Clergy abuse scandals and a prophetic moment I have not forgotten
Rev. Robert Morris founded Gateway Church in April 2000 at the Hilton Hotel in Grapevine, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Ten years later, the church opened its current sixty-four-acre facility. In November 2018, it was ranked the fourth largest megachurch in the US with about twenty-eight thousand weekly attendees.
While I do not know Robert Morris personally, I have known many who have benefited greatly from Gateway’s ministries over the years. It was deeply grievous to learn of horrific abuse allegations against Morris last June, prompting his resignation.
This week, news broke that Morris has now been indicted on child sex abuse charges in Oklahoma. The former pastor is charged with five counts of lewd or indecent acts with a child. The Oklahoma attorney general told the Dallas Morning News yesterday that Morris will “more likely than not” turn himself in and be arraigned by Monday.
Earlier in the week, the Dallas Morning News published an extensive article interviewing ex-Gateway employees who say the church had “a culture of silence and trauma.” They said that before Morris’ exit, the church had a “narcissistic” culture where criticism was silenced and staffers were left with lasting trauma.
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According to the elder board chair, the church is now reckoning with a “failure of culture.”
“If the salt has lost its taste”
Ruth Graham recently profiled evangelical author Aaron Renn in the New York Times. Renn is especially known for his historical taxonomy that has become conventional wisdom for many:
- American Christians experienced a “positive world” between 1964 and 1994, during which being a Christian generally enhanced our social status and “Christian social norms” were the basic norms of the broader American culture.
- In the “neutral world,” which lasted roughly from 1994 to 2014, Christianity no longer held a privileged status, but was viewed as one of many valid options in a pluralistic public square.
- About a decade ago, the US became a “negative world” for Christians. Following Christ and holding traditional Christian moral views, particularly related to sex and gender, is now seen as “a threat to the public good and new public moral order.”
I have written widely on this shift as well in numerous articles and especially in my book, The Coming Tsunami: Why Christians Are Labeled Intolerant, Irrelevant, Oppressive, and Dangerous—and How We Can Turn the Tide. I would nuance Renn’s description by noting that “positive,” “neutral,” and “negative” cultural engagements depend not only on chronology but also on geography. Evangelicals on both coasts and in major cities are likely to experience the “negative” world more than those in smaller Midwest towns, for example.
However, I agree with Renn that biblical morality has become more problematic than ever before in American history and that, despite recent more positive trends, the church in America is facing unprecedented opposition.
According to Notre Dame scholar Christian Smith, author of Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America, sex abuse scandals are especially to blame:
The scandals violated most of the virtues believed to make religion good. They demonstrated that religion did not make people moral, did not help its own leaders cope with life’s challenges and temptations, did not promote social peace and harmony, and did not model virtuous behavior for others.
It is inconceivable to me that ministers whose moral failings have captured so many headlines over recent years intended this to happen. Surely they did not know when they took their first steps into sexual immorality that their sins would grievously wound so many people and deeply damage the larger witness of the church in contemporary society.
But this is just what Jesus warned us could happen: “If the salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet” (Matthew 5:13).
A prophetic moment I have never forgotten
Many years ago, I was teaching philosophy of religion at a major seminary when a megachurch pastor in the community was caught in numerous affairs. The news made headlines all weekend. The next Monday, I was attending seminary chapel when the speaker began his message by addressing the scandal.
I thought he was going to criticize the celebrity pastor for his appalling moral failures. But that’s not what he did.
After describing the story in some detail, he pointed his finger at us in the auditorium and declared, “And there but for the grace of God go you.” Then he pointed at himself and added, “And there but for the grace of God go I.”
It was a prophetic moment I have not forgotten. And one I’d like you to hear directed at your soul today: “Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:14–15, my emphases). This process, unless halted through genuine repentance and sincere restoration, is inevitable.
A cancer left untreated will be worse tomorrow than it is today, until the day it kills the patient.
Why we need “abandonment to Jesus Christ”
Here we find yet another reason why you and I need the personal, transformational relationship with the living Lord Jesus that I have been emphasizing this week. He will “deliver us from evil” (Matthew 6:13), but we must seek such deliverance. His Spirit will give us victory over temptation (1 Corinthians 10:13), but we must first submit our lives and temptations to him.
Oswald Chambers observed:
“The reason some of us are such poor specimens of Christianity is because we have no Almighty Christ. We have Christian attributes and experiences, but there is no abandonment to Jesus Christ.”
Conversely, when we submit ourselves fully to the person of Jesus, “we walk in the light, as he is in the light” (1 John 1:7). But only then.
According to our Lord, you can be “salt [that] has lost its taste” and is “thrown out and trampled,” or you can “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:13, 16). You can be part of the solution, or you can be part of the problem.
I face the same choice today.
Let us choose wisely.
Quote for the day:
“May we not only be delivered from the outward act or word that grieves Thee, but may the very springs of our nature be purified!” —F. B. Meyer
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