Marian and the Elders

Accused of fornication, a woman hales her church into court

People lined up 45 minutes early each day to get a seat. Spillover spectators stood along the walls or perched on windowsills. A law student from California had come to Tulsa for the event; one man had driven down from Washington State. Most of the nearly 200 people in the audience, however, were Oklahoma churchgoers, some of whom clutched Bibles to check out passages on sex and sin referred to by the speakers.

Though the bench seats resembled pews, this was no prairie Bible conference: it was a four-day trial in state district court in Tulsa. And the person described in the courtroom as a sinner, diminutive 36-year-old Nurse Marian Guinn, was not on trial; her accusers were, Guinn was suing her church and its elders for $1.3 million in damages for publicly condemning her sexual behavior. She charged that in denouncing her, the Church of Christ in nearby Collinsville (pop. 3,500) had invaded her privacy, intentionally causing emotional distress and shattering her "whole world."

The trouble began in 1981 after Guinn, a divorcee with four children, began seeing former Collinsville Mayor Pat Sharp, a divorced man. Confronted by the three elders who govern the church, Guinn admitted to an affair. Her confession, she says, was to remain confidential. When she refused their demand to repent in front of the entire 110-member congregation, the elders issued an ultimatum: if she did not confess publicly in two weeks they would issue a formal statement to the congregation denouncing her "fornication" and calling on members to "withdraw fellowship" from her.

"I did everything but get down on my knees, pleading with them not to bring this before the congregation," Guinn told the court. "I'm not saying I wasn't guilty. I was. But it was none of their business." She quit the church to prevent the action, but the elders read the announcement anyway, contending that she would remain a member until they expelled her. Last week Guinn's lawyer, Thomas Frasier, likened the church's action to the public branding of the adulteress Hester Prynne in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Said Frasier of the Guinn-Sharp relationship: "He was a single man. She was a single lady. And this is America."

The elders argued that they had an absolute right to practice their religion as Church of Christ tradition dictates. The 13,000 Churches of Christ in the U.S. are noted for monitoring and disciplining the lives of their 1.3 million adult members. As the elders testified, Churches of Christ seek to apply literally every word of the New Testament. In Matthew 18: 15-17, Jesus Christ lays out the procedure for dealing with a wrongdoer. The final step: "If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector." The churches interpret this as requiring the kind of treatment that was meted out to Guinn.

The Tulsa jury chose a different interpretation. It sided with Guinn, and the court awarded her $390,000, more than the Collinsville congregation's entire proceeds for six years. "A wrong was made right," said a pleased Guinn. As for the church, Elder Roy Witten said, "If Marian were to come back tomorrow, we would welcome her with open arms and the angels in heaven would join with us."