Or, why leaders must confess
A friend in California lives between two animal lovers. To the right of his house lives a man who owns three dogs. To the left resides a family that raises expensive Angora rabbits.
One day the dog owner returned home to find his backyard gate open and the dogs gone. With a quick whistle the dogs soon bounded home to greet their master. In the mouth of one dog was his neighbors prize rabbit — very dirty and very dead.
“Drop it!” the dog owner yelled. The dog obeyed, looking repentant and creeping back to the doghouse.
As the dog owner started over to the neighbors house to apologize, another thought suddenly came to him.It was early in the day yet and his neighbor would not be home for an hour or more.
The dog owner quietly turned around and went home. He took the rabbit to the bathroom tub and washed off the dirt. Then he dried the dead rabbit off with a hair dryer. Returning to the neighbors back yard, he found the pen where the prize rabbit was normally found, placed the rabbit inside, closed the pen and crept discreetly back to his house.
About nine o’clock that night the phone rang. It was the rabbit owner calling.
“Could you come over here right away,” the rabbit owner said. “I have something I want to show you.”
“Sure. I’ll be right over,” the dog owner responded with a pang of guilt.
“Thanks for coming,” the rabbit owner said when his neighbor arrived, leading him to the rabbit pen. “It is my prize rabbit,” the owner said, “he is dead.”
“I’m sorry,” the dog owner said trying to look both surprised and concerned.
“Yes, it is sad,” the rabbit owner said. “But here is the amazing thing . . . this rabbit died yesterday and I buried him in the back yard.”
My mother would often quote a verse from Scripture to my siblings and me when we were growing up, “Be sure your sins will find you out.” We came to fear and to hate that verse.
Break a rule and you would be in trouble. But lie about it and the waters got much deeper.
The game, of course, was weighing the cost of lying against the chance of being caught. I learned early on that it is a game you will always lose.
A principle of life and leadership is that there is nothing hidden from God. All things will one day come to light. Sooner or later, you will be found out.
In fact, the thrust of Scripture assumes two very important facts:
First, that we — all of us — are dogs in want of a doghouse. All sin and fall short. All, including leaders, will fail — often miserably. Count on it. This does not surprise God.
Second, and because of the first, God has provided a remedy in repentance. Here as in all places, the Gospel turns our common wisdom on its head. Our culture gives all benefit of doubt to the sinner. We are innocent until proven guilty with rights against self-incrimination. The dodge is on from the get-go.
The expectation of Scripture, in contrast, is that we — all of us — are guilty. Further, it is the sinner himself who should be first not only to admit his sin but to expose it before it is commonly known. That’s why the Apostle John writes: “I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense–Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.” (1Jn 2:1)
What distinguishes the Christian story from others is that God, in grace, provides the means for us to right our wrongs, to take full responsibility for our sin and, in so doing, begin a process of reconstituting our character. Self-disclosure of sin is the first step to transformation. Like sunbathers on a beach we should long to bask in the Light.
What should surprise us, then, is not that Christian leaders sin but that we do not put into practice the distinguishing characteristic of our redemptive story — confession. Instead, we cover up.
Several years ago we were called into a church that was in deep conflict over a long ordeal with their senior pastor . . .
Pastor Tim and his wife, Nancy, (not their actual names) had been having marital problems. When the Board of the church asked Tim about it, Tim told them that he and Nancy had been struggling for some time. He did not explain why and the board did not ask.
Instead, Tim and Nancy were encouraged to take time off together. They went away. The church prayed for them and, for a time, things seemed to improve.
Months later, though, some members noticed that Nancy and the kids were always alone in the parsonage. Soon word filtered out that Nancy had asked Tim for a divorce. Pastor Tim resigned. Nancy stayed on at the parsonage until she could find another home.
The church split between loyalties and accusations for and against Tim and Nancy. Some believed Tim was at fault, others blamed Nancy. No one knew the full story. The church took a tailspin into confusion, gossip and rancor.
A year later, we were called in to assess this church. By now, Tim and Nancy’s divorce was final. Tim was already engaged to marry a woman from a prominent family in the congregation. Nancy, we soon found out, was having an affair with a deacon who had left his wife.
This scenario was bad enough, but the story got worse. In the course of our assessment we pieced together the following events.
Ten years earlier, Tim had been asked to resign as pastor of another church after a sexual liaison with a teen-age girl in the church youth group. The girl’s family had threatened to sue the church but agreed not to press charges or tell the church about the sin if Tim agreed to leave the church immediately “for personal reasons” that were never explained. With the help of his denomination, Tim soon applied and was called to the church we were assessing. During the candidating process, no one asked Tim why he had left his previous church and neither Tim nor the denomination mentioned Tim’s moral failure.
When I met with Tim for lunch I asked him to explain his silence. Tim told me that he had wanted to say something to the church about his past but his superior in the denomination advised him against it. When the church hired Tim he plunged into ministry determined to put his past behind him.
Still, Tim told me, he did not feel right about keeping the secret. So one day he shared his story with his associate pastor. Tim felt relieved. He told no one else.
