Restoring Fallen Leaders: Integrity, Platforms, and the Hidden Cost of Moral Failure

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm joined today by Nate again, and we are going to be talking a little bit about restoring leaders who have fallen in ministry. We're just coming off this interesting story that came out from G3 of Josh Bice and some of the things that he did. We've seen these sort of stories, unfortunately, be unveiled, I suppose we could say, from other church leaders as well, whether they're financial problems, whether there's an abuse of power of some sort, or whether there is a sexual misconduct. And now we're sort of adding to that in the technological age. So we'll talk a little bit about those aspects and what sort of sins seem to be besetting pastors, at least publicly. And then we'll talk a little bit about choosing elders, how we go about figuring out who we should be listening to and who should be teaching, how we think about accountability, and then ultimately, how do we think about restoring a leader? What does that restoration process look like? Is it the same in every case? We're going to dig into those questions. So that's what we're going to be doing today on Thinking Christian. And Nate, welcome to the show, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to dive in this with you. It's always good conversation. Yeah, I think this is a really crucial issue. I would sit back and say, I guess, that one of the things that I find so troubling about all of these stories that we hear about pastors who have these ultimate moral failings that, at the very least, disqualify them from leadership for a time, is that it just keeps happening. Now, part of me says, well, we're all sinful. And so what's the percentage of pastors that you really should be shooting for? You know, it won't be 100%. There's always going to be these outliers who are doing bad acts that are going to disqualify them from ministry. But it does seem like these are piling up a bit. And it doesn't seem like we understand exactly why they're piling up, nor does it necessarily seem like we have a good understanding of the criteria that we need to be evaluating as we're hiring a pastor, as we're listening to a teacher, as we're installing an elder, whatever that looks like, choosing a leader for a ministry. It doesn't seem like we have the right criteria to figure out, okay, is this person really going to be solid in ministry? And how do we help them sustain their integrity across their time in ministry? I think these are really crucial questions. Yeah, totally. I think it's so crucial to have the right people surrounding you. You know, just like a CEO needs to hire to his weakness, he needs to have people around him to help him see blind spots. I think if there's no transparency there, that's a dangerous place to be as a leader. If you're not fully showcasing your true self in front of your core people behind the scenes and people are able to actually call you out on stuff or to ask you things. Like if you're surrounded by yes men, I feel like that's a slippery slope that pastors can start feeling like they're untouchable and they can do what they want without repercussions. And then they can start hiding things or not bringing everything to light like they should. Those meetings are important behind the scenes because at the end of the day, everyone's human. And it's not one big decision, it's little things over a period of time and then all of a sudden you're like way off center. You know, like we talked about on a couple episodes ago. So I think it's very important to surround yourself with people that are going to help you see your blind spots, see your weaknesses and stop you before you go down the road. Yeah, and I think it's really a difficult challenge for people in ministry, whether that's pastors or whether that's leaders of, you know, sort of parachurch ministries to cultivate those sort of relationships. In part because transparency is what is ultimately going to get you in trouble, right? There are certain things that these leaders are not supposed to be struggling with, right? I mean, when we look at the qualifications of overseers, for instance, right? There are a lot of things in there that you would say, okay, you're supposed to be a one woman man, right? Is sort of the way the Bible phrases it, right? Well, does that mean that if you have a pornography problem, you never should have been in a place anyway? But now that we have anonymous pornography on the internet, right? Via technology that can be accessed with relative anonymity. How would you ever know? And if someone has sort of pinned their hopes on, I want to be in ministry. I want to be doing this job. I feel God has called me to this job. Now, what happens when you're asked to disclose your activities with regard to sex and pornography and those kind of things? You can't really just admit that. Like there's a tension there, right? Totally. Right. And so I think in part, there's a difficulty here where we've just got to struggle with this a little bit and say, yes, ideally, transparency is what is needed. But the reality is that transparency is also what is going to disqualify many people. Or they may feel like that's going to disqualify them. Yep. Because we all fall short at some point in our life. I don't care who you are. Everybody, you know, slips or messes up or don't, don't hold the line. That's why it's important to have accountability. That's why, you know, you've got to have fellowship with other believers to help build you up and pull you up whenever you struggle. And I think it's interesting when we look at, you know, some of these qualifications for overseers. And I'll kind of lump, I know they're not the same. And yes, biblical scholars, I understand they're not the same. I get it. But when we look at the office of the overseer, let's say in first Timothy three, I mean, some of these characteristics, I don't think that what first Timothy three is calling for is perfection. I also don't think that first Timothy three is saying, oh, the occasional slip is okay. Right. Especially not on some of these. So if you look at them, I think what we, how we should be reading some of these characteristics and I'll, I'll read through the list, but my, my tendency is to think that this is the consistent character that a person who can be installed as an overseer is to exhibit. This is who they are. And we'll see this coming out in some of them. So for instance, the overseer must be above reproach. Well, being above reproach, that, that means that, you know, nobody, not just that nobody can pin anything on you. Right. But that there really isn't anything to pin. You have the husband of one wife, right? Kind of already talked about that. It's difficult to be the husband of one wife. If you know, every couple of years I'm cheating on my wife or something like that. Right. It's like, well, is that, you know, is that so occasional that it's not a big deal? You know, how does all that work? Right. And there's a lot that we could get into there, but I don't want to belabor the point. But the next characteristic, sober minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent, but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money, managing his own household well with all dignity, keeping his children submissive for someone who does not know how to manage his own household. How will he care for God's church? You know, he must not be a recent convert or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. Moreover, he will be, he must be well thought of by outsiders so that he may not fall into disgrace into the snare of the devil. Now that's just one of the times that this, this sort of list is put out there. But when you read it, what are we seeing? I think part of what we're seeing is we're seeing overseers need to have a maturity in all aspects of life. They need to be well seasoned in the faith, right? They shouldn't be a new convert. I think the way we almost need to begin translating that into the new world here is these are people who have been well discipled. Right? I mean, you can be an old Christian having been a Christian for a very long time, 10, 15, 20 years, but not really exhibit the sort of maturity that you need to. Right. We see this in the book of Hebrews, right? You should be teaching the weightier things and yet I need to give you spiritual milk, right? There hasn't been a maturity developed there. And so I, I think that's sort of what we're looking at.

