The Sinning Pastor Phenomenon

The pastor who led me and my family to the Lord almost 40 years ago left a lasting impression. Rev. David Errickson (Lambertville, NJ) wasn’t perfect, but I never doubted that he was godly. He took our family under his wing and discipled us. He gave us great books to read, discussed the Bible at length, and introduced us to other godly leaders. And he exhibited love, grace, compassion, and self-sacrifice toward his flock and toward everyone else in our community.

On my first day of classes at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA, where I was a chemistry and math major, Pastor Dave drove to the school, helped find a church for me to attend (and drove me there so I could meet the pastor), set up transportation, and then drove me to the other side of the city to visit United Wesleyan College. I had been a Christian for only 5 months, so he wanted to ensure that I had positive influences in my life while I was away from home. A year later, I transferred to UWC. A few years later, I was a pastor. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Having been a pastor myself for 30 years and having known many pastors, I can attest that there are few who measure up to Pastor Dave’s humble servant leadership. He never pastored a large church. He never won denominational awards or acclaim. He just loved people, discipled them, championed holiness, and set an unwavering example – unnoticed by anyone except those in our small town.

Meet the contemporary pastor…

Unlike my experience with Pastor Dave, whom I continue to admire, many (though certainly not all) young men and women today have grown up under pastors who seem obsessed with downplaying holiness and conveying a sense of uncertainty about everything, especially morality. I heard a Wesleyan pastor say in a sermon a few years ago, “Well, haven’t we all sworn at our wife and kids?” I wanted to raise my hand and say, “No, sir, we have not.” Pastors almost routinely discuss their intense struggles with temptation. Many flaunt their disregard for our denomination’s own membership commitments. Some, to our shame, no longer take a stand against the sexual perversions of our day.

So, what’s happening here? 

From a pastoral perspective, I see several factors contributing to what I call “The Sinning Pastor Phenomenon.”

The desire for perceived transparency – Transparency is a good thing. Pastors should be open and honest about church finances, ministry needs, and even their own shortcomings (to a degree). But should they really advertise every flaw, every temptation, every failure? The rush to bare their souls and confess to the entire congregation, in my opinion, is a misguided quest for intimacy.

Many of these pastors grew up as pastors kids. They saw the loneliness of their parents and vowed not to allow others to place them on a pedestal and isolate them. But leadership is a lonely place. Like it or not, pastors answer to a higher calling and are held to stricter standards. By baring their souls – what they would call being truly “authentic” – these young pastors are hoping to draw people closer to them, to develop deeply meaningful relationships and friendships. I’m not saying this is entirely wrong. But it does shine a spotlight on them instead of Jesus. We ultimately should want people to develop intimacy with Jesus, not necessarily with us as pastors. We want them to bare their souls before Him and to know Him intimately. And pastors should do the same. At least that’s how I see it.

It’s now cool to be uncertain – We’ve all watched the Rob Bells of the world being interviewed on national television, filled with angst and uncertainty, apparently grappling with complex social and theological issues. And we collectively say, “Wow, isn’t that cool? People are listening! Lots of people.” What the secular media is drawn to is the uncertainty. They like the fact that a pastor doesn’t have all the answers. That’s because our entire culture is characterized by moral relativism and an absolute disdain for absolutes. Wanting to appear “relevant” (and also a bit “cool,” if truth be told), pastors are reluctant to preach “thus saith the Lord.” Instead, they want their often young congregations to see them as struggling with theology and morality. They want to reflect the angst and uncertainty of culture.

Don’t get me wrong. There have been plenty of times as a pastor that I was unsure of something. But I studied, prayed, and asked other respected scholars until I was sure before preaching on it. God is not uncertain about anything. We should struggle to understand, but, in my opinion, we shouldn’t share about the struggle until we can also share the solution. It’s not fair to leave our congregation in the struggle when they may not have the time or inclination to ever discover the answer.

