooper and Andrea Petche, were involved in malfeasance and were lying to cover it up. We attempted to walk through confronting them in obedience to Matthew 18, Luke 17:3, 2 Tim 2:23-24 and other scripture, while coming to you to teach us to do it well.

Their response to this correction was not that of the biblical picture of the Early Church where confrontation leads to repentance, resulting in restoration and healing. Rather they became immediately hostile and launched an attack on us and our children, eventually lying and slandering us to you, to Scott’s family, to our community, culminating in the expulsion of our children from the school.

This monumental miscarriage of justice, was allowed to take place on your watch, because when we brought this matter before you and told you that the staff was lying, you did not obey God’s command in Deuteronomy 19 to investigate the matter thoroughly, to hold a hearing where all parties were present, to do this with out prejudice of any kind and to discipline anyone found guilty of giving false testimony.

Instead you joined in the attack; becoming the sole signatory on the letter that dismissed our children from school illegally and with out ever showing cause.

When we met in your office on March 9th 2006, we told you directly that there was corruption at Bel Air. At the time, we earnestly believed that this corruption was allowed to continue because you did not know about it and because many of the others who had witnessed it or had been victims of it were too afraid to come forward for fear of retribution.

We reasoned that since you so often preached against injustice and corruption, and held out as examples men such as Polycarp, Bonheoffer and King who gave their lives courageously in standing up to corrupt governments for God’s truth, surely addressing corruption correctly in an institution that you lead would be a non-issue.

After our experience with you it is clear to us that the corruption continues at Bel Air because you allow it to continue. We are witnesses to you turning your head away from wrong doing, and rubber stamping the mistreatment of the sheep that you are charged with protecting.

Bel Air is a corrupt church because you are a disobedient pastor.

You told us so during our meeting on December 29th, 2005. We told you of our efforts to set up the Growing Families group so that it was prepared to take real action in healing families that are in trouble due to infidelity, addiction, abuse, disability, hardship and the like. We asked what Bel Air’s protocol was for getting help to at risk families, and your reply was that there wasn’t one. When we asked how Bel Air deals with confronting sin in its members, you gave an example: “If we find out a church member is involved in an extra-marital affair, unless that person is in leadership, we don’t address it. But if that person gets nominated for elder for example, we will go to them and say, ‘we are letting you know that you were nominated for elder, but because we know you are having an affair with Such and Such, your nomination has been withdrawn’.”

Mark, this is not how Jesus directed us to deal with sin in the church. In carrying out this policy, you stand in direct defiance of Matthew 18, Luke 17 and a host of other scriptures. In John 21:15-17, Christ’s essential direction to the first pastor is to tend His sheep. Because you do not practice biblical church discipline, wolves are free to attack the sheep. The sheep are not protected, even from themselves. And it pays to lie at Bel Air.

Additionally, you seem to be under the impression that these are your sheep and you can manage them however you see fit. In disobeying God’s command to practice proper church discipline, you have replaced God’s judgment with your own. When pastors do that, God calls it ‘appalling and horrible’ (Jer 5:30-31). If you have forgotten how serious God is about not having his judgments replaced with men’s, we suggest you review the last few chapters of Job.

Further, according to the executive pastor’s own teaching, because Bel Air does not obey God in His command to confront sin, it does not even meet the qualifications of a church. On February 12, 2006, Roger preached a sermon entitled, “Sardis: Obedience”, the thesis of which was, ‘Bel Air if we are not obedient to God then we are not a church. We are a social club, a civic organization, a business, but we are not a church.’

After hearing that sermon, while at the same time witnessing Bel Air’s disobedience to God’s directives for biblical church discipline, we put to you that Bel Air is Sardis. It has the reputation of being alive, but it is dead.

Roger preached this sermon the week that he himself was flagrantly disregarding Deuteronomy 19, among others, in handling our problem when it came before him. He quoted Micah 6:8 in his sermon in which God’s first direction was to “Do Justice”. Four days earlier he went to Ginger and asked her to tell him what was going on at the school, and she told him, in person and in writing, of the families that were having their rights violated by the school, and that Andrea and Mike were lying and attacking us in attempt to silence us. Instead of addressing the allegation biblically, he joined in the attack on us.

Subsequently, when we told you of his disobedience three weeks later, you followed suit, ignoring our charges and joining in the attack against us as well. When we told you of the atrocious behavior of your staff, rather than taking our claims seriously, you actually made fun of us. You mocked us and said, “oh… you guys are the victims here… what… are you martyrs in this?” When you asked us to justify our actions in the matter, Ginger reached for her Bible to read you the scripture that we had been given by ‘wise council’ and were using for guidance, and you reacted as if she had reached for a gun. You snapped upright in your chair and said, “Don’t you quote scripture to me”.

