I don’t love the phrase “moral failure,” but it’s become part of Christian vernacular. We use it when a pastor or ministry leader (almost always male) gets exposed for committing a serious sexual sin like an affair. The moral failure causes loss of job and often career, tremendous personal and institutional devastation, and is highly publicized if the leader was well known or leading a large, well-known organization. These types of sin are very serious and should be treated as such, but are the incorrect definition of moral failure.
If we are talking about moral failure as Bible-believing Christians, a moral failure would be any time a person fails to live out God’s standard of morality, which would be every one of us every single day. A moral failure would be when I won’t humble myself when I’m in a disagreement with my wife, it would be any time we allow an injustice to be committed on an oppressed person or people group, any time someone has a lustful thought or briefly indulges in a scantily-clad person on their Instagram or TikTok feed, or whenever wealth is hoarded apart from significant sacrificial giving to the poor. If we were consistent with the meaning of “moral failures,” male ministry leaders who sin sexually would be included in a much, much larger group.
Herein lies the problem. Modern Christianity treats its pastors and leaders as non-human, and these pastors and leaders (of which I am one) believe it. Christians commit moral failures every day, including infinite amounts of sexual moral failures, but only pastors and leaders get publicly shamed for them in the Christian court of condemnation.
I’m not saying all sin is equal in its ramifications and severity or that it should all be treated the same. Nor am I minimizing the severity of an affair (or sexual abuse or any other sexual misconduct that we include under ‘moral failure’ for ministry leaders). But the fact that we only use the term “moral failure” for pastors and leaders who commit this one type of sin is telling.
Christianity treating its leaders like non-humans, with the leaders believing it—almost having to in order to keep their jobs—is the very catalyst for why there are so many sexual moral failures among Christian leaders and pastors.
Pastors aren’t human because they must be holier than everyone else. You can’t have a messed up, doubting, weak, or tempted pastor because that would undermine the effectiveness of the product of Jesus we are selling (along with the brand of the church or organization said pastor is leading). If the man trying to sell you hair regrowth cream is bald, sales are unlikely to surge.
When a pastor has to be holier than a human to keep their job, how likely are they to reach out for help when they are feeling weak and tempted?
And when you don’t reach out for help when a temptation or weakness first appears, what happens almost every time?
A friend of mine in the aviation industry told me how he wasn’t allowed to be a commercial pilot because he had a depression diagnosis on his medical record and took depression medication. The rationale for this from the powers-that-be is that we can’t have depressed pilots up in the sky flying hundreds of lives around at 30,000 feet.
So if you’re a pilot, and you’re getting depressed, what do you need to do to keep your job? (Your good-paying job you went to years of expensive school for and that pays all of your bills and provides for your family) Never tell anyone about your depression and be sure to never seek medical or therapeutic help for it.
Which is a guarantee for what? Untreated, depressed pilots up in the sky flying hundreds of lives around at 30,000 feet.
Are pastors to be “above reproach” and is there a high standard set for pastoral qualifications? Yes (1 Timothy 3:1-8, Titus 1:6-10). But you don’t wake up one morning and randomly decide to have an affair or become a sexual abuser. Affairs start with an attraction that you likely didn’t intentionally choose. People have attractions toward attractive people all the time. So what is a pastor to do when this happens to them? Well they certainly can’t share it with anyone, because they must be holier than humans. They must be so wholly intoxicated with their spouse 110% of the time that an attraction to someone else could never be a statistical possibility.
But humans who are married go through ups and downs in their relationship all the time. Good and bad seasons are par for the course in the lifelong difficulty of loving one person selflessly and putting their needs above your own. But only for humans. Non-human pastors never have the downs or the bad seasons. They never need to go to marriage counseling. If they did, it would raise credibility concerns among those who employ them or sit in their seats or buy their books.
And if that attraction to a new, attractive person were to happen during one of these difficult seasons (that don’t happen to pastors), would it be okay to participate in an accountability and support group for sexual temptations? Or to have already been in one long before the attraction began? As we’ve learned, of course not. Because who wants to go to a church with a pastor who has a sex problem?
To be a commercial pilot, you can’t have depression.
Which means you can never get the help you need for your depression.
Which means we have a lot of commercial pilots flying with untreated depression.
