In March 2007, Oregon’s KATU-TV reported that police in Albany had arrested and charged David Lee Fink, pastor of the Potter’s House Christian Fellowship, with assault after his own seventeen-year-old son called authorities to report an incident involving his younger brother. The arrest, and the reaction it drew from onlookers, put an old question in front of a modern newsroom: where corporal discipline ends and assault begins.
The paddle, and what it left behind at Potter’s House Christian Fellowship
Police reported finding what they described as extreme red marks, welts, and bruising on the buttocks, thighs, and arm of Fink’s thirteen-year-old son. The instrument itself was taken into evidence: a sixteen-inch wooden paddle, cracked and worn from age, wrapped in duct tape in two separate places, with the words “board of correction” written across it in ballpoint pen. Fink reportedly struck his son with it ten times. Police concluded the incident had crossed from ordinary discipline into assault, a judgment the report notes some in the community did not share.
A defense grounded in Scripture
Christina Niskanen spoke up for the pastor, framing her defense in explicitly biblical terms and pointing to her own experience raising children the same way, arguing that what the Bible says about spanking justified exactly this kind of discipline and that her own children, and she expected most others, came through it without harm.
“I’d rather raise my voice than raise my hand”
A second woman, who did not give her name to the reporter, pushed back directly. She acknowledged the same verse Niskanen’s position rests on, that sparing the rod spoils the child, while still concluding that spanking was not an appropriate measure and that other methods of discipline were available instead, summarizing her own position in a single line: “I’d rather raise my voice than raise my hand.”
Why this case still matters
What makes this report worth preserving is not its resolution, since the investigation was still open when it ran, but the fault line it captured in real time: two women citing the identical text of Scripture to reach opposite conclusions about the same act, in the same community, over the same child. The paper did not need to adjudicate that dispute to make its point. It only needed to record that a church leader’s chosen instrument of discipline, worn, cracked, and labeled by hand, had drawn police involvement serious enough to end in formal charges.
Sources and further reading
- Anita Kissee, “Pastor’s paddle leads to assault charge,” KATU-TV, Oregon, March 1, 2007; archived at the Cult Education Institute reference files
- On the court hearing that followed, see Potter’s House Church Pastor Released Following Child Abuse Hearing
