When I was a teenager, from about the age of 11 to 18, I attended a church that met in a Christian school in my home city where we would often stay behind after Sunday morning service and play basketball, sing, eat lunch, etc, until the time of the evening service. One of those Sundays, I was sitting behind the pulpit and talking with some of the youth, and the daughter of the pastor said to me, “You should become a pastor one day.” I was about 16 or 17 years old and in no way wanted to become a pastor, having seen what her father had to go through. I proclaimed, extremely confidently, “I will NEVER become a pastor.”
I tell that story because after leaving the city in my early
twenties for Bible college and seminary, and determined to never return to the
city, many years later I would return and “accidently” end up becoming a pastor
at the very church I proclaimed I would never be one. I say, “accidently,”
because the church had moved, had completely differently people in it with a
completely different name, and a completely different pastor. We just “happened”
to start going to it and there just “happened” to be a split leaving open a
dire need for an elder/pastor, and I just “happened” to become one, only
learning afterward that this was the church of my youth.
Providence. We weren’t going to come back to my home city
but we were almost forced to since our landlord across the country decided to
remodel the house we were renting and made a deal with a handyman that he could
live there if he fixed it up. We had no place to go but home. Having now
completed my study, God sent me back to shepherd (and soon I would understand,
to save) the church in which I had proclaimed I wouldn’t ever be shepherding
any church.
I had just come off of a seven year rest from ministry in a
Northeastern state. It was meant to be a much longer rest, a permanent one, as
I did not plan on entering ministry again after my last experience, but when I
came to what I would later learn was my home church, there had been a massive
split in the church where most of the people had left. The rest of the church
was in shambles. The pastor was a wreck and teaching all sorts of false
teaching: antinomianism, new covenant theology, an almost full preterism with
just a little room for an end time, a permissive doctrine of divorce and
remarriage, a hedonistic view of sex, not to mention many other lesser
doctrinal errors that many would not consider reformed. The people were in
failing marriages where he was counseling them to get a divorce, adultery, and
just a general state of superficial Christianity in terms of their spiritual
maturity. In terms of their theology, there was such a permissive atmosphere
that there were vocal advocates of full preterism, hypercalvinism, and outright
rejections of penal substitution in favor of a liberation theology of the
scapegoat theory when it came to the cross (i.e., a French liberation theory
where Christ died to show that the scapegoats that men needed to satisfy their
bloodthirst was wrong and that God doesn’t need or want a scapegoat to forgive
men’s sin). They even had a self proclaimed unredeemed pedophile who had to be continually
watched and propositioned one of the men in the congregation when I began
attending in those early days.
There was a general atmosphere of darkness in the church and
the pastor had led it there, so when a choice was set before me to go into the
ministry again and to become an elder there, even with my chronic illness, I
decided I could not just walk on by and turn away. So I made sure that the
pastor was aware that I was chronically ill, something he had already come to
know anyway, but told him that I would likely not be there a lot because of it.
To which he answered, “We’ll take you when we can get you.” Because he said
this, it was the final okay I needed to enter into the pastorate of the church.
One of the things that confirmed to me that God wanted me to
be here and to take upon the position was that only after we had been coming to
the church for some time did I realize that it was the church of my teen years.
The fact that, after all of my travel across the country, all of the education
to become a professor, and after all of the places I could have ended up, God
had me become a pastor in the very church in which I declared I would not
become one in order to revive it from the grave this other man had buried it
in. Through blood, sweat and tears, many hours and sacrifices of time, energy, and
family, the Lord resurrected it through me. I say this because the irony is
that I will be later slandered from trying to steal the ministry from this
other pastor as though the church I had revived resembled in any way the church
he had killed.
My ministry was filled with correcting all of these dark
things he had brought into the church or allowed to be brought in. Countless
hours of teaching, both publicly and in private, counseling and debate, slowly
brough the church out of the chaos. As usual, many rebellious people who were
not used to being corrected in their sin left because they hated the new
atmosphere that was not as permissive. If someone was going to hold to full
preterism, he was going to be refuted. One family wanted to stop any church
discipline from being done toward their son because they were hypercalvinists
who believed there was nothing we could do but wait to see what God would do,
since no one can make anyone repent but God (I got chewed out by the pastor for
merely stating that he would need to be put on church discipline for it). Regardless
of his opposition, that wasn’t going to fly anymore. Slowly and surely, through
many of the heretics either changing their minds or leaving in offense, the
church, at least externally, became a healthier environment.
