I have known and worked with some incredibly gifted and godly pastors.
And some real stinkers.
I worked with a pastor who was so ill-tempered he once nearly provoked the custodian to a fist-fight. Mean as a snake.
I watched a pastor in Haiti steal money from our Christian school. There was no tangible proof.
I know of one pastor who left his wife and moved in with another woman. Completely unrepentant.
I thought I had seen the worst. Then in Columbus here a few years back there was a prominent pastor who got himself in debt to the drug dealer who supplied his addiction. The pastor's solution was to stage a home burglary at his own address and then split the insurance money with his dealer.
This guy was so deep into his sin - so unable to confess and repent - that he willingly traumatized his own family on Christmas Eve! And when the local paper reported that even his daughter's savings jar had been "stolen", this man watched a stream of friends and neighbors come by to refill his girl's jar with their own coins and bills in the following weeks ... and never said a word.
His plan didn't work to his financial benefit, but I hope it brought him the opportunity for true repentance.
When I saw the Lifeway Research finding that 61% of the pastors they polled said that confessing and repenting of sin was an issue they currently faced, I assume that most of them did not have in mind adultery, fraud, or even anger.
Now this is just a guess - a reasonable guess, I believe - but I am guessing for most of them, the sin they had in mind is summed up in one word:
Pornography.
It's a vile scourge across our entire culture and it doesn't stop at the doors of the church.
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