Why you, preacher, should not commit adultery

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!

Letters to a shipwrecked minister

Before I had this blog I had another one. A pseudonymous one. It was called The View Beyond the End. I have decided to repost a piece from it - I think I am ready now, but it has taken a while. This piece explains something of the name of the blog, and how I came to write it. 

Letters

This blog is called what it is because I used to have a life in Christian ministry, and then it came to an end. It came to an end because, over a long period of time, I became cool toward God, professionalised in my work, and neglectful of my marriage. In the end I ended up committing adultery and losing my wife, my career, my reputation and, for a long period of time, all semblance of relationship with God. 

That I have come back I owe to so many factors – above all the preserving grace and infinite mercy of God, but, by way of instrumentality, the prayers of many, many people, and the loving support of my children and their spouses, and of many friends, including from the woman who is now my wife. 

A key instrument that God used in my return was communication by letter, and I wanted to write with thankfulness about the many letters I have received over the last years. You may not be in a position to meet up with a person going through what I was, but you may be able to send a traditional letter or write an email or Facebook message. These all had an impact on me. I stress the word "all", as some may seem to have been viewed very negatively. Indeed, at one level they were, and are, but they still formed part of the whole network of ways that God used in his sovereign grace to bring me back. 

I could categorise the communications in a number of ways 

1)   The aggressive and harsh

2)   The harsh and stern 

3)   The stern and loving

4)   The loving and spiritual 

5)   The spiritual and indirect 

1) The aggressive and harsh. 

I received a small number of letters whose tone was extremely unpleasant. In all cases they were from women; in all cases I knew that what drove the tone had more to do with experiences that the writer had been through themselves than specifically with me. 
 

In one case the writer assumed that I would not know who she was (in relation to other members of her family who I knew far better and who she quoted, unnamed, in her letter); on realising that I knew who she was she replied that she would never have written if she had thought I could identify her. She said that she would ask her daughter's forgiveness for quoting her; to the best of my knowledge she never has. 

Others were less underhanded, but almost as unpleasant. Adultery and betrayal, unhappy marriages and frustration – these things are all around us, and make for very vitriolic correspondents. 

I should say that one friend subsequently wrote to me with sincere apologies for her manner in writing her first letter. Reconciliation was very sweet. 

And the big point is that ALL these letters, although they made me sad and angry at the time, were part of the way God dealt with me to bring me back. Truth spoken viciously is still truth, and it struck home. The viciousness may say a lot about the author's state of mind and heart; the truth can be carried into the conscience.
 

2) The harsh and stern

I received a far larger number of letters, mainly from men, that could be described as harsh and stern. No personal venom, but a definite cold feel.  Sometimes they came from people I didn't know closely, but some were from people who had been close friends. 

 On one occasion the woman I was seeing saw one of these letters.  Her reaction, "THAT is from a FRIEND?" Notwithstanding her ignorance of Christian standards and expectations, she had a point. 

Yet every one of these letters had a real impact on me. Although sometimes my initial reaction was to be confirmed in my rebellion, deep down I knew differently, and over the long haul my conscience was challenged, time and time again. 

3) The stern and loving 

Then again, I received many letters and messages that were deeply serious but extraordinarily loving. These were often from former colleagues in Christian ministry – men I had known well or less well, who wrote to warn me of my spiritual peril. The letters did not pull punches – they told me plainly that if I continued on my present course I would be lost for ever, that I would go to hell – but they did so in a way that ached with pain and affection towards a wandering brother. 

These men were true shepherds. If tone could be described by way of action, while some letters yelled an order at a lost sheep, these letters came and offered to carry me home. 

 

And whereas others often fired off one missive and were done, these brothers sometimes made repeated, non-naggy, contact. 

Such letters never made me feel confirmed in my rebellion. They made me miss the love of these guys. They made me want to come home. 

4) The loving and spiritual 

 

The people who wrote most regularly were a handful of older ladies who never rebuked me at all. Whereas most of the stern letters were one-offs, a few people sent brief notes many times, sometimes with bits of news, a text that had spoken to them last Sunday, or a brief word of encouragement. Above all, I was reassured time and time again that they were praying for me. 

It would be a high-handed rebel indeed who could maintain steady anger towards such people. Some were like my mothers in the faith. Indeed, the most regular writer was directly connected to my conversion; it was after a meeting in her house nearly forty years ago that I had gone home to pray and seek God. 

