For the three months since I wrote this post, I've tried to write some sort of a follow up.
In that post I said,
But is it worth it for the Church to hold onto the pastor role if it results in people experiencing bullying, sexual assault, lifelong trauma, trust issues, and broken relationships?
Almost immediately after that post went live, two people sent me private messages with the same argument:
There are bad apples everywhere. We can’t get rid of pastors altogether just because some of them do bad things.
Those messages bothered me at the time but I couldn't articulate why.
I'm still not entirely sure if I can.
I think at least part of why I was so bothered about that response was because of who the focus was on.1
Not the bullied.
Or assaulted.
Or traumatized.
Or those with trust issues.
Or those who’ve lost relationships.
The immediate focus was to defend pastors and the church structure that supports them.
Honestly, I understand the impulse.
I have pastors that I love.
Ones who have done a tremendous amount of good in their churches. In their neighborhoods. In the world.
I don’t like criticizing the profession.
And I do understand that as a general rule, the existence of pastors brings far more good than bad into the world.
Not all pastors are bad.
Just like not all churches are bad.
I get that.
Still, I don’t think “more good than bad” is a good enough goal.
Keeping the good/bad ratio above 50/50 is a pretty freaking weak goal.
People have experienced abuse in the church.
From pastors and ministry leaders.
And more often than not, the ministry leaders get away with it.
It feels wrong to sidestep that reality by saying that “there are bad apples everywhere.”
If there’s something structurally rotten in the Church, it needs to be fixed.
And if part of what’s rotten is the ways that we elevate and protect our pastors and our church systems, then maybe our priorities need to change entirely.
Our quickness to defend pastors before focusing on victims is probably telling.
Maybe pastors keep getting away with abuse because we’re all so quick to defend them.
When the initial gut response is to defend the system, there's a problem.
When the primary response is not “how do we prevent people from becoming victims of abuse?”, there's a problem.
Why are we so quick to defend our structures of power?
Because they're comfortable?
Familiar?
I’ll write more about this next week probably. Depression’s been a bear this week, and I’m having a hard time stringing together any thoughts.
This substack is, and will always be, free.
I have zero plans to ever put anything I write here behind a paywall.
But if you want to financially support my writing, you’re welcome to do that.
Supporting me won’t get you anything tangible.
But you’ll make me smile.
And you’ll probably incentivize me to keep writing.
God, that sentence is a grammatical nightmare
And the argument completely misses the point of the bad apple analogy is that they ruin the whole bunch, which has to be tossed.