Early this month I ran across a Substack article by Katelyn Beaty dealing with the question of how soon should a pastor be restored after getting into trouble. Ms. Beaty is a Christian journalist and has written for “Christianity Today” and other publications. Her article was triggered by the news that a pastor at Hillsong NYC, who had gotten into trouble and lost his position, had been hired by a megachurch in Tulsa, OK. This is not an isolated incident; during the efforts of the Southern Baptist Convention to deal with their sexual abuse scandals of recent years, one prominent pastor, who had been forced to resign over his misbehavior, was counseled by a couple of other ministers for a few months, and then they announced he was ready to go back into ministry. And of course, at the core of the Roman Catholic sex scandals is the habit of the bishops and archbishops to just transfer priests to another parish, without telling the people there what they had done—followed by many of them just continuing their misbehavior.
Beaty’s article is here:
The link shows nine comments; I wrote two of them. My comments were rooted in my own experiences in ministry in my twenties, and in things I have seen over the years in churches since.
I grew up in the Christian Churches/Churches of Christ. They were part of a movement in the early 1800s in the United States to drop the traditional denominations and return to the ways of the early church depicted in the New Testament. Many of their early leaders declined to take a salary from the churches they preached for. Some of them made their living by farming, others by teaching in schools or writing. One of them, Alexander Campbell, a Scots-Irish immigrant who had grown up in northern Ireland, published a satirical piece in 1825 that mocked the professional clergy, especially of the “established” churches of the day. https://biblicalstudies.info/preacher/third-peter.pdf Campbell’s piece may seem harsh; but from what I have learned of history over the years, it is more accurate than you might think as a picture of the upper clergy in the “established” churches of Europe—and the colonies before the American Revolution. If you do not know what “established church” meant when the First Amendment to the US Constitution was written, here’s a piece I wrote a couple years ago on that topic.
Campbell and his friends tried to do away with paid clergy, although by the late 1800s many congregations had gone back to it. They did create a body of churches with no denominational structure, and they intended the local churches to be managed by local men serving as elders, rather than by pastors.
I grew up in those churches, and graduated from one of their Bible colleges in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1972. I was never “the pastor” of a church. But for seven years I was part of a group of students and former students who operated a store-front mission church in a slum downhill from the college. All we could afford would have been a part-time student minister (typical pay for such back then was $25 a week—the minimum wage in those days was $1.60/hour, and gas for your car cost $0.29/gallon). We were a group of students, just as qualified as we could hire. So we just divided the chores among us. On any Sunday, one of us would lead the singing, one would handle the Communion and offering, and one would preach the sermon. Business was handled by an informal men’s meeting once a month, oftener if needed. And yes, it was done by the men—this was the early 1970s! But if the ladies took exception to any of our decisions, they let us know—and we reconsidered and modified if we needed to. None of us took any pay from the church—we worked to support ourselves.
Later, the owner of our building offered to sell it to us. To own the property, we had to organize. So we set up a non-profit corporation according to Ohio law. I helped write the corporate by-laws. We had an official “board” as a result. I served on that board, was a trustee of the corporation, and was treasurer for several years.
In 1975, the local Christian Church ministers’ association offered to help us. They offered to cover a full-time salary for one of us. The idea was that the man being paid would serve as full-time minister, and also raise funds from the individual churches in the region to cover his salary after the six-month period ended. One of our number was chosen, and the change began. He also began to attend the meetings of the association.
And suddenly, he changed! He was no longer “one of us.” In his own eyes, he was now our clergyman. He was now around all the time, instead of having to work a job for his living—and most of our people took their questions to him, rather than just asking anyone from the board that they ran into. He also fell into a habit of doing things he didn’t have to do, like building repairs—another board member and I were supposed to do that, but we had to work it in around our jobs. But he kept doing it himself instead of waiting for us to get to it.
But the real failure was in the fundraising. Despite the backing of the ministers’ association, the individual churches did not contribute to keep his work going. He came to the board and demanded that we pay him the same salary; that was not what had been agreed to six months before, and the board declined to do so. He got mad, packed up his wife and baby daughter, and left the Cincinnati area. The rest of us kept on, and the church survived without a pastor or the funding.
Four years later I left that church, for an assortment of reasons. I did not seek a preaching ministry job. In fact, I do not think I have preached any sermons in all the years since. But situations I encountered over the years convinced me that I am better off staying out of the pulpit.
My own experiences in ministry, and what I have seen of other ministers, have brought me to the conclusion that the biggest occupational hazard in ministry is that a person’s pride gets wrapped around their position in the church. Pride was described by C. S. Lewis as “the Great Sin”—the sin that turned the angel Lucifer into Satan. And it invariably damages an individual’s walk with Christ. It can have varied effects on preachers. Some just get a little too impressed with their own eloquence; some will lie about matters to get their way. Some are jealous of anyone else who starts to be popular with their people. And some turn into social climbers who give their favor to the well-off people in their churches—and may even be hesitant to confront a sinner because of his financial contributions. I knew one man in his sixties who destroyed a promising church, because he could not tolerate any disagreement. He had been a preacher and professor for many years. But if someone questioned an idea of his, he did not deal with the question; he interpreted it as an attack on his “office” in the church, and defended that tooth and nail, no-holds barred. Over several years, anyone with any leadership potential left that church (and a lot of others with them). Eventually they reached a point where they could no longer pay his salary, and he left the area to live with his son’s family in another state.
It is possible to resist the Pride trap. I have known a few men who did it. Most were men who had gone through some major disruption. Two were men who were forced out of their churches during the charismatic movement in the late 20th century. (Some churches talk a lot about the “right hand of fellowship—but you had better beware of the “left foot of fellowship!) Another was out of ministry for some years after his wife was unfaithful and divorced him; after almost ten years, the church he was attending made him their pastor. Sadly, a few years later, he showed signs that he was getting his ego inflated again. He pushed his elders to give a unanimous vote for a new expensive building upgrade; finally he got it—because the one dissenter resigned, and left the church.
Why does this happen so much? The biggest reason is the exalted position that pastors have in nearly all churches. They are always around, and seldom have any real supervision. In many churches, they have total authority. And even if there are elders and deacons or some sort of board, it isn’t that hard for the pastor to influence who gets chosen for those positions—and to weed out those they don’t like. All too many fill all the positions in their congregations with “yes-men” who will not disagree or confront them on anything.
There is an old adage, from the English Lord Acton back in the 1800s: “Power tends to corrupt; and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The corruption may take different forms. Currently we are seeing a lot sex scandals, some of them going back years. It isn’t just the Roman Catholics; the Southern Baptists are dealing with it currently. But there have been others for many years. It isn’t just the big names like Jimmy Swaggert or Jim Baker or Ravi Zacharias; for every one of them, there are many more who are not famous, but still sinning in secret. The pastor who conducted my wedding back in 1970 eventually got caught having an affair with the church pianist. And it isn’t always sex; that seems to be common at present, but some get into financial scandals or other illicit activities. I even heard of one local pastor who turned out to have connections to a crime syndicate!