These letters, too, really made me want to come home. 

5) The spiritual and indirect

This last category encompasses more than letters. It was more about contact. People who knew God, knew where I was at, knew what the score was, but without direct rebuking or nagging, simply interacted with me. Sometimes they asked questions about where I was at, in a way that took my spiritual state seriously, but with more serious empathy than direct condemnation. More often they just talked about other stuff. Life stuff. Being friends.

Facebook interaction was the general method – a comment on a photo here, a thoughtful political comment there, an appreciation for a YouTube music video or for a particular ale – these contacts from Christians who spoke naturally-and-yet-as-Christians broke down the illusion that I was living a brave new life, having all the fun. These people were human, and had warm and interesting and fulfilling lives, AND loved Christ, and let me know it without much direct speech.

They didn't just make me want to come home: they made me feel the pointlessness of not coming home.  That was a very big victory. 

   *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *  

In conclusion

 

I am grateful for ALL the above categories of correspondence. God used them all. My pastor through all of this was faithful in contact, and if meeting him could be put in terms of the categories of letters, he was both 3 and 5. 

I would say, if you know someone who has wandered:

·       Make contact. The most aggressive of the above types of letters were less painful and less of a stumbling block to my recovery than the massive roar of silence from the bulk of my Christian friends. Men in ministry who I had regarded as friends and colleagues for years made no attempt to contact me at all. To be honest, horrid contact is better than no contact.

·       Be real. Talk to the person where they are. Share your feelings of disappointment and betrayal if you have them. Be honest, so that genuine love may be seen and felt. But interact on a wider range of subjects than simply the sin. Be a friend.

·       Be open. Write in such a way as to encourage dialogue, more correspondence. Don't just fire off a missive (missile?) to salve your conscience as a "watchman"; plant a seed that may grow, starting an interaction that could save a wanderer. 

·      Talk about Jesus. When I was far away, I missed him. Every letter that made me miss him more was a nail in the coffin of rebellion. 

Thank you, all, for helping me come home. 

Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand

Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. 

One of the perpetual pitfalls for the church in its preaching is the tendency to moralism. We love telling people to do this, to not do that, and to change. And we have so many biblical passages to clobber and coerce people with. One is the phrase here, as preached by John the Baptist and then by Jesus. 

The problem is that we tend to see the command to change, but divorce it from the "Kingdom of God is at hand." When we do that we flatten out the time dimension in the passage. God was doing something, or about to do something. The repentance was to be a reaction to what God was doing. The FACT of his work was to lead to the urgent COMMAND to change. Indicative driving imperative, if you like your grammar old fashioned! 

This is how true Christian proclamation is always to be, of course. Not moralism, but good news; God acts, and in the light of it, commands do come our way. Moral command without good news is not Christian preaching - as is communication of gospel facts with no imperative cutting edge, of course! 

"Repent" in John the Baptist's preaching is therefore not a command floating free of a context, a general urge to pull your socks up, turn over a new leaf and change. It is all about impending action and change that God is doing. 

What was God doing? Judging from the texts that the gospels quote as speaking about John the Baptist's preaching - Malachi 3 and Isaiah 40 - two great threads of hope were about to be fulfilled, and fulfilled together. God was about to step into history, with comfort and salvation on the one hand, and with judgement and wrath on the other. It was in the light of that just-around-the-corner action that John's hearers were putting their lives in order. They were baptised because, though they had longed for God's arrival in salvation, they realised they were unprepared for his judgement. After all, who can abide the day of his coming?? Submission to John's baptism was the recognition that you were under a terrible judgement which was about to fall, not a glorified New Year's resolution. 

This perspective really helps us with the oddity of Jesus' baptism by John. So long as we see John's baptism as part of a general repentance process for sinners, then we are flummoxed by Jesus' need of it. But his "fulfilling all righteousness", as he said to John, was not repentance. It was the recognition through baptism that God was about to act.  Judgement and salvation were arriving. The Kingdom of God was at hand! 

Of course, the Kingdom was arriving because the King had arrived. Jesus is the King of the Kingdom. People were preparing for his coming. The shock for John, and for us, is that instead of inspecting, commanding, judging and punishing, the King comes quietly, like a Lamb, and says, right from the start, "I'm under the soon-to-come judgement."

And that's how the salvation comes to the rest of us.