Looking at here, and then that begs the question then, if that's the sort of maturity we should be looking for here, does that mean if somebody flies off the handle once, they should be disqualified as an overseer? How do these things work? Right. Yeah, totally. So, I don't know, those are just some of the questions I think we need to dig into. This situation, let's talk a little bit about Josh Bice, because I do think it's an interesting sort of situation. Like I said, we've usually seen people when they fall, they fall for sexual misconduct or they fall for financial malfeasance of some sort, or there's an abusive power, a domineering leadership style, a way of setting up your elder board so that these elders really aren't guiding anything. They're just there to rubber stamp whatever it is that you want to do. These kind of dynamics have been around for a while, and we've seen them from kind of everybody, from, you know, the big ones that I suppose you'd see is like James MacDonald, Driscoll, Bill Hybels. You know, we've seen those and those have been pretty public, and we can understand what's happening there, even this more recent guy who had an affair with a young girl. Like all of these are clear and present problems. They're very tangible. We can understand what's going on there, and this could have happened in any age of the church, right? What's interesting about Bice is that it's very technologically mediated. The statement that was put out is that he had multiple anonymous accounts that were not associated with him and that he was slandering people through these accounts. Other Christian leaders, yeah. Other Christian leaders through these accounts, some of whom evidently appeared at his G3 conference or the G3 conference. It wasn't his, but at the G3 conference. And so what we have now is this extra layer of anonymity that can be created, and now the leaders have the opportunity to sort of do more than just critically interact with someone else's perspective, which I think is really important. In scholarship, you always want to critically interact with somebody's thought process. But now what you have the opportunity to do is to, for lack of a better term, muster a troll army against someone else, right? You can use that sort of weird social media machine, which I would admit that I don't fully understand, right? To get people to jump on a bandwagon against someone else. And maybe that against someone else allows your status to elevate in some way. But you can see how it's different than anything else we've ever really faced. Right. And I think what it points to is this. The technological age isn't just reinforcing or allowing us to increase or participate in the old sins in a new way. It's also sort of creating new dynamics that we need to be aware of and start sort of thinking through how do we, not how do we eliminate them, because I don't think that's possible, but how do we think about these things? Yeah. There's got to be a root somewhere of why he would choose to do that. Maybe it's to make himself feel better or to justify some of the things he's doing. But the verse you last referenced in 2 Timothy talks about the snare, you know, to avoid that snare of the enemy. I think it's so important, especially in ministry, like we've seen the last several months. Like as hard as God is working to make his message known and his love known across the earth and using people, the enemy is working just as hard, if not harder sometimes, to try to ensnare and trip people up. And if you step in a snare sometimes, but you're so convinced of what you're doing is OK and justify what you're doing is OK, you might not even realize how you're being used by the enemy. That's how he works. He's so deceptive and so cunning. Everything we see in Scripture that talks about the enemy, it's not like he's coming at you, you know, like just half speed or like whatever. Like he has power and dominion still here on the earth for a time. And he can be used just as much as God is doing things. He's always in the background doing things too. And so I think it's important to have those safeguards and have the right people, like you talked about, the qualifications of these elders to kind of see your blind spots and help you. But you have to have full transparency to do that. And somewhere he got off track where he felt like he needed to put others down to maybe justify what he was doing or to make him feel better about it. But that is crazy to like slander the people that are sharing the stage with you. Like that's a whole new, a whole nother level of, you know, being divisive and being deceptive and being used by the enemy. So. Yeah. And I think, so here's something I thought about as I've kind of tried to think through the commonality across all of these things. You know, I've read a number of times, pastors often feel lonely. And I don't want to put this just on pastors, because I think it's ministry leaders in general, people in leadership. Leadership can be a very lonely position. Oftentimes you are having to hold back information from those you're leading because you're trying not to create chaos within an organization. You're trying not to share information before it's really time to share that information, maybe because things are just still forming up. And so proactive communication at that point is just premature and it would get people worried and they don't maybe understand the scope and complexity of an issue the way that you do because you've been privy to different, you know, data points. You've been privy to different conversations. And so there is an aspect of leadership where you're holding an awful lot to yourself. And that can be a very lonely situation. I think also there's a sense in which leaders aren't supposed to be friends. There should be a healthy distance between, or at least this is the theory, that leaders and leaders shouldn't be as intimately involved with their employees because they're trying to keep some sort of a professional distance between that. And so, you know, the leader needs to run the business and, you know, the employees need to do their job and and these social relationships can potentially get in the way of that. And that, I think, is the going sort of rate. And I think there's some wisdom to that. I don't want to discount it completely, but then, you know, you do start looking at the way Jesus trained his disciples. And you ask yourself, you know, even