Reconciliation

What does reconciliation look like? We ran into a corrupt pastor who just flat out lied about us to get control of some land. This pastor even recruited a Swiss national to write to our headquarters, FMI, in Los Angeles, CA, USA, about what crooks we were. I first heard of this when I met Jim Scott (my former boss at FMI) at our regional missions meeting in Malaysia in October. My reaction was, "With pastors like this who need hemorrhoids?" This is happening at the same time we are working at transitioning our leadership to a new team over the next few years.  In order to clarify the situation, Jim Scott and George Butron, who are directing our leadership transition, came in early November too meet with the FCOPI transition committee (Sou, myself and five Cambodian leaders) and they wanted to straighten this out as their first agenda item. As only God could work it out, the Swiss man called the morning Jim and George were arriving and said he wanted to come and apologize. Jim and George confronted the committee with these accusations in the presence of the Swiss man and his wife. The leadership team showed Jim and George hard evidence that the pastor had lied to both the Swiss man, and through him, to FMI. In addition they told the real story about what was going on with the pastor, the church, and the orphanage. The Swiss man and his wife were stunned, and sincerely apologized, they asked for forgiveness for lying on the part of the crooked pastor and for spreading false information about FCOP Cambodia. They repented, "Please destroy this negative message from Satan. We apologize to you for distributing this information, with only the word of a corrupt pastor, and without searching out the truth. How can we repair the damage?" We asked them to write out a statement of the truth, and confront the pastor, which they did. We prayed with them and offered our forgiveness. May all of our problems be so simple!

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