I have known and worked with some incredibly gifted and godly pastors.<\/p>\n\n\n
And some real stinkers.<\/p>\n\n\n
I worked with a pastor who was so ill-tempered he once nearly provoked the custodian to a fist-fight. Mean as a snake.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
I watched a pastor in Haiti steal money from our Christian school. There was no tangible proof.<\/p>\n\n\n
I know of one pastor who left his wife and moved in with another woman. Completely unrepentant.<\/p>\n\n\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n
His plan didn’t work to his financial benefit, but I hope it brought him the opportunity for true repentance.<\/p>\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n
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:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Pornography.<\/p>\n\n\n
It’s a vile scourge across our entire culture and it doesn’t stop at the doors of the church.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.\u00a0 I watched a pastor in Haiti steal money from our Christian school. There was no tangible proof. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7313,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7312\/revisions\/7313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}