Several people recommended the Netflix documentary, ‘The Death of the Pastor’s Wife’ around the same time.  And I enjoy documentaries. And I have a particular interest in at least one pastor’s wife, so Linda and I sat down and gave it a watch.

It is hard to express the depth of brokenness expressed in this documentary.  And while my goal in this blog is not an endorsement of the documentary, I am blogging about it because many have already watched it, and many who watched it have deep questions and concerns about churches in general.

I’ve been to Myrtle Beach several times.  I went to Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina.  And that is about the closest I’ve been to the church that is the center of this documentary.  I have never met any of the people firsthand.  I have established none of the facts.  But I AM a pastor.  I do know the Bible.  And I am seeking to lead a church based on Biblical instructions.

So all that I say next is heavier on the Bible and lighter on the documentary.  I don’t think I would like to sit under that pastor’s preaching.  That is irrelevant.  I don’t like it when a man rides his dad’s coattails into ministry.  But that is preference.

What I want to point out is the incredible necessity for accountability and taking the qualifications for eldership seriously.  There are two closely related passages of Scripture that offer direct qualifications for shepherds of His flocks.

In 1 Timothy 3:2-7 the apostle Paul wrote:

“[2] Therefore, an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, [3] not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. [4] He must manage his own household well, with all dignity, keeping his children submissive, [5] for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church? [6] He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. [7] Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil.”

And he also wrote similarly in Titus 1:5-9:

“[5] This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you—[6] if anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination. [7] For an overseer, as God’s steward, must be above reproach. He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, [8] but hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined. [9] He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.”

The church is to be regulated BY the Word of God.  It is interesting in the documentary that a pastor was brought in from the outside to determine what should be done after the pastor had an affair with his worship leader, who was his assistant, who was married, who was 15 years his junior, and whose marriage he officiated.  This last one is incredibly abhorrent to me as a pastor.

My wife and I were counting, and we decided that I have officiated about 100 weddings over the past 20 years of pastoral ministry.  And there is something special about being the officiant at a wedding where God forges a new family, and my words help to mediate that covenant.  It is a holy thing. It is a beautiful thing!  A pastor who could officiate a wedding and then sleep with the bride is a man who is incredibly mired in a unique brand of self-centeredness.  While I am not trying to pretend to know His motives, I DO know the grotesque nature of this sin!

All of it is an incredible abuse of his office.  Trust in his judgment and leadership ought to be completely gone at this point.  But the outside minister didn’t reference the qualifications for leadership in the church above but instead just said, “we have to give grace”.  SHE turned to generalized, fuzzy, undefined terms to find her response, rather than the concrete and direct qualifications for leadership.

The problems with this pastor escalated.  He divorced his wife.  She divorced her husband.  They got married.  He continued in affairs.  It turns out he was a moral monster who appears to have systematically abused his wife spiritually, emotionally, and sexually.

While watching this train wreck, I felt nauseous with the details, I felt sick with the slide of the pastor into Himself, I felt devastated for this wife and all that she endured, but I also felt disquiet in my soul over how much trust is given to the office of pastor.

Everyone wants to be trusted.  Everyone wants to be given the benefit of the doubt.  And ministry would be discouraging if everyone assumed I was a monster because one disqualified pastor in Myrtle Beach, SC, was a moral monster.  But a qualified man will be an accountable man.  He will seek to be open about his struggles.  His church will be structured in a way that has genuine accountability among a team of elders or leaders.  There will be people in his life asking tough questions.  And the leadership will submit to the BIBLICAL qualifications of church leadership.

The fundamental focus of the documentary is to present the possibility that J.P. killed his wife, Mica.  And let this sink in . . . he continued to preach after her death!  I want to say to anyone that is reading this that this is not normal.  So much had to be broken in this church, and so many warning signs had to be blown past in order for this man to remain in leadership.

I hear people who imply that this documentary shows the danger of church life.  As if this could happen at ANY church.  And I would disagree.  While we are all capable of deep sins and we are at risk of shipwrecking our lives in a stupid moment, I don’t believe that this slide into depravity displayed in this documentary is a by-product of general church life.  I think it is a product of unbiblical church life.  This mess requires leadership that is unaccountable.  It requires a church that offers grace without knowing what grace means.  It requires ignorance of the qualifications for church leadership, or an unwillingness to apply them.  For a church to get to this point it must be full of weak Christians who won’t speak up.

I looked over at my wife after the final episode with a pale face and troubled thoughts, and asked her, “You don’t think I could get away with that, do you!?”  A pastor who could continue to be loved and championed by his church while behaving that badly is a pastor that isn’t leading a church but he is leading a fan club.

What can we learn from this documentary?  Churches need accountability for their leadership.  A loving and grace-filled leaning into life together.  But we must also have an accountability that knows that there is a time when ‘disqualification’ is a genuine category. I am extremely confident that my elders (who I also count as my friends), love me enough, love Jesus enough, and love the Word enough that they would not put up with a quarter of the nonsense revealed in this documentary.  And while I know that much of the stuff revealed in the documentary was hidden while it was happening, the obvious and out-front parts would’ve been enough for the elders of ReCAST church to lovingly let me go.

Some failures happen by little things that went wrong along the way, and it leads to  big failure.  What makes this documentary so gripping is that it was a bunch of big things leading up to a big thing.  The signposts were not small.  Nobody had to put on their Sherlock Holmes hat and meditate over a pipe to figure out that JP was untrustworthy.

We need to be ready to address the small things, because small things often hide or lead to big things.  But we certainly MUST NOT ignore the big things.  Anybody reading this that attends a church ought to be curious about how this kind of situation would be handled there.  What we can learn from this is that churches need healthy, routine, BIBLICAL, accountability.  It needs to be an accountability that goes beyond our feelings or impressions about Scripture, and goes instead to the content of God’s WRITTEN qualifications.