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Church & Ministry
Tullian Tchividjian

“Tchividjian resigned from his position as pastor at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last summer due to an extramarital affair.” CPost

Discussion

Thu, 12/01/16

What I’d love to see….is for the elders who didn’t catch on to this sin, or who flat out aided and abetted it, to get together and work with someone to figure out what happened—why they didn’t take action, why they didn’t clue in to the signs, maybe even produce an article or book saying, more or less, “this is how to recognize your pastor’s midlife crisis, and how to intervene before he destroys at least two families and a church”.

People can get a LOT of mileage out of the following things:

  1. A refusal to recognize warning flags in your church
  2. A refusal to act on warning flags in your church
  3. A refusal to admit that your pastor has serious issues and may actually be at the root of the issues in your church
  4. A refusal to appoint Elders/Deacons who will actually evaluate things instead of just supporting the status quo or pastor in question
  5. I’m sure there’s more…

Who is going to seriously stand up to a pastor and admit he has issues to his face, or bring them up in the first place? That takes a very special - and very rare - breed of individual. That’s assuming that you can find someone else to support what you are saying or even be willing to look hard at what’s going on from a neutral point of view. Oh, and by the way, if you are wrong, you can be disciplined out of the church for slander / gossip / rebellion ‘against the Lord’s anointed’ or ‘God’s Man’.

The stakes of accusing an elder - even when handled correctly - are incredibly high, and that’s why most people will just bail out entirely rather than investigate enough to find the rotting smell comes from. Otherwise, people probably just walk out the back door, and then watch in horror as they are proven right when the entire structure blows up.

"Our task today is to tell people — who no longer know what sin is...no longer see themselves as sinners, and no longer have room for these categories — that Christ died for sins of which they do not think they’re guilty." - David Wells

Thu, 12/01/16

It certainly is hard to make a case against a pastor, and I’ve been there a few times (thankfully not involving adultery—it was theological issues), but in this case, the IT staff had TT’s phone records, including salacious text messages. If we can’t make open and shut cases like this, we need to just give it up, I think.

Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.