When the assistant pastor called the church’s key leaders to his house for an urgent meeting, my husband and I both suspected something serious had happened. We could not have guessed just how serious. Once all 20 of us had packed into the living room, our senior pastor came in and simply said, “I have something to tell you.”
His subsequent admission of marital infidelity made sense of his angry outbursts, controlling behavior, and whimsical abandonment of several key programs. Though we felt relief to finally understand what had been propelling his perplexing conduct over the past year, his confession plunged the church into a season of chaos.
Each year an alarming number of churches will face a similar situation. Based on a 2005-2006 study done by the Francis Schaeffer Institute, more than 30 percent of all pastors have admitted to having either an ongoing affair or a one-time sexual encounter with a parishioner during their tenure. (And of course sexual misconduct is but one of the ways that a leader can disqualify himself or herself.) Despite the fact that this situation happens far too often, “pastoring your church through trauma” is not a class taught in many seminaries or church growth conferences.
To read the remainder of this article on how to help your church navigate a leader’s misconduct, please go to Gifted for Leadership.