When Should You Report Ministerial Misconduct?

….but perhaps very important is the question of “what things did people see about an errant church leader, but did not say anything until it was too late?” Does one notice that a leader’s spending habits get grander and grander, that his hours get longer and longer, etc..

James MacDonald got fired after Mancow Muller released hundreds of hours of recordings of apparently some pretty nasty things he’s said in meetings and such. However, as one looks back to at least 2013, if not before, there were some huge problem signs well before—huge house, some quite frankly odd teaching that got past whatever editors he had at Moody, kicking elders out for wanting to see the line item budget, paying an extra salary to the pastor of a Romanian affiliate (they’d wanted to pay their own pastor, caused a church split), and authoritarian tendencies going back to at least 1998, when he founded Harvest Bible Chapel.

Things got out of hand because too many simply accepted what they knew what was going on in little ways, and now things are going badly in a big way. I wouldn’t be surprised if HBC folded altogether.