the way that we see Paul and Peter doing this with the communities that they're involved with. I mean, it's hard for me to read Philippians and not think that Paul had a deep personal relationship with that church. It's something that went well beyond, hey, I'm the apostle who's in charge of you. You guys aren't doing it right. So let me come in and control this thing back into alignment. Like there's a depth there when he talks about it. These are his co-workers. These are his fellow workers. These are people who have suffered along with him. These are people who have ministered to him as much as he's ministered to them. There's a reciprocity. And so I think in part, what I guess I'm saying when I'm looking at our models of leadership within ministry is, number one, I think we're ignoring some of the unhelpful dynamics of leadership that we may have picked up from more secular concepts of leadership. Gotcha. Yeah, that's good. I mean, it's interesting. It's a lot to think about. And I think each case is different. Like you said, there's so many complexities to them. Yeah. I think we often talk about accountability and it's appropriate that we do. But I would also say, as we look at accountability, we often just think of accountability as stopping a wrong thing. And so it's been interesting to watch. My wife works in healthcare. I ran an aviation school when I was at MBI. I oversaw the aviation program. And in both of those scenarios, there's all this talk about high reliability organizations. And high reliability organizations, part of what they do is, yes, they keep you from doing wrong things. That's part of what they need to do. You can think of flight, right? You know, there's standards and checklists and, you know, harder regulations. You know, hey, I don't want my airline pilot just to have a little nip before he gets on to fly. Right. He might not be technically drunk, but why don't we just not take that risk? Right. Why don't we just not trust him to discern, right, that he's good. He can fly this plane. Right. Like, let's just say, no, there's none of that. And let's put that wall up. But then they also try to make it easy for people to make the right decisions. And so I think what we've done in the church, when we should be thinking in terms of a high reliability organization that makes it easy to make the right decision, as well as...

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Or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. And so when I think, you know, I think again about leadership, you know, part of what we need to be thinking about is just leadership capacity, right? I mean, you know, I've been dealing with plumbing problems for the last, like, month. If not more. I'm on like a first-name basis with my plumber. He's a great guy. You know, if I were getting married, he'd be my best man. But, like, the reality is that sucks capacity away from everything else I'm doing. I have to manage the appointments. I have to be here when he's here. There's the added, you know, concern of, like, is this going to seep into the walls? Do I need to replace drywall? Do I need to get a contractor in? You know, how do I need to handle this with insurance? These are things that on a normal day-to-day basis I don't deal with. Right. These are special pressures now that are pushing in, and they're taking away from my normal capacities. And I think we, like, when you think about that in terms of capacity for a leader, what we have to recognize is everybody's going to have a particular capacity, right? And so as we're looking at this, we need to be asking as ministries, as Christians, does our leader actually have this capacity? Or are we pushing him or her beyond their capacity and still expecting their integrity to hold? I think that's a really crucial way for us to look at this. Yeah, totally. Because at the end of the day, everybody's still human, like, you know, and people have their limits, as we all see. And if, I think that's right on the money, James, we have to make sure. And then also we got to make sure they're taking breaks, that, you know, they have healthy relationships at home with their kids, with everyone else. And I, I was thinking, we were talking beforehand, like, if he's willing to do that, somebody like that, that's willing to create an alias just to slander someone else to either make yourself feel better or just to, you know, deal with bitterness you're harboring towards somebody or something, that's not a good place to be because if you're doing that behind the scenes, you're probably doing that with the relationships on your staff or people that you work with on a daily basis too. And so there should be telltale signs, like there should be somebody there that starts to see the writing on the wall that can kind of be like, Hey, let's, let's talk about this. Let's kind of figure out what's going on so we can set up some safeguards so this doesn't turn into a problem. Yeah. I always go back to, and this, hopefully this will sort of frame it for people. And I don't want to try to make an excuse for bad behavior. That's not at all my attempt here. I think bad behavior, as we read in first Timothy five, you know, when you have an elder who sins, they are to be rebuked publicly. And that public rebuke, this is first Timothy 5, 20 and 21. It says as, as for those who participate or as elders, as for elders who persist in sin, rebuke them in the presence of all. Why? So that the rest may stand in fear. And so there is supposed to be a dynamic where this passage, when they're persisting in sin, they're to be rebuked. There's a sense in which the elders accountability has to be more public. That these can't continue to remain behind closed doors. Because what it then encourages is, and if I'm just sort of extrapolating from this passage, what it encourages is, okay, there's a point to which if I'm smart, I can get away with this. And I can then construct in my own mind a trade-off. And I can say, these little compromises that I'm making along the way, they don't, they pale in comparison to the height of ministry that we can do. Right. And so because we're not concerned first with our integrity is our ministry. Without integrity, the ministry just simply isn't really what we think it is. It's a facade. And so I need to be laser focused on doing things with integrity and allowing God to use that in whatever way he wants to use it. I think often what we do