I'm thinking a lot about three pastors this week.
Pastor 1 is in his early 70s and recently was removed from ministry due to a five-year long relationship with a woman in her 20s that was not sexual in nature, but was still a violation of the pastor's wedding vows.
Prior to being defrocked he worked for a nonprofit that he ran and that paid him $150,000 annually with an additional $100,000 paid "by the organization or other related organizations," according to tax filings while claiming he worked for them 40 hours a week. We can't view his church's financials, obviously, but one imagines the church paid him a wage and also expected that he worked 40 hours a week there—which raises the question of how a man in his 70s is logging 80 hour weeks.
It would also mean that the man was making, at minimum, $250,000 annually from ministry, if the $100,000 supplemental income on the tax form is from the church. Or it might also mean that he made $250,000 from the non-profit, with the church salary (and book royalties and speaking gigs) layered on top of that.
This, incidentally, is what Carl Trueman had in mind when he coined the term "big eva." Trueman specifically had in view pastors who become internet brands, become largely divorced from the work of shepherding in local churches, and who become surrogate pastors for Christians who spend too much time online and too little in their local church. (This old piece from the Baylys, by the way, is helpful for learning a bit about how ministry finances often work in the evangelical world.)
Even before the inappropriate relationship was known, this first pastor had a reputation for being a rather expensive and "high-maintenance" speaker with "very, very unusual food requirements," as one acquaintance of his put it on social media. He reportedly would demand to be taken to stores that sell thousand dollar pens on certain trips, and also had highly specific requirements regarding wardrobe, including what brands of suit he wears and even specific ties he would wear.
You know pastor 1's name, which is why I'm not bothering to say it here. What's worse, you probably know a number of other pastors that fit this profile. I certainly do. But if that's all you know about American church life, you know something true, but you also know too little.
Pastor 2 is in his early to mid 60s. He recently decided to step down from his senior pastor role in a church of 250 after nearly 35 years in the church and around 30 years as the senior pastor, faithfully and quietly shepherding a congregation, preaching the Word, and administering the sacraments. In that time, he's helped plant two churches and launch an RUF. Now one of the churches he helped plant is planting and there may be a further plant happening in the medium-term future.
During his career he has pastored his congregation through two building fires and a move after the first fire destroyed their building. He has dealt with many complicated shepherding cases in his own congregation and in the presbytery.
He has sent dozens of people to seminary over the years and is known and respected amongst staff at the seminary where he graduated and where he has sent many people as students.
He has also been instrumental in helping the presbytery become a far healthier place. He has sought to create an atmosphere of care and trust amongst the presbytery's teaching elders and has been remarkably successful in that, insuring that the men called to ministry there all recognize one another as brothers, are all praying for each other, and trust the basic virtue, theological soundness, and good will of their fellow pastors. That sounds like it should be the norm, but in too many places it isn't.
He has done all of this without any notable scandal in his household and while faithfully caring for his family.
He's stepping down so that he's able to care better for his in-laws and mother, all of whom are in their 80s or 90s and in poor health. But he's still staying active in ministry, just in a less senior role. He's moving into an associate job at a church he helped plant nearly 25 years ago where he'll be working under the senior pastor, who was one of the first adult converts at that plant when it launched in the early 2000s. This church may be planting in the medium-term future, meaning that in his final pastoral role he may help plant one more church before retiring from local church pastoral ministry.
So by the time he retires, the city he pastors in will have gone from one PCA congregation to at least four and, God-willing, five congregations as well as having an RUF as well as pastors sent to seminary by the presbytery currently serving in Phoenix, Omaha, St Louis, and Tokyo. All of this he has done over the course of fulfilling the ordinary ministries of word and sacrament in his local church.
Unless you're in the city this man pastors in or connected to the seminary he graduated from, you probably don't know his name. And he'd actually prefer it that way. But the above is a true account of his ministry. C. S. Lewis's remarks about the Sarah Smiths of the world comes to mind when I consider it.
Pastor 3 is in his late 30s or early 40s. He was a youth worker at a church near where he attended college as a young man and at first didn't expect to stay there long term. But years later he's still there, now serving as the senior pastor. He is shepherding a congregation and city reeling in the aftermath of the flooding in western North Carolina, which appears to have completely destroyed their town.
I met him in the summer of 2023 when I was in the area and our family attended worship with them one Sunday morning. In his congregation we found fidelity, thrift, creativity, and a deep love for children and their region. It seemed to me a wonderful church. After seeing the flooding news I went to their website to see how they were doing and found this note from the pastor:
I do not know how many of you will see this. Like you, I have mostly not had any service. I feel cut off and clueless. Once I came into Swannanoa, I was overwhelmed. How does all of this begin to be untangled? I don't know.
My daughter, with tears in her eyes, asked me the question just at the surface of almost every heart and mind: Why? And my answer to her is the same that I have for myself and anyone else. I do not know. What I told her is that while I do not know why such a thing might happen here or anywhere, I do trust, I know that God cares. I have seen the cross and empty tomb of Jesus and I know he refuses to leave the world this way. He has opened a door to a time when everything will be made right. I know it because of his cross. And now all we can do is wait with tears in our eyes.
And we can work. I do believe that the resurrection of our Lord means that every bit of this place matters. So we can work to make and remake this world, confident not that we can fix it all, but that he can. And he will. And he will not waste even a little bit of our labor.
So right now, my advice to you is to pray and to seek out the voice of the risen Lord Jesus. Lean in for all the peace and comfort only His Spirit can offer. Throw him all your tears and questions, which he can handle. And we can work together. Take care of one another if you can. Care for your neighbors.
I have chuckled at the irony of me telling you all why I feel that God has called us to this Swannanoa Valley. I thought we were fragmented and under-resourced before. But look at us! Our roads are chopped and changed. We can't communicate with one another. And we need so much help.
But Friday night, head spinning, all I kept coming back to was this: God called us here on purpose. We are here for this very reason, for this very time. Together, let's cultivate communities that live out the life changing hope of Jesus. This is our work.
I love you all and I miss you already. You all are in my prayers and, more importantly, safely in the hand of the Bridegroom who will not leave his Bride.
Peace be with you. I'll see you soon.
You don't know pastor 3's name either and probably he also prefers it that way. But, again, he's a real pastor laboring faithfully in a church you've not heard of.
And I bet if you spoke to other pastors or friends you might know in other churches or cities, you'd find out that there are actually lots of folks like these two men, simply laboring in quiet obscurity, seeing God bless their work in various ways while also patiently enduring the things that cannot be helped.
None of this is to say we shouldn't care about pastor 1, let alone to make some version of the "don't let a few bad apples ruin it for everyone," type argument that you'll sometimes hear from evangelicals reluctant to deal frankly with corruption in the church. Pastor 1 has rightly been defrocked. Even apart from the relationship, I think it's hard to square his other behaviors with the requirements for pastors given in Scripture. We need to become far more serious than we have been about corruption, starting with the actual real enforcement of all the Pauline and Petrine demands for pastoral qualification.
My point is not to minimize the evils of corruption, then, but rather to note that even if it sometimes seems as if corruption is the norm, there still remain many faithful pastors. You just never hear about them.
People who spend a great deal of time online and consuming media can forget about this because their habits have a way of uprooting them from local community and small, local institutions. But even if you do not see it or you feel surrounded only by men like pastor 1, I can assure you that there are many pastors that look like pastor 2 and pastor 3.
Pray for them. Support them. Encourage them. For all the damage that men like pastor 1 do, there are countless forgotten goods and beauties that flow from the ministries of faithful shepherds.