God has a long history of redeeming our sinful failures, of turning our worst blunders into opportunities for personal growth and spiritual development.
— Richard Exley
The voice on the other end of the line was desperate. In a shaky, emotion-filled voice, the wife of a minister and mother of four confessed her adultery.
“I don’t know why I’m calling you,” she stammered, “except I read your book, and I thought maybe you could help me.”
I began to reply, but she plowed ahead, “But I’m not sure I want help. I love Brad. He’s so understanding, so caring, not like my husband who takes me for granted.”
I listened for the better part of an hour while she poured out her story of a marriage undermined by the demands of ministry that won her husband’s affections. She had inadvertently begun spending time with a younger man who was just a friend. Nothing more. Suddenly she was “in love.” Now she was torn between her family and her lover. Her husband was growing suspicious, and her allconsuming guilt enveloped her.
Following the release of my book, Perils of Power: Immorality in the Ministry (Honor Books), I began receiving calls like this and visits from fallen ministers and their spouses. Although their circumstances differed, they all shared at least one thing in common — devastation.
In every case, I found myself face to face with immorality’s tragic consequences. A pastor ensnared by adultery, or some other moral failure, usually loses his position, his income, and often his residence. (Since I’ve worked only with male ministers, I write of the experience of male pastors and their wives.) Not infrequently, he is forced to leave the very community that should be giving him emotional support. He will be asked to confess publicly and resign all hard-won places of honor.
These losses, though, are inconsequential compared to his loss of self-esteem. In telling the truth, he has destroyed his own self-image, false though it was. No longer can he pretend to be a godly man of spiritual and moral integrity. For years he has managed to live a lie, but no more. Now everyone knows, now everywhere he turns his shameful failure confronts him. His confession has destroyed the faith placed in him by his peers, his congregation, his family.
His wife and family, too, share in the consequences. Heather Bryce, a pen name of a spouse who wrote “After the Affair” in Leadership magazine, points out, “The bewildered, stunned pastor’s wife suffers losses in addition to her husband’s. They will move, thus costing her contact with her friends, and she may well lose her husband. At the least, she has lost her pastor. She loses her self-worth both from the adultery and from losing the ministry where she received approval. Since few people understand the whole situation, she is isolated at her point of greatest need. When able to stay within the marriage relationship, her only companion is the one who acted to her hurt.”
Her past, once cherished, is tarnished. Now she is contaminated by it.
Helping such couples in crisis is draining. At times, I don’t feel particularly qualified for it. Still, from time to time, I am required to play a primary role in the restoration of a pastor. Here is what I’ve learned as I’ve walked couples through their pain.
Failure or Sinful Lifestyle?
There is a difference between the minister who falls once, voluntarily confesses his sinful failure, and submits to a restoration process, and the minister trapped in an immoral lifestyle. The latter rarely confesses his sin until he is exposed — even then he may deny its full extent and resist church discipline.
Those in authority are wise to distinguish between the two. Arbitrary discipline, without regard to individual circumstances, is irresponsible. A minister should be able to confess voluntarily without fear of exposure or recrimination. If such a forum existed, in conjunction with spiritual care, many ministers could be delivered from immorality before it blossomed into a lifestyle. If the sin is not public knowledge, I see no scriptural reason why it should be publicly exposed if he has forsaken his sin, voluntarily confessed, and submitted to the proper authorities for rehabilitation.
Unfortunately, no such official forum exists. So the minister who, in a moment of weakness, gives in to temptation is trapped with the awful knowledge of his sin. The isolation he feels can make him vulnerable to further temptation. In short order, he is ensnared in immorality. What was birthed in sinful weakness has become a clandestine, immoral lifestyle. It is this situation — secret, habitual immorality — I address in this chapter.
Repeated adultery is seldom just a “sexual sin.” Rather it is a complex web of issues — the way the man relates to his spouse, his self-image and sexual identity, his lifestyle and work habits. These cannot be worked through in a brief encounter or in a few days away in retreat. Nor can they be adequately addressed while the minister is still enmeshed in ministry. The pressures are simply too great, the temptation to return to the familiar routine too compelling — a routine that originally contributed to the problem. Therefore the fallen minister must be removed from active ministry if he is going to be restored both spiritually and vocationally.
