We Need A Virtuous Church
We Can't Tell Good Pastors from Predators
The Scandal Churn
A few days ago, LCMS District President Michael Mohr was raided by the FBI on charges related to the production of child pornography. He allegedly used hidden cameras to film himself committing a sexual act over a boy. The child identified the recording device and reported it. There were apparently at least three victims. His personal Facebook page had bizarre photos of him taking pictures of minors with a stuffed bear at a meal, in a swimming pool, and in hotel rooms.
A few weeks earlier, Presbyterian pastor Zecharias Weldeyesus of the OPC in Atlanta, GA was arrested on misdemeanor charges of pandering, allegedly at a massage parlor. Pandering involves inducing another to commit prostitution. Prior to his arrest, he was seen as a “persecuted Christian” for leaving Eritrea where his fellow Presbyterians were apparently getting imprisoned by the secular government.
Months before that, Presbyterian Pastor Boyd Miller of the OPC in LaGrange, GA was exposed by the (liberal) Sons of Patriarchy podcast of having groomed underage girls for years throughout the course of his ministry. At least two of the actions he admitted to in ecclesiastical hearings could meet the legal definition of a sexual crime (though outside of statutes of limitations), and it’s really unclear what the full scope of his actions were. They at least include him proposing marriage to a teenage girl and obsessive clingy behavior. He had already been under an investigation that was effectively covered-up. The OPC only moved to act due to the podcast embarrassment, and he was granted a sweetheart deal to resign willingly with a generous severance package, and ultimately to transfer his ministry credentials into a new denomination.1
Last year, Michael Deckinga, Vice President of Advancement at Mid-America Reformed Seminary was indicted on federal child pornography charges, which he pled guilty to on January 20th of this year.
A little over a year ago, Liam Goligher, pastor of Tenth Presbyterian in Philadelphia, pled guilty to concealing an arrest regarding public sex from an adulterous affair, having concealed the lie from 2014-2023 at which point he was confronted. Tenth Presbyterian is a historic church with famous former pastors like Donald Barnhouse, James Montgomery Boice, and Phil Ryken.
Time would escape me to go on about the scandals. It is a never ending job to report on church scandals. They happen at all levels of leadership, in all denominations, and among liberals and conservatives. Even the counter-abuse movements within the churches become abusive in their own ways, making it uniquely impossible to respect either side.
The Response of the Church
The church responds to these scandals in predictable ways indistinguishable from the bland copy of a public relations firm, except for the inclusion of religious language:
We are shocked and horrified
We don’t presume guilt, want due process, and will follow the law
We care about the victims
Religious statements
The takeaway is, “We didn’t see it coming, we won’t see it next time, and we are not going to do anything differently. Now here is some Christian theology.”
As I have observed and waded into the dialogue online, among both clergy and layman, the responses are no better. Most fall into the same categories.
Sectarian theological responses: If it happened outside your denomination to blame the key differences between your group and theirs. If it happened within your denomination, make it a matter of the degree of adherence to those distinctions. “This is why you need a plurality of elders. This is why we need to restore the right worship of the church. This is what happens with a low view of the sacraments,” and other nauseating arguments.
Religious framing of the issue: “Satan loves to attack pastors. Pray for your pastors, they are under spiritual attack.”
Impossibility of prevention: No one could have known or predicted this, it is impossible and would require magic abilities or 24-hour surveillance. It is unreasonable to hold the institution responsible for that sly devil, that slick Rick.
No church is perfect, everyone is a sinner: Yes, we all have indwelling sin, but it’s not normal to want to rape kids. It seems like you could pick other Christians with remaining indwelling sin to lead the church.
Take heed to yourself, this is the deceitfulness of sin: This is a variation of “no one’s perfect.” Basically a passive-aggressive way to tell concerned onlookers that it is unspiritual and judgmental to think about the sins of others because you have sin yourself and if you don’t watch it, you could be next.
Maybe there are degrees of truth in these arguments, but the net effect is to reinforce:
We are powerless to prevent this from happening
We bear no responsibility for the results we are seeing
Nothing about our thinking or system is compromised
We need to just keep doing what we are doing, perhaps at a higher degree than before
Try not to bring any attention to this
This is a pretty disturbing concept.
I like to listen to the sermons of disgraced pastors, and I encourage you to do the same, at least in small doses. Most of these guys still have their sermons online, and you can listen to them right now.
What you will find is that they are barely distinguishable from their peers. Their peers are preaching sermons with titles like, “The Grace of Repentance” or, “Finding Jesus in the Lord’s Table,” or “The Marvelous Grace of Jesus,” and so are they. If you listen to them without foreknowledge of the scandal, most people would say, “That was a good sermon.”