But as I would learn, it was far from it on the inside. On
the inside, I had learned that the pastor had let one of his sons bring over
his girlfriend to the house and fornicate with her. When it was brought to his
attention by his other son, that son was told to hush up about it. I then
learned that the other son was in an adulterous affair with the wife of a
couple who had been good friends with the pastor and his wife. This was kept
from me and my other fellow elder until the husband called me and told me that
this was going on behind our backs. It was first explained that the pastor
wanted to bring us in but was forbidden by the woman who threatened to commit
suicide if they said anything. I later would learn from their own mouths and a
meeting we had between everyone that in reality, the pastor and his wife had
participated in the adultery each in their own way. The wife of the pastor, who
was best friends with the adulteress woman, had encouraged the affair from the
get go and was trying to set the husband up with another woman so that her son
could have his wife. Apparently, she was also going out with her and trying to
get her to go into bars with her in order to flirt with men and see what
happens. This all came out at the meeting. Likewise, the pastor had
participated by hanging out with his son and the man’s wife and suggesting that
since they seem to like one another so much maybe they could get alimony from
the man so that he could financially support them and they could be together
that way since the son didn’t have much of an income and neither did she. He
said he would marry them secretly so that the state would continue to make the
husband pay alimony so that she and his son could live comfortably together.
They were going out to restaurants with them on a sort of double date, on trips
to their hometown, and hanging out. At no time was she encouraged to reconcile
with her husband but was rather instructed on good divorce attorneys she might
utilize. The woman reported that the pastor was smoking marijuana one time
while she was crying over everything and he rebuked her because she was ruining
his buzz. I was so sick to hear all of this cold betrayal and then when the man
asked for an apology from the pastor for suggesting such a thing, the pastor
snarked back with what is probably the worst apology of all time, “I’m
s-o-r-r-y. I was trying to find a way to be with MY son.” It was said in a tone
of offense as though to say, How dare you question me! The pastor had even
threatened the husband (after also threatening him physically by getting in his
face and saying very hostilely that “you and I are going to have a problem”) to
not spill all of the information he apparently had on them or he could tell the job he worked for that this all had made him seriously
depressed and could get him fired, something he had confided in the pastor but was now being used as a
manipulative tool since it could get him fired. And that was my first lesson of
that night. That these two people, the pastor and his wife, were likely
Christians in persona only and were highly manipulative. In fact, by the end of
the night, the wife of the pastor had the husband who was defrauded by her son
apologizing to her, as she threw a crying fit saying how she was just trying to
help him out when she was trying to set him up with other women, one of which
the husband said was herself, as she would come over his house alone in lowcut
clothing with wine in hand. This crying fit came after leaving the meeting, going
back and strategizing in the car, and then coming back into the meeting, something
this couple did a few times. Looking back on it, even though tensions
eventually died down, I now realize that there was absolutely no repentance on
the part of these people, and the couple later confirmed that there was in fact
none. They only cared whether we would take them out of ministry for it. I was
in such a whirlwind of the bomb just dropped on me, my default was to be
merciful, thinking because tensions died down that somehow repentance was there
when in reality it wasn’t, and that maybe this was just a horrible one-off
mistake, a really really bad mistake that I’ve never heard of anyone else in
ministry making before, but sadly I didn’t know if this was disqualifying at
the time if there was repentance, a decision I would later regret and realize
was completely in error. The other elder just followed my lead, again,
regretfully. It is to my eternal shame that I did not immediately remove them
from the ministry and place them on church discipline, something I should have
done time and again throughout the next ten years since.