Earning Trust
Pastor Ed Dobson, who played a significant role in the rehabilitation of Truman Dollar, a well-known independent Baptist minister, says, “Restoration, to me, has two levels. The basic need is restoration to spiritual wholeness. Only after that issue is dealt with can we begin to even talk about the possibility of restoration to position.”
The early sessions should focus on trust building, believes Louis McBurney, a psychiatrist who specializes in helping clergy in crisis. “It’s important to bring up issues that need to be discussed,” he says, “but it’s especially important to build relationships.”
Trust between the fallen minister and the pastor, counselor, or group must be established on several levels. First he must trust you as a person. He must be convinced you are willing and able to empathize with him — to feel and understand what he is experiencing. Only then can he trust you.
At this juncture, he feels disenfranchised from his peers and feels his professional identity is lost. He feels more like a client than a fellow minister. To help him feel accepted as a peer, I like to meet informally, over lunch or a game of racquetball. These informal meetings are “social” and never take the place of our scheduled counseling. Although they are time consuming, an added pressure in an already over-crowded calendar, the benefits more than justify the extra effort.
I remember one emotional parting at the conclusion of a successful two-year rehabilitation. The restored minister and his wife hugged me and wept with gratitude. “I don’t know what we would have done without you,” the wife said. “It really made a difference the way you and your wife accepted us. The meals we shared were real life savers for me.”
Her husband added, “In the office, you were ‘the doctor’ and I was ‘the patient,’ but on the racquetball court, we were just men. I was one of the guys, not just a fallen minister.”
He also must have confidence in your skills. Fundamental to the whole process is his conviction of your competence, that you can help him. He must be absolutely sure his deepest secrets are safe with you, that you will always honor the sacred privilege of confidentiality.
Finally, he must know, beyond all doubt, that you are on his side, that his spiritual well-being is your highest concern. If he has the slightest doubt where your loyalties lie, the whole process will be compromised. This level of trust will not be achieved in the first session, of course — probably not in the first several sessions. Initially he may resent you, may consider you a part of the religious system that deprived him of his reputation, his ministry, and his livelihood. As the process continues, he will probably send up some trial balloons to see how you’ll react.
One minister finally risked revealing to me his anger at the way his denomination handled his adultery.
“They are accusing me of being uncooperative,” he spewed angrily, “simply because I’m unwilling to relocate to another city. I’ve tried to tell them that we own a home here, that my wife has a good job, which is our only source of income right now. But they refuse to understand. In fact, they have told me that if I don’t relocate within thirty days, I will be expelled from the rehabilitation program.”
He paused, waiting for my reaction. Rather than offering an opinion, I simply said, “It sounds like you feel trapped and misunderstood.”
If you consistently demonstrate both compassion and competence, his trust will begin to grow.
Personal disclosures, if they are timely and appropriate, can enhance the process significantly at this point.
One minister with a long history of sexual immorality struggled with an overwhelming sense of unworthiness. He was convinced he would be doing God and the church a big favor if he dropped out of the ministry for good. He didn’t believe God could forgive him. And even if God could forgive, he wasn’t sure God could change him.
Nothing seemed to pierce his armor until his counselor disclosed that he too had suffered a moral failure in the early years of his ministry. Following that disclosure the fallen minister took hope. The evidence of God’s grace and forgiveness was so obvious in his counselor’s life that he dared to believe God could do the same for him.
One word of caution: disclose personal struggles and failures in the past tense. This accomplishes at least two things. First, it offers hope. If you’ve already worked through a particular temptation or difficulty, the struggling minister can point to your victory. Second, your victorious experience can lend insights for helping him with his temptations, thus reinforcing his faith. Because he knows you share that which is common to all men, he will find your counsel more credible.
The Real Issue
Once trust is established, I begin to discuss his failures. I help him process his feelings, and we try to determine the underlying issue that initially made him vulnerable to sexual temptation.
Owning sin is seldom easy, though. The truth of infidelity is terribly painful. He has grown accustomed to living with selfdeceit. He has developed an elaborate system to rationalize his inexplicable behavior. In confession he experiences, maybe for the first time, the true magnitude of his sin. He suddenly sees his sin through God’s eyes. He is a liar and a deceiver. His immorality has made a mockery out of his faith, his marriage, and his ministry. In the agony of that moment, he will be tempted to withhold some of the details. He will probably attempt to justify his actions.
