If you were looking for Biblical support for church NDAs, you might think the Apostle Paul would be your best bet.

After all, Paul managed much of the early church organization and policy, as well as managing internal disputes in churches across the Roman Empire.  He was an expert in religious law and a Roman citizen who appealed his legal case all the way to Caesar. Surely, out of all the early church characters, Paul would best understand the need for NDAs to “protect unity in the Church,” right?

That would be a hard no.

Paul wouldn’t be the cheerleader for church NDAs. He would be the one burning them in the town square. In fact, if Paul had signed an NDA like churches use today, half of the New Testament would be gone or different.

That’s how antithetical NDAs are to the things Paul taught in Scripture. Let me show you why.

Paul wasn’t shy, and he had no problem and zero chill with disparaging people in the church.

Almost every NDA you find in churches today will have one thing in common: non-disparagement language. Basically, they make sure the signer knows they can’t say or do anything that might embarrass or hurt the reputation of the church or its leaders. Anything negative or critical is off limits, regardless of whether it’s true.

And if you break the contract and say something disparaging, the church reserves the right to sue the pants off you. That will teach you a lesson, right?

A cursory reading of the New Testament will tell you why Paul would have been on team “What the heck were you thinking” when it comes to NDAs in church.

You see, Paul disparaged people. A lot. Right there in the Holy Spirit-inspired scriptures. That’s right. The inerrant Word of God includes public disparagement from Paul (and Jesus.)

Paul regularly named specific people in his letters to protect congregations from harm.

Think about the man in Corinth who was sleeping with his stepmother and got kicked out of the church. We know about him and what he did because Paul wrote about him. From a modern legal perspective, that was wildly disparaging. And if Paul had signed an NDA, it would have been cause for legal action against the unruly apostle.

People like Hymenaeus, Alexander, and Demas are known to us today only because of Paul’s biblical warnings against them. He wrote to Timothy that Hymenaeus and Alexander rejected “good faith and conscience” and that Paul “handed them over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme.” It’s almost as if Paul went out of his way to make sure Timothy (and future bible readers) knew what these guys did.

Demas received a warm, loving greeting in Colossians 4:14. By the time of the first letter to Timothy, Paul labeled him a deserter. Paul called balls and strikes. He showed both love and public disparagement to Demas, all based on his actions.

And then there was Alexander the Coppersmith. 1 Timothy 4:14-15 reads:

“Alexander the Coppersmith did me a great deal of harm. The Lord will repay him for what he has done. You too should be on your guard against him, because he strongly opposed our message.”

Now, I don’t know exactly what Alexander the Coppersmith did, but I do know how Paul felt about it. Timothy did too, and he knew Paul was warning him to stay away from that guy. Moreover, nearly 2,000 years later, you and I are giving Alexander the side eye and wondering what that jerk did! Why? Because Paul disparaged him in the Holy Bible.

Paul even disparaged Peter when he wrote about correcting him in Galatians. If Paul had been under a modern NDA, his public accountability for Peter and the book of Galatians itself would have been an illegal breach of contract.

Can you imagine the church planter who started most of the churches in the New Testament being sued by those same churches for disparaging them? Me neither.

In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul puts the church on blast for taking each other to court and using lawsuits to handle disputes. He doesn’t mince words. Instead, he says some tough and disparaging things to them like “I say this to shame you” and “The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already.”

There goes Paul, disparaging people in the Bible again.

He continues, “Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated? Instead, you cheat yourselves and do wrong, and you do this to your brothers and sisters.” I can hear him saying this to church leaders today.

I know you are worried about that person saying something to hurt your reputation, but why not rather be wronged? I get it. Your church may lose some people over what they said. But if you think they are incorrect, still, why not rather be wronged?

Instead, you cheat yourselves and do wrong to your brothers and sisters! You do this to the sheep in your own flock. And you threaten to sue them in a secular court just to silence them. Don’t you realize that’s just another loss for you?

That’s the reality of church NDAs.

They are inherently a legal threat to take a brother or sister before a secular court. Why? Because they are paying you money in exchange for silencing you about anything disparaging.

Paul was clear this wasn’t what God wants from us.

In his letters to Timothy and Titus, Paul set a high bar for elder qualifications. Elders had to be above reproach, blameless, respectable, and have a good reputation with outsiders, among other things.

What do these qualifications have in common? They all require public scrutiny.

 A person cannot be above reproach without first facing public reproach. The process of installing New Testament elders starts with an implicit invitation for the community to scrutinize the candidate.

To be blameless, one must first face down the potential blame of others. One can only be determined respectable by first being scrutinized for that quality.  And a good reputation with outsiders is, by definition, something decided by others.

Simply put, no one can meet the qualifications of a biblical elder without first undergoing public scrutiny. Yet, that same scrutiny is precisely what NDAs aim to stop.

So, how likely is it that the Apostle Paul would ignore the very elder qualifications he wrote to protect those same church leaders from public scrutiny and questioning? From my perspective, it’s not likely at all.

Paul didn’t mince words when it came to the public exposure of sin and immorality. He wasn’t afraid of exposure. He expected it!

Paul charged the church of Ephesus to “have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.” He challenged them to do the opposite by “living as children of the light.” And in case anyone was confused about what he was saying, Paul clarified that “the fruit of light consists of all goodness, righteousness, and TRUTH” (emphasis added).

Truth is part of living in the light. Where truth is obscured or absent, it is not the light, but darkness. And Paul was extremely clear: Christians should have nothing to do with darkness.

An NDA legally requires darkness. There is no way around it. Such agreements are predicated on keeping certain truths hidden.

When we see darkness, we should expose it by shining light on it. None of this is consistent with NDA use in the church. However, Paul had even stronger words for church leaders.

In 1 Timothy 5:20, he instructs us that “those elders who are sinning you are to rebuke before everyone, so that the others may take warning.”

Sinning elders weren’t to be quietly corrected. They were to be rebuked publicly before everyone. Not only was the correction to be made public, but its whole point was to serve as a stark and sobering warning to others.

Modern church NDAs do the exact opposite. They protect sinning elders from any sort of public rebuke, discipline, correction, or even questions. They control the narrative by deciding what can and cannot be said about leaders, sometimes even requiring people to trade the truth for flat-out lies. All in the name of church unity, of course.

Church NDAs aren’t just inconsistent with the Apostle Paul’s teaching. They are completely antithetical to it.

To make a compelling case for why churches should use NDAs, you have to ignore Paul’s teaching and much of the New Testament.

Modern churches use these corporate tools to avoid public embarrassment. Paul, on the other hand, used public exposure to preserve church purity. He taught Christians everywhere to expose darkness. He commanded Timothy to publicly expose sinning elders. And he exposed bad actors time and time again in his letters to churches.

Paul never avoided embarrassment or skirted the exposure of sin.  Instead, he modeled the power of Biblical exposure in a healthy church.

If Paul had signed an NDA and couldn’t say anything disparaging, embarrassing, or corrective, then we would have a much different (and significantly thinner) New Testament today.