Over the course of the next few years, other signs that this
was not a one-off egregious sin came up. The son that had been in the
adulterous affair would continually do the same with other women, although some
officially divorced or separated (I do not know which) and the son who slept
with his girlfriend in the pastor’s house was now moved out and sleeping with
his girlfriend that he lived with. During these periods, the pastor continued
to have full relationships with his sons, knowing that it disqualified him from
ministry. They only resolved themselves as time went on and they each found
more acceptable relationships (more on that later), but not because there had
ever been any genuine repentance.
In the midst of all of this I would hear from multiple
witnesses that they would go over to the pastor and his wife’s home to watch
movies and TV shows like Game of Thrones that contained naked women and
explicit sex scenes in them. During that time, many people were making the
argument that such doesn’t really affect them nor did they necessarily believe
it was wrong to do these things. Licentiousness seemed to abound along with
drinking, as it was reported to me by more than one witness that the pastor had
become drunk on more than one occasion throughout the time I was doing ministry
with him. He had called me a couple times where he sounded quite drunk but if
not for these other witnesses that would never have been confirmed.
On top of all of this, I started having multiple people come
to me to tell me that the pastor’s wife and son were horribly slandering me and
my family. This occurred around the time that I started to take a salary as a
pastor after serving the church with no salary for a few years. My family had
been dirt poor due to my illness, but the church was unable to support us, so I
labored for the first few years just as hard as any paid pastor without any
compensation because I cared about the people and still thought I would be able
to save them from this nightmare of church leadership. It only became possible
for the church to pay me once we sold a building. But it was told to a women’s
group that the pastor’s wife thought all of that money should be theirs. I
imagine she wanted her husband to come out on top both financially in case
there was a split so she needed to mold me into a villain and him into a
victim. This slander went on and on until the day of the church split ten years
later. Every time someone would come into the church, they would be excited to
study the Bible and learn Christianity and then suddenly I would see them again
(or not, as many didn’t want to go to a church with me being such a horrible
person) and the air would be so thick with tension I could tell that they had
been with at least one member of the pastor’s family. Whether he knew it or not
during those earlier days, I believe that he full well did, it benefited him
because a faction began to grow between us in the church. My teaching was
transforming lives. His teaching had killed everyone. Marriages were being saved
under me whereas marriages had been counseled to dissolve under him. His
preaching was void of the Spirit and those who had been enlivened by the Spirit
knew it. I said none of this to congregation or even my closest confidants for
fear that I or my wife would turn into what this pastor and his wife had
become. I kept my mouth shut and hoped that God would still save and transform
whomever He wished within the congregation despite the evil that lurked there
through the pastor and his family.
In the midst of all of this, from the time I first knew
them, they seemed to have a lot of financial need, or at least presented
themselves that way. I cannot speak to the
illness of his wife that was reported to the church and made front and center
when asking others for money, but
regardless of the reason, there seemed to be no shortage of people who were
asked for money. I remember our deacons being offended because they were
presenting themselves as not being paid enough when they were being paid a
small fortune for just two people. We had the same salary to show that we were
equals and not to be seen as a hierarchy by the laity even though my family was
made up of 11 people. They demanded to live in luxury and did not want to move
when they claimed to not have enough so I agreed to up our salaries going up
each month to cover what they “needed.” He would charge the cc to pay for meals
that were not authorized, ask to be reimbursed when they had to buy food for
fellowships (something we paid for as a poor family out of our own pockets),
and ask the church for thousands of dollars to supposedly pay for credit cards
right around the time of his son’s wedding. I realize now that their presentation of
themselves as economically upper class would be used against us later on, as we
were still living under the poverty line with the same salary with an 11 member
family, and we would be presented as the gross poor and unsuccessful family as
one of the many ways to slander us.
