July 23, 2024
#75 What is Happening in Churches, P.1 Moral Integrity Among Religious Leaders
What causes trusted pastors to fall into moral failure, and how can we prevent it? In this eye-opening episode of the Words for Change podcas, we scrutinize the immense pressures facing pastors today, particularly those in the evangelical and Southern Baptist traditions, and how these factors contribute to their moral lapses.
We don't stop at identifying the problems; we offer actionable insights to support pastors in maintaining their moral compass.
Listen in as we also discuss the crucial role of church boards in ensuring ethical behavior and integrity among religious leaders including inspiring message from Bishop TD Jakes #BishopJakes
00:00 - Moral Failure Among Religious Leaders
17:47 - Psychological Triggers of Moral Failure
30:53 - Precautionary Measures for Religious Leaders
WEBVTT
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As of 2024, as you're listening to this podcast, less than a third of Americans view pastors as highly honest and ethical people, down from 40% to 32% over the past four years.
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And might I add that, based on recent information that you and I have been introduced to what we've seen in the media, these numbers are going to change drastically.
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Well, hello everybody, welcome to the Words for Change podcast.
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This is your host, lionel, and I want to say happy Tuesday, happy podcast Tuesday.
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As a matter of fact, this Tuesday I'm actually not recording this live, I'm recording this previously.
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By the time you listen to this podcast, I will be in Europe doing some business as well as hoping to vacation with the family, and so today we're talking about and addressing the critical topic of moral failure among pastors.
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This is something that we cannot deny, nor can we neglect, because, as you have witnessed all throughout the media, that this situation is becoming unglued primarily amongst the evangelical church, I would say even within the Southern Baptist tradition.
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You've seen and I've witnessed many, many pastors who have great ministries, have had great impact on our world and on Christianity in the United States, are coming under an immense amount of scrutiny, and some of them rightly so Now I must say that some of the pastors that are mentioned, I know them personally, have worked with him.
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I'm not for sure equally or intimately excuse me acquainted with him, but I know a lot of them, and so this comes as much a shock to me as it does for you.
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Now I will say that I come to this topic not in a judgmental attitude.
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My attitude is not judgmental at all.
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My attitude is one of trying to find understanding.
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That's my goal.
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My goal is to help all of us to understand why moral failures occur in religious leaders, particularly in pastors, and how we can prevent them.
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As a person who served people have served in the church or in pastoral ministry this comes close to my heart and is very, very important to me.
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And my goal is I prayed through this and I asked the Lord to give me wisdom about how I talk about this, because my goal is not to be judgmental.
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God brought to me Psalms 23,.
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The Lord is my shepherd.
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I shall not want, and that you and you know, and I know that Jesus is the perfect shepherd.
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But but you and I also know that there are many pastors and leaders who can influence how we understand or see or view said pastors and shepherds.
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So we're going to explore the causes and preventative measures from a biblical perspective and touch on the psychological part somewhat.
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But our goal is to gain insight to the basic concepts and delve at it this way.
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Now we in the church need to understand what do we mean when we say moral failures.
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You and I have probably, over the many, many years.
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If you've grown up in church, you understand this lingo.
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If you have not grown up in church or didn't, your family didn't take you to church on a regular basis.
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It was not part of how you were raised or how you made moral decisions or how you develop your morality then this is going to be the concept or phrase of moral failure.
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May not have much make much sense to you, but just for a good, solid definition so that we're all on the same page, moral failure is a significant breach of ethical and moral standard.
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Significant breach of ethical and moral standard.
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That standard can be held by, that is expected to be held by, a religious leader.
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It is an example of this individual who stands and represents God amid a community, is expected to act and behave in certain ways to not have certain sorts of misconduct, and those misconduct can include adultery, sexual impropriety, financial misconduct, abuse of power and many other circumstances or many other topics, just to name a few.
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But from a biblical perspective, just to name a few.
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But from a biblical perspective, we've seen moral failure recorded in the Bible and the biblical perspective describes moral failure as a departure from the word or the ethical commandments of God.
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In the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament it's really moral failure, or sin is another way we classify this in the church is understood as something that causes us to make a direct disobedience toward biblical context of toward a commandment given by God.
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And in the Hebrew Bible there was a commandment that violated the 630, some odd laws that Moses gave to the children of Israel upon his descent from Mount Sinai when he received the law that was summarized into what we all know as the Ten Commandments.
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So biblically, moral failure is seen as a disobedience toward a commandment of God, is seen as a disobedience toward the commandment of God.
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Now, given texture to what that means in the lives of people.
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We see more failure in King David and his sin with Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11.
