Malpractice Insurance

where do the wolves keep coming from?

Recently our board of elders finished a bylaws revision project for our local church. As we neared the end of the project, one of my goals for the revision was causing me problems. I have more time behind me now than I do ahead of me in my vocation and among other things, I wanted to make sure that these new bylaws would be comprehensive and robust enough to make sure that no future pastor or elder could game the system and use their position of influence to do harm. My goal was to create a document that would empower people with clarity of purpose and practice that would make it impossible for any individual or small group to utilize the inherent power of leadership positions to take advantage of that power or evolve into a tyrannical or dictatorial style of church leadership.

And I failed.

About 2 weeks from our final ratification, I realized that there simply was no system, no matter how clever, by which we could ensure that there was no malpractice by leadership in the church.

That probably seems obvious to you but at the time, after almost 35 years of ministry experience, I still believed that a document could be so well crafted that a system would be empowered to be “abuse proof.” I was naïve.

In the end, I realized that my mother’s observation about doors and locks was true, locks only keep honest people out. At best, people bent on doing harm might be slowed by a lock on a door, but they wouldn’t be stopped.

In the same way, a person determined to be a bully, given the right conditions, can and will be a bully, no matter how “bully proof” the rules of the game or group might be. It is the unwillingness of the other participants to play with a bully that can make a difference. And frankly, after 35ish years of ministry experience, I can confirm that a lot of people love a bully but more impactfully, a whole lot of people are willing to ignore the behavior of a bully as long as they get things done and advance the overall goals of an organization.

In the New Testament, the book of Acts tells the story of the early Church. There’s a moment, well into the story, in which the apostle Paul meets with a group of church elders in a young church (they all were young then) just before facing a legal trial that probably won’t go well for him. Rather than bylaws or a special set of rules, Paul gives them a practice and implores them to use it to safeguard against malpractice by leaders of the church. Paul writes:

“So guard yourselves and God’s people. Feed and shepherd God’s flock—his church, purchased with his own blood—over which the Holy Spirit has appointed you as leaders. I know that false teachers, like vicious wolves, will come in among you after I leave, not sparing the flock. Even some men from your own group will rise up and distort the truth in order to draw a following. Watch out! Remember the three years I was with you—my constant watch and care over you night and day, and my many tears for you.” (AC 20:28-32 NLT)

Paul was, in this part of the story at least, a realist. Trouble’s going to come.

The only thing we can do about malpractice by church leaders is not accept it, facilitate it, empower it or approve it. Rules can’t stop it, rules can only underline where it’s happening or where it has happened.

Let me clarify what I mean by malpractice though. The truth is that a lot of pastors find themselves at odds with boards and congregations or congregants.

Years ago, as a youth pastor in a small church, I showed a movie at a youth group lock-in. To be honest, having a lock-in was probably malpractice but at the time it seemed like a good idea. However, the movie had a scene in it in which the main character swore. He used the word, “damn.” It was not in a biblical context. It happened once and was the only “swear” word in the film. One young woman was shocked and stunned and immediately left the room and called her father to come pick her up. She would have nothing to do with my corruption. Within a few days I was meeting with a couple of our church elders to “explain myself.” The father of the young girl wanted the elders to fire me for subjecting his daughter and our whole youth group to offensive language inside of the church building.

This is not the kind of malpractice I am talking about. I’m not talking about having disagreements or situations that develop that leave some people with feelings of disappointment or unhappiness or just an overall lack of satisfaction. When I refer to malpractice I am not talking about people feeling harmed because we introduced too many new songs last Sunday or the sermon slide had jesus accidentally spelled with a lower case j.

I’m talking about people who do real harm, who use their position to get their own way. I’m referring to those who engage in graft and corruption and abuse. Malpractice in leadership of the Church is where people behave more like John Wayne than Jesus. It’s when leaders tell lies and double down on their lies with more lies or self-justification. Malpractice is when leaders won’t own their stuff and won’t apologize. Malpractice is when church leaders knowingly manipulate, gas light and attempt to control people whose souls they have been charged to care for.