Months later, however, Tim discovered that his associate pastor was having a homosexual relationship with a young man in the church. Outraged at this, Tim confronted the associate pastor. You might guess what happened. “If you tell the church about me,” he threatened, “then I will tell them about your past.”
Both pastors had a secret about the other, so they agreed not to tell either story. Instead, the associate pastor resigned “for personal reasons.”
As our weekend assessment unfolded, more secrets were exposed. We learned that three more leaders in the church had committed adultery during the past ten years. Some church members knew bits and pieces of the story, but most did not. No sin was ever specifically acknowledged or publicly confessed. Instead, leaders resigned and left, usually under a cloud of mystery.
While this story sounds extreme, it is true. Worse, it is not uncommon.
We frequently receive calls from church and denomination leaders asking for advice about how to manage a leader’s sin. Our response, of course, is to say, “You don’t manage sin, you confess it.” These leaders are understandably concerned about fallout.
“It will split the church,” they say, “or hurt people,” or “ruin a reputations” if the sin became public knowledge.
Our experience is that repentance is always less painful and a lot more helpful to the leader and to the church. When sin is confessed openly, humbly and completely as soon as it becomes known, the sinner and community can embody reconciliation. Silence and cover-up, on the other hand, invites heaviness and harm.
Witness David’s words in Psalm 32: Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the LORD does not count against him and in whose spirit is no deceit. When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD” — and you forgave the guilt of my sin. Selah
George MacDonald once wrote, “our sins are crimes that will hunt us, either to the bosom of God or to the pit of hell.”
In his book, Eyewitness to Power, David Gergen discusses Richard Nixon’s presidency and the lessons learned from Watergate. “A cover up is always worse than the crime,” Gergen writes. This is especially true of Christian leaders.
When a pastor or Christian leader falls, the first and worst possible reaction is to cover up. It is always wrong. It is wrong first and foremost because Scripture says it is. Confession was, from early on, the primary means for Israel to make themselves right with God (Lev 5:5) and confession is the means by which the New Testament believer finds salvation and sanctification. “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead,” Paul says, “you will be saved.”(Ro 10:9) The Apostle John writes, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” (1Jo 1:9)
Confession is not a one time event but a continual practice, a way of life. It is the very means for growing and forming our character, changing our habits and renewing our mind. The apostle James even hints that our health is dependent upon regular confession. “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other,” writes James, “so that you may be healed.” Unconfessed sin, as the context of this passage suggests, leads to trouble and sickness.
So why don’t we confess? I suspect that here, as in so many other places, we adopt the habits of our culture rather than apply the values of the cross.
Our culture assumes that people are good and that sin is private. If people are good and sin is private then we need acceptance, not forgiveness; a therapist, not community.
L. Gregory Jones writes in Embodying Forgiveness, that “the rise of therapy cannot be understood without simultaneously recognizing both the complicity of the church and its failure to embody practices of love, forgiveness and reconciliation.” (pp. 44)
It is a telling, shameful sign of our syncretism, that the church would rather refer a sinner to an outside expert to handle our “private” pathologies then apply the power of the cross through corporate confession, forgiveness and restitution.
In contrast, the values of the cross tell us that all believers are sinners and that our lives are not our own. When we came to Christ for salvation we did not stop sinning. The difference between a believer and an unbeliever is not that the believer no longer sins. We are sinners! The difference is that now, in Christ, we have a new, spiritual reality that can redeem our guilt and reform our habits and reconstitute our character.
“In the face of human sin and evil,” says Jones, “God’s love moves toward reconciliation by means of costly forgiveness. Human beings are called to become holy by embodying that forgiveness through specific habits and practices that seek to remember the past truthfully, to repair brokenness, to heal divisions, and to reconcile and renew relationships.”
Confession, then, is the gateway to embodying the Gospel story. Acknowledging sin is the first step into a way of life shaped by the cross.
If the church is to be the church, confession must be taught and modeled by leaders. It has always been so. Consider Moses, David and Peter. Each committed significant sins while they were leaders. The very fact that these sins are recorded in Scripture tells us how God views the public disclosure of sin.
If the church is the body of Christ and we (all believers) are members of it, then there is no right to privacy. There is no private sin. All sin belongs to the church.
Paul writes: “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.” (Eph 5:8,11)
When leaders fail to confess they disobey Scripture and they violate the trust of their people — making two problems when there was once only one. And the second problem — the failure to confess — is the greater problem because it denies the power and reality of the cross.
Our experience working with fallen leaders follows the same pattern of Scripture:
When a leader confesses sin specifically, completely and humbly, submitting to a process of transformation, that leader is broken, healed and often restored to much greater ministry.
When a leader refuses to confess or submit, that leader always grows distant, bitter and frequently ends up destroying (often by self-sabotage) his marriage and ministry.
Is there anything in your life that, if exposed today, would bring dishonor to Christ? If so, “sin is crouching at you door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.” (Gen 4:7)
God would have you confess. After all, the doghouse is not a bad place to be once you admit that you are a dog.