We Messed Up, and It’s Important That People Know About It
Yesterday we wrote an article about Grace Community Church and former elder Hohn Cho, questioning his choice of employment and disparaging his discernment because of it. We (falsely) believed that his employer, a bioscience company, was purchasing aborted fetal tissue for experimentation and that he was in a position to know about it while turning a blind eye. Basically, “He must’ve known they were doing scientific study on aborted babies, as the chief ethics officer, but did and said nothing.” Thankfully, someone read the article, realized that we got some details wrong, and publicly rebuked us.
Rather than double down on our error, we realized that we misunderstood some technical jargon, made a bad inference because of it, and quickly retracted it with full disclaimers.
Why? Because we sinned. We sinned against Cho, his employer, and we sinned against God.
Because we believe in full transparency, we encourage all our readers to read our articles with a critical eye and call us out when we fall short or get something wrong. We don’t want to covertly edit and correct an offending article and then not address it, hoping it dies and is never heard from again.
Instead, we want to make it twice as public as our mistake. We believe it is a sin to bear false witness and spread bad information, even if it was inadvertent, and this is one way we offer accountability.
Our standard policy is to throw the article with our corrections in the Corrections/ Retraction page while keeping the record intact. However, we didn’t get a few details wrong with relatively minor implications, but we really got it wrong, causing potential reputational damage. Given the egregious nature of our error, it became apparent that leaving it up ran the risk of it being shared further, so we nuked it from our Twitter feed. (Thankfully, we never shared it anywhere else.)
Because this sort of error is new ground for us, we’re not sure if this was the right move. We believe it is, but it isn’t easy to know if a different course may have been better.
However, it is easy to know that we must do our best to make it right. We have reached out to Hohn and offered our sincere apologies, asking him to forgive us for our sin against him. Second, we’re pinning this post to all our social media feeds for the next month so that it will come before every article, even on sites where it never appeared.
It’s not enough to undo the damage, but it reflects our editorial commitments as best as we can, along with our sincere desire to be as open and honest with our friends and foes alike.
Again, we’re sorry.
Dustin & David
Note: A previous version of this article stated a willingness to provide a summary or full version of the removed article upon request. As we have firsthand knowledge that the spirit of Christian reconciliation is sadly no longer operational regarding this matter, we cannot and will not do this.
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why are you doing a total retraction? One of the subsidiaries (recent acquisition) does in vivo experiments with humanized mice. Another does a bunch of stuff with IVF. They use HEK 293 fetal cell lines as well. It’s all out there. Still a woke, ESG company.
Please DM me on Twitter or FB.
I don’t have either of those. Can’t you see the email in my comment?
DM me too ; )
Grow up, troll.
Wow! I wasn’t sure if you were just JMac/GCC fanboys, willing to slam anyone and anything that came against them. My respect for you guys just jumped.
Where does MacArthur depart from the Faith ?
Or are you just reflexively against the Doctrines of Grace ? 😬
I was concerned when I read the original article because you had linked Cho’s new job being the standard for not believing what he said about GCC’s elder board and horrible job of shepherding the people there. I’m very glad to see this humble retraction and calling the original piece for what it was: sin. It appears that Cho had first hand knowledge as an elder for a number of years, of the problems he had specifically addressed in his letter and therefore should be heard. The sin of partiality is a very damaging one (1 Cor. 1-3; James 2). Thanks again for your apology and correction.