Has the glut of material dedicated to diagnosing and exposing bad pastors been recklessly unaccompanied and counterweighted by the far less interesting fact that most of us have good pastors? What is more, has the definition of bullying become so broad and subjective that nearly every pastor can be accused of bullying by doing no more than simply conforming to the Bible’s instructions for pastors and churches? Given today’s standards for what constitutes bullying and narcissism, I don’t know how the Apostle Paul can avoid either charge. After all, he called the church to publicly excommunicate those in the church who violated God’s standard for sexual chastity. At times he employed sarcasm to expose error.

It seems like everywhere you turn there are discussions being had about bad pastors. Indeed, multiplied books, podcasts, articles, and documentaries airing on such streaming services as Netflix and Hulu seem to pop up every week or so. And, of course, there are bad pastors, and they should be refused the responsibility of leadership among God’s beloved flock. But has the focus on bad pastors been overdone? Has the proliferation of what some people have dubbed “scandal porn,” produced a skewed vision of reality? Certainly, I expect the world to cast as negative a light as possible upon Christian pastors. But when that project is taken up with equal zeal by Christians, I believe we have reason to be troubled.
I have no desire to diminish the sad experiences of those who have found themselves in the unfortunate and at times tragic circumstance of having an abusive pastor. But the attention given to those who abuse God’s people suggests, whether intentionally or unintentionally, that abusive pastors are the norm. And I think we all know why. It is because the salacious stories of bad pastors get a lot more traffic than any unspectacular account of the many good pastors who, day after day, faithfully plod away at their calling. Truth be told, there is something in us that rather enjoys the sensational and scandalous. We like reading the stories of the fiends and the failures. But the facts on the ground are much more boring. Most of us have good pastors. Perfect pastors? Of course not. Pastors who have never disappointed us or successfully mortified all of their remaining sin? Nope. But measured against the Scripture’s expectations for leadership, most Bible believing evangelical churches are served by good pastors.
In 35 years of vocational ministry, I have known very few people who can honestly say that they were bullied or abused by their pastor. Again, their stories are real and heart-breaking. No instance of a bad pastor abusing a church member is tolerable. But given the massive number of churches, pastors, and church members, such cases are not nearly as common as the attention given to them suggests.
On the other hand, I have never spoken to a pastor who has not been mistreated, slandered, undermined, or run off by church members, an associate pastor, elders, deacons, or all of the above. And I have known more than a few who have been so cruelly treated that they have been left deeply scared along with their families. Sadly, many of these men leave the ministry altogether. They are left in the dust of disillusionment, seeing no way to continue on in the call that at one time had been a source of great joy. Many others take the beating, persevere, and, by God’s grace, carry on faithfully.
So, while no one denies that there are bad pastors, almost no one is discussing the fact that there are bad churches. Where are the documentaries and podcasts discussing pastor-destroying churches? There is precious little discussion about the fact that there is hardly a pastor out there who has not been wounded, slandered, bullied, or run off from a church by bad associate pastors and ungodly church members.
In their excellent book, Handbook for Battered Leaders, Wesley and Janis Balda throw a spotlight on the well-known but often ignored phenomena of “toxic followers” that are present in most organizations from large corporations to family businesses to churches. Their exploration of “mobbing” and “triangulation,” are especially important:
A classic follower response in certain situations is the palace coup. This is the point when the mutiny begins flexing destructive muscles and everyone but the leader realizes a corner has been turned. We all know of situations where a powerful and evil despot abused followers…We are less convinced that simply misguided, or even evil, followers can bring down an otherwise competent leader on their own. However, there should not always be a presumption of innocence when confronting followers who have an agenda, as they can eventually destroy leaders and organizations” (p. 59).
Yet another problem often faced by pastors is a culture of niceness which is typically ill-defined but nevertheless pervades the congregation, elders, deacons, and staff. While kindness is a virtue and should be pursued, a culture of “niceness” can and often does turn rancid. Again, the Baldas write:
“While it is entirely a good thing that courtesy and civility attend our day-to-day work, niceness can be used to apply unfair standards and gloss over vulnerabilities. Passive-aggressive organizations employ niceness to avoid healthy confrontation and positive conflict…The fear of being seen as a complainer or even whistleblower quashes many situations where a little righteous anger might be helpful. And God help the leader who allows followers a glimpse of actual frustration or negative emotion in nice organizations – gossip and mobbing may quickly ensue, and a ride out of town sometimes follows” (p. 112).
Imagine the complexity of being called to lead a congregation of volunteers who pay your salary; men and women who often times have competing expectations of you, who are themselves still sinners. Imagine being in a position of leadership where it is absolutely essential to be liked by those you are called to lead, teach, correct, and, at times, rebuke. Imagine maintaining emotional and spiritual health when every day you are aware that you are letting someone down, failing to live up to some of the myriad and, at times, conflicting expectations. Add to that the all too common experience that pastors have of being actively undermined by an associate pastor, slandered by someone who voted against his call, or unyielding criticism from an influential church member. If young men called by God knew how they were likely to be treated in at least one church, I’m quite sure there would be very few willing to serve.