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You also see Peter's denial of Christ in Matthew 26.
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You see Paul talks about this as he dealt with the church of Corinthians at Corinth.
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You see, paul talks about this as he dealt with the church of Corinthians at Corinth.
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Saul and the book of Samuel, who disobeyed the commandment of God, the commandment of God that was given by the prophet Samuel to slaughter the Amalekites right, and we're not going to get into the ethical issue of that right now.
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But upon him returning back from battle, samuel the prophet said to him what is this bleeding of the sheep out here?
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Did not God tell you to slaughter everything, to get rid of everything, to get rid of everyone?
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And so you have here again disobeyed a direct commandment of God.
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These are the biblical examples, just a few.
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There's many others, I'm sure.
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If you read the Bible then you know of many other stories.
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If you haven't, then these two stories I gave you in 2 Samuel, 11 and 1 Samuel, as well as in Matthew 26, verse 69 to 75, you can go back and look at those stories and they can give you more context From a biblical perspective.
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What about moral integrity?
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So the Bible sets a high standard for leaders.
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Okay, first, timothy three, one through seven talks about what are some of the qualifications of a person seeking the office of a bishop or overseer or elder.
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These are particular words that was mentioned.
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This text, this pericope in 1 Timothy 3, is also in Titus 1, chapter 1, 5 through 9.
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It outlines the qualifications that emphasizes self-control, respectability, the ability to teach, and so if you look at those texts, these texts describes what, what is expected of those who will lead in a religious context, particularly from a christian, biblical religious context.
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Okay, so if you are from another religious tradition, we're not referring to those religious communities we're primarily talking about, in a Christian, in a Western Christian perspective, what is expected of leaders.
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And I'll just go as far as to say anyone who's standing as a moral figure of some sort has qualifications that he or she are expected to maintain.
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I think what we get it wrong, often the church get it wrong is that we don't account for the humanity in these people.
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When 1 Timothy and Titus talks about the qualifications of an elder or overseer or a leader, he's talking about setting a standard.
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That doesn't mean a person is perfect, but it means that they should strive toward these standards.
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And that's something critical for us to consider as we look at the public shaming, if you will, of these pastors by the public media and as if you were a person in church or a person who is connected to a church.
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Obviously, there are some egregious failures that some of these leaders have participated in, and by no means am I condoning them, but my heart and my spirit is of that of how.
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Why are we having these problems?
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Why are people, why is it consistently a problem?
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Are we in a position where we can't see the forest because of the trees?
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In other words, we keep looking at the byproduct through these said behaviors versus looking at what's actually causing these behaviors and how can we get at it.
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So that's my heart and that's my motive.
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Proverbs 4.23 says guard your heart, because out of it flows the issues of life.
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So if we look at King David again, right, despite his faith, he was a man of faith.
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Faith, right.
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So we're still talking about biblical perspectives, moral integrity.
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He committed adultery and he committed murder, and the consequences were severe family strife, national turmoil.
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David was the king of Israel, so because he had sinned against God, it caused that his sin had consequences that affected his family and his leadership position as well.
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Samson is another example of a person who had allowed his personal sins to make him unable to make wise decisions.
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His personal sins kept him from having the strength of moral will to resist temptations leading to an eventual capture and death.
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So these stories remind us that God chooses leaders, and this is an important point here that will fail.
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As long as you have people in a human institution, you're going to have failures, you're going to have mistakes, you're going to have people who do things that they shouldn't do.
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Now the question you're asking yourself well, listen, there are deeper issues here.
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It's not just about the fact that you guys remember, years ago, mark Driscoll out of I can't remember the name of the church right now, but he was out of Seattle.
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I lived in Seattle for about five years, marcio Church.
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His issues first began with plagiarism, and you can go on and on and look at as of late, I think it's Ravi Zacharias.
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Sorry, I'm not going to edit this, by the way.
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I'm just going to let it go because I have to record this podcast and then prepare to start packing so I can get ready to go out of town.
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So it's not going to be perfect, but I pray that you forgive me and charge it to my head, not my heart, okay.
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So Robbie Zacharias, who was who was caught up in some kind of uh egregious, uh sex trafficking, uh situation, and it's something that I brought that came to my mind as well that a lot of these there.
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There are two contexts that we have to think about.
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All of this stuff is happening.
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All of these stories are coming to the light during a presidential election year.
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That's the first thing that I talked to my friends about.
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I said why do you think this?
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I said well, I think it has something to do with.
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It's a political election year and people are doing a lot of research on pastors and notice where these things are happening.
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They're happening primarily in the South.
