What would Jesus do (if he were an evangelical pastor)?

The latest scandal in the church involving Ted Haggard is another in a series of incidents in which nationally prominent evangelical leaders have crashed and burned. Haggard’s response carried as much class as possible in a situation like this, and one can only pray that he and his family will land on their feet, and that his followers will too.

Responses from the Christian community abound. An extraordinary example is Mark Driscoll’s blog. The leader of Seattle’s hugely successful Mars Hill Fellowship begins by talking about heart issues. He then lists a number of “suggestions” designed to help young male pastors avoid the kind of trouble visited on Haggard.

Apparently, pastors’ wives, while not responsible, could help by being more sexually available to their husbands and not “letting themselves go” physically. Pastors (presumably male) should only hire heterosexual male assistants, with whom they could travel and minister, free from temptation. Another suggestion was that pastors work at home in order to escape the temptation that comes from working late and odd hours at an office, where they might be susceptible to single, sexually frustrated, flirtatious women. (Does Driscoll really think that homes are temptation free zones?)

Included on Driscoll’s list of suggestions were recommendations that pastors have at least two people screen their e-mails and have a private cellphone so “the wrong people” won’t call. As well, they should take pains to keep their homes protected from those wrong people.

I wonder how Jesus, if he were an evangelical pastor, would deal with these suggestions. Would he no longer travel with women? Would he stay away from sinners or other “wrong people” and just hang out at a local evangelical church where “the right people” are? Would Judas be banned from the circle of 12 because he was so obviously a wrong person?

I’d like to propose a different tactic. Much of what we’ve done in the last few decades is call attention to various moral issues, about which we feel strongly. We’ve been pretty strong in our language, because a significant component of evangelicalism is “at war” with culture.

In the process, we’ve cried discrimination because society hasn’t bought into our moral code. (Is it any wonder, given our inability to live up to our own rhetoric?) And we’ve publicly lamented that we’ve been marginalized in a society we say is rushing headlong to its demise. On top of all that, we’ve been publicly laid bare by scandal after scandal (involving power, money, abuse, or sex, or various combinations of these), proving that we just can’t do what we tell everyone else to do.

What if we took a different approach? What if we stopped calling public attention to “their” great sin? What if, instead of allowing scandal to erupt in our churches, we went public and talked about how we’re just as sinful as the society we’ve condemned for so long? What if we asked society to forgive us for our arrogance, our condescension, and our gross hypocrisy? What if, rather than crafting another set of ever tighter “suggestions” for moral living, we admitted that we don’t know how to rid ourselves of sin, let alone the whole world? What if, instead of telling people how to live, we invited them to help us explore life together?

We must learn from our recent past and admit we’re all sinners. We must take a larger and longer view of our strategy, perhaps abandoning “strategy” altogether and simply following Jesus by loving people – yes, even, and maybe most especially, “the wrong people.”

Tim Thiessen is pastor at College Drive Community Church, Lethbridge, Alta.