is we switch to the other side and we say, our integrity can be relatively flexible so long as the ministry is growing and God is blessing it. That is a subtle shift, but it's really important. And I think what 1 Timothy 5 is trying to do is say, look, you've got to stay on this side of the fence. The integrity actually matters, right? You're not building this. God is building it through you. And so we need to stay in the pocket on the underlying dynamics of reality, which is you obey, God works through. Not you get really, really smart. You kind of ignore ethics and integrity occasionally, and you're able to grow this ministry to where you think it should be or where you want it to be. Those are two slightly different mindsets. But I will say in saying all that, what I would say is I think a lot of times we're pressuring leaders to do bend on integrity a little bit, grow the ministry, get big. There's financial pressures. There are, you know, there's, I don't know whether I call it an addiction, but there's a, there's something, there is something addictive or seductive is the word I'm looking for about having a big platform and having big influence apart from the money. Right. And so I think to the extent that ministries are pressuring their, their leaders to do this as opposed to just saying, well, you have to do this with integrity period. And if the results come, that's amazing. If not, you know, yeah, the ministry may not last, but we've done it with integrity. We can be sure that either God was or was not in it. Yeah. I don't get the impression that that's actually the way we work out our ministries oftentimes. Sure. Yeah. I think it's really easy. Like I said earlier, the slippery slope, like at some point when you start to rise and you get a bigger platform and things are successful and you get like some of these pastors, they start getting shows or like they get picked up by networks or whatever. And then there's more pressure to like, you know, look at the numbers and like try to grow. And it, it, in the beginning might be like, he must increase, I must decrease. But somewhere along the road, it becomes more about the person than it does about Christ. And, and there's a shift, like you said there, it's really dangerous, but I mean, it's a subtle, it's not like, you know, nobody sets out to be like, okay, I'm going to get to a certain point and then I'm just going to do my own thing. And then I'll just kind of tow God along with me. That's absolutely backwards from what the scripture says. He must increase, which means it should be more about him than one person or one leader or one group of leaders, the board, anything. Like at the end of the day, Christ should be the central focus. And I think when that gets off, even slightly, just like a ship, if you set your navigation, if you're off slightly, it doesn't seem like you're off course much, but like in 12 hours, you're way off course. Right. I do think that's a good analogy, Nate. I mean, I think that at the end of the day, what we're looking at there is we're saying either I'm the focus or we're putting so much weight on leaders to build this. Right. And the ministry becomes sort of the thing that takes up all our attention, whether it's the singular leader or the group of people around that leader who are sort of pushing this thing. And this becomes the fetish. It becomes, you know, theologically, I suppose we call it an idol of some sorts. Right. And we start orienting ourselves toward the idol and we start figuring out strategies to serve that idol. When really what we ought to be doing is when people are sort of saying, hey, why isn't your viewership up? Hey, why aren't you bringing in more donations? Hey, why aren't you? It's like, well, I'm working with integrity. So if there are some tactics that we can

ploy that we're not employing now, but we still have to have integrity. That can't be compromised. It has to be there. This has to be the sine qua non. And if the ministry doesn't last, the ministry doesn't last. I don't think we're very comfortable saying that most of the time, but as we think about it, so again, it's not about absolving people of personal responsibility. I think what like Josh Byce and some of these other guys, all of us, we make bad choices. And we're responsible for the bad choices we make. That's all there is to it. He could have made many other different choices. He could have not done what he did and maybe the ministry wouldn't be thriving the way it is, but maybe it would be even bigger. And I think that's the challenge that we have here is that when we're picking our strategy, if we aren't saying obedience is always the best strategy, we're ultimately going to end up with a subpar strategy. Totally. And I think that's why so many churches have, it comes out and then you find out that the church is new about it, the leadership knew about it, the board knew about it, and they were covering it up or trying to sweep it under the rug or hide it. How many times have we seen that in the last several years of these kind of things when they break? It's at the end of the day, let's just do damage control and try to salvage this where, you know, it's better like the scripture says, just to openly rebuke and then deal with it. I think there is a process, like you said at the beginning of this, there is restoration that we can get to. You just have to go through those steps because I'm sure when he's talking about that in 2 Timothy, it's rebuke that public elder so that it puts fear in the hearts of everyone else. It doesn't go on to say that like that's it, they're done, their ticket's punched, they're never going to be able to come back. There is restoration, but you have to go through those steps. And most importantly, you have to realign your focus and make sure that it's under the obedience of Christ, like you were just talking about. Well, and let's pivot to that because I think it's important to, I personally think it's important to make a distinction between being restored as a believer, so being restored to fellowship with the community of faith, with Christ, with a given church or ministry, you know, that sort of reconciliation. I think all of that needs to take place regardless of whether someone is deemed qualified for a leadership position later. We're not, we should not be demonizing these leaders to the extent that we throw them out of Christian community forever and ever. I think when