Sinners as Leaders: Follow-Up

I had some thoughts on John's post from the other day that I thought I'd write down.

The reaction of society at large to Christian leaders' sins when they're revealed publicly is often to think that, if every Christian is not better than every non-Christian, then Christianity must not be true. An agnostic coworker of mine saw this as a major reason not to believe in Christianity: its adherents claim to be in communication with an all-powerful, perfectly good God, but most of them don't seem particularly better or worse than others around them. If it makes no difference in their lives, if it doesn't make them remarkably different than everyone else, then what good is it? How can it be so powerful if its effects are so invisible?

This is a subtle logical fallacy that I would address with an analogy. Let's say James and Rick are both in the same field. James goes to college for a degree in the field, and Rick does not. Rick, without a degree, is more knowledgeable about the field than James is with his degree. Therefore, college is not valuable: people who did not go are still smarter than people who did go.

The false implication here is that in order for college to be acknowledged as valuable, every college graduate must be smarter than every person who did not go to college. This is an improbable condition to meet: Rick could be a genius, and no amount of education would elevate James over him. In this light we can see that this is not a necessary condition for college to be valuable. In what way is college valuable, then, if James is not smarter than Rick at the end of it?

The answer is this: college's value is not about making James smarter than Rick. Its value is solely in improving James. Its value can only be measured in terms of how much smarter the college experience made James than he himself was beforehand. Rick's intelligence is irrelevant and distracts us from what's truly being measured.

Christianity works the same way. Jesus doesn't promise to make you objectively better than the best non-Christian: if you let Him, He promises to make you better than you are. Thus, Christianity can have tremendous value without meeting our arbitrary standard of making every Christian better (in some objective sense) than every non-Christian. It would certainly be a momentous change for a murderer to be brought to the point where he is as good a man as his neighbors!

Returning to John's post, I have perhaps more reservations than John about those who have sinned publicly continuing to lead. I want very much to forgive them their sins; if we as Christians can't forgive each other then we don't really know our faith. I agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment. Nor is it easy to show forgiveness while revoking a leader's position; fair or not, necessary or not, it will feel like a punishment to the individual and may make him feel that his church does not truly forgive him. For instance, it feels very cruel to remove a pastor from his position because he's getting divorced. It feels like kicking him when he's down, wounding him when he needs support the most.

However, there are some kinds of sin which to me would seem to preclude the possibility of effective leadership. It's important to consider the circumstances. There are a few situations which could be outside the pastor's control -- his wife has decided to leave regardless of whether he grants a divorce, or she has committed adultery. On the other hand, what of the ever popular "irreconcilable differences"? What if he simply feels that "it isn't working anymore" and that both parties should move on, as is common in society at large?

I don't cite this example to indicate that those who divorce are the worst of sinners, or any such thing. "The wages of sin is death," big or small, public or private. However, some sins lead us into a place where everything we do is sinful; where simply leaving things as they are for another day takes us farther from God; where we cannot draw close to Him. We cannot be washed clean when we're standing in the mud.

If a man divorces his wife without Biblical cause, every step he takes which is not a step towards reconciliation with her in recognition of his sin is a step away from God. There can be no neutrality: everything he does, he does instead of doing what's right. In this state, how can he lead God's church?

We must forgive those who repent; our God commands it, and He knows I've needed that forgiveness many times and will again. I simply think it's important to recognize a man who has fully turned away from his sin and has turned back toward the light from one who has simply walked away from the sin. Leadership of God's church is too important not to consider it.