According to the media reports, a pastor who just took over as assistant principal at a Massachusetts middle school has sparked outrage because he advocates spanking children.

The Boston Herald reported on Monday that in an online video of a church lecture, since taken down, Silas Coellner urges parents to use the "Christian discipline" of spanking children when they begin to crawl and calls it "critical" to raising them.

Coellner, 40, of Mashpee, Mass., will oversee discipline at Old Rochester Regional Junior High School in Mattapoisett.

He does not plan to have students spanked at the school, he told the Herald.

Coellner, who said he spanks his children, ages 6, 8 and 10, said, "I'm not (spanking) other people's kids. It's all prescribed. You don't wing it. I'm not doing it alone and I'm not doing it privately. It's about teachable moments. I never, ever, ever want to harm a child."

It was also reported that the video of Coellner's lecture at Calvary Chapel Cape Cod had been carried on the church's Web site for six months before being taken offline

The lecture was meant to convey his belief: "If you don't discipline them, then you hate them," he told the Herald.

In the video, he urged parents to "apply the board of education to the seat of learning" and suggested they start spanking early.

Coellner said in the video, "I have this little bundle of innocence. When do I start dealing with them? There's something about when they reach that crawling stage, I have found, in my experience, when you can suddenly see that heart of defiance, of rebellion for the first time. That's when you begin."

Kathleen Wolf, a psychiatric nurse from Arlington, Mass., who failed in 2007 to make Massachusetts the only state in the nation to ban corporal punishment in the home, called Coellner's message disturbing.

Wolf said, "What an example of depth of ignorance. The concern is that someone in this kind of position gives a very strong, explicit message in public." (With Inputs from Agencies)