I would have already had my moral failure if it weren’t for the regularly scheduled, systematized, vulnerable community that I have in my life. This is the primary reason I launched our Beyond the Battle alumni community, which is free for any man who goes through a BTB 7-week group. Because I needed this. And it wasn’t going to randomly fall out of the sky, and it certainly wasn’t a mandated requirement along the way by those who train and employ pastors.
Pastoral moral failures are not about good Christians versus bad ones. They are about the ones who know their brokenness and weakness and build in the essential systems of vulnerable support needed. It’s the difference between a person with a disabled leg using crutches or insisting on walking around like everyone else without the use of helps. In both situations, the person has a disabled leg, even if they’ve convinced themselves and their church that they don’t.
While this person must be held accountable when they fall and are responsible for their behavior, the macro-level blame needs to be put on modern Christianity and the industry of Church. This is the industry that told the pastor they can’t be human or they’d lose their job. So the pastor did a fantastic job of acting like they weren’t human, and perhaps acted so well they ended up believing it themselves. No problems. No struggles. No doubts. No temptations. Just the joy of Jesus plus chapter-and-verse for every difficult question.
Meanwhile the human living beneath the costume is going through the problems, struggles, doubts, and temptations that every human on the planet goes through. But they’re the only ones who aren’t allowed to get help for any of these things.
The “not allowed” isn’t explicitly stated like with my friend in the aviation industry, but it’s baked into seminaries, pastor interviews, search committees, and elder and congregational expectations. It’s what the pedestals are made of for the famous Christian celebrities with the highest surging sales and are the holiest and deemed least-human of all. The pedestals that are the holiest, highest, and furthest away from the solid ground of being a weak, vulnerable human are the ones that make the biggest craters when they inevitably crumble.
Advice to pastors and ministry leaders:
Go to a licensed counselor regularly—for yourself and for your marriage.
Go to a spiritual director.
Have a regularly-scheduled support and accountability group or individual that you meet with. This should be from outside of your church or organization. This is not a randomly-scheduled coffee time with a friend where you ask each other how you’re doing, which inevitably leads to surface level responses or only sharing the categories you feel like sharing about. Develop a systemized set of questions that you answer every time you meet, with the questions hitting on all major areas of weakness or temptation, with sex / pornography / lust / attractions / marriage being a top one.
Model vulnerability within your church or organization in contextually appropriate ways, even if it’s just consistently making it known that you participate in counseling or support/accountability groups, normalizing these things for your congregation and creating a culture of grace and vulnerability. Share contextually-appropriate vulnerable stories about your struggles when you can.
Advice to churches and those who oversee pastors:
Stop making sexual recovery groups or conversations niche, taboo, and stigmatized in your churches. Make them a normal, regular component of discipleship for all men and women in your church, middle school through adults.
Go beyond Bible studies and asking for generic prayer requests in your small groups, Sunday Schools, and other discipleship settings. Intentionally build in layers of vulnerability into these spaces in contextual ways, with increased depth being required in the next steps of maturity and discipleship contexts. Lead by example. You can have superficial spaces that are meant for new people and friendships to start, but then take people deeper as trust and safety is built, providing deeper layers people can can opt-in to.
If a pastor doesn’t see a counselor for personal and marital reasons, be concerned. (If they have never seen one, don’t see a need for it, and/or are resistant to it)
If a pastor doesn’t have some type of regular accountability and support group for themselves where they are vulnerably sharing their struggles, be concerned.
If a pastor acts like they are too strong or holy to need such things, be concerned.
These are the pastors who have the highest likelihood of sexual moral failures.
But I don’t blame them. I blame the ones signing their paychecks who told them commercial pilots can’t have depression.
Related posts:
Research Statistics: 504 Christian Singles on Singleness in the Church
Ep. 109: Dr. Andrew Bauman on Guarding Against Sexism & Abuse in the Church
Ellen Page vs. Chris Pratt/Hillsong on LGBT stance raises question, "Can you love someone you disagr...
Noah's New Book from Zondervan, coming in July 2021
The Tension
He is:
Author of Beyond the Battle: A man's guide to his identity in Christ in an oversexualized world
Host of the The Flip Side Podcast
Join an online men's small group led by Noah and team at BeyondTheBattle.net
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