We were stunned silent at your reaction.

When Ginger finally very politely replied, “Sir, you asked me a question and I have to read scripture to give you your answer”, you scolded, “Listen to me, I know that book better than you and we can go back and forth all day and I will win.”

Is this the behavior of a man who is sharing the love of Jesus and biblically reproving the flock? Are these the words of a man who follows Christ’s lead in considering the scriptures as, ‘his food and his drink’? Is this the picture of a pastor who reflects Christ’s compassion on a family struggling with caring for a disabled child in the midst of financial hardship? No, this is the behavior of a man who sees the people in front of him as adversaries and a threat to his power.

After leaving Bel Air, we talked to several people who had been in leadership positions for years, and they all reflected the same sentiment. Each offered different versions of the message that, ‘no matter what you would have done, they never would have let you win’. They all used the word “win”. It was not until we heard that word used for the third time that we really came to grips with this realization -- the staff at Bel Air function in conflict more like first century Rome than the first century Church.

Your goal in conflict is not repentance, obedience and restoration. Your goal is winning.

During your meeting with us, you opened by reminding us of our duty to obey you as our pastor, a duty that we told you that we considered ourselves bound to. You ended that meeting by exercising that power over us, by which we responded in complete obedience to your direction. Because we did, and because you are the senior pastor, you now are responsible to give an account to God not only for your bad behavior in this matter, but also the sin and lawlessness of all those whose souls God has given you watch over.

You are also answerable for our sin as we submitted ourselves to, and even solicited, your correction as our pastor. Even in the end we repeatedly asked you what we had done wrong that merited the treatment that we were getting, and your only response was repeating, “You know what you did”. Not biblical instruction or confrontation under any standard, but rather an intimidating, shaming statement.

We believe that it is our responsibility to inform you that because you did not obey God’s direction to exercise appropriate church discipline, Andrea Petche has since gone on to commit perjury in a state investigation. In June we filed a simple oral complaint with the State of California. According to the report we received from the investigator, when she went to the school, Andrea lied to her, falsified our son’s records, misrepresented documents, and suborned perjury from those working under her. Jon Taylor, member of the preschool committee and Scott’s brother, was informed of Andrea’s perjury last summer, and in turn informed the committee, but no action has been taken to resolve the matter legally, biblically or to any standard of integrity.

Scott and Jon’s father, Steve Taylor, met with you last summer to give you further account. He told us that he reported to you how his family was now divided because of Bel Air’s actions, [a portion of this sentence has been removed as there is a question as to whether or not it was based on faulty information]. Steve told us that your concern seemed to be primarily whether or not we intended to sue. When he told you that he didn’t think we would, you seemed satisfied and took no further action.

Suppose Mr. Taylor had indicated we were probably going to file suit, would your course of action been different? Does one need to threaten a law suit at Bel Air for a complaint to be taken seriously? Do you only honor the rights of those who have the resources and the will to sue you?

We have reported to you that according to witnesses, Andrea Petche, Mike Hooper, Karen Crawford and Roger Dermody have given false testimony during this conflict with our family. Conducting a hearing according to scripture is part of the debt that you owe to God, so that sin is not allowed to go unchecked in His church. It is Bel Air’s responsibility to call its own hearing. We should not have to sue you in civil court to get you to obey scripture and California law. (1 Cor 6)

Consider this a written demand, requiring that you forward us complete copies of both of our sons’ school records so that we may review them, as is our right under California Code of Regulations, Title 22, Div 12, Chap 1, Art 6, Section 101221 (e). This right was breeched by Andrea Petche and Mike Hooper on March 3, 2006 when they refused to produce a signed consent form (which doesn’t exist) allowing Andrea to order an evaluation of Chandler. (For your personal review, you can find the laws under which the school operates in pdf format at: http://www.dss.cahwnet.gov/ord/CCRTitle22_715.htm listed under Child Care Centers). These records should also contain the minutes of the school board meeting on Feb. 21, 2006, which we were not allowed to attend, during which we are told that false testimony was given against us and our child.

During our final meeting with you, you told us that Mike and Andrea had reported to you that Chandler had to be dismissed from school because his disability was too severe for him to be maintained in the classroom; and that we had threatened to sue the church. We informed you that their testimony was completely false. The records should also contain the minutes of your meeting with them and the specific claims that they made which informed your decision to terminate Chandler’s enrollment. Finally, the school records should also contain the notes of any other meetings in which we were discussed.