there's genuine repentance, reconciliation needs to happen within the community of faith and these people need to be restored to fellowship with the church. And so that's just, that's an aside, right? We see that over and over and over again. And I don't think that there's a different process on that for leaders, right? Leaders can sin, leaders do sin, but that does not mean that they're no longer Christian, right? It may very well mean that they have damaged people such that they need to go back and do a deeper sort of repentance. I think there's some validity to that, right? Forgetting to, you know, buy something at the grocery store and me having to go to my wife and apologize to her is a far different scenario than me embezzling money from a company that I'm running and then having to go back and figure out how do I make this right. Those are two very different sorts of problems, you know? And so the scale and scope of the damage that a leader can do is larger, and I think that's why the Bible cautions us on choosing leaders wisely. On the flip side of that, we have to ask ourselves, are folks, can folks be restored to the ministry they previously held? In other words, if we have an elder in the church, and I think we need to think deeply, we won't do it on this episode probably, but we need to think about who are we really talking about there, right? I mean, I teach publicly. I don't have anywhere as big a platform as some people, but at the end of the day, if I have some sort of moral failing, should I be able to start another podcast? There's part of me that just really feels like, no, I shouldn't. At least not for a reason, yeah. Yeah, but I don't know that I want to set a hard and fast rule on this. I just don't know that that's the appropriate way to go. And again, I think it has to be up to, I think there has to be some really deep discernment on this because I don't see it as a black and white issue. I think that, for one, we have to ask ourselves when we've put someone in a position that they weren't ready to be put in in the first place. If we were given these people time to mature after an initial fall, is it inappropriate to put them back into that space again? You know, my concern with some of these guys, and we've seen different instances of this. I don't remember the guy's name, but he often wrote about purity culture, and then he and his wife got divorced later. Anyway, he was writing and being very influential as an extremely young person. And so he may have been a Christian his whole life, but as my old seminary professor told me, he's like, you won't be respected until you start losing your hair and getting a gut, right? Gray hair and a gut is how you get respected in the Christian community, right? Not a beer gut, but just a gut, right? You have to get old and fat. And these are signs of wisdom in the Christian community. And I remember him telling me that when I was like 21 years old, right? I'm a personal trainer at the time. I'm pretty trim. I'm, you know, I'm trying to get six-pack abs and, you know, big shoulders, big chest, right? And be really good at the Bible. And I, I didn't hear it at the time, right? I wanted that respect immediately. I wanted, I wanted it to be acknowledged that I was good at this, that I was smart, that I knew what I was talking about with the Bible. But I will say, you know, 47 year old James compared to 21 year old James. I get it now. Right. I get it. I, you know, I totally get it. I mean, you know, 20 some years of marriage, four kids now later, right? And adoption process, like difficult times in marriage and life with economics, you know, living through and having responsibility over multiple years, you know, decades. I totally get why he said it and I actually believe it's true. And so are we putting people in positions of ministry that haven't gone through that maturation process? And if, and when we do, should they be treated slightly differently than like somebody like me, who's been around now for a long time. If I fall morally, like I've just been faking maturity. I haven't really been developing maturity. Right. I think there are factors there. I guess my point is this, not to like set a number on it, but I do think there are factors there that we have to take into account when we're looking at moral failure. And we have to ask ourselves whether or not we put someone in a position they weren't really ready for and how we as the Christian community think about that, you know, two decades later, when this guy has come to maturity, learned his lesson, you know, moved away from the sins of the past and now is that person capable of being reinstalled? I don't, again, I don't have a hard and fast rule for that, but I do think, I do think it's something we need to be considering. Yeah, totally. And you, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, when you talked about earlier, uh, if you, if you look at a church of 300 people, for instance, like a good percentage of them have probably been serving Christ for decades or long periods of time in their life. But it's hard to really know where each of them stand internally on their walk. If they are actually maturing, if they're actually being discipled, if they're growing or if they're just been coasting for a long period of time. And we all have seasons of that where we kind of go through that, um, you know, where we're not maturing, we're kind of just like stagnant or kind of standing at the same place. And I think that's why it's so important to have people that really get an inside look, have transparency of you and your life and where you're at, for there to be true accountability and integrity and make sure somebody's character can be in check because I've seen some pastors where it's like, you can't question them. You can't, uh, examine them. You can't like, you know, look under the surface and that's not a good place to be because we're all, you know, underneath God's authority and we all need that accountability at times in our life. I know I certainly do. I don't always get it right. Yeah. No, I agree with you. And I, I think there's something to be said for pastors who are willing to take that sort of feedback. Um, I, I would imagine being a pastor, being a ministry leader is really, it's taxing, right? Because you're constantly balancing. I'll give a story from when I was an academic dean, right? You know, there were budget realities that I had to deal with.

