In Matthew 18:15-20, Jesus explains that the pattern for correcting a fellow Christian is simple: First, confront him privately yourself. Second, if necessary, confront him privately with one or two others. And third, if necessary, confront him before the whole group of believers.
In all my years of thinking about the ethics of confrontation, it always seemed obvious that the big benefit of this way of doing things was for the person being confronted, since you lead him away from sin in the least embarrassing way. I had never realized the massive alternate benefit in protecting the person doing the confronting from making a public fool out of himself when he is wrong.
I discovered this rather inadvertently after I overreacted to something a friend posted on facebook, first publicly and then (after realizing my mistake and deleting my response) via email to him privately. Because I turned out to be so wrong, my own reputation was protected from the truth of my stupidity. Even though we confronters don’t understand that side of the benefit, it still protects us when we do things the right way.
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