I want to write to friends
in Christian ministry – especially to the many men I know whose income comes
from Christian people, whether simply from the offerings in an independent
church, from denominational funds, or channelled through a mission or other parachurch
agency. I want to write to you who are called to minister God’s word, preaching
his gospel and shepherding his flock, and I want to urge you not to commit
adultery. I know that at this very moment some of you are being tempted in this
direction, and I fear that some of you will fall.
There are so many reasons I
can think of for writing in this way, so many motives I could bring to your
attention. But I want to focus on one, because it is the one that never
occurred to me during my trajectory into sin. I have to confess that I was
conscious of most of the others; I am aware that that is a pretty grim
confession as it makes clear how wilful and high-handed my sin was.
So, I am not writing to tell
you not to commit adultery because of the offence to Jesus Christ that such sin
would be. You are aware of the appalling blasphemy and peril of wilfully
sinning against his precious blood that cleaned you up, but I am not writing
about that. I’m not writing to urge you not to grieve the Holy Spirit by using
your body – his temple – in a way which utterly rejects his presence. I’m not
writing to remind you of the desperate spurning of the Father’s eternal love
that such an action would represent.
I’m not writing to press on
you the awful impact of such unfaithfulness on your own local church, and
perhaps on many other people who look up to you in wider circles. Of course,
real converts to Jesus won’t simply fall away because you do: rather, they will
see through you and your sin. But they will be desperately disappointed and
hurt, and some may suffer real spiritual damage and set back over this. And
there will be those who are as yet uncommitted who will make this THE excuse
for their not coming to Jesus. Some will even cite your example as part of
their own pathway to adultery. They will give account for that one day, to the
extent that it is a shallow, fake excuse; you will, to the extent that it
isn’t. And the young people in the church who you have known from little kids
will be hurt the most. But I’m not writing to you about all that.
I’m not writing to you about
your own marriage and family. Of course, in the state you’re in right now, your
wife’s love and commitment may not be meaning much to you. Believe me, one day
you will see this phase of your life with less astigmatism. If you commit
adultery you will be running headlong into catastrophic breakdown in your
marriage. Before it is discovered or confessed, the secret act itself will
already mean that nothing will ever be the same again with the woman to whom
you made your vows; discovery will take you into as yet unimaginable fear,
shame and misery as you face break-up and divorce, or a long, hard and
frequently painful road to putting things right. Whether divorcing or “saving
it", you are going to put the woman you promised to love and cherish
through as great an emotional pain as you can possibly inflict. And your
children, who have probably already put up with a lot due to your ministry,
will put up with a whole lot more. From being pedestal-placed preacher’s kids
they will become the pitied, and possibly suspect, failed-preacher’s kids. And,
though they already knew you and your weaknesses and the issues in your
marriage and behaviour like no leader or member of your church knew, they will
in future see you in a whole new light and you will run the risk of losing them
completely. But I’m not writing to you about that.
I’m not writing to you about
the risk to your own personal life, your mental and physical health, and your
eternal salvation. It isn’t my aim to impress on you the appalling sense of
free fall that can come over you when everything is in breakdown. I needn’t
talk about the hours sitting in a practically empty room with a tube of
Pringles and a bottle of whisky, when the distance between being a well-known,
respected preacher and living as a drunk on the streets suddenly seems
incredibly narrow. I am not talking about the slow, uncertain and insecure
struggle to totally reinvent yourself, finding some kind of job in midlife,
with the one skill set in which you feel moderately confident now utterly
valueless and irrelevant. I am not warning you about the perils of actually
surviving and making some money, when ex-pastors find themselves starting to
live by precisely the materialistic, or promiscuous, or plain idolatrous
lifestyle that they warned against for so long. I have friends who were great
preachers and able theologians who are now living as practical atheists. I know
of others who have ended up simply denying all they once stood for, slipping
from orthodox Christian faith through liberalism to agnosticism or even some
tailor-made mystical or pagan nonsense that will give them a philosophical
excuse to carry on random sex. I could never manage that - I was always
strictly orthodox in my sinning, so I know what it is to carry around in my
head and conscience the truth I preached for 20 years, and yet live in total
disobedience to it. I know the semi-madness of that incoherence, and I know the
fear and dread that goes with it, but I’m not writing about that.
Nor am I writing to you
about the utter social emptiness that can hit you as your friends and
colleagues drop you. As I have written before, there will be those who
write, and those who don’t. To this day, there are those who ignore my
messages, refuse my friend requests and generally give me the cold shoulder. I
am not condoning their behaviour – though I know that I used to be pretty much
as ungracious. In that context it is easy to give way to bitterness, and it is
that bitterness that can make it easy to live, or excuse our living, in a state
of worsening backsliding. It is a lethal whirlpool that can suck you down to
hell, while all the time you self-justify by complaining about the
injustice/heartlessness/hypocrisy of your erstwhile friends. It is horrible,
but I am not writing to you about that.
No, I’m not writing to you
about any of that. I’m writing to you about something else. I’m writing about
the situation you may find yourself in if, by God’s amazing grace, you come out
the other side of the grand canyon of sin into which adultery will throw
you.
I think many of us ministers
who sinned sexually did so in a context of wider issues. Tiredness,
disillusion, financial pressures, marital struggles, relationship tensions with
church or mission colleagues – a general malaise in and with the ministry which
combined with spiritual backsliding to leave us frankly uncaring about the
consequences of sin. One Christian leader even suggested to me that adultery
was a mode of “ministry suicide” – just about the only way definitively to
escape a treadmill.