I’m just like you (the desire to be relatable) – Let’s face it. No one likes to be “different.” Anyone who was ever teased in grade school will tell you that. We all want to be liked and to fit in. And that includes pastors. Part of “The Sinning Pastor Phenomenon” stems from that desire to fit in. So, pastors will often augment their moral struggles just so they can say, “See, I’m no different than you are.” They want to relate to their congregation, but in their desire to do so, they fail to lead by example. I don’t know about you, but if I went to my local car repairman and he said, “I know almost as little about cars as you do,” I’d take my business elsewhere. I don’t want someone just like me to fix my car or operate on my body or teach me calculus or help me lose weight. I want someone who knows what they’re doing and has had a measure of success. But I “get” the desire to be relatable. Pastors are, after all, just people. Flawed people. But they shouldn’t be “just like everyone else.” People were drawn to Jesus, but He certainly wasn’t just like everyone else. He lived a pure and sinless life, and everyone knew it. It’s possible to be relatable without portraying yourself as outright sinful.

A safeguard against falling and failing – From the outside, it seems as if many pastors today want to bring themselves down in the view of their congregations (i.e., “I’m just like you; you sin, I sin; we’re all just flawed human beings”) to insulate themselves against any accusations of moral compromise by the more “judgmental” members of the church. Some of these pastors want to do the things they were forbidden to do as PKs. Of course, many of them grew up in very “legalistic” households. So, they want to dance and drink and try the things that were once forbidden (within reason, of course). They don’t want to go to church on Sunday if it also happens to be Christmas Day. And they don’t want to be judged for making any of those decisions. It almost feels like rebellion. But I believe it’s rooted in the desire to not fall from the favor of the congregation or to fail in their ministries. Once they get people to agree with them and accept the fact that they are flawed and sinful, well, what can you possibly say when they live up to that? Yes, the pastor sinned, but we all knew he was a sinner when we hired him.

I don’t believe anyone goes into ministry expecting to sin. But without a strong commitment to holiness and a belief that it is both attainable and desirable, many pastors may conclude that sin is inevitable at some point in life (even if it’s not a reality at the time). Lowering the congregation’s expectations is a means of insulating them from possible accusation in the future.

Errant theology?  – I served on the District Board of Ministerial Development years ago in Wisconsin and also in Florida. My husband continues to serve on that board right now here in Florida. We have always been amazed at the number of ministerial candidates who can’t even articulate our denomination’s theological position on holiness, much less testify to having experienced it. Even some of the board members themselves struggled to define holiness from a Wesleyan perspective.Ultimately, people live up to their theology, pastors included. You can’t preach holiness and live holiness if you don’t know what it is and don’t believe it’s necessary.

“We all sin every day in word, thought, and deed” is the mantra of many Christians today, especially those influenced by Calvinism. It’s what they hear from most Christian radio personalities. But is that really what the Bible teaches? Is sin so inevitable that we live in defeat every day? To make everything “sin” is effectively to make nothing sin. It becomes an excuse for not appropriating the power of God to not sin. And it sure does make God powerless, doesn’t it? We are no longer slaves to sin, obeying its desires. We’ve been set free from sin and are now slaves to righteousness. At least that’s what Paul taught.

Or maybe the faulty theology has much older roots. Dualism, embraced by the second-century Gnostics, held in part that anything spiritual was good, and anything material was evil (in simplistic terms). The logical corollary was that, since the spiritual and material have nothing to do with each other, what I do with my material body has no effect on my spiritual soul. Is it possible that this theological understanding has crept back into the church? Have we so dichotomized the Christian life that we really believe faith and practice don’t affect one another? Or perhaps the problem is that the only “practice” that concerns pastors today is feeding the poor and caring for immigrants. Those are important, but so are personal integrity and purity of heart (which result in purity of lifestyle). Something is definitely missing from the theological framework of the pastors who are glorying in their shame.

Who’s to blame?

There are so many places we could lay blame.

• The lure of sin.
• Educational institutions that failed to teach the holiness doctrine effectively to generations of young adults entering the ministry,
• The church’s emphasis on church growth and tangible results during the 1970s and 1980s to the exclusion of church health and holiness and the resulting shift in requirements for ministers. If they can employ good business and marketing strategies, they were in, regardless of their theological proficiency.
• The social justice movement, which, while well-intentioned, regarded overcoming inequality and oppression as the only hallmarks of holiness.
• The moral relativism of our culture. If pastors grew up believing there were no absolutes, it’s little wonder they would preach out of that worldview.
• The division of life into sacred and secular, not seeing how our relationship with Christ should influence every area of our lives.
• The breakdown of society’s trust in religious institutions. Remember how the fall of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart rocked the evangelical world in the late 1980s and early 1990s? At the same time, sex abuse scandals were first coming to light within the Roman Catholic Church. During the 90s, society began viewing clergy differently – with suspicion. No wonder today’s pastors want to be completely transparent and not come across as the moral authority!