Right, there's enrollment paradigms that I have to deal with, you know, how many enrollments in a given program? How much am I paying the faculty allocated to that program? Is this program financially sustainable? Could I recruit for it if I did more over here to make it financially sustainable? Like all these things kind of come into play. And then you also have aspects of mission of the institution, and you know, people would say, no, no, underwater basket weaving is the greatest thing we've ever had. We can't get rid of it. It's so missional. Paul was a basket weaver. You know, you have these sort of missional stories that kind of grow up around that. And so as a leader, you're trying to thread a needle between being strategically stubborn and saying, look, you haven't given me any reason to rethink a decision to discontinue the underwater basket weaving program. Right. Underwater basket weaving is just gonna have to go. Right. Because we just can't make it sustainable. Versus being friendly and bringing people along. Right. And saying, look, I understand how deeply committed people are to the underwater basket weaving program, which was my favorite program ever. You know, and I know everybody loves this. And so I'm gonna give it some time to let people kind of percolate on this. I'm gonna give this some time for discussion. I'm gonna give this some time to let people come to the same conclusion I'm coming to, to recognize the problem that I'm seeing and make the make the right decision for the organization with me. And you're, you're always walking that line. Right. And so I think as leaders think through how are you supposed to be challenged in leadership, part of that is just the strategic choices you're making. Why is it that you think this is the right direction? That's part of it. The other part of it is just as a human being, right? Are you approaching things with a posture that is gonna help those under your charge grow toward Christ? And if you're not, if you're not doing that proactively, somebody should call you on it. You know, if you're domineering, if you're lying, if you're manipulating, if you're moving people, you know, people around like they're pieces on a chessboard, that's not good practice. You're not actually doing the function of the office that you're being called to do. You have to be called on that. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide, or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. But this is where I think some of the accountability starts to break down. And I don't want to boil it all down to, look, it's a dichotomy between integrity and ministry outcomes, right? It's a fight always between those two. I don't think that's the case. But I would say that we, my guess is that when we look at our leaders, our first thought is not, are they an integrous person? Our first thought, we may quickly move past that to ask, how big's their following? You know, just give an example. I was listening to a podcast the other day on Christian publishing. And one of the things they were talking about was how they choose what books to actually publish. And one of the big criteria is whether or not you have a platform that will allow the publisher to sell books. Now, there were other things. I don't want to make it seem like it was just a straight up trade, you know, platform for publishing, right? It wasn't that. There needed to be some substance to the work. There needed to be a, you know, no publisher wants the PR nightmare of a, you know, a big platform that all of a sudden falls into a moral conundrum, right? Nobody wants that either. And so they are checking some of those things. But even the person who was on the podcast was saying that when they look at this, there are books that they would really love to publish but have no platform and so they don't. And there are books that they publish that they know are sort of like, they didn't describe it like this, but I just, you know, the easy way to say is like, these are C plus books. But because the person has a platform, they'll publish it. And so we've got these dynamics, right? Yeah. And I mean, we can say that, we can say the money, but at the end of the day, it's a true concern. It's just not doing us any favors when we're looking, I think, at leadership and how the church would actually run. Our money-oriented mentality, our results-oriented mentality is what I would say. It's not just about money, but our results-oriented mentality, our desire for influence, our desire for growth and expansion. I don't think it's doing us any favors, especially when it's decoupled from a deep desire for our ministers to have this level of integrity that we're talking about. Right. It takes away from the things that should be the most critical, like character, integrity, and those things. And then it just pushes those to the side and they're like, oh, but, you know, we could, we could push this out to 10,000 people each day or each week or whatever. So then it's justification. And, you know, at the end of the day, that's the human condition. I think that's something that we're always gonna see no matter what. I would say the other dynamic we have here, Nate, and getting back to this topic of restoration, how are, how are leaders restored? I think a leader that operates outside of authority in their first run, right? Let's say, you know, someone's been, uh, had an abuse of power, let's say, right? They've been abusing their power and uh their elder board finally uh has enough pressure put on them that they have to oust this guy. Right. And I say guy because it's usually the men who are abusing the power. But let's say, you know, let's, let's just say that in today's age, it's still possible for someone like this to then just go out and start their own YouTube channel. And for the people that they haven't harmed who still value their teaching and find them to have wisdom to share, to rally around them so that this person can have a new platform that's even more decoupled from a from accountability than they had when they were in within an organization. And I find this dynamic really problematic because what we're functionally doing is we're allowing people to restore themselves when they feel they're ready. Right? I mean, that's essentially what it is. I'm ready to start teaching it and I'll start a YouTube channel. I'll start a podcast. I'll hire a marketing company. I'll do whatever and I'll put myself out there. As we've decoupled some of these things from a local community of faith, we are losing the ability to have the sort of accountability over people, over leaders, choice of leaders that I think the Bible really counsels us to have. I mean, these words that Paul writes to Timothy in 1 Timothy 5 are actually really sobering. Um, he says, you know, do not be hasty in the laying on of hands. In other words, as you're picking the elders, don't do this hastily, right? Nor take part in the sins of others. Keep yourself pure. And then he goes on. There's a little uh sort of interlude in 23 and then 1 Timothy 5, the sins of some people are conspicuous, going before them to judgment, but the sins of others appear later. So also good works are conspicuous and even those that are not cannot remain hidden. And so what he's counseling Timothy here is not to be, to be cautious in choosing elders of the church, to be cautious about who is put in charge. And I think if we sort of bend this a little bit, and I would say this is an application, certainly not an interpretation, but I think we need to be as individuals exercising the same sort of discernment with the people that we're listening to online, the people whose podcasts we're listening to, because we are so detached from them. Right? Even this podcast, right? I would say, folks, if you're listening to this podcast in lieu of being involved in a local church and congregation and having a teaching authority over you, having a congregation that you're in fellowship with, don't, like, stop doing that. Go and find a local congregation.