As time went on, the pastor’s son that had been in adultery
found a woman he wanted to marry and it came out that he had been married
before. It kicked up a lot of dust to where I was lied to by the pastor’s wife
(she had presented the girl as coming in one night and on a whim just getting
her son to marry her when I had been on the girl’s facebook account a week
before and saw a picture of the pastor, his wife, their son, and the girl all
dressed up and going out somewhere a month before they got married). Her own sister reported that she had a problem lying and did it quite a bit so I actually expected it at the meeting. Most in the
church held the permanence view I had taught them by this time and would have
seen as partaking in a marriage like this as participating in adultery if they
attended the ceremony or remained on good terms with their son. So this was
hidden from the church until it was revealed by the sister of the pastor’s
wife. I was able to resolve the issue (once again, working it out rather than
repentance occurring) with a biblical understanding that since the guardians of
the girl did not agree to the marriage and broke it up, it was illegitimate. The pastor said he simply forgot his son had been married before. About a year or two after they were married, we found out that the new girl he
married had been married before, so that everyone involved was led into the
communal sin of adultery much like the sin of Achan in the Book of Joshua.
Whether the pastor, who was also the one who counseled them for marriage or his wife, knew
or not is unknown.
Some time before this, my eldest son had come to me
expressing that he was lonely and really wanted friends. As many who homeschool
know, it can be hard for the kids if there are not a lot of kids their age in
the church. We prayed together about it and some of the young adults in the
church started to invite him out. Unfortunately, this group ended up turning
into just hanging out at the pastor’s house most nights and it was there that
my son turned from being in submission to me to being told that his views
concerning leaving the household and becoming his own man before I thought he
was ready to leave the household were right and mine were wrong. Coupled with
the constant derision I would get from the household, my son developed such a
rebellious attitude toward me that it caused a horrible division in our family
and not long after my son left my household. He has since realized that he was
given evil advice and used by them but the damage was done. Ironically, he
would be used as an example of why I was not a good father. After all, I have a
rebellious son because I must have been too strict and overbearing. It couldn’t
have been because he was poisoned against me or anything by a household who had
been slandering me for the past half of decade before he got there of course.
BTW, I have eight other children, seven sons and one daughter, who are all in
loving submission to me, and of whom I am very proud as they excel in their godly
character in the hidden person that the world does not admire and in their pursuit of Christ.
But my children were attacked because they were not up to
the standards of the upper classes, or those who thought themselves as such,
within the congregation (again, a slander largely started and perpetuated by this family). All the while, his sons had gone on further to other
debaucheries. His one son had lied that he had become a Christian in order to
get a girl in the church. Then he was sleeping with that girl in the pastors
house (yes, another one), all the while courting other girls with his parents
help in other parts of the country. His other son was attending a heretical
church and was rebuked for it but did not repent, again, until it all worked
out and they had to move away. The one son finally married the girl he was
sleeping with in his father and mother’s house and he seems to have become a
Christian, although the last I heard the slander of me and my family continued
on even after he had admitted to me that he was doing it and supposedly
repented of it.
Within all of this, I was made to play bad cop whenever
there was a disciplinary issue at hand. I was the one the pastor wanted to go
talk to this person or that person when there needed to be a correction. I had to
deliver the bad news that they would be put on church discipline. I was made
out to be the mean one, the legalistic one, the tyrant. Indeed, I am a strict
father when it comes to rebellion and unrepentant sin but I am also a loving
one with a lot of mercy (as you can see from this very testimony, probably too
much mercy to a fault), but that wasn’t the narrative that benefited this other
family. Of course, my preaching style is like the Billy Graham of the 1950s and
his was of the Billy Graham of the 1990s, so it fed into this idea that I was a
harsh judge. If anything, I was more like Paul in that I was weighty in my
medium of communication but personally much softer, unless someone was in
rebellion. So he painted a picture of himself as the loving and nurturing
pastor, even though I don’t think he actually cared that much about most of the
congregation. He always had small groups of young men he hung around and who he
really cared about and probably who actually controlled the church (along with
his wife who imposed herself into every conversation and meeting of the elders
of course until we banned her from the official meetings at least). The irony
is that he had a horrible temper and would throw fits and tantrums whenever the
elders made a decision he didn’t like. If I were to sum up his demeanor in a
sentence, it would be that he was agreeable with what he agreed with, tolerant
of what he didn’t care about, and insufferable when it came to anything he
didn’t like.