Over the years, I have probably learned more from disgraced pastors than from those without scandal because when you listen to the sermon of an unsaved preacher, you learn to identify what does not work and what does not save. Their own message did not save them. The fact that we can’t tell the difference between the preaching of a godly man and one who commits child abuse is an indictment on more than the child abuser.
We have been trained to believe since salvation is by faith and that faith comes by hearing the word preached, that therefore salvation is conveyed by doctrine. So then we judge the quality of a pastor by the way he preaches doctrine and how it is garnished by his religiosity.
Most modern preaching is little more than statements of biblical data, and religiosity on display. If then the sermons of the good pastor and the child rapist sound the same, we now have a crisis of ministry.
It begs a question whose answer has eluded me for my whole life.
What is the relationship between Christian ministry and the impact it has on believers?
Or put another way, why do we bother to go to church and associate with other Christians? Why donate money, hire pastors, and send missionaries? Why do we have entire training grounds to raise up leadership with degrees that can cost $60,000 to get pastors? Are we happy with the men selected and the training they receive?
When Christians go home and implement the lessons they are taught in church, what impact does it have on their lives? How do I know if my church is correctly advising me about what I should do? Can I have confidence that a pastor’s assessment of me is accurate?
On the surface, it seems simple enough. Take this theory of ministry as a default assumption.
Christian ministry is about God’s servants getting people the word of God so that they can repent of their sins and believe in Jesus for their justification. Then they continue to hear the word of God so they will grow in sanctification and remain encouraged until the end.
To new Christians or fresh reverts to Jesus, this may seem plausible. When they trust in Jesus, pray, read the Bible, and eliminate vices, their lives improve significantly. If anything, the biggest observable change occurs before they spend much time under the ministry of the church.
Once people gain actual experience in the church, their character and virtue tends to stagnate or regress. Plenty of church members are already decent people and good neighbors, and they remain that in church, but it’s not the ministry that got them there. People who have long struggled with an alcohol, money, pornography, or honesty problem are likely to still be struggling with it ten years later. Ministry does not seem to be improving that. Some churches just pander to their audiences in the first place, and so it is expected there is no dynamism to the ministry, but even among those “good” churches, the main things that change are doctrinal knowledge and religiosity. It creates the impression of spiritual health and growth where the character and virtue lack.
When we do see real growth of character and virtue, it tends to be in a one-off fashion through non-traditional means, like a personal mentor or reading a self-help book.
Men become “called to the ministry” when they take on the emotional affect of piety, when their public prayers can seamlessly loop in Bible references, when they can rattle off the defenses of their denominational sectarianism winsomely, and when they show deference to the institution and its leaders. These men preach with pained expressions of “weightiness,” dramatic pauses, and unnatural modulation of the voice.
Total Institutional Failure
The church fails to protect its own people from predators or to bring new people to salvation. Then it fails to grow the character and virtues of its members. It is only successful at replicating its existing form minus the losses of atrophy and defection to leftism. This does not give us an encouraging picture of the ministry of the church.
The proposed theory of ministry predicted that getting people the word of God would produce justification and sanctification, but it has never been easier to access the word of God. The YouVersion Bible App surpassed 1 Billion downloads, and thousands of new sermons land on Sermon Audio and YouTube every week. Thousands of people show up weekly to attend in person. Yet of people in attendance five or more years in, where is the fruit of this ministry? It is just not present. Numerical growth in conservative churches happens mainly through lateral transfers and through childbirth, which is not ministry.
If our current model of ministry worked, we would see people come from unbelief into faith in Jesus and believers become more virtuous in their lives. Statistics and experience confirm we don’t see that.
We are donating money, sending missionaries, training pastors, operating seminaries, planting churches, running building campaigns, publishing books, and writing curriculum when we do not understand Christian ministry.
We Do Not Understand How Ministry Works
I would love to offer a simple answer, but I am afraid we must dig even deeper. We must be disabused of all the excuses and coping narratives that have polluted our thinking about ministry if we are to have any hope of getting to the bottom of this.
Character Judgment
Let us go back to the scandals. Judging character is fundamental to the job of a minister. A minister who cannot discern between faith and unbelief, virtue and vice, works of the Spirit and works of the flesh is dangerous. He may flatter and reassure people all the way to Hell, or discourage and oppress people who are walking with God. When a sexually abusive pastor can slip in under the noses of the other ministers, how can those ministers be good judges of character?
