The Gospel Coalition

Topic: “Help”

What do you do when a staff member fails morally? How bad is bad enough for dismissal? What responsibilities does the church continue to have to the former staff member? What if the failure involves a higher-profile pastor in your area or circle of influence? Is it ever acceptable to name a fallen pastor publicly? Can a fallen pastor re-qualify and be restored? In the same church? How soon is too soon? What safeguards can be established to help those who sincerely desire to remain faithful?

Speakers: Crawford Loritts and Wayne Cordeiro, moderated by James MacDonald

MacDonald: A conversation called “Help.” Let’s help churches, pastors and leaders on what we do when a good man falls morally.

Loritts: What you do begins prior to the fall, prior to when all the stuff takes place. The need to be spiritually healthy and emotionally healthy. There also needs to be a strong sense in every church about the responsibility you have in leadership – the issue of character, leadership, and that there is a higher standard for leaders. We must be godly and modeling that. I am, if I am on a church staff in any capacity, a steward of the ministry itself and the message as a whole. When someone falls into sin, Galatians 6 is our attitude, and Matthew 18 is our approach. Whenever we confront anyone over sin, there ought to be tears in our soul. The goal is that person’s restoration, not about me being embarrassed about the ministry or just removing the person, but it’s my love for that person. I want them back to spiritual wholeness.

Cordeiro: We need to take a look at the aura of our staff. Not just the sin, but the temptation before that.

MacDonald: But if everyone who has had a lustful thought was disqualified, we’d all have to vacate the ministry.

Cordeiro: Is that a confession?

MacDonald: Lust – adultery in the heart – single incidents does not disqualify for ministry. But when it does cross the line, and you are no longer exemplary (to some degree), what process would you take? If a pastor on your staff disqualified himself morally, what are the steps?

Cordeiro: Remove him immediately from the position he’s in. Partly for him, partly for others. It’s not condescending. If someone has a contagious disease, you pull him out and put him somewhere he won’t infect others. And you want him to be healed. Watch his correctability. It’s not confession that starts healing, but contrition. Repentance – a true desire to change that comes from a heart that has been broken.

MacDonald: Can you put them in some non-ministry role? There’s the family, economics, the church is watching… we want to show grace and not be punitive. Can they stay on staff?

Cordeiro: We keep them on pay but remove that mantle of authority. People want to know – Are you going to do something pastor? But you don’t throw this man away. You get him help.

MacDonald: You want him to focus on seeing his life rebuilt.

Cordeiro: Yes, and I love his family. His wife is innocent.

MacDonald: But let’s say that I can barely hold it together financially as a church member and my tithe goes to this guy. He should get a job!

Cordeiro: If he doesn’t have a heart of correctability and he wants to be honored quickly, it’s a theatrical confession. That can happen. You let him go get a job.

Loritts: 2 Corinthians 7 gives the profile of true repentance. There is a profile I’ve seen through the years. If they are trying to protect their reputation, they have not repented. If they are negotiating, they have not repented. The sign of repentance is brokenness. Psalm 51. The broken and contrite heart. Contrition is the active remembrance of the pain my sin caused. Whatever it takes for me to be whole… it doesn’t manage sin. 85% of the time I’ve confronted people with moral failures, the confession does not come the first time around. Sin management goes on.

Cordeiro: The sensitivity to the Holy Spirit and the desire to self-correct. I’m paying you 8 hours a day to work it out with your spouse. The third thing is that we will reinstate you, maybe not to the same position.

MacDonald: But possibly?

Cordeiro: Very rare. It depends on how far they stepped over the line. I don’t wait until they get so far over.

MacDonald: Have you ever had it come out and you didn’t see it coming?

Loritts: Absolutely. You’re shocked, and you confront them. You ask the questions. What’s going on? Sin that has been going on for a long time leads to compartmentalizing. People are good at self-protection and covering their steps. I watch out for personality patterns where people avoid authority and direct conversations about their spiritual health. Always first one out the door when you talk about spiritual things. The shift in the conversation… not wanting to be held accountable. We tend to broadcast more about ourselves than we intend to.

MacDonald: A man grows silent about his marriage before it goes south.

Cordeiro: You’ll be ready to come back when your wife tells me you are ready to come back.

MacDonald: You can tell a lot about a man’s marriage by the countenance on his wife’s face.

Loritts: Sometimes, we think we’re being merciful and kind and gracious to people when we put them back too soon. We further entrench them in those habits and patterns. There needs to be a degree of health and consistency, affirmation from his wife, others who know him, so that you’re restoring them. You don’t want to take the cast off too soon.

MacDonald: I’ve found the tension in our church that restoration to fellowship is not necessarily restoration to leadership. If you fall morally and disqualify yourself, you return to Go, do not collect 200$, you start over and cannot be a pastor again in weeks or months. If a pastor  returns to vocational ministry, it won’t be in this church. It’s one strike and you’re out. That doesn’t mean he can’t go elsewhere if he is restored, but not here.