In the midst of all of this going on, the pastor had turned
from being receptive to what I taught to constant opposition, undermining what
I said in secret, mocking what I would teach sometimes, telling others he did
not agree, etc. So as I pulled one way, he pulled the other. He would create
factions of people and his family would stir them up against me, all “knowing”
the same false information about me even though none of them had spent five
minutes with me. If anyone came to him offended by something, he would side
with them and agree with them that I was in the wrong and that he did not
agree. It was incredibly difficult to pull the congregation out of the mire
when they were being told by one of the pastors that the mire was just fine.
Some of this may have been due to a lack of biblical qualification in terms of
scholarship. He was clearly educated by a seminary that saw pastors as
different than scholars and so trained their pastors to be “pastoral” which I
would define as relational rather than to be able to do any serious work in the
original text or the real difference between exegesis and eisegesis. Much of my
ministry early on was to teach exegesis and correct a lot of the errors he had
made in bringing the church into some of the errors mentioned at the beginning
of this testimony. Some of it was just because he didn’t like it and it went
against what he wanted to do in his own life (much of it having to do with
sexuality) or what he was brought up to believe in fundamentalism (literal
Genesis creation days or that Daniel was written in the Sixth century). The
latter wasn’t a big deal to me, as I didn’t really care, but the former issues
were of a much greater importance and so I fought for those.
He would often call me and chew me out for teaching what he
did not agree with but then go on to teach whatever he wished without
consulting me. He called me one time to tell me that he was resenting me
because I had too much influence in the church and eventually it got to the
point that I could not say two words without him cutting me off and showing his disgust for me. It
reminded me of the girl at school who got all of the attention until a prettier
girl walked in and started getting it. The disgust and envy oozed out from him
and it was vile. He would proclaim with his lips that he loved me and my family
because that’s what he knew he should say, but his actions and disdain were clear to everyone who met with us in our leadership meetings. He would always
remind me how much everyone hated me. It got to the point that there was almost
not a single time he saw me that he didn’t have a story about someone who didn’t
like me and he would let me know it.
It became very clear that he had started to see himself as
the supreme authority, the head pastor, rather than an equal elder, and he
wanted the congregation to see him that way as well. He did not like to give up
the pulpit and even if he was away a lot (and he was) he would make sure he was
back in time to fill the pulpit on Sunday morning. So while I would be on the
phone with people from morning to midnight every day during the week, often not
even able to eat anything because I had little to no breaks in between to do
so, he and his family made himself out to be the martyr, the victim of some
sick guy who was just collecting a salary while he did all of the work. When it
was suggested he give the pulpit more often to another elder, he refused to do
so. He knew that his age and being in the pulpit would manipulate the people
into believing a falsehood. They would see him as senior pastor and the one in
authority even though our church had always taught the equality of the elders and the authority of elder majority. He even took people off church discipline one time without consulting the other elders—a decision made without the two or three—and I did not agree that they should be.
This would turn out to be beneficial for him as I had gotten
violently ill when Covid hit and even though our church went online for about
six months or so, and I did the bulk of the teaching and ministry through it, I
was not able to be present on Sunday mornings for about four years. So I continued the online ministry and counseled and held meetings and dinners and Bible studies from my home. During that
time I held on because I did not want to give this church back into the hands
of this man and his family. I deeply loved these people and did not want to
abandon them or my family to a fate I knew would take place if I gave up my
position. So even though he wanted me out, he did not have consent from the
rest of the leadership and so I stayed on even though it was all causing me
tons of anxiety and likely giving me a really bad case of PTSD. It was worth it
to me to save the church from the darkness. And I knew if I left that would be
all that was left. The other elder would be easily outvoted or discouraged so
that he would quit too and then the church would completely fall into the abyss.
To abandon the people I loved was a worse option for me than having health and peace.
He typically ignored the biblical qualifications for
ministry and put in whomever he liked. So since he liked a lot of the young
guys, he would put a bunch of young guys in ministry positions, many of whom were
rebellious and later either became churchless or apostatized against
Christianity altogether. This was a constant throughout the time I knew him.