Entrepreneurs figure out how to judge character every day in America. They pay for choosing the wrong partners, for every bad hiring decision, for picking the wrong suppliers, and for entrusting the wrong people with information. They win or lose every investment by the decisions they make.
Ministry incompetence has more in common with that of corporate middle managers. Middle managers take credit for corporate success, but divert responsibility for failure by trying to prove their decisions at the time were justified or blaming someone else. Even when their tenures are horrible, both minister and middle managers have a remarkable ability to bail with a golden parachute into the next career move.
Since character development is fundamental to ministry, there is little hope of success if we cannot judge character, let alone develop it. Judging character is not even that hard to do. Does he consistently act in accord with his beliefs? Does he keep his word and follow through? Can he be trusted to be in charge of other people to accomplish a task? Is he a weirdo? Does he have noteworthy immaturity? Do shocking statements ever “slip out”? Does he ever “test” groups to see what he gets away with? Will he give honest answers to honest questions without evasion? Does he treat himself as a perpetual victim? Would this man be selected to lead a startup business, a military company, or a wilderness survival journey? Does the man have self-control? Does he have a family, and are they joyful and normal? Is he overly soft, or hot-tempered? Is he fine with other people living their own lives so long as they are growing in faith and virtue?
These are things that are hard to dress up in religious language and performance, but demonstrate a lot about character.
Religiosity, Dishonesty, and False Appearances
Many assume that predators are people who plan their careers around getting access to victims. There is a profile for that, but it seems less common in Christian institutions. In Christian institutions, I believe it tends to be double-minded men who use religion to act out their own inner drama. Their secret sins are the context where their religion gains significance as they loop through secret patterns of sin, prayers of gloom after completion, and the high of feeling forgiveness from directing the mind to Jesus crucified for sinners and wanting that forgiveness themselves. Abstractly, even wanting to be free from the sin, but not in a tangible way that would deny them the sense of gratification they get from it. They associate cycling through this loop in the mind with growing closer to Jesus, creating the impression that they have learned to rely on his grace daily.
They may also double-down on legalistic severity as a form of over-compensation for guilt or as a way to feign rededication to God’s cause. Rather than driving them from religion, their sins drive them toward it and inspires them to devour books and dive into sectarian controversies. The rhythm of emotional pleas for forgiveness grants them the false confidence that they have a tender conscience, while the inner man is always scheming for new opportunities to gratify whatever perverse desires are at play. Each boundary crossed in secret becomes the new baseline until the difference is so strong that there is radical discontinuity between the public man and the private man. He becomes adept at deception of both himself and others, believing that everyone sins as he does, but he uniquely understands the experience of the gospel. Nothing about the man’s character is defined by love or self-control, and he is emotionally volatile.
Such a person finds conservative Christian institutions the ideal safe harbor. He is perfectly suited to rehash the message of justification and sanctification, to thunder about God’s holiness and man’s depravity, and to weigh in with encyclopedic knowledge of sacraments, covenants, church history, and philosophy. By outward appearance, he seems to be a holy man.
This is the nature of religiosity. It is not the religion itself, but the discontinuity between true integrity and religious forms. Religiosity is taken as a testimony of the holiness of the man, and the social environment trains people to judge one another by and conform to the standards of religiosity. Not everyone is a predator or harboring secret sin, but the culture of religiosity makes it impossible to discern between a truly virtuous man and a predator.
All religious forms can be rehearsed and performed, and one can believe and embody them without any saving grace. You can be a servant of the devil and embody them to the same degree as a normal pastor.
Religiosity is such a perfect trap because the right views and right forms are taught in the Bible, albeit faintly, unlike the ethical dimensions which are front and center. Embodying honesty, hospitality, generosity, thoughtfulness, kindness, restraint, patience, and endurance are obvious and not something it takes a genius to understand. Yet mode, timing, and administration of baptism, the type of music to sing, the frequency and recipients of the Lord’s Supper, the appropriate governance structure of the church, the exact nature of the covenants, and untold other issues have biblical data which can be used to make a case, but are not exactly shouted from the rooftops. A committee gathered to assess an aspiring minister will not be impressed by a man who is able to confirm that lying is in fact a sin, but may be impressed by a novel argument for one of these issues. To be a fully honest man is a greater accomplishment than to read fluent Greek, yet the church institutionally selects for one and not the other.
Business as Usual
The clergy are part of the system and have little interest in change, as change goes against their own interests. The laity are either apathetic towards change or defensive from the sunk costs of their involvement.
When a new scandal breaks, the instinct is never to ask, “how can we make sure this absolutely never happens again?” but to assure people that it doesn’t reflect the institution or the leadership.
