What Do We Do With Pastors That Fail?
Reactionary.
That’s what we are.
Our propensity to swing too far from things we perceive to be wrong, I believe, is the cause not just of increasing division, tribalism, and extremism on both sides of the aisle politically, but is a major contributing factor for things like deconstruction, legalism, gracelessness, lawlessness, and liberalism within the church. They’re all different manifestations of the same core issue: that we’ve lost sight of what the Bible actually teaches and have replaced it with what makes better sense to us based on trying to correct the failures of humans. A pastor will say something out of character, or something that rubs us the wrong way, or will even sin and fall, and it can quickly cause us to rule out their entire ministry. So what do we do?
In this blog, I’m talking about pastors who do their very best to submit to and uphold the line of scripture with good-will and integrity, but have human flaws. This absolutely doesn’t mean that we give a pass and lower our defenses against legitimate false teaching as defined by the New Testament. We also don’t just shrug our shoulders on true issues of problem behavior. But because of some of the sinful mistakes good-will pastors have made, and because of the way even other pastors can over-correct in response to past hurt and failure, we now have entire large scale churches built upon things like self-esteem instead of self-denial. Overreaction is always based on emotion, never truth.
A few years ago, a prominent female teacher in the Southern Baptist Convention had been on the receiving end of some various instances of insensitivity and responded by publicly placing all white, male, SBC pastors in the camp of potential abuser - which is an utterly absurd and harmful overreaction. It’s now a means for justification for an entire group of people to railroad several unbiblical theological approaches into that convention. Scary stuff. You can’t define an entire group of people based on the behavior of very few. That’s called overreaction and overgeneralization, and helps nobody.
Now, I harp all the time on the fact that we must be reasonable and windsome in our approach to teaching and evangelism, but often times, if a pastor has a reputation of a perceived harshness or some other undesirable quality, we tend to distance ourselves from everything that man stands for or has ever said. I think of a very faithful and gifted pastor who found himself playing a word association game at a conference where he said something fairly off-kilter about a hot button issue, and was essentially blacklisted. We even prematurely cut off other Christian brothers and sisters because they don’t dislike who we dislike. We’ll even start to disagree with faithful teaching of God’s Word because it came from a man with a character flaw. All of these things beg for more maturity in us.
Right now entire generations of Christians are being raised without a working knowledge of what God has actually said because of the way it may have been said in the past, which is a problem to navigate for sure, but I’ll say this: Wishy-washiness from pastors who are buckling under the weight of not offending people are actually FAR worse in the long run for the church than those who uphold the line but biffed it on being winsome. I know in 2022 the worst thing anybody could be is mean, but wishy-washy pastors who don’t draw any lines about anything hard that God has said is an extremely troublesome reactionary response to the past harshness in others. But again, polar swinging helps nobody. TRUTH in LOVE. We need both. We need BOTH.
It’s important that we gravitate toward the brave and bold men of good-will who see themselves as under the authority of and the mouthpiece for God, who with love, grace, reasonableness, and clarity can discern the Word of God, cut it straight, clarify what it’s really saying and why, and communicate and apply it as God intended. There’s NO room for wishy-washy. Jesus never was. It might make us feel nice, but sermons without the loving slices from the sword are not going to conform anyone into the image of Christ.
Pastors are indeed held to a very high standard Biblically - complete with a list of things that qualify and disqualify that can’t be ignored. But as we’ve seen with many, even recently, it is certainly possible for a man to know and be able to teach the Word at a very high degree of skill, but to also not let all of it impact his heart fully. We don’t excuse that because it happens, but we shouldn’t kill the whole body because of a wart. Heck, we do this too - not just with the Bible, but with things like food and exercise. When I was a kid, my dad owned a carpet cleaning business - and while he could and did make carpets for homes and businesses look brand new, they’d even tell you that our carpets at home were narsty. There is certainly a high cost of preaching it and not living it. The Bible is riddled with people who failed to uphold the line of scripture to great cost to themselves and others.
