This past week’s news of yet another fallen leader hit hard; this was no ordinary scandal. This was not some sycophantic thirtysomething “pastor” with aberrant theology and dress and manner better suited to Saturday nights on the town than to Sunday mornings in the sanctuary of God; this was a sober, stalwart, and studied older man, a shepherd and scholar with a deep and serious view of God, sin, and salvation. This was not a momentary gust of passion to which we are all susceptible in our evening moments, our times of leisure; this was a drawn-out, emotionally-engulfing affair of the heart, a point at which one arrives only after willfully and knowingly knocking down one hurdle after another, quieting a thousand solemn whispers of warning, and standing before countless sacred gatherings with an indiscernible yet surely palpable knee-knocking of conscience.

Age, perhaps; universal human weakness, no doubt; the old story laid bare in every classic piece of literature and film, on every image of every storyboard of every human heart; the great cautionary tale, the story of us all, all the way back to Eden. Because of this, this fallen leader should be loved, pitied, embraced, comforted, and accepted, just as we manage to accept ourselves each day after every time we sin; just as Christ accepts us; provided, of course, that we repent and run back to God the Father and to Jesus and to the Holy Spirit with all the tears and holy zeal and firm resolve that our shameful, broken spirits can muster. This leader must not lead again, to be sure; his ministry in large part is over; but he is still a child of God. His repentance must not be trite or quick; it must be long and deep and proven; but his story is still the same as all of us. In that day, our only hope will be in Christ; our only joy the cross.

And yet—there is another story here, one that has not been told; one that I tell now with the greatest measure of sobriety. It is a true story, but it contains a false narrative. It is the story of two men, both young believers, both former athletes, united in their passion for souls and their zeal for the glory of God; both engaged in struggle. It is the 1970s, and their present seminary’s spiritual climate is largely bankrupt, swallowed up by the lure of power and prestige that marks its absurdly affluent metropolitan context, save for a few remaining serious-minded professors and a tiny band of student radicals. Burdened by the state of things, these two men, two of that little band of radicals, spend hours together in intercession, often emerging from the prayer closet with faces marred by streams of tears. They are close, bound together in the truest of earthly bonds, the bond only found by those who come together often into the very throne room of God, the only place where real spiritual unity can be found—the unity of the Spirit. 

They both graduate and become ordained ministers. They are so close that one performs the other’s wedding ceremony. They eventually go their separate ways, embark upon their separate ministries…and the bond begins to weaken. One’s ministry flourishes; the other’s falters. The former invites the latter back to preach, only to have the sermon threaten to divide the church. The bond nearly breaks. Eventually, one’s ministry journey takes him to the very top of the celebrity Christian circuit; the other’s to the ends of the earth. One’s results in fame and notoriety; the other’s in obscurity. One frequently finds himself in the overstuffed chairs of the conference platform; the other squats over ditches in pastures inhabited by pigs, waking each day to speak simple words to recent converts with a third-grade third-world education. One is feted by the fawning masses; the other is brutally arrested, interrogated, and banned from the country in which he works. And yet, at this present moment, one sits in veritable ruins, cast cruelly to the side by the very ones that once doted on him, the masses inevitably incapable of balancing either adoration or disdain. The other preaches at a rally for desperate believers under the threat of Hindu extremism in India.

The temptation is to put one down and the other up; to attribute one’s fall to some defect, some weakness, some flaw, and the other’s continued usefulness to superior sacrifice, discipline, or grace. To be sure, there is some warning here about ambition; about the subtle danger of pursuing ministry in the spiritually affluent West, which lauds and adores its Christian celebrities even as it remains in chains to the same habitual sins, fleshly worship, and dead prayer that has become the hallmark of the Western church. There is danger in self-promotion, in platforms, in publications; and perhaps, in the end, such a spectacular fall might indeed be indicative of a flickering, insidious, long-coddled unwillingness to truly seek the approval of God instead of the approval of man, to give up everything, truly everything, for Jesus. This might be a narrative of compromise and its final fruits; but this is too easy. I fear the lesson is much more rudimentary. 

This fallen man was not a hypocrite. For much of his life, I honestly believe, he served and suffered for God as much as my father has, his one-time bosom friend, the very one he spent hours in prayer with, the one who performed his marriage ceremony, the one under whose ministry he once sat, the one he inexplicably drifted away from, long before the distance grew literal. The truth is that both men are flesh; both are weak; both have served God imperfectly; both have fallen and risen, will fall and rise again. The real lesson here, once again, is for all Christians at all times. Only God knows the motivations and purity of every ministry, the true lasting value of each. It is entirely possible to do supposedly great spiritual deeds that will one day be consumed by the judgement fire as wood, hay, and straw; but the unknown missionary is as much in danger of this as the celebrity pastor. The real lesson is simply this: there is one race to run, and we are all in it; and we must run it to the end. There is one and only one crown to gain, and it sure as heaven ain’t an earthly one.