These “wider issues” are no
excuse for sin, of course. But I mention them because they may be one reason
why losing this job, this career, this calling, doesn’t carry much weight at
present. And you may even want shot of it. And that is what I wanted to write
about.
Let’s suppose that, like I
did, you do this evil thing. And let’s suppose that, by God’s shocking grace,
you emerge the other side as a Christian. You may find yourself in a church in
broadly the same circle that you have ministered in. You were known there. But
you will never be what you were. Even the whole business of “going to church”
will have to be relearned and reinvented. A lot of that humbling will do you
nothing but good, but over time, as your spiritual life is re-formed, you will
find yourself feeling again and again your inability to relate to what is
happening around you. Your mind will be like a Formula One engine with no power
train to connect it to the road. You will feel like an athlete who can never
run.
In my case, and every case
is different, after the slow road (while still overtly not living as a
Christian) via village Anglicans and then anonymous attendance at a distant
FIEC church, I had a time back as a professing Christian in an independent
Baptist church where I was well known. I then remarried and, by virtue of my
new wife’s church involvement, now find myself in the Salvation Army. At the
time we married I had very low expectations of what I could/should/would be
able to do; my only desire was to love her faithfully and assist her in living
out her calling. But I have been gradually coming alive. And the very
circumstances into which God has placed me are reminders of past hopes, past
preparation for ministry, a past sense of calling and purpose. Sarah’s
unanticipated appointment to the Salvation Army training college in Camberwell
not only took me back uncomfortably to wonderful days in South London 30 years
earlier, but her role teaching the very disciplines in which I had worked in
colleges and seminaries all over Brazil seemed like a particular pointed
providence. The Salvation Army is at one and the same time a lovely
gracious body which encourages and is open to new starts among those who have
slipped very, very low. It is also a
holiness/Arminian movement whose doctrines I respect, but which I cannot fully
subscribe, and that might appear to place a natural limit on my usefulness within the organisation.
As I say, every case is
different. Your trajectory after adultery will not be the same as mine. You
cannot presume that there will be a way back to God in your story at all. (Even
though, wherever you are right now, there is a way back to God, and you know
it, don’t you?) But supposing you do come back, what then?
After the initial howling
pain has shifted into the past, after your children have graciously put
together some new level of relationship with you, after you have got
comfortable in a Christian meeting again, after you have reinstated the
long-lost rhythm of Bible reading and prayer and even read some theology again,
you will wake up and remember.
If you were ever really
called to the ministry at all, you will remember what it is to preach the
gospel. I don’t mean get up on your hind legs and give a talk in church. I mean
that, whether it was one to one, in a small group or in a big congregation, you
knew what it was to bring a word that came from the throne of heaven, portrayed
the beauty and love of Christ crucified, and called for repentance Now. You knew
what it was to feel yourself held at the intersection of the only three moments that matter – Christ’s past coming, his future judgement and the
day that is called Today, and to be the herald given by God for these people in
front of you. You knew what it was to see, to sense, God at work, to know
that this word now was making impact, that lives were being challenged, that
grace was breaking in, that the silence and power were from the Holy Spirit of
God, that you were a mere mouthpiece in what God was doing, and that he was
doing what he loves to do. You knew that not everyone was called to do this,
and that every calling was of great value to God, but you also knew that this
was what you were made for and you had to do it and do it to the best of your ability.
And you blew it. But then
one day you are spiritually awake again. And, each morning, you are off to (in
my case) sell granite worktops or take photographs. And, though you enjoy those
jobs in a way, you know that you are not going to do the one thing you were
really created for. You know you have put yourself into a permanent bypath.
And that sensation isn’t going to go away, or diminish with time, like
the first screaming terror of adultery-discovered. This is going to go on and
on, for the rest of your life.
I was recently reasonably
ill. Not very ill – I was quite clear that I wasn’t dying! – but ill enough to
spend a night in hospital and have a fair battery of tests. It made me stop and
think. Despite so much happiness in my new marriage, and much pleasure
from so many good things in life – travel and food and music and books and film
and mountains and photography – I lay there at one stage really thinking
through whether I would actually prefer to be dying, simply because of this.
When you have fully woken up to your original sense of calling, the weight of
the disqualification that adultery brings seems utterly unbearable.
I am not saying I can’t bear
it. By God’s grace I am pressing on. I try to explore any and every pathway to
spiritual usefulness and fruitfulness, and I guess this blog is part of that.
But nothing prepared me or warned me about the deep, inward angst of feeling
that my life is now doomed to be a continuous, steady waste where nothing is
actually what it could and should have been, and where I have thrown away the
years of my maturity in ministry – the strategic years, the weighty years,
years where with language and cultural knowledge under my belt in Brazil I
could have been speaking into the spiritual chaos with some helpfulness.
That is what I am trying to
write to you about. If you commit adultery, you can’t count on getting back a
spiritual life at all. You may disappear without trace in the swamp of sin that
your new “freedom” and exclusion from the church open up to you. But if the
initial pain is got through and you do come back, don’t think that that will be
the end. You will be forgiven, you will be back among Christian people, you
will be useful. But regrets… boy, you’ll have a few.
If you are being tempted, my
dear brother, THINK!