Read More
Related Posts:

“I’ve been delegated to synod four times now, and each time increasingly feels like war,” pastor and Abide clerk Aaron Vriesman wrote after Synod 2023. “The CRC’s existential crisis has been building for some time. Each synod is a battle of opposing visions for the CRC, with diametrically opposing values. While synodical sermons trumpet Christian unity and the worship times lead us to rejoice together in one circle, the reality among the delegates and throughout the CRC is a battle for the soul of the denomination.”

Two years ago, in a move that surprised almost everyone, the synod of the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC) voted 123–53 to affirm that “unchastity” in the Heidelberg Catechism includes adultery, premarital sex, extramarital sex, polyamory, pornography, and homosexual sex.
“What now?” asked an article in the denominational publication, The Banner, two weeks later. “How will this decision play out?”
It was a good question. Some wondered if the vote wasn’t an accurate reflection of the denomination but instead a “coup” by a few well-organized conservatives. The FAQs released by the denomination included ways to change synod’s decision and ways for pastors, elders, or deacons to stay in office while disagreeing with the denomination’s position on sexuality. They could submit a “confessional-difficulty gravamen”—which is “a personal request for information and/or clarification of the confession”—to their church council.
In other words, you could tell your church you weren’t sure about the CRC’s position on sexuality, then continue to serve indefinitely.
In 2023, a fresh batch of synod delegates took another run at the issue. The vote splits looked much the same as the year before, and the confessional status of the definition of “unchastity” was upheld.
Then, as time was running out on the last afternoon, a vote was finally called on gravamina—to clarify they were temporary, not a permanent way to operate in the CRC while disagreeing with her confessions.
It felt rushed; the discussion had only been 10 minutes long. And to progressives, it also felt predetermined; the conservatives had won every vote so far. Emotions were running high when a handful of delegates said they no longer trusted the body, took off their name tags, and walked out in protest.
Out of time, synod voted to delay the issue another year. The CRC had never done that before. To conservatives, it felt like the liberal members had just won more time to maneuver their way out of church discipline.
“I was weeping,” said Jason Ruis, chair of the committee that proposed limitations on gravamina. “I thought we just saw the death of the denomination. I thought the vast majority was in agreement with what we were putting forward, but it got hijacked again by a small group of people. I thought [fellow] conservatives were going to say, ‘I’m done with this. Let’s go someplace else.’”
But they didn’t. This summer, the gravamen issue was the first that synod took up. By a vote of 137–47, they gave office-bearers three years to work through their difficulties. Synod also voted 134–50 that publicly affirming churches needed to stop and to publicly repent within a year or, at the most, two.
Next year, only delegates without gravamina will be allowed to serve in regional gatherings or at synod, effectively ending the debate. For a denomination that has slid leftward since the mid-1990s, this has been a remarkably quick and decisive shift back to orthodoxy.
“To feel like I’m part of this denomination, and part of that reshaping that is happening right now, is super exciting,” California pastor Patrick Anthony said. “To be the one denomination that was going liberal to have it not happen—why would God be so gracious to us?”
Dutch Reformed to Mainline-ish
Founded in 1857 by Dutch immigrants, the CRC draws from an old, rich history of Reformed theology and love of education. Less than 20 years after it began, the CRC founded a college and seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and named them both after John Calvin. Later, another CRC-affiliated college would name itself after the synod in Dordrecht, Holland, that outlined the five points of Calvinism. (I sit on the board there.)
Membership in the CRC grew fairly steadily until 1992, when it peaked at more than 315,000 members in nearly 1,000 churches. The average church size was 300.
And then things seemed to fall apart.
In 1995, after 25 years of arguing over women in office, synod finally said each congregation could decide for itself. Thirty-six complementarian churches left, and their 7,500 attendees formed a new denomination—the United Reformed Churches in North America (URCNA).
The CRC’s numbers never recovered. Over the years, more conservative churches left to join the URCNA, and the CRC’s numbers began to follow the mainline path of decline. Fewer babies were born, fewer teens enrolled at Calvin University, and fewer young people stayed in the denomination.
The CRC also followed the mainline in a decline in personal piety. For about 25 years after the split, CRC members reported reading the Bible less, praying less, and having fewer personal and family devotion times.
Perhaps most concerning were the implications for belief. Studies show mainline church members are less likely than evangelicals to believe the Bible is the word of God. Was the CRC losing that too?
Progressive Leadership
Certainly, with the rise of Donald Trump, prominent CRC leaders were distancing themselves from American evangelicalism. “I Never Was an Evangelical, and I Never Want to Be,” CRC member and Calvin professor of English Debra Rienstra wrote in 2017. Her colleague Kristin Kobes Du Mez published Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation in 2020.
