Dreamers’ Hub

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A few days back, I was informed that a peer in a ministerial association has had sex before marriage. That peer contemplates resigning from the church.

Yesterday, I received a verbal note that said, “Sorry for the disappointment.” I was on a leadership seminar for pastors and Christian leaders. It was from a youth that I am mentoring who fell into sexual sin.

That note made me think about my own spiritual journey. My life too has been laden with ups and downs that if one would draw a line graph about it, I wonder how it would look like.

I know that the youth who sent the note to me via one of her friends who was also my disciple expects an answer soon. So I began to assess my own feelings about the situation. Shall I disassociate from her as others have already done?

While pressed with such dilemma, I remember reading the book, “Overcoming the Dark Side of Leadership” which I bought late last year. The book explored the psychology of leadership by doing case studies about the life and leadership of famous secular and Christian leaders.

From the book, I made a mental note that in the last two decades, the Church had been hurt by controversies involving leaders who “fell from grace” as some say.

There was the case of Evangelist Jimmy Swaggart which shocked and hurt many in the 1980s. Then there was former US President Bill Clinton, who narrowly escaped impeachment because of his sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky; he was an ardent evangelical Christian. The authors of the book which I have earlier cited even made a case study about famous PTL television evangelist, Jim Bakker.

So armed with such saddening insight, I decided to add a discussion about integrity in this blog in hopes that this would allow me to frame the right words to say to my hurting disciple.

In this venture, though, I will try to be fair by not pointing fingers on people who by some form of measuring rod formulated by some well-meaning Christians, have little or no integrity because they have fallen- people like Mike Guglielmucci, Todd Bentley, Ted Haggard, Roberts Liardon and others who were labeled as fraud, fake and a blemish to the good reputation of the Church of Jesus Christ in the eyes of some.

However, I cannot do this without first leading you to the fact that integrity is not an easy word to discuss. It is not an easy topic to explore even for pastors like us who are also prone to fail. Take note that those who are now labeled as fraud and fake are also leaders who may have at one time or more have discussed the very same concept that I am trying to discuss here.

For one, it is hard to discuss because integrity is a gargantuan theory. It is multi-faceted in scope.

It is easy to say (I think the better word is condemn) a person to have little or no integrity if he is a recognized leader in the Church who was found all of a sudden to have certain skeletons in the closet such as lying about having cancer to atone for having a secret addiction to pornography for 12 years or having a homosexual affair with his youth pastor for a time.

These situations are of course valid arguments on the matter at hand. Didn’t the Bible in Ephesians 5 outlined for us that Christians most especially leaders are supposed to have high standards of living? That our lifestyle should mirror the lifestyle of Jesus?

The answer to both is of course yes and in light of that fact (which is totally biblical) we sometimes forget that it is also biblical not to condemn our fallen brothers by readily branding them as fake or fraud or by pointing our fingers on them by making them grandiose illustrations of a life without integrity.

It is sad that sometimes, in our effort to stand to the truth set forth in one part of God’s Word we forget what is set forth beside it.

The way I see it, in every discussion about integrity lays the tension between responding with grace and responding with condemnation. Taking sides on both are equally dangerous. If we will respond with grace we might at one point tolerate the sin. That is dangerous. If we will, on the other hand, respond with condemnation, if we will point fingers on them, we might lose the opportunity to restore a fallen brother. That falls short of Jesus’ example in the Bible.

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