The critics of the church: apostates, exvangelicals, feminists, communists, and the like, will recognize scandals and be the first to parade them around triumphantly, but only with the intent to show we must abandon Christianity or core Christian doctrine and ignore the even worse scandals that characterize them. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
The temptation for some readers will be to draw the exact wrong conclusions: We need to just focus on being faithful to our current ways of doing things in church, the things that are not working and bearing bad fruit. I am saying we need to abandon them.
Living Without Guile
I waited this long to argue from the Bible because rushing right in to debate about the Bible is the characteristic religiosity that is part of the problem. Nevertheless, my readers need confidence that they are not being asked to abandon the truth.
Philip found Nathanael and told him, “We have found the One Moses wrote about in the Law, the One the prophets foretold—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”
“Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Nathanael asked.
…
Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward Him, and said of him, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!”
Even though Nathanael gave Philip pushback against his religious views, Jesus commends Nathanael for his honesty. Jesus appreciates Nathanael for not faking a religious posture.
Contrast this with Matthew 23:13-36 (too long to quote here). Jesus pronounces seven “woes” on the scribes and Pharisees, the religious teachers of his day. Consider how many of these still apply today:
Blocking the kingdom (prevent people from getting saved)
Devouring widows and pretentious prayers (mercilessness, selfish handling of money, and religiosity)
Corrupting converts (incubating and training their followers in their own sins)
Blind oath-making (dishonesty and abuse of sacred things)
Neglecting weightier matters (majoring on minors while neglecting virtue)
Cleaning outside only (obsession with religious appearance, not with inner virtue)
Whitewashed tombs and killing the righteous (Honoring the persecuted of an earlier age while persecuting the righteous people of this age)
I do not want to belabor the ways that these are true of pastors of our day.
When you make a vow to God, do not delay to pay it;
For He has no pleasure in fools.
Pay what you have vowed—
Better not to vow than to vow and not pay.
We see that there is a priority of inward righteousness over outward religion. It is strong enough that it is better to avoid religious words that one cannot fulfill.
“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep. But a hireling, he who is not the shepherd, one who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf catches the sheep and scatters them. The hireling flees because he is a hireling and does not care about the sheep.
A counterfeit pastor (a hireling) abandons the people when danger comes. If predators operate within the church as the status quo, the overseers are hirelings.
Now you, if you call yourself a Jew; if you rely on the law and boast in God; if you know His will and approve of what is superior because you are instructed by the law; if you are convinced that you are a guide for the blind, a light for those in darkness, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of infants, because you have in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth— you, then, who teach others, do you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you steal? You who forbid adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? As it is written: “God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.”
Technically, this passage is addressing the hypocrisy of Jews, but the point applies also to Christian teachers, since Paul is contrasting those taught by God’s law from those who do not have the law. As Christians are stewards of God’s law today, hypocrisy and pride of one’s own righteousness while committing the same things causes the atheists, exvangelicals, feminists, and communists to blaspheme God on their account!
Living in Freedom
If you seek to live a godly life and grow in your everyday virtue, you must not assimilate into the hypocritical culture of the contemporary church. Become skeptical of most “religious” language, and get in the habit of interpreting the Bible in “everyday” language, thinking of how it applies to things like your school, work, commute, and household. Explain it to yourself the way you would explain it to someone who knew nothing about Christianity, and pray that God will help you live out the truth, and stop being a double-minded man.
You have the responsibility to judge the character of those who claim spiritual authority over you, and especially those warning signs that even those outside the church would notice. No one is impressed by religious performance except those least worthy of emulation.
Despite all this, the church needs virtuous members, even if it welcomes abuse, and believers still benefit from worshiping together. You still benefit from the administration of the sacraments. When you face God, it will not matter what others did, you will want to be able to say that you lived in good faith and without guile, and that you call on the mercy of Jesus to forgive your failures.
The church can be reformed, and the church will endure, but you must ensure that you are not overcome by the corruption it offers. May God grant it.
After publication someone disputed whether his credentials were transferred. From the standpoint of the OPC, he demitted the office (i.e. he willingly resigned and surrendered his ordination under pressure). Since then, he had denied the legitimacy of his surrender of his ordination and has been transferred into Hanover Presbytery as an “Evangelist.” An office of Evangelist is the same as a pastor but without a call to a specific church, which is normally used for church planters or parachurch ministries.
Extremely astute. Thank you for including a section to self-reflect. I find mindself hiding behind religiosity to avoid a painful look in the mirror quite a bit.
Great article, you put things I had been thinking about all together finally.