Home Pastors Pastor How To's Beneath the SGM Scandal: Pain and Opportunity

Beneath the SGM Scandal: Pain and Opportunity

I think the SGM scandal is one more occasion for all of us Christians to look at ourselves, ask what are we doing and why the kind of leadership we are perpetrating has created so much abuse and moral failure? What structures and culture are we perpetrating? How long are we going to look the other way every time another megachurch pastor has another moral failure? There’s something bigger going on here than just another isolated pastor who fell. We must ask whether our leaders have been set up on a false pedestal (this post makes me seriously wonder about this). We must ask whether we have set up structures and a culture where the leader loses his/her ability to confess sins and listen to one another (again, this post makes me wonder about this). This does NOT mean everybody gets to take his/her best shot — releasing his/her pet peave — against the pastor. No, there should be structures for discerning lies from truth (this takes a living community and time). But we must be alarmed when leaders are impervious to submission to their fellow believers in community and the hearing of their sins. Because when we lose this, we have all lost what it means to be the church, a place that recognizes our sinfulness and the need to be ever open to challenge, recognition of sin and God’s work to transform.

I encourage us all, not just my Neo-Reformed brothers and sisters, to NOT gloss over the events of this most recent SGM scandal. But let’s also get beyond pointing the finger at another church scandal. Don’t be gleeful, you all who have an axe to grind. Instead, let’s use this moment to examine ourselves and our churches concerning our own lives, the structure and culture of leadership in our own churches.

Peace, reconciliation and joy of Christ.