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These stories are coming out.
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I'm talking about I'm not saying that they're not pastors.
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It's stories that are happening in different parts of the United States, like on the East Coast or up North, but I'm saying these stories are being highlighted in the news, are coming primarily from churches in the South, pastors who typically vote or hold the Republican evangelical line right and those who have spoken out publicly about certain kinds of sins.
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You and I must look at what context is happening here as we think about what's really happening, what's really going on Now.
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None of that excuses the problem.
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I want to make that clear.
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None of that excuses the problem.
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I want to make that clear.
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None of that excuses the problem.
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Okay, and, by the way, I just want to say before we go on, if, if, if you have a question or you got a concern, if you're looking at show notes and you want to send me a question or you, I would love to hear back from you.
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I really, really would.
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What do you thought about this episode and was it helpful to you at all?
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So there's a in the show notes, if you, there should be a link where you can send me a text message.
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I'll actually get a message or email and then, when I come back on the line, I answer that email.
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I won't mention names and you can say if you would like for me to mention your name or not, and I'll bring that up during our next episode.
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So what about the psychological factors?
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And here's something that we really don't talk about.
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We in church leadership I can remember after serving in large past churches I'm talking about.
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I served with Dr Tony Evans and I have a lot of respect for him.
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I don't know exactly what he's going through, but, man, I'm telling you, always seen as a person of character, always seen as a person who, you know, kept his nose straight, he had people that kept him accountable, his elder board, so forth and so on.
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So very, very surprised about all of it.
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But in all of my years of over 20 years of being in pastoral leadership and what I mean by pastoral leadership that means serving in local congregations, being around pastors, being at conferences, traveling the United States, speaking, teaching Bible, college teaching the Bible, doing Wednesday night prayer services, doing three or four or five services on Sunday morning for years at a time, not include everything that went on during the weekday.
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I was really up close and personal to all of this and through all of my experiences I cannot remember one time, except maybe in seminary, going through my first master's degree, that we ever talked about understanding the psychological behavior behind pastorship, behind leadership.
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So the psychological considerations gives us insight into why these more affairs occur.
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Some people call, some psychologists call it cognate dissonance theory suggests that we act against our own beliefs and the experience causes mental discomfort and which which we often try to resolve through, often through justification.
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So there's a sense of cognitive dissonance, right?
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So you may say well, how can a person who has that much influence proceed on to act in such a way?
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How can a famous teacher and preacher and evangelist go on to be involved with sex trafficking?
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Some call it psychology.
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Psychologists and psychiatrists call it a mental discomfort.
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Right, it is this that leads them to justifying their behavior.
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Okay, some other psychological triggers stress and burnout are significant triggers.
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I remember years ago asking one of my mentors, how do you deal with stress?
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And he said something to me that really stuck with me.
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His words to me were sometimes people deal with stress in different ways and there are times when people allow their worst demons to rise because they haven't figured out other productive ways to relieve their stress.
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Pastors often face immense pressures to meet spiritual and emotional needs from congregants.
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This is some of the triggers.
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That comes from burnout, leading to exhaustion, isolation and other factors.
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The lack of a support network.
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Pastors can become vulnerable.
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Personality disorder, such as narcissism, can also come into this question of moral failure, and this is important because these psychological triggers what we call them, are important to talk about, because there are pastors in positions right now who could possibly have a diagnosable or have never been diagnosed, with multiple personality disorder, narcissistic tendencies, split personalities, but they've never been tested because they hid it all under the blood of Jesus.
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And this is problematic.
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And if what we are experiencing through this rise and surge of the public shaming of pastors and leaders and then again, I just want to be clear I'm not talking about those who are obviously making egregious mistakes, I'm not condoning any of those.
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What I'm simply getting at is what's the reason?
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Why is this happening?
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Right, the goal is to figure out why, in order to be a more healthy pastorate, okay, there are pastors in positions of authority that have never been clinically diagnosed with actually mental health issues and mental health concerns, and it is stress, comes into their life, it increases and causes more problems.
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So so, when we talk about psychological triggers right, these are very clinical terms that I'm using it's an immense pressure that comes from spiritual and emotional needs, what people need versus what they need, what pastors need, the immense amount of exhaustion.
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I remember doing research years ago while in seminary and we talked about that pastors, the pastoral industry are some of the most underpaid and most exhausted, stressed out leaders in the American workforce.
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And so if you couple these triggers with any other factors, like family problems with any other factors like family problems, personal growing up with childhood abuse or any of these things.
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What happens is when these triggers come up and stress increases them, guess what happens?