Take Bill, for example. He avoided detection for more than fourteen years, having been involved in a series of affairs. Even after being confronted with his immorality, he resisted confessing the magnitude of his sin. His wife writes, “It took six days of confrontation to extract all the facts. Through clever hedging and conscious lying, Bill had covered the extent of his immoral actions.”
While understandable, refusing to come fully clean only delays the healing process. And painful though it may be, the counselor must hold the man’s feet to the fire; he must come clean. But often the man doesn’t have the stomach for it; the pain is more than he can admit even to himself. Over a few days, perhaps two to three weeks, he will finally tell all. The results are traumatic — for him and his wife — wide swings of emotion ranging from almost uncontrollable rage to numbing grief.
The help of a pastor, counselor, or support group is invaluable during this period.
In Beyond Forgiveness, Don Baker tells of the discipline and restoration of a staff minister named Greg. Baker confesses, “One of the many mistakes I made during Greg’s twenty-six month restoration period was that I failed to maintain constant contact with him. In fact, Greg admitted later that he felt that I and other members of the staff had let him down. One staff person took him to lunch — once. I met with him occasionally and called periodically, but we never established a routine.”
They had been Greg’s closest friends, the ones to whom he looked for support. But during his ordeal, he had almost no fellowship with them. They were gracious when they ran into him, but they never went out of their way to connect with him or his wife.
Greg was invited to join a group of five men who met weekly for breakfast and spiritual fellowship.
“They accepted him completely,” Baker writes. “They treated him as a human being and as an equal. There was no condemnation, no criticism. No conditions were imposed upon their continuing relationship. They had breakfast together, shared needs with each other, and prayed.” They became a major force in his recovery.
Cracking the Lifestyle
Ministers who fall prey to sexual temptation are often driven people, workaholics whose lifestyle cause their most important relationships to suffer. Helping them regain control is critical. They must learn new ways of dealing with the pressures of life.
One minister I counseled was obviously a type-A personality, but the drivenness contributing to his moral failure remained unchecked. His old way of dealing with stress was to immerse himself in ministry (now in his new line of work), isolating himself from his wife and family. Of course, this only amplified his stress. This cycle fed itself, leaving him stressed out and susceptible to sexual temptation.
With his wife, I explored with him the source of his drivenness. At its root was a lack of self-esteem. No amount of success could enable him to escape his self-doubt. In fact the more successful he became, the harder he pushed himself. He was convinced that if other people really knew him the way he knew himself, they would know what a phony he really was.
Using both Scripture and reason, I helped him see there was not enough success in the world to still the tormenting voices within. Over time he came to appreciate his value as a person simply because of who he was — a man created in the image of God — not because of any success he might achieve. The Scriptures, rather than his emotions, became the foundation for his selfworth. He learned to share his fears with his wife, and in prayer they combated the inner enemies that sought to destroy him. Little by little, his drivenness was replaced by self-acceptance.
Attention should also be given to spiritual disciplines. Often a fallen pastor’s devotional life centers around power rather than intimacy; he’s looking for strength to succeed rather than an experience of God’s love. He has only a “working relationship” with God. His reading, if he takes time to read at all, is generally in the area of church growth and professional development.
So I require him to read for spiritual enrichment, to focus on his own spiritual needs. Required reading includes My Utmost For His Highest by Oswald Chambers, A Testament of Devotion by Thomas R. Kelly, Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster, and Ordering Your Private World by Gordon MacDonald, as well as my books, Perils of Power and The Rhythm of Life.
Probing Marital Wounds
Critical to the restoration process is the minister’s relationship with his wife. Most of the wives I’ve counseled were determined to stand by their husbands. But the healing of their marriage was, nonetheless, a lengthy and difficult process.
Her emotions swing. She has discovered that her husband isn’t the man she married. That man was good and godly, incapable of the kind of things this man has done — unspeakable things, sinful things beyond her comprehension. Not only has he done them, but he has confessed them to her in sordid detail. She had trusted him. She never thought to question his late hours. She believed him when he told her his preoccupation was churchrelated. But now her trust is gone, crushed beneath the awful revelation of his unfaithfulness.