As it is our understanding from the state investigator that Andrea falsified the records, we have requested that Ellen Baker, Secretary of the Session, retrieve all the records without prior notice to Andrea or any school staff and express copies to us within 24 hours of receipt of this letter; so that we can be assured that no further tampering will take place. We trust that she will not alter the records in any way.

There are many, many issues here. Many sins that have gone unconfessed and unrepented by many people, but so that we don’t cloud the purpose of this letter, we will focus the rest of it on you and specifically what you have done to our family.

Mark, you are in sin. Our experience with you has shown us not a man who is yielded to the Holy Spirit and yearning to follow Jesus no matter what it costs him, but a man who worships power and influence, and loves the money that buys it for him. A man who is willing to sabotage the treatment of a three year old autistic boy in order to protect his control over his organization which serves his ambition.

"When a successful figure becomes especially prominent and conspicuous, the majority give way to the idolization of success. They become blind to right and wrong, truth and untruth, fair play and foul play." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

You appear to us to be man who was once a broken truck driver, driven to God in his pain, who has years later come to arrogantly believe his own P.R. You live as if the rules don’t apply to you. You constrained us to Matthew 5 during our meeting in March, but you do not adhere to it yourself. After your phone call to Ginger when you derided her, saying “I am not going to discuss this with you, I know how you work”, Scott sent you an email letting you know in no uncertain terms that we had something against you. Why then did you not obey Matthew 5:23-24? Does it not apply to you because you are a pastor of a large congregation?

In preparing this letter, we went back to the Bel Air web site to check the date of Roger’s sermon. While there we saw that you recently preached a sermon entitled, “Estrangement to Reconciliation”. We had to listen to it as the irony was too much -- a sermon on reconciliation preached at the institution which [section of the sentence removed as there are questions to its accuracy] lead to our complete estrangement from him. Well you could see how our curiosity would be piqued.

It was a truly upsetting experience to listen to such hypocrisy. You spoke as if this was actually something that you and the staff practice. Except for the moment when you joke that this practice doesn’t apply to you personally. In that sermon you tell God’s flock that they are to seek reconciliation in estranged relationships -- to come along side and confess their sins to and forgive those with whom they have broken relationships. Except you begin by making a joke which seems to excuse you from mending your own broken relationships. Apparently alienating people is part of your job.

“He can reconcile our relationships to each other. Even the most toxic, poisoned, beat-up relationships … and I make a living out of making those.”

Much truth is spoken in jest. And it begs the question, “Okay Mark, if you admit to making toxic, poisoned, beat-up relationships on a regular basis (as was certainly our experience), how do you heal them? You must have a lot of wisdom to share because you have to mend relationships so often.” Why did you not share with your audience stories where you, confessed, repented, forgave and were forgiven, and how it lead to healing? Why did you not tell them that even though you make these horrible relationships, you always are sure to heal them? As with any preacher, it is generally assumed that you practice in your own life what you are preaching. If you are indeed above reproach, shouldn’t you be inviting those who have something against you to obey Luke 17:3 and come to you in private so you can be sure all your relationships are healed?

How could you preach that sermon and not quote Matthew 5:23-24? How do you get around not giving God’s sheep His command to “be at peace with all men so far as it depends on you”? How do you leave out God’s imperative and recipe for healing found in James 5:16, “Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed”? You barely mention their responsibility for confession of sin at all.

Is it because those verses convict you and you don’t want to obey them yourself?

We attest to the fact that you do not practice these principles in your own life. You are a false teacher to those under your lead. You do not teach them confession and repentance. You teach them to ignore complaints, cover their asses and bully into submission anyone who might hold them to account. You lord over Bel Air and teach others to do it, and your life lessons negate what scripture you might quote from the pulpit.

These commands are not optional to the Christian. One cannot be in disobedience to scripture and be in a right relationship with Christ. Indeed Matthew 5:23-24 tells you not to come to the altar until you go to your brother. How many times have you come to the altar since we let you know that we had something against you 15 months ago? Every single time you did it, Matt 5 says you did it in defiance of God.

Mark, you have said from the pulpit several times, not all pastors go to heaven, but that it is your belief that you will, even if you are just “waiting tables”. If the true character of a man is found in what he does when he thinks no one is watching, what he does that he thinks he can get away with, and what he does when he has something to loose, then your true character is of a man who does not know Jesus.

Where Jesus is present, broken people are healed. But you have crushed our family under the wheels of your ambition. Mark, you are not keeping His commandments, therefore, according to the Word, you do not love Him, and if you say you know him, then you are a liar.