And the results?

The obvious results…

1. Low expectations of clergy – No one really expects pastors to be holy anymore. The really cool pastors swear from the pulpit to shock their listeners. I listened to one pastor’s sermon online (Southern Baptist), and he used “flippin'” a dozen times as an obvious replacement for a much cruder term. But, hey, some 40,000 people watch or listen to him every week. When pastors publicly display their rebellion to denominational authority and highlight their more benign sins, well, people just stop expecting anything more.
2. No moral authority – Pastors themselves come to the conclusion that, since they’ve sinned and are sinners, they have no authority to condemn any sin in others or in society. While I freely admit that sin is sin, and God doesn’t regard one sin as worse than another (although even He made lists), there are some sins that are more destructive to innocent people than others. And they ought to be condemned. One popular Wesleyan professor wrote an internet article back around 2003 or 2004, drawing a moral equivalence between protecting the environment and protecting unborn babies from abortion. Really? Is it just as much a sin to litter as to murder a baby? In this case, he was trying to justify supporting a particular political party, and he was in a position of influence in my own denomination. No wonder pastors have lost all moral authority! When pastors portray a sense of uncertainty about every issue and refuse to take a stand on polarizing issues – because they don’t want to offend people who believe there are no absolutes – they surrender any moral authority. While we may struggle with the Bible’s application, shouldn’t pastors be the one group of people who are certain about something? Shouldn’t the Bible be the authority on issues of morality?
3. No clear understanding of holiness – Since pastors have such a low view of personal holiness and convey that to their congregations, the only logical outcome is for their people to have no clear understanding of the need for holiness or the possibility of holiness. They live day to day in their own sin, often without guilt, because the pastor said he did the same thing last Sunday. Sadly, many congregants have never heard the word “holiness” from their pastors apart from the call to “love your neighbor.”
4. If it doesn’t work for you… – In the end, in spite of rapid church growth now, churches pastored by “sinning pastors” will eventually decline. If Christianity isn’t “working” for pastors, then why would people in the congregation think it would work for them? If the pastor can’t keep himself from swearing at his family or flipping off the guy who cuts him off in traffic, if he can’t overcome his anger or his lust, then how can this Gospel ever help them? People are looking for answers. They yearn to be free from the sin that is destroying their lives and the lives of their families. And they turn to the church. But the church – the pastors – need to offer the hope of the Gospel. The hope of holiness. It doesnt’ mean they need to claim perfection, but they should at least claim to be climbing higher every day and living in victory more often than not.

So, what do we do?

It’s not enough to just complain. Pastors suffering from the “Sinning Pastor Phenomenon” are a product of the times. If they are teachable, then come alongside them and teach them a more excellent way.

Be holy yourself and allow your pastor to see it in you.

Pray for your pastor regularly.

Invite your pastor for coffee. Then, open your Bible and ask questions about the meaning of passages like Romans 6-8 (as a whole, not just 7:14-25).

Engage in holiness-centered conversations to help your pastor discover a better worldview.

If necessary, gently and privately call him out if repentance isn’t communicated.

Be patient. Your pastor’s way of communicating underlying beliefs wasn’t formed in a week or a year. It will take time to see a change.

Be available to be used by God. Praise him when he communicates holiness effectively. Ignore it when he doesn’t. Be a cheerleader and an encourager. Your pastor needs your help, not your condemnation. It’s not enough, though, to chalk it up to “the way young people think nowadays.” You need to be involved and to make a difference in his life. But you need to let God do the work and be willing to help when He asks you to.

[Please note that I often use “he” to refer to pastors, but only because it makes writing easier. I absolutely recognize female ministers, being one myself, and I realize this phenomenon also applies to women pastors.]

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