Yet she wants to save their marriage. She badly wants to forgive him as much as he wants to be forgiven. Can she? Can she get rid of her hurt and anger without destroying him — and their relationship? Can she learn to trust him again, respect him as a godly man, as the spiritual leader in their home? These and a hundred more questions haunt her.
Before her wound can heal, though, she must work through her feelings. During this process, the presence of a compassionate Christian counselor is mandatory. The counselor serves as both a nonjudgmental listener and a spiritual facilitator. The counselor holds her accountable, helps her deal with the hurts and anger she might otherwise gloss over or bury. Anger and bitterness must be acknowledged and confessed before forgiveness can truly be extended to the offending spouse.
To survive her husband’s repeated adulteries, Jeanne (not her real name) created an elaborate denial system. She simply refused to admit to herself that he might be unfaithful. Once his moral failures were made public, that same web of denial made it nearly impossible for her to feel the deep emotions of betrayal. She denied her hurt and anger, hid her feelings beneath a “Christian” facade, but on the inside she was raging.
In desperation, I suggested she write a letter to God, telling him exactly what Larry had done and how it made her feel.
“Don’t edit your feelings,” I counseled her. “God won’t be shocked. He knows you better than you know yourself.”
She tried to assure me she had already forgiven Larry, that there was nothing to tell. Gently I insisted, and reluctantly she agreed to give it a try.
When she arrived for her next session, she was barely seated before she extracted a manuscript-size letter from her purse. I commented on it.
“Once I got started,” she said, holding it up, “I couldn’t seem to stop. It all came rushing back — all the lies, the sneaking around, the deceit. And the anger — boy, did I get angry! I felt things I didn’t know I was capable of feeling. If Larry had been there I might have tried to hurt him.” Seeing this quiet woman rage was something to behold. Years of stubbornly denied hurt and anger gave her words an awful intensity.
“For the first time in my life,” she continued, “I realized how much I hate him. He’s destroyed my life, our children, our family — everything. I’ve always been the model wife and mother, and what do I get for all my efforts? A husband who sleeps with my best friend!”
“And her!” she snarled, contempt making her voice thick. “How could she pretend to be my friend? How could she look me in the eye knowing she had been with my husband? She still wants to be friends. Can you believe that?”
During this process, Jeanne faced two dangers. Initially she was tempted to deny her feelings, to avoid the whole painful process. She wanted to hurry on to forgiveness, to put the entire sordid episode behind her. By insisting she write the letter, I helped her overcome that temptation, only to be confronted by a new danger: Once she started to feel deeply, she wanted to indulge her emotions. She felt justified in her anger and wanted to punish Larry, wanted to make him suffer the way she had suffered.
I encouraged her, as I have others, to deal properly with her anger: “Jeanne, there are basically three ways of dealing with anger. The first is the world’s way — express it. Take your revenge, get even. That way has a certain appeal, especially when you’ve been hurt. But it is terribly destructive. The second way is often the church’s way — repress it. Most Christians shove it down, bury it deep inside themselves. That’s what you did for years. I don’t have to tell you how debilitating that can be.
“The third way is God’s way — confess it. Tell God exactly how you feel. Pour your hurt and anger out to him. That’s what you did when you wrote the letter. But you can’t get stuck there. You’ve got to release your anger, let go of it. If you don’t, confession does nothing but recycle your anger.”
I reminded her that forgiveness is an act of the will. We begin by telling God how we really feel, that we don’t want to forgive, but that, in obedience to his Word, we choose to do it anyway. Then we give God permission to change our feelings, to replace our hurt and anger with new love. Then we must forgive specifically each sin the person has committed against us.
When she asked for more guidance, I suggested a prayer. I added that since she had not been sinned against generally but specifically, she needed to forgive the sinful act specifically.
She nodded, and in a voice I had to strain to hear, she prayed, “God, you know that the very thought of the things Larry did with that woman makes me sick. When I look at him, I keep imagining them together. Sometimes I just want to run away, so I never have to see him again, but I can’t. I don’t want to forgive him. I want to get even, I want to hurt him, but I know that’s not right. Please, God, help me to forgive him.”