Partiality and nepotism were the words that ruled the day. Even if not put in official
positions of power, he would primarily consult his wife and unqualified young
men, including his immature son, about spiritual matters above the elders. I
should say that I think this is the worst of his sins even though most will see
it as minor due to the state of the American church today and how it picks its
leadership but I knew if I left, it would subject the congregation to
unqualified men under a disqualified man, and I could not just turn away and
let this happen no matter how much pressure was poured on me and how much I was
presented as a bad guy for hanging on.
Finally, this led to a coup where he secretly met with a
deacon and launched a campaign to coerce the family members of the church to
leave and start a new church under a particular denomination. This was when the
slander was elevated to a massive level. Anything and everything was said by
them to “win over” congregants. They began giving reward certificates and gifts and
very visibly praying with people in the assembly so that all could see (we
didn’t usually display all of these things in such a show and I thought people
would see through this narcissistic love-bombing, but I was wrong). In the mean
time, I and the other elder were left in the dark to what was happening but it
became clear when the pastor began to preach against me from the pulpit,
insinuating that I was arrogant because I would tell people that I knew what
the Bible said and could help them understand it. This was a five or six week
long series against me, but he never mentioned my name. It was simply clear to
everyone who was in the know and afterward when asked if that is what he was
doing by my fellow elder, he admitted it. He then preached a sermon acting like the reason we were
agreeably splitting was over a ministerial difference when it was actually his
deep seated hatred toward a minister that had given nothing but far too much mercy and had done
nothing but good to him and his family the entirety of the ministry. I found
some comfort, ironically, in a book published by his cousin, where his cousin
had become an atheist and lists in his very famous book that one of the three
reasons for becoming an atheist was this very pastor and his wife (they were
both mentioned explicitly in his book but he made sure to list the wife’s full
previous and current name, telling me that she was heavily involved). What he
did with his cousin was to slander him to the rest of the congregation as one
who was trying to take his power from him as a pastor and so this pastor and
his wife turned people who had previously loved his cousin into people who
hated him. He notes that they took away the illusion from him that a Christian
community was a loving one. After splitting the church, the pastor and his wife
left only to do the same thing to me at another church.
Eventually liars believe their own lies. If you tell enough
people that someone is a villain then you either have to admit you’re the
villainous slanderer or you have to make every reason to believe it yourself.
It is an irony that I had such mercy on this family so as to counsel them in
their many egregious sins, and that they didn’t think that any of their utter
wickedness toward God and the congregation was what threatened the
congregation. Instead, they fabricated this narrative in their minds that it was
me, as a tyrant, who was the villain because I was trying to pull them and the
congregation out of their sins. No deed goes unpunished and this testimony will
likely go unbelieved or dismissed as unweighty until the Lord brings us all
before Him in judgment. So be it. Come, Lord Jesus!
So when he and his family began making arguments that I
wasn’t qualified to be a pastor because I was either too harsh when I taught or
rebuked someone, or wasn’t there on Sunday morning (which I was beginning to
rectify btw after starting to get better), or my house wasn’t of museum
quality, you can imagine the absurdity I thought of it all since this family
was actually disqualified by things God considers actual sins but they were trying to disqualify me
for superficial reasons that were not sin, not to mention that it was a complete
180 on “we’ll take you when we can get you,” and that after working my butt off
beyond measure, it was presented that I wasn’t doing my part of the ministry
(this guy took more vacation and family time than any other pastor I have
ever known, but he made sure he was back for most pulpit shows on Sunday
morning). I don’t think most pastors worked as hard as I did. I certainly never
worked that hard in ministry before when I was healthy nor even after the
split, which finally left us with largely a peaceful, submissively loving, and
uneventful church. I’ve even started writing more books because I feel like I
don’t do anything near as much as I did in that ministry. Irony is simply all
over this thing.
On top of this, he had family members tell me that he was looking to run off to other churches throughout the ministry if he could get the church’s money and another church would hire him (which would actually show how little he cares about the people). He contemplated leaving on the phone with me before and has tried this coup before with other people so I know there is truth in this claim. Even after this recent split, I'm told he was contemplating leaving the people behind to move up with the in-group in the church.
He was accused and suspected of many other things by some people but unlike him, I would always shut them down if they had no reliable witnesses.