I get that there are, and I would say it's probably a very small number of people, who can't actually get to a church, right? For whom biblical teaching and preaching and stuff like that, that is delivered online, is actually really helpful. My concern is that a lot of people who can get to a local congregation are either replacing these sort of online interactions with local congregation or they're allowing popular preachers and teachers to drive an agenda back into their local congregation that has nothing to do with that local congregation. And so my encouragement for people would be, this, all of this kind of podcasting, anything you watch online, any video, I don't care who it is, It should be supplemental. Right? It should be something that you do in addition to being rooted in a local congregation. And I would say that's something I've had to come to over years of just sort of maturing again as a Christian is to say, yeah, I really think local congregational ministry is actually pretty crucial for us right now because you don't have any idea, at the end of the day, you really have no idea who I am until there's a late-breaking story about, you know, my, my financial malfeasance or, you know, something crazy like that, right? Where you don't know. And so I think we have to be careful about who we authorize would be all I'm saying. Well, and I think every, if you look at every single case where something comes to light, there's always people that were really close to them that are like, what? I did not even see that coming. Like I had no clue. So that just goes to show how much that human condition we've been talking about, you know, not, not one big decision, but little tiny decisions over time, snowballing over a course of somebody's life and it becoming more about them and not about the mission, not about the kingdom of God, not about obedience underneath Christ, sitting underneath that. I think people are always shocked and they always will be. I mean, I, we've, we've both had that probably personally in our lives. We're like, whoa, I didn't see that coming from that person. So you can feel like even for years, you know somebody, but people can keep one part of themselves like away from everybody else. It's just, it's very, very easy to do and I think that's one commonality we see with all of these things. And I don't think anyone ever stepped out to do it. It's just over a course of time, little tiny, it's like death by a thousand cuts kind of a thing. Well, and I will say, I think, you know, that might be one benefit. We've kind of talked a little bit about technology and how it allows us to do bad things. It's probably one of the things that allows for, you know, the, the anonymity is bad, but there's also the surveillance aspect that is certainly troubling in a number of ways, but it can also serve to keep us honest. I would assume it's much harder to do bad things nowadays than it used to be, right? You know, I mean, how many places can you really think about walking into and assume that nobody's filming you? Assume that there's not going to be some sort of digital record that you were there. Assume that, you know, I mean it, I don't know, it just seems to me like it would be very difficult nowadays if I really wanted to go out and do bad things, I don't even know how I'd plan to do them and think I could get away with it. Right. Totally. Go ahead. I'm always in, I don't know, impressed is the wrong word, but I am always amazed at how long people can get by with some of this stuff because they are so out there. Right. And once you move up to that certain level of like a public, being a public figure, you're even more under a microscope. Right. It just seems to me like, you know, as the internet gets more sophisticated, as we get more into more of a voyeuristic culture, maybe we could say, It seems to me like it would be extremely difficult for certain bad acts to continue taking place. I mean, again, Josh Byes, if he did this, you know, 20, 30 years ago when the internet was fresh, right? I think that's even overshooting it. Let's, you know, but, but I mean people barely understood how to use email or AOL or anything like that. Like nobody's, nobody's finding this out. Now people figured it out. I don't know how, but people figured it out. So you're sitting there and you're going, if you have an anonymous email address, if you have a, an anonymous substack, you've got to be sitting at home right now. If you're reading that story going, wait, people could figure that out. Yeah. You know, it's like you've never watched a movie ever. Of course people can figure that out. Right. You know, and so I think there's just the, you know, there is something good about that. Uh, I would just also say, I think as, as sort of a final thought on restoration and that, you know, at the end of the day, I think we really need to be, I think the scriptures give us ample warrant to be cautious about who we saw as elders, who we, who we, and I would say by extension, who we restore to ministry after sin. So I'm not advocating for sort of the flippant, well, they repented and, and they did some work over the last year. And so let's bring it back in. I'm not on that. I'm not in that camp. Uh, I, I just, I don't, I think those instances would be very few and far between for me. And then when a leader has um demonstrated a pattern of even something like spiritual abuse or like this latest one with slander or what have you, I think that takes longer than a year to unwind. And so the last thing I would just say is I think that dynamic that we, we see occasionally, oh, let's put this person back in leadership, even though they've, they've, you know, had these sort of falls or they've demonstrated a real hole in the leadership or they, you know, they're not quite as mature as they could be. I think that that is a, how would I put it? A dismissal of the necessity of that person's soul and the integrity they need to be exercising. I think when we continually push people back into these leadership settings, knowing that they broke before and not giving sufficient time and attention, effort to that restoration process and just assuming that, well, they went to some counseling, they