Pastors: Don't Gloat Over Ashley Madison

Every week in “Pulse,” Leadership Journal provides context and perspective on a stand-out cultural event from the past week, illuminating the ways it might impact local church ministry.

This week, an anonymous group of hackers made good on a threat. If Ashley Madison, a dating website dedicated to the explicit purpose of helping people initiate extra-marital affairs, didn’t shut down, they would expose the personal information of more than 30 million patrons of the service.

After waiting a month for compliance to their demands, the hackers dumped the names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, and credit card information of those who had used Ashley Madison under the presumption that they were paying for their privacy.

For Christians who rightly recoil at the practice of adultery, we may be tempted to indulge a sense of schadenfreude. Your sins will find you out, and sometimes it’s nice to sit back and watch that sort of poetic justice unfold.

Plus these hacks may feel a bit detached from our local realities, a news story that’s about people “out there” (“Did you hear about Josh Duggar!” “I heard there are government emails in the dump!”). But this hack has unprecedented potential to hit uncomfortably close to home for those in your congregation. The pastoral challenge is to move past schadenfreude and toward genuine soul care.

The pastoral challenge is to move past schadenfreude and toward genuine soul care.

Outside of the church, individuals may be able to shrug off finding their name in the now searchable database of Ashley Madison users. But inside the church, being found out in this way is going to be (and ought to be) a significant disruption to family and church life. The more affluent your congregation, the more likely it is that you will be facing the challenge of pastoring through personal and public scandal. "The proclivity to cheat often goes hand in hand with opportunity," says the CEO and founder of Ashley Madison, Noel Biderman. "Those with discretionary income and freedom to travel are even more likely to stray."

This is a time to exercise caution. One’s information in an Ashley Madison database can only prove so much. In some cases, the accused may not have followed through, having signed up in a moment of weakness. According to reports, emails are not validated, and it is possible for one’s email to be in the database without having actually signed up. More likely, finding one’s name in the database may just be the final straw, the piece of evidence that confirms a sneaking suspicion.

As Jesus shows us in challenging the woman caught in adultery to “Go and sin no more,” being caught does not preclude genuine repentance. Biblically, being found out and confronted in sin is a grace, and a steppingstone to further grace. And the consequences of past sin, though sometimes unavoidable, are opportunities for church leaders to model the gospel by caring for sinners as consequences play out, whether they are a formal stoning or the social consequences of a malicious hack.

Of course, the difficulty with this situation is that those exposed in their sin seem a lot less victim-like than the aforementioned woman. In fact, it’s likely that they have victimized others, most notably their spouses. The other side of this pastoral challenge is in caring for those whose lives will never be the same. Wives will feel abandoned; husbands betrayed. Children will find their lives changed forever. You may be faced with pastoring your congregation through sudden scandal and subsequent divorce.

“Let he without sin cast the first stone,” is overly simple advice in this case. That was an answer Jesus gave to Pharisees attempting to trap him — a starting point for hypocrites. For the minister of the gospel, the challenge is to show grace to sinners and victims of sin alike, never forgetting that we are sinners too. This is not a time to excommunicate first and ask questions later. This is a time for confrontation, grieving, and prayer.

We like to advertise our churches as places for broken people. But when sin and its consequences come to public fruition, it results in a mess we often are tempted to clean up at all costs. Unfortunately there is no quick fix for the disorder caused by sin. The gospel teaches something else: work through the disorder and chaos, and revel in grace.

Richard Clark is associate editor of Leadership Journal.