If I have learned one thing about others among the many
personal things that I needed to change about myself, I would have to say
regretfully that people are easily manipulated by people of low moral character
because only people of low moral character seek to manipulate them and are good
at it.
What I learned about myself is that my desire for God to be
merciful to me often gets in the way of my enacting justice, and thus,
distorting the character of God to people because I want to show them mercy
when it would actually be unjust to do so. Ironically, and it is a huge irony,
is that I was painted as a tyrant and a cult-leader, but if anyone slandered me personally (and
there were many largely because there were many influenced by this family) I
never put them on discipline. I just chalked it up to immaturity and turned the
other cheek. But I realize now that in letting the slanderers in this family
go, I hurt the church. I let these clouds without rain corrupt and take over
the church by doing nothing about their very now documentable evils. Although I
truly was guarding it by holding on and not resigning as I was constantly
pressured to do by this pastor because I thought I provided a shield and the balance from
God’s judgment, I ended up destroying it anyway because I did not follow what I
now see as the clear instructions of God to remove anyone who even commits one
of the egregious sins above much less all of them.
I have two roads before me that I now contemplate the future.
I’m thinking of stepping down because looking back now all of this is due to my
colossal failure to rid the church of these charlatans. Perhaps it was the
arrogance in me that thought I could redeem even them with the Word of God. I
did truly believe that I could and it looked like I was for a time, but I
failed in the end. My other path is to take what I’ve learned and to truly
repent and never let this happen again, and to encourage my fellow elder and
one day elders to never let it happen, even if it is with me. To be merciful to
the wicked is to be burdensome to the righteous. Honestly, I could go either
way right now. If I’m really honest, I feel the weight of the guilt on me and
because of my willingness to be a “martyr” and just take all the slander on the
cheek, and because I only really knew of the one other sin of their son’s
adultery that happened toward the beginning of the ministry for most of my most of my ministry, the majority of
the church I tried so hard to save fell back into the darkness of this man’s
leadership. For this reason, you may think that the pastor and his wife are the
villains here, but unfortunately, I must come to grips with the fact that I am
because I had the responsibility to rid the church of this evil and did not do
it. And this is what I struggle with the most. I really thought at the time
that mercy was to triumph over judgment because of the problem that most
pastors have in trying to figure out when someone is merely ignorant and
immature and when someone is rebellious. Coupled with confusing qualifications for
ministry and forgiveness, this led to a really bad decision on my part to let
him continue in ministry.
I can only give nothing but praise and admiration for a
young elder that God sent in my place and because of my failure, he did what I
could not do by giving this corrupt man the ultimatum that either he leaves the
church or he stays and we take him out of ministry. Unfortunately, the bulk of
the church went with him but that may be a sign of their judgment too, as I
heard many reasons for why they went with him and not one was because they
believed the Word of God taught by him was powerfully transforming them into
the image of Christ. They went with him for convenience, to maintain
friendships, to become a part of a denomination they wanted to be a part of,
because they liked him, because they knew him a long time, etc. None of them
submitted to the actual authority of Christ through the church which is through
the majority of elders, not through some pastor to whom they gave authority
because he stood by a wood box up front on a particular day of the week. That’s
for them to reconcile to Christ on the day of judgment and not everyone may be
as equally culpable depending on how just they acted in all of this.
In Revelation 2, Christ speaks of a Jezebel that had taken
over the church and swayed many within it to partake in corrupt doctrines and
practices. I’m reminded of the scene in Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible,
where the Puritans had a law that refused to take testimony from a whore. It
was because whores were seen as having demons and as liars by nature. It is
interesting that Jezebel here is described as a whore who brings others into
the lies belonging to whoredom. At one point in the play, John Proctor
proclaims to the court, “You are pulling heaven down and raising up a whore!”
What the court should have done is dismiss any testimony from the whore as lies
and damnable lies, but it persisted in receiving her testimony, and because it
did, the innocent suffered. I am ashamed to have not silenced the whore. I wish
I was John Proctor in this story, even after his sin of adultery he regains his
integrity and resolve, but I’m the gullible and unjust court instead, and as
such, am not able to throw my hat in with the innocent and pretend that I am as
pure as God’s fingers for letting this go on. I’ve often wondered at the
horrific scene of these people standing before Christ and answering for all of
these crimes on judgment day. But now I ponder my own judgment and worry more
about myself than others.