“I devoted more of my career than I can believe to help recover and nurture the better part of the CRC tradition in the hope that it might occupy some space between both the mainline and Evangelical sides of American Protestantism,” Calvin professor emeritus of history James Bratt wrote in 2022. He, Rienstra, Du Mez, and Calvin philosophy professor James K. A. Smith have all signaled LGBT+ support. In 2021, about 150 Calvin professors and staff told the administration they opposed a CRC report supporting biblical sexuality.
Until 2020, those faculty were required to be members of a CRC church. Because of geography—the CRC headquarters was four miles down the road—they often ended up in the same churches as the CRC leadership. In that corner of Grand Rapids, there are 21 CRC churches within about 10 miles of each other. Their classis, or regional body, is called Grand Rapids East.
“Many denominational employees are part of those churches,” said Orland Park CRC pastor Derek Buikema, president of synod this year. “And a significant number of professors and members of administration at Calvin University and Calvin Seminary also go to those churches. Classis Grand Rapids East churches dominate the ethos of the entire denominational apparatus.”
In 2011, Grand Rapids East asked synod to revisit its historical perspective on human sexuality. When it declined, members in two of its churches founded All One Body, an organization that advocates for “unrestricted membership and full participation” in the church of those living LGBT+ lifestyles.
Five years later, Grand Rapids East released its own report, which it also submitted to synod. It explained the advancements in scientific and theological thinking and recommended the CRC allow for diverse views on sexuality.
That same year, another classis—this one from Alberta, Canada—suggested synod appoint a panel of LGBT+ advisers. And another report, this one official, advised synod to allow CRC pastors to use their discretion when asked to attend a same-sex wedding or make their facilities available for a same-sex wedding. CRC pastors should also be allowed to officiate civil same-sex ceremonies, they said.
But the 2016 synod wasn’t amenable. The delegates turned down the LGBT+ advisers and voted by a 60 percent majority to tell pastors they couldn’t officiate, participate in, or allow their buildings to be used for same-sex weddings.
In response to Grand Rapids East’s report, they appointed an official study committee on human sexuality. Every person on it, they said, must “adhere to the CRC’s biblical view on marriage and same-sex relationships.”
Conservative Synod
The committee had five years to do its work—and then six, when Synod 2021 was canceled for COVID-19. During that time, Neland Avenue CRC—a member of Grand Rapids East—installed a female deacon who was in a same-sex marriage (perhaps hoping to force the issue at synod). Calvin University students elected an openly gay undergrad as student body president and a Calvin professor officiated a same-sex wedding for a Calvin staffer at a campus-based research center.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
The world does not want the church’s approval. It has managed very well without that for many years and will continue to do so. What the world wants is the church’s capitulation. And however one cares to dress up these latest findings—as pastorally sensitive, as keeping up with the times, as affirming the marginalized—they represent the latest fulfillment of that desire.

A recent poll conducted by The Times of London indicates that a majority of Church of England clergy now favor gay marriage. The figures (53.4 percent in favor, 36.5 percent opposed) show a significant shift from 2014. Back then, in the aftermath of the legalization of gay civil marriage in the U.K., only 39 percent were in favor and 51 percent were opposed. There are numerous lessons here.
First, the old battle lines between conservative and liberal Christians have changed. In the past, it was the affirmation or denial of the supernatural claims of the Bible, supremely that of Jesus’s bodily resurrection, that divided churches. Today, it is questions of morality, specifically sexual morality, that are the points of contention. And these are of more significance for the broader life of the church within society. To affirm the resurrection might have made you look like a benighted fool, but societies generally tolerate benighted fools. To oppose our current Western cultural regime, where sexual identity is key to personal value, is to deny the humanity of fellow citizens. The world sees that as a deeply immoral act, and not one that will likely be tolerated forever. Christians need to understand that. This is not an excuse for abandoning biblical teaching on kind words turning away wrath or on blessing those who curse us. But it is to say that we should expect suffering, not op-eds in the Washington Post, to be our reward.
And that brings us to the second lesson. The clergy’s shift on this issue might well be motivated by pastoral intuitions to affirm people. It is a caring vocation and few, one hopes, enter it with a view to hurting others. Kindness is the order of the day. Ironically, however, this shift buys the immediate possibility of affirmation at huge long-term cost.
One reason for this is that gay marriage does not simply involve a minor expansion of the traditional concept. There was a time when gay writers such as Andrew Sullivan argued that allowing same-sex marriages would simply permit gay people to be part of a conservative institution. It is now clear that gay marriage did not merely expand the set of those considered to be married, but fundamentally evacuated marriage of meaning—or, more accurately, exposed the fact that it had already been fundamentally evacuated of meaning by the ready acceptance of no-fault divorce. It is no longer a unique relationship whose stability is important for its normative ends, but little more than a sentimental bond that only has to last for as long as it meets the emotional needs of the parties involved.
Read More
Related Posts: