Resurrection after Scandal

There is an exhausting irony in serving Christ. We suffer defeats, yet those defeats empower victory.

My first experience in ministry was serving under a pastor who habitually lied—even when nothing was at stake. Staff and committee meetings became a hall of mirrors. I rarely knew what was real.

Another early experience was leading a tiny church where the previous pastor had sexually molested a teenage girl. Yet another experience was reporting an abuser who led a ministry for physically and mentally challenged youth. He had molested a boy in my church. After he was in prison, I was told that he knew I had turned him in and that he was going to sue me.

Such were my first three years of ministry. Bridget and I frequently did not even know how to pray. Yet, ministering to people in the middle of so much wrong, I learned truths that enabled me to reach more people than before—truths I could not have learned any other way. In particular, the Lord showed me how to be consistent when almost everything around me is chaotic. He taught me a new level of discipline that became a source of security for other people.

Later years brought many more confrontations with abuse of authority.

There was a missionary who seemed to have stepped out of Heart of Darkness. Raised to take over his family’s missions empire, he ruled an isolated tribe in the jungle of South America, teaching that he had the power to transform people by renaming them. He then returned stateside to break up at least two marriages. In another case, a pastor secured “retirement” payments for an associate by lying to the congregation—nearly bankrupting the church. There was also a denominational official who requisitioned millions in church planting money that didn’t belong to his ministry, and yet another case of a pastor who “investigated” members of his church to expel them.

These are merely the abuses that I helped correct personally. They are in a different category from routine immorality, incompetence, deceit, bullying, and betrayal. Shocking behavior does not always involve institutional officers ignoring misconduct.

The abuses are also different from the long list of scandals I have observed at close range but have not been involved in resolving. 

The crimes turn out to be like manure. Every abuse that left me gasping in shock also fertilized new wisdom for the future. There was redemptive power for the abuse survivors too: marriages saved, public repentance, parents leading their children deeper in grace, elders standing united against authoritarian legalism. The wisdom we gain from defeats is unique in that we can only praise God for it, not our own insight.

My experiences confronting abuses are far from unique.

On the contrary, the problem today is that my experiences are normal. Pastors like me are finding their own local traumas in the news about national ministry scandals.

These scandals, which have swamped so many organizations, are like a sore on the skin that indicates sepsis. The sex abuse investigation commissioned by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is roiling churches and schools because it explains local problems in nationwide patterns. The meltdown in the Hillsong movement is happening because the high-profile exposures validated local suspicions.

Whether the issue is authoritarian patterns in church planting, deeply flawed counseling models combined with refusal to report sexual predators, or the trainwreck of unethical practices by men like Ravi Zacharias and Jerry Falwell, Jr.—practices overlooked by boards, staff, and constituents—we are seeing failures of governance and doctrine that are shredding the legitimacy of evangelical institutions.

The crisis of evangelicalism has tipped. We may be witnessing the early stages of collapse.

The consequences of these abuses will be severe.

Sectarian hysteria will likely intensify. Every faction has its list of suspects who caused these abuses, and the list keeps lengthening: professionalized ministry, creeds, no creeds, Arminianism, Calvinism, Christian nationalism, woke churches. The fights between sects will only get hotter.

More distressing, the revelations of incompetence and corruption will increase. The reckoning now hitting the SBC will not be unique. Some denominations will prove to have handled sexual abuse better, and some worse. Regardless, accountability will come upon all evangelical institutions. Many won’t survive.

But the exhausting irony persists. There will be new life from Christ in spite of us.

The local churches that build with integrity have become regional in character. Being regional is not the same as being a megachurch. Such churches welcome regular attenders from many traditions, traveling a greater distance to worship. This change has been happening for some time. It will accelerate and become standard for the vast majority of American Christians.

If this prediction is correct, then churches with integrity can rebuild an American core of historic Christian doctrine and practice. More and more Christians can prioritize essential truths over their preferences. The extremity of our need for the bond of peace can drive us to recapture the unity of the Spirit. Sectarian obsessions will not make the cut. Historic Christian teachings will.

The manifesto for faithful Gospel witness today is clear. Gather the friends of historic Christianity from all traditions. Worship the living God together. Build new institutions. If we do these things, and if the Lord tarries, America could be a different culture in 50 years.

The exhausting irony of ministry is that we carry in ourselves the sentence of death so that we might display Christ’s resurrection.