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They don't know how to deal with it and so they begin dealing with it in very, very immoral ways.
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Okay, so external factors as well?
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Right.
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Some of the other triggers are high expectations, being morally impeccable, feeling a sense of overwhelm, being overwhelmed because of the budget.
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If you've ever gone through a church budget or having to raise money, it is a stressful process, which is the reason why you may see this being evident if you see pastors who are extremely overweight Because one, they're sitting down most times because they're studying the scriptures.
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So they could be sitting down for 20, 30, 40, 50 hours a week and not really moving their body as much because of the expectation that they must deliver, and some pastors are.
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Think about it if you are a pastor who has, the average church attendance is around 60 people in America.
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So if you look at some of these large churches, they have thousands of congregants and millions of dollars that are coming through.
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Not just they're not coming through their hands personally, but typically they have a CFO or someone else who has a financial background who handles these things.
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So they're not.
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They're not dealing with the money personally.
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And so if you are a church, a small church pastor, meaning a church that's 40 or below, or maybe a hundred.
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When it starts to get around over a hundred, most statistics say this is when one pastor can only handle about a hundred people before he has to start getting other people to help him out, him or her out.
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So if you consider these things, if you consider these realities, if you add to all of that thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, millions of programs, millions of volunteers, family pressure, you can only imagine the amount of tenacity, stick-to-it-ness that these preachers need to have.
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And so, again, we're talking about the triggers and the social pressures that can impact a pastor's decision-making process.
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So these pressures can make him or her overwhelmed and seek to escape through inappropriate ways.
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And this is when scrutiny amplifies.
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And many people don't know that when pastors come down from sermons on Sunday morning, some pastors are only doing one service a month, sorry, a week.
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Some pastors are doing three, four and five services a day, a day.
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The moral impeccability, the pressure is absolutely overwhelming, and I could not make emphasize this enough Serving as a pastor myself of a church plant, I remember on several occasions having to worry about the rent for the facilities where we were having church, then worship practices that happened during the week, then Bible study, and then people calling me after hours because they were having family problems.
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People in the hospital.
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Having to be, at one point, a real estate broker right, having to know things about real estate, having to know about the local laws, working with kids who were in abused environments and abused homes, and having to know about the local laws working with kids who are were in abused environments and abused homes and having to kind of know what the laws were to try to assist families with these things.
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Then being an accountant right Now, I hired an accountant.
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I didn't deal with the money, so I hired somebody to help me out with that.
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I didn't deal with the money, so I hired somebody to help me out with that.
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But these are again right.
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I remember from my personal experience it was just a lot going on, not to mention I had a wife, I have a wife, I have kids, I have kids.
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So it's just absolutely overwhelming.
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Okay, some church cultures are very toxic.
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That's what I wanted to say Right Based on the wanted to say Right Based on the people.
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You have Right.
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Some people come to churches because they're out to shame pastors.
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I remember doing making a really bad decision as a pastor.
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I remember having a sermon series called God Question and I put word out in the community and I told everybody you bring anyone you want to bring on Sunday morning and we're going to answer all their questions about faith.
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Now, number one that was an arrogant thing for me to do, but you know, when you're young you make silly decisions like that.
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But then, two, I had no way of controlling what people were saying.
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So people came up and lying.
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I mean, we had a microphone in the middle of the sanctuary, on the floors, chairs on both sides.
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I'm standing up front like the arrogant know-it-all and people came down to the microphone and ask questions and I answer questions and some people they had every intent to prove why my religious perspective was wrong or why church was wrong or why Jesus was not the way.
00:25:20.928 --> 00:25:38.976
Okay, I obviously put myself in a situation, but there are many times when pastors who maybe have a after preaching a sermon, step down to greet people and thank them for coming, people begin critiquing them, I mean, right after the service and most pastors.
00:25:38.976 --> 00:25:59.559
If you're a good pastor as far as in teaching the scripture the way you're supposed to, you spend somewhere between 20 to 30 hours a week preparing those messages Okay, and so to have somebody rip them apart although it's it's, you know, there's nothing morally wrong with that questioning a religious leader.
00:25:59.559 --> 00:26:07.939
But what I'm getting at is that there are a lot of different strains and struggles that lead to or contribute to moral failure.
00:26:07.939 --> 00:26:09.221
Lead to or contribute to moral failure.
00:26:09.221 --> 00:26:22.373
And when pastors don't have a safe place to express their struggles or their sins, or their mistakes, or their frustrations and or fears, they what lead to destructive behavior?
00:26:22.373 --> 00:26:22.795
Okay.
