How a Qualified Pastor Can Ruin You

One of the criticisms I’ve received over the years, particularly when scandals erupt in the church, has been that I just don’t have enough grace. I’m not sufficiently inclined, critics have said, to grant my fellow sinners the benefit of the doubt or forgive them for their trespasses. Who do I think I am?

I got a lot of that after I exposed Mark Driscoll’s plagiarism on the radio in 2013. I’m getting more of it again this week over this latest plagiarism scandal involving well-connected former G3 Ministries board member Tom Buck, pastor of First Baptist Church of Lindale, Texas. Tom’s wife, Jennifer, even posted a thread on X that dismissed the evidence of Tom’s verbatim plagiarism of a marriage anecdote by saying that the evidence “tries to make it sound like he took someone else’s life example as his own. That is not true. … Those words were (Tom and me) 35 years ago.”

First of all, the packet of evidence doesn’t argue that Tom plagiarized an anecdote that bore no similarity to his own marital experience. The packet just stated (and presented the evidence) that Tom reproduced, word for word, the “entire personal illustration” and presented it “as Buck’s own experience, with only the wife’s name changed to Jennifer.” Which was what happened. And those who wrote this are correct.

My online take on Jennifer’s posts was this: “Just because I notice that another author’s observation can also apply to my life doesn’t mean I can just steal it verbatim, insert my wife’s name and pretend I wrote it. How lazy are you if you can’t even come up with a few original sentences to describe your own life?” It’s totally unnecessary petty theft, really, because the person who stole it didn’t even need what he stole -- somewhat akin to Steve Jobs shoplifting an iPhone charger.

Which brings me to my thought about honorable, godly pastors and the lifelong impact they can have on the young Christians they disciple. In fact, such pastors can ruin you, if by “ruin” you mean “modeled for you and taught you biblical right and wrong so well that he forever ensured you won’t be able to join the cool kids in excusing serious pulpit crimes during a future time of evangelical downgrade.”

For me, the pastor who “ruined me” best was a man I’ll call David.

He was hired to be our church’s youth pastor when I was a teenager. The first thing he did upon arrival was to invite each individual kid in the youth group out for a Coke and then ask each one, “Do you know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? How did you come to know Him, and what has He done in your life?” No one had ever asked me those questions before, and I was thrilled to be able to share everything about the Lord that I’d experienced at that point: my testimony of how I became a Christian, how much I loved Him and all the incredible stories of how He’d worked in my life. 

David listened to me with great interest. He asked questions and encouraged me. He answered my questions, too (and I had a lot of them), giving me patient, biblical answers. Showing such deep spiritual interest in each teenager, individually, immediately endeared him to all of us. He loved the Lord, He loved the Bible, and he loved discipling kids. He pulled off, in my estimation, the perfect introduction to a great pastor.

And even though he wasn’t very old himself at that time, David proved himself throughout his tenure at our church to be the most godly of tenderhearted shepherds. He overflowed with the fruits of the Spirit. He always behaved honorably, in every setting. He was wise and mature in dispensing sound biblical advice, and that extended to life guidance. It was David who suggested it might be good for me to consider serving the Lord in Christian radio, having seen my burgeoning affinity for it and love for spreading the gospel.

I also remember how often he praised his own mentor, whom I’ll call John. John was the pastor who had discipled David before David discipled us. That was a significant reveal for me, because it meant that I really owed the Lord as much thanks for John as I did for David. I realized I wouldn’t have had one godly pastor if it hadn’t been for the faithfulness of the godly pastor before him. That’s how the Lord does things, after all. He forms long links of faithful Christians, one disciple at a time, through the ministries of godly shepherds. 

Of course, I’ve had many more faithful and godly shepherds since I met David, for whom I am deeply grateful, but he was the one who shaped me the most initially as a Christian. He was the first pastor who really cared about me as an immature little sheep. But even more importantly, his life completely matched his testimony, and that made a huge impact on me as a teenager. David certainly was a sinner, but he was above reproach, exactly as 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 required him to be. The mere thought of David ever plagiarizing anything is – to his credit – simply preposterous.

But pastors like David in a sense do ruin you, because you’ll forever after expect that every pastor you meet will be equally godly and blameless. Then you grow up and realize the evangelical church has entered into such a downward moral spiral that many Christians are totally fine with jettisoning iron-clad biblical character standards just so their disqualified pastors can stay put.

And then you watch in horror as undiscerning Christians actually try to defend the practice of keeping plagiarizing pastors, or pastors who cover up sexual abuse, or adulterous pastors, or dishonest or abusive pastors, or greedy pastors who enter the ministry solely for the megachurch flock-fleecing possibilities. Further, you have to listen to their ridiculous justifications for all this, cloaked in a Scripture-twisted “grace/forgiveness!” speech, and you feel so angry and sickened at the tolerance for sin. You know that such misguided tolerance will only end up immeasurably harming the Body of Christ, on whose behalf God required those pastoral character standards in the first place!

Here’s the real torture of encountering such a situation, though, in my book: you’re not just upset because these disqualified pastors are getting away with flouting God’s non-negotiable character standards for all overseers. You’re also upset because you see so many Christians – including supposedly Top Conservative Christian Men – in essence pretending as if the requirements of 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 are humanly impossible, when you know from personal experience with a great and qualified pastor that that isn’t true. That’s precisely why I do hold the line on this point with such intensity. To believe that no one pastor can ever meet biblical character qualifications is to believe the father of lies.

So while my godly pastor “ruined” me, in the sense that I’ve outlined, it was the best kind of ruining. It is the polar opposite of the kind of ungodly ruin that a fallen pastor brings upon himself, and by extension, any congregation of believers who refuse to take disqualifying sin as seriously as the Lord does. David ruined me for any tendency I would have otherwise developed to compromise the Word of God just to please men.

Should we offer grace and forgiveness to a disqualified pastor who repents? Without question. But we must hold that duty in tension with God’s command that those who assume a holy office as His shepherds must be above reproach and can, in fact, invalidate themselves. And if they do that, they must surrender the office.

As God’s people, we dare not be derelict in our duty to ensure that His unchanging standards for pastors are upheld.

“ … When Christ calls upon his hearers to beware of false prophets and to know the true and the false by their fruits, Christ thereby seats all hearers upon the seat of judgment, placed the balance scale of truth in their hands, and bids them confidently execute judgment on their teachers. … Oh, my dear friends, if you at one time had realized that the office of judge belonged to you, you would not have entered upon so many and such dangerous bypaths. Your preachers went on false paths and you followed without testing, in false confidence in man. How sorrowful the consequences have been. Therefore know and protect your right. ‘Prove all things and hold fast that which is good.’"

~ C.F.W. Walther, from the sermon “The Sheep Judge Their Shepherds”