Driscoll: Often times, there is accountability for the male pastor, but not a relationship structure for the wife. My experience working with younger pastors… I’ve been in on more cases where the pastor’s wife is the guilty one than the pastor. So don’t just hold the man accountable, but tend to the wife. The friendship between the husband and wife is important. You can have ministry idolatry and stand shoulder-to-shoulder in ministry, but she be neglected and alone.

MacDonald: Someone is listening and heard that, and that’s them. What should they do?

Driscoll: Come clean before you get caught. Invite accountability in immediately. You’re confessing to your spouse. You will need help personally, and this affects the church pastorally.

MacDonald: The longer it goes, the worse it gets.

Cordeiro: Better to confess than to have to admit.

Graham: If the question is about when a person is ready for ministry again, I always fall on the side of protecting the congregation. I always think in terms of – get the guy back spiritually healthy – but talking to pastors restoring people, protect your church. There are sexual predators in the church. Most people who have a problem sexually have a pattern in their life. If they got caught once, they will probably do it again. It’s the bondage of sexual sin. What did Spurgeon say? You are ready for ministry again after moral failure when you are known more for your repentance than for your sin. But that takes a long time. My predecessor wanted 4 weeks of restoration and then come back. That can’t happen. Or the guy goes down the road and starts another church. I am a shepherd and must protect the flock from wolves.

Jakes: There was a time when I would hear the severity of the sentence and be against it, out of mercy. Any time you tell someone to come forward, but if you do, you can never be here again… I don’t know if that is realistic. What’s interesting though is that we’ve only talked about sexual failure, when 1 in 6 women in this country is beaten by someone who says he loves her. Why did we go straight to sex and stay there? We have another kind of problem in this room right now that no one ever says anything about. The other observation is this. In my experience, when something unhealthy goes on in the house, it is a symptom of other unhealthy things in the house. I assume if the wife is healthy enough to help her husband to recovery, you may have left the rabbit with the wolf. Just because the husband is the perpetrator does not mean the wife is innocent. That’s a naive perspective. You have to evaluate the health of the whole family. Because we are so focused on sin alone, we don’t see dysfunction that produces the sin in the first place. We don’t see the puss that causes the black head. We are dealing with morality from a legalistic mentality, adjudicating some aspect of justice. Most families are, to varying degrees, dysfunctional. If we really want to give care to that family unit, don’t let anyone go without inspection. Few people will tell you what led them down the path. There’s something going on in that house. There’s something going on in millions of houses – not just moral, sexual failures. Domestic violence is sweeping this country – colorless, classless, pastors, elders, deacons, angry men out of control. There are all sorts of ways to cross the line.

Furtick: We seem to be focusing on monitoring individual behaviors. We need to think of the culture of our staff. We want the staff to be healthy and less prone to these moral blow-outs. We’ve kept an eye on it from the beginning. My wife’s primary role in our church has been the care and shepherding of the lead staff’s wives. We want to keep that knowledge together and have our hearts beating the same. We hope by monitoring the culture of our staff (giving date nights to all staff and couples, paid for by the church or by my speaking income) we can be proactive and keep an eye on everyone’s relationship. We also want to provide off-ramps so people can get help when they’re starting to veer.

MacDonald: I didn’t think about domestic violence, truthfully. I don’t struggle with that, and I haven’t thought of it. We gravitated to sexual issues, but there are other issues as well.

Cordeiro: Develop a culture of holiness in your staff. Don’t let it be susceptible to the world’s lack of moral resolve. If we don’t put positive air pressure on the inside… I remember hearing from a lady whose husband was beating her, and I began to love her, and the Lord said, “Don’t love her with your love. Love her with your love.”

MacDonald: That’s why I get women to counsel women.

Cordeiro: We do too, but through referral. I refer them to women.

Loritts: We are often reactionary. The way I overcome weaknesses in my own heart is not by focusing on the weakness but by having a passionate heart for Jesus. To love Him more. To love His Word. I’ve never talked to anyone who fell morally who was consistent in their times alone with God. Never. And I’ve been in the ministry 40 years. (You can read your Bible legalistically, of course, but I mean having a hunger and thirst for loving Christ more.) I have standards. I don’t do lunches with women. I don’t travel with women. Holiness and passion, though, is everything. We need to orient people to the spiritual responsibility of leadership. Holiness matters. Character is important. Modeling is important. This is not your gig or your platform. You’re representing Jesus and the people who trust you and believe in you. Be like Joseph – “How could I sin against God and against my master?”

Cordeiro: You can teach what you know. But you will reproduce what you are. You’ve got to model it – a passion for the holiness of God. It sets a culture that makes the devil backs off. If he can remove the pressure from you and make you susceptible to the dirt of the world, he has free rein in your congregation.

Loritts: Years ago, when I was traveling a great deal, I had a conviction to ask God before I ever bring reproach on the name of Christ or on my wife and kids to kill me. I really believe that this issue of holiness is a big deal. There’s too much at stake. Too many people listen to us and believe in us. They buy our books, they tune in. Too many people. I don’t want to be used by the devil to knock them out of the race.

MacDonald: God doesn’t need us. God will find someone who will do His work. We are not as important as we think we are. Our first concern must be the reputation of Christ and the restoration of people.