Dr. John Bergsma

What have you seen?

Not.

You haven't at all, huh?

It generally hasn't been, except in like maybe 12-step groups or high intimacy groups like that, or maybe with a disciple maker.

Not in the sense that he would personally absolve them.

But that's what got to me was that I began to reflect on this and I realized, oh, this is where Catholic confession comes in.

Because what Catholics do is go to their pastor.

That's how I viewed it as an outsider.

That, oh, this is a great practice within Catholicism.

Catholicism has kind of a customary, institutional, regularized, you know, as it were, comfortable.

Not exactly comfortable, but, you know, a way of living this out that works and that is regular and doesn't require some kind of...

of a new practice within a congregation.

And so I looked at this and I thought, oh, Catholics can just go to their pastor and they confess in a situation of confidentiality

and they get advice from him.

And so all of the pitfalls that I could think of from trying to implement this in a regular congregation were avoided by the Catholic practice of confession.

So I actually grew to admire the Catholic practice of confession as a way of carrying out what James is commanding us to do, confess your sins to one another.

I thought that sounded to me like public confession, you know, which has a lot of dangers to it, which was in fact how the church practiced confession.

Right.

You know, since the priest represents the congregation and acts in persona Christi,

When we confess to the priest, it is, in a sense, confessing to the church.