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Ashley Madison and the Clergy

Ashley-madison-hacked-customer-details-leakedSome are predicting that over 400 clergy and religious leaders will resign their positions this Sunday after their names appeared on the Ashley Madison list. As many of you know, this website facilitated affairs.

Many will be understandably frustrated and hurt by the news that their pastor appeared on this list. This will be particularly true for those clergy who have preached monogamy and who have attacked gay marriage as an assault on traditional marriages. Clearly, this will be seen as hypocrisy and unfitting for those serving churches.

So what do we do and where do we go from here? As a minister and as a husband, I believe that the marriage relationship is one that is a kin to a covenantal relationship. We are to be supportive of one another and in the words of Scripture we are to be subject to one another.

Still, clergy are human and prone to human error. That does not mean, however, that all clergy are having affairs or misusing their positions for financial gain or other purposes that are in conflict with their call to ministry.

The real tragedy is the hypocrisy that so many clergy engage in. Clergy often present themselves as somehow more perfect or more holy than the average parishioner. This is a terrible mistake. We are all flawed.

President Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian, was openly mocked decades ago when he declared that he had sinned in his heart. But it was a deeply honest answer from a Christian struggling with his faith and trying to be the best husband that he could be. In retrospect, I hope that people see his openness as a demonstration of what it means to be an authentic Christian.

We need more of this from our church leaders. We need to be able to admit that we are not perfect people and that our lives are a journey and that none of us has reached perfection. We need to be humble and to embrace our flawed humanity as we seek through our faith and experience to better ourselves.

It is also a mistake, if not a sin, to point other people (such as gays and lesbians) and suggest that they are a threat to the institution of marriage. Straight people have been messing up the institution of marriage as we now understand it for as long as it has been around.

Ultimately, families and individual churches will have to wrestle with how to respond if their church pastor is found to be on this list. My sincere hope is that whenever possible we seek to offer appropriate forgiveness and to look for ways to bring reconciliation to broken relationships.

Spouses should be given the space to determine what that best means for them under these difficult circumstances. Yes, sometimes that will mean separation or divorce and there is nothing unChristian about responding in such away. We can never know all the dynamics involved in a marriage that is not our own. Nor should we judge if a couple decides to stay together and repair the breach that has been broken.

As for the rest of us, we should not take glee in the Ashley Madison leak. We shoud seriously contemplate the words uttered by Jesus that are recorded in Matthew 7:3 (NRSV):

"Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?"

Who among us can say that we have not stumbled or fallen in one way or another over the course of our lives?


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad


A Review Of Ferguson and Faith By Leah Gunning Francis

11822762_10153585395149365_5138022202446270685_nFerguson and Faith, the new book from Leah Gunning Francis, takes us through the tragic death of Michael Brown in Missouri and how the faith community responded.

For me, it is a story of hope. A common frustration that many of us who are Christian share is that our churches and leaders are absent when they are most needed. We concern ourselves with issues such as divorce and personal morality but ignore larger social issues such as racial injustice.

Ferguson and Faith documents how interfaith leaders in the larger St. Louis community responded with courage, wisdom and a prophetic voice to the death of Brown and the protests that followed.

Francis tells the different stories of individual clergy and protest leaders in their own words. The interviews are compelling and emotionally charged. You read firsthand how people who never expected to find themselves in leadership roles at the front lines of a new and emerging civil rights struggle learned by walking through the fires how to engage difficult issues and to fight for systemic changes in our society.

Many of those profiled are people who are colleagues and friends to me from my days at Eden Theological Seminary, where I earned my Master of Divinity degree in 2005. It comes as no surprise to me that clergy such as Starkey Wilson, Nelson Pierce, Traci Blackmon, Heather Arcovitch and Deb Krause, Eden's academic dean, became such important voices in the days,  weeks and months after Michael Brown's death. They each responded to the call to ministry with courage and humility. That much and more comes out very clearly in this book. Those of us in other communities can learn from their example.

One of the concluding chapters notes that "There is a Ferguson Near You." We know that here in Portland, Oregon as over the years we have struggled with the deaths of unarmed and mostly African-American citizens who have died at the hands of Portland Police.  The US Department of Justice investigation of the Ferguson police department, in fact, uses tools that were developed first here in Portland after it was determined that police in our city engaged in a pattern of discrimination against people with mental illnesses. Where the DOJ in Portland failed wasn't recognizing that almost all of those killed were African-American and that the issue of race was linked with police shootings. We know this is true in many other communities. So yes, there is work for all of us to do across the nation.

My hope is that church members and students across the country will read the stories and hear the accounts of the faith leaders and young activists who demanded that racial injustices be addressed in Ferguson when others told them to go home and be quiet. Silence, as Francis illustrates so well, is not an option in these times.

We should not debate the reality of racism and it's impact on our nation anymore than we should be debate the reality of climate change.  This is settled science. Racism is well documented in sociological studies and in the findings of the Department of Justice as they look at practices undertaken by police bureaus across the country. We know that our system is not fair and is in places quite broken.

All who have argued in the aftermath of Ferguson that "Black Lives Matter" should read this book, learn from the stories that it tells, and look for opportunities in all of our different communities to address racial injustices. Otherwise, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes that have been made in the past. The civil rights struggle did not end with the Voting Rights Act of the 1960s. Ferguson and Portland both remind us that there is a great need to address racism so that all of our people are more free. It is heartening to read in the pages of this book how faith leaders in the Ferguson area have boldly proclaimed that this is not the world that God has intended for us and that we can and must do better.