How regularly do we expect Luthers to pop up in church history? Apparently, a lot!

Aug 7, 2022 by Jill

by Stephen Kneale, Building Jerusalem:

A lot has been said of pastors abusing their congregations. There are certainly wolves out there who seem to view the sheep as their personal resource to exploit for their own ends. It is not okay and such people are rightly removed from office when character disqualifying sin is brought to light. You can search this blog for various posts that dig into this more deeply. The Lord is very clear on what he expects of his under shepherds and we have some fairly clear guidelines on what disqualifies a man from office – these things should rightly and properly be insisted upon.

Far less, however, is said about pastors, elders and church leaders who are themselves on the receiving end of some fairly difficult behaviour. Sometimes it may be wolves who have settled in among the sheep. Sometimes it is hurting sheep who can have a nasty habit of kicking and biting because they don’t trust any shepherd anymore, even gentle and loving ones. Sometimes – in fact, I suspect a lot of the time – it is neither hurting sheep nor ravenous wolves. It is just ordinary Christian folk sinning and behaving badly because – and I know this will come as a total shock – sinners are gonna sin and Christians sometimes don’t act and behave like Christians should. There is no hurt behind it, there is no wolfy desire to harm others intentionally, it is just Christian people behaving badly, sometimes obliviously other times not, and it is deeply unpleasant.

I’ll be honest, I suspect the average person does not know the damage some of their behaviour does to their leaders. I am reminded of the time I tried to highlight to someone just how difficult their behaviour had been and why I didn’t think it was godly. I was rebuffed with a wave of the hand and the dismissive comment, ‘well, that’s just ministry!’ Apparently, their ungodly behaviour was not the problem, it was my unwillingness to concede that being a pastor meant welcoming ungodly behaviour and sucking it up. And, in a sense, sometimes you do have to just suck up ungodly behaviour – so let’s be straight about that. But it is not the case that members ought to be ungodly with impunity and insist the nature of ministry means nobody can call them on it.

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