John 14:21-24 tells us that if we love Him, we will keep his commandments. It also tells us that the converse is true, if we are not obeying Him, we do not love him.

1 John 2:3-4 says, “by this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. The one who says, “I have come to know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.”

In this, you have no excuse and cannot claim ignorance of his commandments. You have a Ph. D. in “His Commandments”. In the last meeting with us, in claiming that you know ‘that book’ better than we do, you arrogantly claim responsibility for knowing the entire Bible, as you can’t possibly know which parts we know and which parts we don’t. God heard that claim and holds you to it now. Add to that the warning God gives us that, “to whom much is given, much is required,” and, “let not many of you become teachers knowing that you will incur stricter judgment”, and your responsibility of humility, obedience, repentance, and carrying the burdens of others is higher than everyone but perhaps a dozen people in all of Los Angeles.

Does that not terrify you? Does that not put into perspective God’s command to work out your salvation with fear and trembling? If that realization does not drive to plead for His forgiveness for not shepherding His sheep according to His directions, if you are not convicted by this letter, then you have to ask yourself, “Do I know Jesus”? You clearly know a lot about Him, but if you know Him you will be in love with Him and will be compelled to obey Him. Joyfully even! (1 John 5:3)

If you do not have the Holy Spirit at work in you, convicting you of your sins against our family and against those you lead, then you do not know Jesus. If that is the case, then it is time for you to give your life back to Him. All of it. All your power and influence, all your relationships, your reputation, your job, your vision for “Making LA the Greatest City for Christ In America®” and most of all your ambition.

If God is going to change LA, he does not need you to do it. Further, it will never happen around you while you are in disobedience to Him. Never. He CANNOT use you. You will only succeed in creating a false front powered by cash and worldly influence; a 21st century, “PTL” with better production values.

And what if God doesn’t want to make LA the Christian Mecca? Are you sure that is God’s will? Has He appeared to you told you that? Sure it is a lovely thought, but God’s glory is served in judgment just as it is in mercy. The Bible is clear that most people will not come to Christ, thus the ‘narrow road’ analogy, and that God will be glorified in the judgment of the unbelievers. What if His plan for LA is to save the few believers who have not soiled their garments and judge the greater city?

Reign in your ambition, stop trying to do God’s job for Him and just obey Him in this moment and then in the next. He is going to do with LA what HE wants to do with LA.

If you are not willing to give it all back to God, and openly repent to the congregation of your sins against them and drastically change the way Bel Air operates, beginning with this conflict, then quit your job. Immediately. Give Bel Air to a pastor who will shepherd that flock in obedience to God, who will confess his sin to them, and who will be teachable and offer himself, even the most vulnerable parts of himself to them, as an example of what Christ has done for him.

As it stands, hard decisions at Bel Air are not made according to scripture, but cost-benefit-analysis. Repeatedly when we asked, “why aren’t we INSERT BIBLICAL COMMAND HERE, the response we got was, ‘oh… we can’t do that because someone might sue us.’ You cannot serve two masters, and you have chosen the god of money over Jesus.

Over and over during our dealing with Bel Air on this problem, we ran into the same ethos. The lie that one can disobey Jesus for the sake of the ministry of Jesus and still be in a relationship with Jesus. This is Bel Air’s mentality because it is your mentality. (Proverbs 29:12)

Mark, when we read through Matthew 23 we see verse after verse which describe your behavior. You meet the requirements of a Pharisee.

You have tied up heavy loads and laid them on our shoulders and are unwilling to lift a finger to help us. You love the place of honor at parties and love being called “Doctor” in the marketplace. You exalt yourself and belittle those less powerful than you.

God has called us to confront sin in our own lives, and in the lives of others, in that order. During this conflict, you treated us as sinners, but when we requested correction from you, you would not offer it. Therefore we cannot “enter into the Kingdom” by confession and repentance; or restore our relationships by defending ourselves against false accusations. And you will not confess your sin and enter the Kingdom yourself.

As for devouring the widow’s houses, the corruption at Bel Air actually lost us our home. You were well aware that we had been walking the fine edge of financial ruin for two years because of Chandler’s diagnosis. Because we spent so much time in February and March away from work taking meetings and seeking wise council and pouring through scripture and getting on our knees before God and reading the law for ourselves and fighting to keep our children in school while trying to obeying God in confronting those in sin and weeping over the way our church that was treating us, in April we fell too far behind on our mortgage and our house went into foreclosure. We were able to borrow the money from Ginger’s family to get it out and sell it. You literally devoured our home.

[Paragraph removed as it may have been based on inaccurate information.]