She took a deep breath. “God, I choose to forgive Larry for having sex with Rachel. I choose to forgive him for betraying me and the covenant of marriage.”
Jeanne prayed for a long time that afternoon, dealing with one painful incident after another. When she finished, I asked her if she would like to destroy the letter she had written to God.
“It’s a symbol of your feelings, of all the things you’ve held against Larry,” I said. “When you tear it up and drop it in the wastebasket, you are releasing your feelings, letting go of your hurt and anger.”
With trembling hands, she slowly shredded the letter and let the fragments fall from her fingers into the wastebasket. When she finished, tears were running down her cheeks. She said, “I feel different. I really do.”
Rebuilding the Broken World
Before the cycle of forgiveness was complete, Jeanne had to confront Larry with the truth of what his adulteries had done to her. During this time, more than once Larry pleaded, “Must you tell me all of this? Can’t we let bygones be bygones?”
Jeanne might have yielded to his pleadings had she not been convinced that Larry’s only hope was coming to grips with the full extent of his sin. He could fully repent only if he saw his sin through her eyes, only if he fully felt everything she had suffered. As the apostle Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 7:10, “Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret.”
Confronting Larry was different from confessing her feelings to God. Then she was pouring herself before God. But the object of her wrath was not present, so no one got hurt. This time she told Larry the effects of his behavior. Her purpose was not to wound him but to confront him with the tragic consequences of his sin.
This phase was painfully slow and fraught with crises — like the time Larry had car trouble and was late getting home but didn’t bother to call. When he finally walked through the door, Jeanne was raging.
“Where have you been?” she demanded. Without giving him a chance to reply, she continued, “Who is it this time?”
When he tried to explain, she cut him off. He then cut her off: “I’m not going to live like this the rest of my life. If you are going to throw the past up to me every time I’m a few minutes late, there’s no hope for us!”
They argued for a long time that night. They finally called me and asked me to come over. I sat in their small living room and worked to help them understand what was happening: “Larry, your adulteries have destroyed Jeanne’s trust. In the past you were often late, and she thought nothing about it. Now she knows you were lying to her, that you made a fool out of her. She’s not going to let that happen again.”
“But I’ve told her I will never be unfaithful again,” Larry protested. He turned to Jeanne. “Don’t you believe me?”
“I want to, Larry,” Jeanne said, “but it’s going to take some time.”
I then read to them from Richard Dobbins’s book Saints in Crises: “When an adulterous relationship has broken that bridge of trust, then building it back again frequently requires a healing period ranging from six months to two years … [the adulterous spouse] must realize that his infidelity has given his mate just cause to be both jealous and suspicious.… The mate who breaks the trust should volunteer information required for the mate whose trust has been shaken to check up on his whereabouts. Discovering that he is in the place he is supposed to be, doing what he said he would be doing, will help to rebuild that trust.”
Chasing Little Foxes
Although adultery is the most obvious problem in the fallen minister’s marriage, it is certainly not the only one. Larry and Jeanne’s marriage did not suddenly fail; adultery was not the problem as much as the consequence, the culmination of several small things that went undetected. They had to give these “little foxes” their undivided attention. They had to be rectified to prevent their marriage from mediocrity and another episode of adultery.
For Don and Sherry (not their real names), the issue was busyness. With a first grader and two preschoolers, Sherry had her hands full. By the end of the day, she was exhausted. She loved her husband, but running the house and taking care of the children took all of her energy. For his part, Don was always busy with the church and never seemed to have time to help her. She tried to understand, but she resented the long hours he put in. She began to complain.
This only added to Don’s frustrations, which were already stretched as a result of a strained relationship with the church board. Desperately he threw himself into ministry. He was convinced that when the board saw how hard he worked, the long hours he put in, they would appreciate him more. His long hours only served to distance him further from Sherry and the children. Eventually the pressure and loneliness became so great, he became involved with another woman.
Following Don’s affair, Don and Sherry came to me for counseling. By this time, busyness had become for them a way of life. Besides working through the adultery, they had to reorder their priorities. Don made a commitment to protect his day off at all costs and to spend it with his family. He also determined to become more involved around the house and with the children. Sherry made a conscious effort to give Don the special attention he wanted.
And when these “little foxes” are attended to, the relationship is not only healed but can end up being better than the old marriage.