And while we can buy insurance to pay off those who have been damaged by malpractice, we can not come up with a system by which we can guarantee people that they will not be harmed by unscrupulous men or unhealthy men or mentally ill men (and women) who function as leaders in the church. We can define what ought to happen. We can define what healthy looks like. But in the end it requires all of us to watch out and call out the wolves.

Sadly, today, that means a lot of people are walking away from the institutional church because they’ve done their part and called a wolf a wolf but their concerns and pain have been dismissed “for the greater good.” We’ve created a dysfunctional culture of silence and our discomfort with confrontation and disagreement has convinced us that saying nothing is more godly than saying something. Or at least safer than saying something. If you’ve watched any of the documentaries out now about Hillsong and Carl Lentz, read articles or listened to the Fall of Mars Hill podcast, or watched the Shiny Happy People docuseries, you know that people who speak up in abusive and unhealthy systems are typically the people who are vilified and ostracized. The people who cry “wolf!” are the ones labelled as troublemakers and told that they didn’t cry “wolf!” the right way, “first,” we tell them, “go talk to the wolf and try to reconciled” (which turns out is difficult to do while the wolf is licking its lips).

But it’s really simple. We hate conflict and tension and so it’s much easier to project all those feelings onto the person who raised the alarm, lodged the complaint, made the accusation than it is to take a long, hard, honest, and transparent look at the situation.

Julie Roys is a perfect example of our malady. James MacDonald is a pastor who has behaved badly. Malpractice barely begins to describe the things MacDonald has done. Yet, when Roys publishes a story about MacDonald’s many improprieties, Christians tell her to stop being so judgmental and stop giving non-Christians a reason to criticize the church. Repeatedly, church goers will tell Roys some version of “for God’s sake, stop airing our dirty laundry.” The impression this creates and that permeates the Church is that the harm James MacDonald has done is nothing compared to exposing that harm and telling people about his wolfy ways.

The same is true with Brian Houston from Hillsong or Carl Lentz or Mark Driscoll or Mike Pilavachi or Alan Scott at Dwelling Place Anaheim. We’re aghast now at the long list of abusive leadership practices of Alan that have been cited of late but are hardly new. When Alan first landed at Anaheim, I expressed concerns about his rhetoric and his actions, another pastor who had worked with Alan spoke admiringly of some of the very practices we now clutch our pearls over. His previous issues and practices were not unknown when he came to Anaheim with great promises to “restore the glory to the house!” They were not unknown or unlogged when he was approached, just prior to its disaffiliation from the Vineyard, to have a place among the national leadership.

In the same way, we are now told that people in power had been told many times by many people about the questionable practices of Mike Pilavachi. But the “success” of Soul Survivor was of greater importance and significance than those who complained about Mike’s egregious malpractice and abuses of power. Our problem isn’t that no one speaks up, it’s that if someone is deemed “successful,” no one listens.

And worse, we try to stop those who are talking.

In Acts, Paul tells the Ephesian elders that it comes down to their relationships and their willingness in the context of their relationships to resist the wolves. What he doesn’t say but we’ve since learned is that so much of our identity can become associated with being in the coolest, most successful herd that until it’s my leg the wolf is gnawing on, I can have tremendous capacity to ignore their malpractice. We’re reaping the whirlwind in these “deconstruction” days of the countless numbers of people, mostly women, who have now left the Church and are telling their stories, who have been harmed by the malpractice of the system and system keepers.

Perhaps the true malpractice insurance is making space in all our gatherings for people to share their stories of the systems and practices that have done them harm in the hope that we will reform our ways and redefine our success. Maybe if we held onto these stories and intentionally made them public, we would develop a greater capacity to recognize malpractice when it begins and be more apt to believe the stories when they come to us.