You are a blind guide, teaching the flock how to move from Estrangement to Restoration when you have a trail of broken relationships behind you and ignore the damage you have done to God’s children.

You tithe, but neglect the weightier portions of the law in judging our case. You did not offer us justice; you did not offer us mercy, you were not faithful to God.

YOU BUILD AN ENTIRE NEW WING ON THE OUTSIDE OF THE CUP AND WILL NOT CLEAN OUT THE CORRUPTION IN YOUR STAFF AND IN YOUR LIFE!

Outwardly you appear as a righteous man, but behind closed doors you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

Mark, nothing is hidden from God, He has seen it all. Be very afraid of Matthew 23:35.

And if that wasn’t enough to send you crashing to your knees before the Holy God, there is yet one more passage which suggests most clearly an impending threat to your salvation. You have sinned boldly and recklessly against our four year old disabled son, Chandler Taylor, “The Least of These” among all the sheep at Bel Air. We want to be absolutely clear here, so we are being as frank and direct as we possibly can.

Focus on Matthew 25:31-46. Really spend time meditating on it.

When you ratified the requirement for us to sign a contract giving up access to him while he was on school grounds, you violated his rights that protect him from harm. When you dismissed Chandler from school, you violated the laws that protected his therapeutic school placement, his treatment for Autism. [Charge with held for questions about accuracy]. In all this you ended up taking 11 months of therapy and treatment from him during one of the most crucial years in his battle against Autism. This account only touches on all of the things you have stolen from Chandler, that were rightfully his, since we first came to you about Andrea and Mike’s malfeasance.

If Christ judges as unbelievers those who simply don’t visit the sick, how harshly will he judge a pastor who steals a disabled child’s treatment?

For you, it all comes down to this: What you have done to Chandler, you have done to Jesus Christ himself. What you have stolen from Chandler, you have stolen from Christ. Your dismissal of Chandler’s needs is a dismissal of Christ’s needs. Your violation of Chandler’s rights is a violation of the rights of the God you claim to serve.

Of the three thousand people at Bel Air, Chandler Taylor was the most vulnerable, disabled person there. He was as close to an actual innocent as could be found there. He was the singular person whom Jesus Christ chose to represent Himself most seriously for the purposes of His judgment. He was The Least of These in your charge.

Chandler IS the weak thing that God has chosen to shame the strong.

Christ stands behind Chandler at all times and witnesses everything that any of us do to him and everything that we don’t do for him.

Having Chandler as our son, and knowing the immutable truth of Matthew 25 has shown us, in all too painful detail, who we really are. It has given us a good look at all the love and all the selfishness that we are capable of.

As the parents of a “The Least of These” child, we live under the glare of this scripture every day. We have to repent constantly that we do not live up to the obligation that we have to this little boy with whom we have fallen in love. We praise God for this reality because it has driven us to brokenness and repentance. We praise God for giving us the new chance every day to tangibly serve Him.

THAT is the blessing of the disabled child. THAT is the blessing you have missed by throwing him out of school and driving his family out of Bel Air.

We are holding a mirror up to you and asking you to take a good hard look at yourself.

Did you ever expect you would become the sort of man who would throw a disabled child out of his therapy? For any reason? We listened to you preach for almost five years and we believe that if you heard this story about some anonymous pastor, you would be completely disgusted. This story would probably show up in one of your sermons as an example of how just how arrogant, cold hearted and dead pastors can become when they start believing that they are somehow above those that God called them to serve.

Mark, the week that you threw us out, you actually ended your sermon with the story of a disabled family and you got choked up as you declared that disabled children are a blessing and extolled the virtues of their parents, saying all they had to do was love their disabled child and people would come to Jesus. Three days later you called Ginger and shamed her over the phone for simply asking for the reason you were throwing her disabled son out of his school! You insinuated that she was some sort of manipulative, destructive malcontent for obeying God’s command to advocate for the rights of her disabled child and the other disabled children at the school found in Proverbs 31:8-9, and according to your own sermons, both that week and the previous week!!

How did you get here?

God says that unless everything that was taken from Chandler is restored to him as best can be by you, plus one fifth, you will not see heaven. Matthew 25 is not an empty metaphor; it is God giving us the final exam at the beginning of the semester and writing the answers on the blackboard so we can constantly be testing ourselves.

“Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves! Or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you--unless indeed you fail the test?” -- 2 Corinthians 13:5

Chandler Taylor is the litmus test of your salvation, and you have failed.

Your first Sunday at Bel Air, we sat in the balcony, pregnant with Chandler, and decided to stay at Bel Air under your shepherding because of a commitment that you made during that sermon. Chandler was born and baptized into your care. He was your responsibility before God and you have failed him.