00:26:23.746 --> 00:26:42.130
In 2021, a survey by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability found that 94% of ministry leaders and board chairs believe that leadership failures are negatively impacting donor trust, according to Gallup poll.
00:26:42.130 --> 00:26:50.811
Here's another one about public trust toward clergy in 2024, less than a third of Americans view pastors as highly honest and ethical.
00:26:50.811 --> 00:26:56.436
Okay, so, and I think a lot of this has to do with the frequencies of failure.
00:26:56.436 --> 00:27:03.609
While exact statistics are, some of these statistics are questionable in my opinion, but some of them have some merit.
00:27:03.609 --> 00:27:10.372
They may be a little off, but they are addressing some critical issues and asking great questions.
00:27:10.372 --> 00:27:17.545
One source claims that 40% of pastors polled admitted to having extramarital affairs since beginning their ministry.
00:27:17.545 --> 00:27:22.916
The same source reports that 70% of pastors consistently fight depression.
00:27:22.916 --> 00:27:27.035
50% feel so discouraged that they would leave the ministry.
00:27:27.035 --> 00:27:30.354
If they could that they would leave the ministry as they could.
00:27:30.354 --> 00:27:31.188
I'm a country boy.
00:27:31.249 --> 00:27:32.112
I'm from West Virginia.
00:27:32.112 --> 00:27:34.891
I don't know nothing about this big time stuff.
00:27:34.891 --> 00:27:37.792
I never even asked to be big.
00:27:37.792 --> 00:27:41.748
I wanted to be effective, not famous.
00:27:41.748 --> 00:27:46.111
Famous is the consequences of being effective.
00:27:46.111 --> 00:27:50.453
I didn't know nothing about being famous and I didn't like it.
00:27:50.453 --> 00:28:00.731
And the first time I was in the Washington Post the article was so vicious it made me nauseous.
00:28:00.731 --> 00:28:03.219
I was so shocked that you could say that stuff about somebody you didn't even know.
00:28:03.605 --> 00:28:09.430
Based on assumptions and a little bit of this and a little bit of that, they piece it all together and you don't get the same thing back.
00:28:09.430 --> 00:28:11.536
So I decided I don't want this.
00:28:11.536 --> 00:28:20.114
I was preaching for Pastor Bishop Donnie Mears, and nobody knew it, because preachers can override their feelings and function.
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I preached the places on fire, but inside I want to quit.
00:28:23.994 --> 00:28:26.589
I told God I'm through with this.
00:28:26.589 --> 00:28:27.653
I'm not going through this.
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I don't need this.
00:28:28.496 --> 00:28:30.451
I don't see, I don't need that.
00:28:30.451 --> 00:28:31.747
I'm not going through this.
00:28:31.747 --> 00:28:32.107
I don't need this.
00:28:32.107 --> 00:28:32.729
I don't see, I don't need that.
00:28:32.729 --> 00:28:34.413
I'm a guy who likes to go get his own chicken wings.
00:28:34.413 --> 00:28:38.128
I don't have to have all of that stuff to be happy.
00:28:38.128 --> 00:28:40.700
So I said I'm not doing this, no more, I'm not doing it.
00:28:40.700 --> 00:28:41.723
I'm not doing this.
00:28:41.723 --> 00:28:45.048
I'm not doing this because I don't need this and I didn't ask for this.
00:28:45.048 --> 00:28:50.996
I'm only doing this because of what happened in my life, of the circumstances that happened in my life.
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He put me on stage.
00:28:52.097 --> 00:28:56.568
I didn't ask for it and when I saw how much it costs I thought you can have that right back here.
00:28:56.568 --> 00:28:58.915
You can have that right back up in here.
00:28:58.915 --> 00:28:59.396
I don't need it.
00:29:00.125 --> 00:29:09.413
So I was mad inside and I was hurt and I stayed up in the fellowship with the pastors because I didn't want to go back to my room and sulk in my own sorrows.
00:29:09.413 --> 00:29:13.078
And they said there's a lady down in the chair waiting to see you.
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The service was over and the fellowship was over.
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The pastor was starting to leave.
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I was trying to outwait her.
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I thought she'd give up and leave and when I finally came down the steps, she was there and she was just a willowy bit of a woman and she said Bishop Jakes.
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She said I've been in the hospital.
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She said I was pregnant in my fallopian tubes and the baby died in my tubes and I was carrying around a dead baby and the toxicity from the baby almost killed me.
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And she said the only thing that kept me alive was hearing you preach.
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She said if you hadn't have been preaching to me every day, I swear I would have died.
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And then she looked at me and she said it's for us.
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