went, they did some coaching, they did this, they did that, that all of it's okay now. I think it's really a slight on the people that we're putting back into leadership. I think we are setting them up to fail again. And I think we're doing that in large part, just so we can kind of reap the benefits of having them back in leadership. I don't love that process. Right. And so I think no matter how we think about whether we want to, you know, some people may want to come to a hard and fast rule and you just say, nope, never. If you, um, if you are disqualified, now you're disqualified forever. Or if you want to take more of the, I suppose the gray approach that I'm advocating for, I think the gray approach requires us to have a deep, long, cautious, effortful process that we're looking at this and genuinely deciding that this person can be restored to this type of ministry and that they can handle it. And I, I think one of the, the questions that doesn't often get one of the topics that doesn't often get talked about as we look at this in Christian ministry is that, you know, are we really setting people up for failure? You know, are we putting them in positions that they can't handle? Are we putting too much on them so that they're going to break? I think, I think ministries have to ask those questions again, kind of going back to that high reliability concept. You know, if I just let a pilot do whatever it is that they want, that's an awful lot of responsibility for an individual to handle. Right. Whereas if I say, no, organizationally, I'm going to arrange this so that it's easy for you to make the right decision. I've actually helped them. And I think churches need to adopt a mentality similar to that, whether we're talking about current leaders who haven't fallen or whether we're talking about leaders who are seeking to be restored to leadership. Yep. And I think that's why some churches like encourage pastors to take sabbaticals. I think it's very important to make sure and check in with anyone in leadership to make sure that they're not at the verge of burnout, make sure their heart's not in the right, the wrong place because like we talked about earlier, even just slight off course in one area of somebody's personal life, their personal relationship with Christ, their walk, their family life, all these things should be considered and it's important to have people around you that are going to make those tough calls, say those hard things, because if you're surrounded by people that are just going to go with whatever you say, then you're driving the ship and what's the point of having people to kind of help you and guide you anyway? Like if I had people surrounding me, I want to make sure that they're going to challenge me. Like I would pick someone purposely that's going to hold me accountable even when it's uncomfortable. And I might be irritated at times, just like anybody would be, but at the end of the day, you know what they have, number one, uh, Christ's best interest in mind, but also your mission and what you're called to do, that making sure no matter what, that that

Not personal relationship, not friendship, not going against the grain with, you know, how they're feeling. And I think that's the slippery slope in my own life when I've seen pastors that kind of get off kilter. It's because it becomes more about them, and they don't really have anyone that can speak into their lives and counter and kind of, you know, hold them to a line. Yeah, yeah. That's a good place to end it, man. I think that's right. And this is a complex topic. I don't even think we really scratched the surface on everything we could have talked about. But I think it's, you know, I think we all have a responsibility. And that is when I go back to 1 Timothy 5. That's what I see Paul saying here. I see Paul saying that it's not just up to the person. Yes, they have responsibility for their actions. But Timothy, as the person who is choosing the elder, as the person who's laying on hands, as the person who's endorsing this person, you also have a responsibility here. Exercise that that responsibility with caution. Absolutely. You don't want to share in the sins of this person because you've been so hasty and you've wanted to rush in and you say, well, I've got an open elder decision. I got to fill it. I got to fill it in the next five days. This is the wrong attitude to take. And I think that hastiness is something that we often allow to drive our decision making, to drive our lives. We've got to be very careful not to rush into things, but to be patient, to take our time and to remember that it isn't about getting the position filled. It's about installing an elder with integrity who is going to allow us to move in step with the God of the universe that we serve. So, yeah, a lot of difficult conversations, I'm sure around this. And, you know, I would say my prayers go out to G3, to those who are dealing with the Josh By situation and to other churches who may be dealing with similar things. These are hard times. These are challenges that that ministries sometimes go through. And I don't think it should be a comment necessarily on the ministry itself. But I do think that there are certainly things that every ministry could look at and say, what are we really encouraging at this moment? Yeah. And what can we do to make sure we have safeguards so this doesn't happen? That's right. That's right. It's good, man. Appreciate your perspective. Great conversation. Yeah, agreed. All right, everybody. Well, thanks for sticking with us. We will catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Have a good one. Take care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to LifeAudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. The love of God is immeasurable. It's unchanging. It's indescribable. Because God loves you so much, you can sleep through the night in peace. With Abide Bible Sleep Meditation, you can fall asleep fast with relaxing sleep stories based on Scripture. To start listening now, go to LifeAudio.com or search your favorite podcast app for Abide Bible Sleep Meditation. You can also download the Abide app for more biblical meditations at Abide.com.