The picture that Jesus paints in Matthew 25 is this: When Chandler was diagnosed with Autism, it was as if Christ stepped into his skin and walked around Bel Air Presbyterian, giving everyone the chance to serve Him directly. But you did not recognize it.

Read this sentence as many times as you need to in order for you to understand the gravity of it: YOUR STAFF, UNDER YOUR AUTHORITY, HIRED EXTRA SECURITY TO TURN ‘JESUS CHRIST’ AWAY AT YOUR GATE; YOU RATIFIED THEIR DECISION IN WRITING AND SIGNED YOUR NAME TO IT.

When you step before the Bema on that day, Jesus need not say anything to you. He can just hand you that letter, as it is a standing testimony against you.

You are standing on a precipice with a millstone around your neck. We are very afraid for you, Mark. You have sold your birthright for a new building and an adoring fan club. Turn back before it is too late.

Unless you practice true repentance in this (Numbers 5:5-7), regardless of what ever else you have done in your life, you will be counted among the goats (Matt 7:21-23). As of now, Chandler’s life and present circumstance stand as a testimony to the fact that you are not a disciple of Jesus Christ.

This is not our judgment; it is the judgment of God that He has laid out for us all in scripture. All we are attempting to here is hold your actions up to His standard and connect the dots for you. When we do, this is what we see: You are the man who built the Taj Mahal and mislaid the body. You are the Ecclesiastical “foolish king who has forgotten how to learn”. You are one of the seeds who have been choked out by the deceitfulness of wealth and the worries of life. You have gained the whole world and lost your soul.

Repent. Clean up your life. Clean up Bel Air. Find the narrow road and get back on it, no matter what it costs you. No matter what it costs Bel Air Presbyterian. Mark, turn from the idols of this world and “bear fruit in keeping with repentance”.

There is a culture at Bel Air that pre-dates you. But you are the captain of that ship and the responsibility of it now rests squarely on your shoulders. And it is not unique to Bel Air or the American church, but it is a deadly cancer, eating at the body and hindering the work of the Spirit.

The functional heresy at Bel Air is that repentance of sin is not required for the forgiveness of sin, for sanctification and maybe not even for salvation.

You have preached that Satan loves to get a foothold in churches. This seems to be the foothold that he has a Bel Air, and you look to be the one holding it in place for him.

A search of Bel Air’s web site for the words “repent” or “repentance” yields only a single hit. An article where you quote Acts 26:19 where God gave a vision to call the people to repentance. You then write an article about “following your dreams”, but never mention repentance, which was the important part of the verse in the first place.

According to Numbers 5:5-7, repentance requires three things:

1) Guilt. Conviction of legitimate wrong doing.
2) Confession. Saying to God and those you have wronged, “I have wronged you. I did ____________ but I should have done _________________.
3) Restitution. Cleaning up your mess. Doing the thing that you should have done in the first place and adding 20% (if that is possible).

This is what we are calling you to now. This is the biblical standard we are calling you to hold your staff and membership accountable to. This is what we are calling you to preach and live.

Repentance is the first command that He gives us so that we may gain eternal life, and continued repentance is continued proof of life. You have no proof of life.

We are fully aware of the harshness of this letter, and the utter gall it must seem to confront a well-respected pastor in front of the Elders. And yet we are compelled by scripture and conscience to speak the truth, not in anger, but not sugar-coated either. And it has taken us a year to be able to address these issues with love and not anger. In constructing this letter we have worked to balance two commands that God gives in confronting sin. First, 2 Timothy 2:23-24, “The Lord's bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth”. And Second, “Do not hate your brother in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt.” Leviticus 19:17)

We have purposefully been detailed and brutally honest, John the Baptist honest. We have chosen to err on the part of frankness, as that is the example that Christ set when he rebuked those in God’s leadership who were mistreating the sheep. We do not believe that God’s purposes are served by polite rhetoric, as the consequences of your actions in this matter will extend into eternity for you, for Scott’s brother, and for the thousands of people who look to you for guidance. We believe the harshness of this rebuke is in line with the gravity of the circumstances. “Better is open rebuke than hidden love. Faithful are the wounds of a friend.” (Prv.27:5-6)

If we have been, or even seem to be, too harsh or unloving, we apologize.

Whom the Lord loves, He reproves. It is our earnest hope that this will not be received as us lashing out at you or trying to embarrass you in front of others, but as brotherly concern and correction from God’s Word (not ours) for the sake of your future. We pray that the Holy Spirit will fall on you hard so that your cheap grace will fall away and you will fall in love with Jesus for offering you absolution for your horrible treatment of Him. That in true humility, you will come to allow yourself to be taught by the people you have wronged. Not just us, but all of the people that you have wronged during your ministry, no matter how far back it goes.