It all comes back to the authority and sufficiently of scripture, and this is where we need God’s wisdom, discernment, and maturity. We hate holding things in tension and just want everything be clean and in their correct buckets, which is why in politics we can overlook serious problems from people we support and can’t say a single kind word about people we don’t. Every single human can become rigidly binary about the things we are passionate about, but reacting to everything that hits us as either all good or purely evil though is harming us. The only thing truly immovable and uniquely binary is what God has declared in His Word. It’s our standard for truth. Christ’s life, death, and resurrection are inevitably solid. But with men, even the best of men are men at best. Meaning that good-willed men who faithfully preach God’s Word can fail. It’s sad and harmful when they do, so that doesn’t excuse wrong behavior at all, but recognition that a tension exists there does put things into a right and grace-filled perspective. God uses imperfect men to deliver His perfect truth.
While I wouldn’t want him to be a pastor at my church, nor would I probably recommend his teaching to people, I can still love and pray for a brother who got caught plagiarizing sermons and needed to step down. He crumpled under the weight of needing a big church and being seen as great, so sin was the bridge he chose. Is he still saved? Yeah, I don’t think that’s the question, but the judgement seat of Christ may burn much of his ministry up - but that’s not for me to decide. I can make a mature, informed decision about both the good and bad of his ministry while not damning him to hell - that thing we do all too often. Let’s be so incredibly careful not to let podcasts and articles about how horrible a pastor’s mistakes were let us walk endlessly in skepticism, judgement, and a wholesale rejection of everything taught.
Again, this isn’t talking about legitimate card-carrying false teachers. We are to handle them differently, but needing to be judge, jury, and executioner of good-willed pastors who said something we didn’t like or made a mistake or fell lets us off the hook from needing our pastors to be things they never could and puts our focus back on who we’re ALL subject to - Christ. Some pastors will sadly fall in a blaze of glory while some will thankfully remain faithful, but ALL will at least have minor things that they need to deal with. All too often though, our ability to be offended is much higher than our ability to be charitable.
But for those faithful pastors doing their best in leadership over you, pray for him regularly. Love him. Encourage him. Even though our culture has us on the constant look-out for scandal, cheer on the faithfulness and good-will in him. The enemy HATES good-willed and faithfully submitted pastors. It’s unbelievably hard work to write what is a full term paper every week and present it to a congregation while feeling the weight of faithfully transferring the very words of God. Let’s be the first to give so much more grace.
Ultimately, if there’s been church hurt, we should not be guilty of throwing the true theological baby out with the human-propensity-of-sin bath water. I think of the famed apologist who died with some intensely dark and sinful secrets he was covering up. Was he truly saved? I don’t know. Can we still learn and glean truth from his skill in apologetics? Yes we can. We should again hold it in tension knowing what we know, but the sin doesn’t mean everything he’s ever said is now bunk. We should always seek to work out our salvation, ask questions, and seek truth from His Word, but it’s an overreaction to get hurt by a pastor and then toss out the whole thing. I almost did that. Yes, much of the responsibility does lay on that pastor for sure, and he will certainly stand before the Lord, but if somebody doing karaoke totally botches a Billy Joel song, we don’t blame Billy Joel. God’s Word always stands as true and good regardless of how somebody sins despite its teaching.
By the way, reacting isn’t a bad thing. We are often faced with times when we need to make hard decisions about things that happen, but we gain clarity and freedom when we recognize in maturity that no pastor will be perfect. Mistakes and sin of others will confront us, sometimes in big ways, and walking in grace is not the same thing as shrugging off things that truly need to be dealt with. It just means that with charity and forgiveness, we can deal with things in a Christ honoring and respectful way. After all, we are to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God” (Micah 6:8). They all can exist together. We’re just really bad at it. Today we’re far too tribal, far to quick to pull the trigger, and far less gracious than we would ask others to have for us.
In the messiness of life, we need to slow down, think, pray, read, and come to humble and informed decisions rather than angry snap judgments. We don’t back down from truth because we don’t like conflict. But we also don’t prematurely cut off brothers because they made mistakes. It doesn’t mean we have to embrace everybody. Some people might not be our taste, and that’s ok, but let’s not make ourselves the standard for what is good and right. God’s Word does that. Let’s ask God for wisdom on all these things as we seek to become more like Jesus.
Here’s what we need.
Maturity.
