In this second article on pastoral moral failures, I address two systemic problems that contribute to moral failures by our pastors.
Confront Systemic Organizational Sin:
Recently, I received a phone call informing me that the senior pastor of a mega church I know well had resigned because he used inappropriate sexual language with women in the church. The public statement by the pastor and the elders was that “This was a one-time occurrence.” As I expected, more information emerged later to prove this had happened on multiple occasions. (It had even occurred at his previous church but was kept secret by that leadership board.) Sadly, I’ve known this church for over twenty years; inappropriate behavior towards members of the opposite sex on staff has occurred six times over that period. Each time the elders minimized the damage, implemented a public relations approach, and acted as though this had never happened before.
This most recent time the elders proclaimed that the senior pastor had repented and resigned. They also stated that they’d forgiven him and were caring for his family. Then they immediately moved on to how the search process would procced, asking the congregation to support the church through their prayers and finances. The matter was considered closed: No mention of the past occurrence of this sin among their pastoral staff, and no mention of asking those affected for forgiveness. I wonder, How long before it happens again?
I suggest an alternative, pro-active strategy:
*What if the elders chose to publicly ask forgiveness for their failure to properly address this repetitive sin?
*What if the church accepts culpability, publicly asking forgiveness from the women who were harmed by all previous and this latest occurrence?
*What would happen if the elders openly explained to the congregation the steps they were taking to prevent this from happening again?
*What if they stopped approaching this sin as a public relations problem—and instead viewed it as an organizational sin problem?
*Would the Spirit of God demonstrate life-changing power in the church with this form of holistic approach?
Stop Blaming the Women:
Too many times the church and/or the pastors blame the women who were involved in the inappropriate situations. Statements like “I was seduced by her” or “She misunderstood what I intended” are attempts to deflect responsibility—like Adam’s blaming Eve. I observed this behavior when a friend came to me for advice on how to handle a situation in which his pastor inappropriately touched his wife and then privately pursued her. When this husband confronted the pastor, he blamed the wife by insisting she was lying. When the elders became involved, they misapplied the biblical passage about needing two witnesses before accusing an elder. Then the elders demanded that my friend and his wife go before the church to confess their sin of wrongfully accusing an elder. A few days later another wife in the church came forward to state that she also had been inappropriately touched and pursued by the pastor. Once more the elders misused the same biblical passage and accused her of sinning against the church—because there weren’t two witnesses to her accusations. They demanded that she also go before the church to confess her sin of falsely accusing the pastor.
The obvious problem is that—by the very nature of these types of sins—there aren’t two witnesses. Eventually the pastor had to leave the church as more women came forward. To my amazement and disgust, a couple years later the denomination appointed this same pastor as the regional director for all denominational churches in that region, planning to bring him back to the city where the assaults had originally occurred. Fortunately, the uproar from the former church members was so great that the denomination reversed their decision. Still, they moved him to another region of the country and promoted him. This type of cover-up, intentional misuse of Scripture, and lack of accountability for the guilty simply cannot be tolerated in the Church.
Our struggle with the presence of sin in our lives will continue until Christ returns, and we all need to recognize that this could happen to any of us—if we aren’t intentionally pro-active about guarding our hearts. Eliminating all instances of pastors resigning because of moral failure isn’t possible. But we must be more creative, more intentional, more determined, and more open in dealing with these destructive issues.
The holiness of the Church is at stake.