You have a choice now.

You can continue on the present path, ignore our complaints and warnings, and go on the attack against us yet again; to continue to sabotage and seduce until you get what you want. If that is your choice, then you are sadly not a pastor but a CEO, and you are lost.

Or

You can accept the correction, get out your Bible, meditate on scripture, humble yourself on your face before God, and examine yourself to see if there be any wicked way within you. Repent, beg the Holy Spirit to convict you to the depths of your heart and to create in you a clean heart and renew a right spirit within you. Then go out and make it right. DO justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God in His steps.

Forgiveness and freedom from sin do not come without true repentance. True repentance is seen clearly in a man’s acts of repentance. Repentance/Forgiveness (which are two sides of the same coin) is a mixture of humility, grief and joy that is unmistakable and drives a man not to dread confession of sin, but to take pleasure in finding some burden that he can hand back to his God so that he can be rewarded with more of Him.

Being the parents of an autistic child has given us insights that we never would have had otherwise. We would like to share one more with you.

In the beginning of our journey with Chandler’s autism, we heard the question, “what is the hardest thing about having an autistic child?” and upon thinking about it, Ginger realized that the hardest thing was the lack of ecclesia. It is wrenchingly heartbreaking to call to your own child but to never have him respond.

It has given us a glimpse of what it must be like for God to be constantly calling out to the children that He loves, knowing that because of the manifestation of sin, they cannot hear Him and respond, and indeed some never will.

The pain of longing to know and be known by our son is merely a glimpse of the pain that The Father bears when He longs to draw His children to Himself, but they do not come to Him because His voice does not break through all of the other noise and distraction in their world.

The joy that filled us the first time he responded to us after beginning treatment cannot be fully described. Give the Father that joy now.

Please let us know if there is anything we can do to help you on this journey. We hope that God is even now working in all of our hearts, for His glory.

We will be praying for you and for Bel Air as we wait for your written reply.

Sincerely,
Scott & Ginger Taylor

cc: Elders on Session

1/15/08 - Adding the Letter to the Elders on Session. The letter has been edited as we believe that two of the people that we filed charges against are most likely innocent of the charges we made against them, after they DID come to us to be reconciled in obedience to Matthew 5:23-24.

YAY OBEDIENCE! IT WORKS!! (*Never mind on the reconciliation and obedience. Said parties, were not earnest or honest with us about the conflict and the reconciliation attempt failed. We now believe our charges were basically correct, but should be altered a bit, but we have decided to continue to leave them off the public record just for the sake of accuracy. - GT 05/29/09)

I am also with holding the names of any one who is NOT in an overseer position at Bel Air, as God's command in 1 Tim 5:20 only extends to the public rebuke of those in high positions, and not to the general membership.

Secretary of the Session
Ellen Baker
Bel Air Presbyterian
16221 Mulholland Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90049
June 21, 2007

To The Elders on Session,

We began attending Bel Air Presbyterian in 2001 and became regulars when Mark Brewer arrived. We quickly made friends and became active in the Young Marrieds group, becoming part of the leadership and helping build that community. In 2003 we became members, and both of our sons were baptized by Roger Dermody that April. Webster enrolled in the preschool in the fall of 2004, Chandler followed in fall 2005.

During our childrens' enrollment in the Bel Air Presbyterian Church Preschool, we became aware of several unethical and illegal actions perpetrated by the staff and administration. In the fall of 2005, we attempted to move through a Matthew 18:15-21 process with the key staff members, as we are obligated to by scripture. We also met with Mark Brewer in December telling him what we were doing and asking him to teach us and hold us accountable to do it well, which he committed to doing.

To say it did not go well is an understatement. When confronted by Ginger, the staff members became defensive and indignant. How dare she question their judgment? Instead of holding themselves accountable to scripture, the licensing laws of California, the student handbook, and the enrollment agreement of the school, these staff members initiated a scorched earth initiative to silence and discredit us, and to keep their sin hidden in darkness.

On several occasions, we reported the continuing malfeasance of the school’s staff to Mark Brewer, Roger Dermody, Karen Crawford, [names with held] and one of the mothers whose child was being mishandled. On every occasion a report was made by us, rather than being investigated and adjudicated properly, it was dismissed out of hand and we were mocked, slandered and retaliated against for filing legitimate grievances.