Evaluating Progress
One of the weightier responsibilities the pastor or committee has is evaluating the progress of the person they are restoring. Often their input determines when, and under what conditions, the pastor may return to active ministry. Therefore developing objective guidelines for measuring progress is critical.
Every minister I have worked with was initially angry — angry at his former congregation for the way it handled the situation, angry with his denominational officials for what he perceived to be insensitive and arbitrary decisions, angry with those involved in the restoration process. Rather than addressing his own failures, he insists on finding fault with the process. When a man stops being angry and blaming others, I take note of it. It is a sure sign of progress.
Bishop William Frey, president of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, looks for how much control the fallen minister tries to exercise over his own therapy: “Is he selfdiagnosing and self-prescribing, or is he willing to trust the therapist or the group? I don’t trust somebody who says, ‘Here’s my disease, and here’s the treatment that you ought to give me.'”
Another sign of progress is the way the pastor sees himself. Initially, he has limited self-knowledge and tends to talk about his accomplishments — achievements around which his self-image is centered. As he makes progress toward wholeness, he will develop a greater self-understanding. This will be reflected in the way he talks about himself. His comments should begin to focus on who he is rather than what he has done — on being rather than doing.
Pastor Edward Dobson reports that Truman Dollar learned that his significance and value to God was not determined by whether or not he was in ministry or by the size of his church.
“He also learned more clearly,” writes Dobson, “the importance of a personal relationship with God, not just a professional relationship with God. He learned balance. He’s now convinced that it’s okay to take time off to relax, to exercise, to spend time with his family — to be something besides a pastor of a big church.”
Lifestyle changes also mark progress. Before his moral failure was uncovered, the fallen minister was probably over-investing in ministry at the expense of his marriage and family. That’s not something he can change overnight, but it is mandatory he gets control of his schedule. When I see evidence of a balance between work and rest, worship and play, I know he is making progress.
“Another way to assess a person’s progress,” says Louis McBurney, “is to get feedback from the spouse.… The man may be able to put the mask on or say the right things in public, but the spouse is going to tell us, ‘Well, I’m still worried about him,’ and she will identify unresolved issues.”
Sometimes it is not just what she says, but her body language. I’ve seen a wife cross her legs, fold her arms, and bend forward when her husband was saying something she knew, and I later discovered, wasn’t true. By the same token, when she genuinely affirms her husband’s progress, you can usually be assured real progress is being made.
Back into It
Once emotional and spiritual wholeness has been restored, we can turn our attention toward restoration to ministry. This process should include at least three stages: (1) supervised ministry in the local church, (2) selected preaching engagements, and (3) full and unrestricted ministry as the Lord directs.
This will resurrect a host of conflicting emotions. He is excited yet also filled with dread. Am I really ready? Can I handle the unique pressures and stress of ministry? How will a return to ministry effect my wife and family? The supervised stage of restoration will give him and his family an opportunity to work through their initial concerns without the constant demands of their own congregation.
The minister often finds himself in a dilemma regarding his past moral failure. Unless he was highly visible, most congregations who may consider calling him will be unaware of his fall. How much should he tell them, and when? If he discloses everything up front, will they even consider him?
I believe a full disclosure during the interview with the pulpit committee is mandatory. Deception is at the heart of adultery, and a decision to keep this information from the pulpit committee may open the door for a return to a life of half-truths and self-deception.
Of equal concern to me is the minister’s state of mind. If he doesn’t tell them of his moral failure, he will always live in fear they will find out. No one should live under that kind of pressure. And should the pulpit committee discover his moral failure later, they will feel betrayed and doubt his integrity. As difficult as it may be, a full disclosure of the facts, though not the details, seems best.
Moral failure does not have to end as a disaster. God has a long history of redeeming our sinful failures, of turning our worst blunders into opportunities for personal growth and spiritual development. If a minister’s fall is a time for great grief, then his restoration should be a time for a sacred celebration.
The final official act in the restoration process should be a public service in which the minister is officially restored to ministry. Such a service provides closure for the minister and his family, and those involved in his restoration. It publicly confirms his successful restoration and announces to the church he is once again fit for ministry.
Few experiences in life can match the holy splendor of that moment.
Copyright © 1994 by Christianity Today