I could bring up that I didn’t have any real power in the
congregation and so could not take them out because people follow who they
like, not who has authority by divine rite. It would simply have been me
leaving the church and leaving behind people that needed my help. I could argue that I wanted to save this
pastor and his family too and was waiting patiently for God to turn them around,
and genuinely thought that He was. I could argue that I didn’t think I was
supposed to remove them because all things seemed like they were reconciled and
worked out, so I had no more reason to give to the congregation for their
removal and they were learning and growing earlier on and so it looked like the
right decision at the time. After all, if God had forgiven them it would be
wrong, so I thought, to then remove them for a sin of which they were no longer
guilty in the eyes of God. All of these would be a true testimony for how I
thought at the time, but in the end it doesn’t matter because I should have known
and done what was right in God’s eyes and not in my own. I should have had a
better understanding of what I was supposed to do. I was the Bible scholar and
yet didn’t understand the Bible on such a pivotal point. I had always struggled
in figuring out what constituted repentance. Is it just a confession? Is it a
long term removal of the sin? Is it regret and hatred for the sin that causes
one to turn away from it even if only for a few moments? I’m sad to say, I
think I’ve just now figured it out. Because of this, good intentions or not, I
acted foolishly in the matter, and am now ashamed by it, and that is a very
jagged pill to swallow.
Authority carries so much responsibility. Fools fight for it.
The arrogant steal it. The wise only take hold of it with trembling hands
because they must. But woe to me that I took it. Whether fool, arrogant, or
wise, I failed nonetheless and I will forever regret it.
It seems clear to me now that my primary mistake was
confusing forgiveness and qualification for ministry. Everyone who repents (and
again I don’t believe they ever did of any of this) has forgiveness, but not
everyone is qualified to be a pastor. Anyone can be restored to the church, but
some people should never be restored to the pastorate. That may include even
me, and I’m left weighing these things for my own future and the future of the
church.
I wish I could go back now and warn the young 19 Year-Old to
not enter ministry before he was 50. I wish I knew then what I know now.
Nothing would have been easier but what I was to do would have been clearer. I
would have stayed in seminary for thirty years and just soaked up the Bible
without becoming a teacher until I understood it fully. But I know that’s not
how it works. It’s through failures that come from ignorance, stubbornness to
do it our way, and even sin that God causes us to look again and see where we
have so greatly erred. The church is seminary. I just wish someone else had
gone through this to learn the lessons these regrets have taught and passed
them onto me. But I can’t go back, so it’s me. Whether I stay in ministry or
not, I will forever warn those going into it and who are already in it to get
this one right because if you get everything else right but this it will
devastate the church.
Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten into ministry again. There is
a scene in one of the Spiderman movies, cheesy as they may be, that always
affected me emotionally. Peter decides that he just wants to live a normal life
and not be Spiderman anymore. One day, he passes by an alley where a man is
being beaten up and robbed, he stops for a moment but then just passes on by
and lets it happen. I often wonder if it would have been better if I just kept
walking. I don’t tell anyone this but I was actually offered a lot of ministry
jobs after I was fired from my previous one. I simply turned them all down. My
pastor at the OPC church we went to afterward was so relieved that had another
minister there who could take some preaching off of his hands and give him a
break for a while, to which I replied, “I’m sorry. I just don’t do that
anymore.” But when I saw them scattered like sheep that had been massacred across
a field I could not walk by. Surely, God brought me back here to deliver the
church from this chaos, and although He did deliver many from it, I obviously
failed to do it in a manner that was swift and decisive. Maybe it wasn’t my
place to intervene. Maybe someone better would have come. It’s all so
uncertain. I just don’t know. Either way, may the Lord forgive me for what I
have done incorrectly and what I have failed to do correctly and may He now and
forever grant peace and mercy to those in the church who followed Him by faith
despite the mess that men have made of the church.