As the senior pastor of Bel Air, Mark Brewer has a mission and an obligation to adhere in strict obedience to scripture and to teach and correct those under his authority to do likewise. Mark does not live up to this standard. And when we had occasion to bring this to his attention personally and privately in his office, he mocked us, dismissed our claims, told us not to use scripture, and made an empty promise that he would look into it properly and thoroughly. He did nothing further on our behalf, except to belittle Ginger over the phone several days later and to write us a letter dismissing our children from the school and [accusation edited].

It is our earnest prayer that Mark Brewer will begin to take seriously the unaddressed sin in his life and in the lives of the staff at Bel Air. It is also our earnest prayer that as his administrative superiors, you will take seriously and with great care the position of authority God has placed you in over him and the rest of the staff.

At this time we report to you that false testimony was given about our family and this conflict by the following people: Roger Dermody, Karen Crawford, Mike Hooper, Andrea Petche, [names with held].

We also report to you that the following people violated state law during our conflict with the school: Mark Brewer, Mike Hooper, Roger Dermody, Andrea Petche, Megan MacMeekin, [names with held].

These violations include, but are not limited to:
• Commissioning an evaluation of our son Chandler without our knowledge or consent
• Requiring us to give up our parental right to have access to our children while they were on school grounds as terms of their continued enrollment
• Refusing to produce school records on demand
• Multiple violations of confidentiality.

Further, according to the Community Care Licensing investigator’s report, the following people committed perjury and fraud during the state’s investigation into our charges in June of 2006: Andrea Petche, [names with held].

According to the Book of Order which follows Robert’s Rules and standard parliamentary procedures, we believe that Megan MacMeekin and Mark Brewer’s recusal from any deliberations by the Session on the matter is required.

Consider this a formal written demand requiring that you forward us complete copies of both of our sons’ school records so that we may review them, as is our right under California Code of Regulations, Title 22, Div 12, Chap 1, Art 6, Section 101221 (e).

These records should contain the minutes of the “trial in absentia” preschool committee meeting on Feb. 21, 2006:
• Which we were not allowed to attend
• Of which we were not allowed to know the topics discussed,
• Of which we were not allowed to know the charges brought against us despite repeated requests
• After which we were not given the opportunity to make a defense against any charges despite repeated requests
• Of which were not allowed to question the work product (illegal contract)
• During which we are told that false testimony was given against us and our child.

During our final meeting with Mark Brewer, he told us that Mike and Andrea had reported to him that Chandler had to be dismissed from school because his disability was too severe for him to be maintained in the classroom and also that we had threatened to sue the church. We informed him that their testimony was a complete fabrication. The aforementioned records should also contain the minutes of this meeting and the specific claims Mike and Andrea made to Mark. The records should also include all minutes, notes or summaries of any other meetings in which Scott, Ginger, Webster or Chandler Taylor were discussed.

It is our understanding from the state investigator that Andrea Petche falsified Chandler’s records, therefore we request that Ellen Baker retrieve all records without prior notice to Andrea or any staff and express copies to us within 24 hours of receipt of this letter; so that we may be assured that no further tampering will take place. We trust that Ms. Baker will not alter the records in any way, and ask that she include a letter stating that they have not been altered since receipt of this demand notice.

We take scripture and the law very seriously. Paul tells us that God holds the elders and ministers of His flock to a higher standard, and we as Christian brothers are to encourage, instruct and rebuke one another in love for the building up of the body. To not do so, to let someone continue in sin unchecked, does not serve the sinner, it does not serve the body and could inevitably leads us back into a “Moomaw” situation.

This is a very complicated matter and we wish to be of assistance to you as you investigate and adjudicate it biblically. Let us know what we need to do and how we may best be of service to you.

Sincerely,
Scott & Ginger Taylor
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Update: April 20, 2008

I see that people have begun coming to this post from Los Angeles because of the questions circulating about what is going on at Bel Air.

Just to update, we never received a response to our last demand to in January for our children's full records and BAPC still remains in violation of California law allowing parents access to their children's school records. Neither Mark Brewer, nor the elders have ever contacted us about resolving this matter.

For the record, we have never filed a law suit or even threatened to file one against Bel Air for their actions. It is Bel Air's obligation to deal biblically and legally in this matter and no one should have to file a law suit to force a true church to do the right thing and take responsibility for its actions.

Since leaving, we have heard from others whose experiences mirror our own, but who have not spoken out publicly for fear of retribution and of not being believed. We encourage those people to speak up for the sake of those still at Bel Air who will be treated poorly in the future if appropriate accountability is not put in place.

We encourage the members of Bel Air to initiate a detailed and serious investigation of what is going on there, of both the current and former staff members, and of the finances.