When Protecting the Pastor Becomes More Important Than Protecting People
I’ve sat in church and heard these exact words from the stage: “If we’re being honest, we’re all hypocrites.” At the time, I didn’t really think much about it beyond the idea that we are, in fact, all human. We do, in fact, all have moments in our lives when we, either intentionally or unintentionally, say one thing and do another — thus supporting the premise that we are all, in fact, hypocrites.
But after living through some major church trauma and then watching Death of a Pastor’s Wife a couple of times, I’m wondering how often this idea that we’re all hypocrites is used as a means to justify bad behavior and avoid accountability.
Lately, I’ve been leaning into the chasm between hypocrisy and accountability.
When Grace Becomes a Shield
If this is a tough one to wrap your head around, let me give you an example.
Let’s say a pastor is having an affair. When this affair is exposed, people will inevitably respond differently. Some people will automatically see the problem with an individual in a pastoral leadership position having an affair and assume the pastor will step down, confess, repent, repair the damage over time, and focus on healing.
Others, though, will be quick to conclude that this expectation is hypocritical. Instead of expecting pastoral leaders to be above reproach, they approach the situation by claiming that grace has covered the sin—which it has—but that isn’t the issue here. They’ll insist that holding the pastor accountable is somehow evidence that church people are unforgiving or hypocritical.
Did you catch all of that? It was a lot. Of logical fallacies. But I’m not going to get into that.
There are many reasons people hesitate to hold pastoral leaders accountable. Maybe the behavior hits a little too close to home. Maybe they don’t want to be the bad guy. Maybe there are power dynamics involved, or maybe they’re afraid of what will happen if they speak up.
There are layers here. Seriously.
But complexity is not an excuse to look the other way.
So, let me say this very clearly: Holding pastoral leadership accountable for their behavior is not hypocritical. If anything, it’s actually scriptural.
When I was watching Death of a Pastor’s Wife, and they showed the video of the “I have had a moral failing in my marriage” announcement, I bristled immediately. What followed the announcement, though, was even more disturbing. The pastor never intended to step away. He took no steps toward repentance; instead, he continued in a relationship with his “moral failing.” There was no repair, no period of healing and restoration. Nothing.
In fact, the only reason someone else came in to pastor during that time was that the church was hemorrhaging members.
Did you catch that?
The presence of a different pastor only came to be because people were leaving the church — not because the pastor repented, stepped away, and did the hard work of healing and repair.
This is not accountability. It’s simply damage control.
And if you don’t know how the story ends, take three hours to watch the documentary, because it only gets worse from here. Years later, when this interim pastor finally understood the reality of the situation, she learned the board didn’t even have the power to remove the pastor — which is another topic entirely that I won’t even delve into today.
But what I do want to delve into is accountability for pastoral leadership.
Above Reproach Doesn’t Mean Perfect
I’m just going to be really honest with you here. Over the past year, I have found myself looking at situations involving multiple churches and asking myself the same questions on repeat: Have you even read the Bible? Have you actually looked at who Jesus was and what He taught? Have you forgotten how Jesus dealt with religious leaders?
Because I hear things coming out of people’s mouths on the subject of accountability for pastoral leaders, and it is baffling to me. It is honestly like we have either forgotten or overlooked the idea that leadership is called to be above reproach.
We could go into a deep dive here about what it means to be above reproach, and everyone could start arguing semantics, then grace, then forgiveness, and it would turn into a zoo.
So I don’t want us to do that.
If you want to read about the Greek words used in 1 Timothy and Titus for more context, you can find great resources out there. They’re all going to point you to the same basic conclusion: perfection has never been the expectation or the model for pastoral leadership.
Integrity has.
Somewhere along the way, though, churches began acting as if admitting that pastors aren’t perfect meant we no longer got to expect integrity from them.
And that is the problem.
For many of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s, if you asked us to define integrity, we would spout off “who you are when no one’s looking” without missing a beat.
And while I do think part of integrity is maintaining the same person in private as you do in public, I also think it is so much more than that.
Integrity is who you are when you fail. Who you are when you’re confronted. Who you are when you’ve hurt someone. Who you are when things don’t go your way. It is the culmination of our character and our demonstrable conduct.
Or, shall we say, the fruit we bear?
I’m not sure why, but it’s almost as if the church forgets the fruit of the Spirit when pastoral leadership fails. It’s like we completely ignore the fruit that should be evident in the lives of our leaders. If we aren’t seeing love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control in our leaders, there is a major problem.
And accountability is the necessary response.
Accountability Is Not Punishment
This is the point in the discussion where people start to confuse accountability with punishment. Accountability is not punishment. It is an appropriate response to harm, especially when someone holds spiritual authority.
Grace can forgive the sin without immediately restoring somebody to leadership. And forgiveness does not require continued access, authority, trust, or platform.
So why do churches so often behave as though removing someone’s access, authority, trust, or platform is crueler than allowing harmed people to continue carrying the consequences of that leader’s actions?
Churches often claim they are protecting the people, the ministry, the witness, or everything God has supposedly done through the pastor. Somewhere, though, in all that protecting, the very people who were actually harmed become an afterthought.
Then the question shifts from, “Did the pastor do something wrong?” to something far more revealing:
“When something went wrong, who did the church decide was worth protecting?”
The answer to that question tells you a lot about the system’s health.
Who Are We Actually Protecting?
When church boards, leadership teams, or councils choose to protect the pastor over the people, it isn’t always obvious that is what is happening. It might look like using minimizing language like “moral failing,” rushing toward restoration without repentance or repair, invoking grace, questioning the credibility or motives of the harmed person, asking people to remain quiet “for the sake of the church,” keeping leadership structures intact, controlling information, or treating declining attendance as the crisis rather than the misconduct itself.
None of those ideas exist in a vacuum. But they become deeply problematic when used to silence accountability or to shift the cost of a pastoral leader’s behavior onto the people they’ve harmed.
I think sometimes we forget that grace asks what restoration looks like for the pastor who fell, but accountability asks what safety, justice, and repair look like for the people who were affected by the failure.
Healthy churches and healthy systems must be willing and able to ask both of these questions.
A system centered on protecting the pastor only asks the first.
And I think this is where we have to bring repentance back into the conversation, because we can’t reach greedily for grace while quietly ignoring repentance.
Grace does not erase repentance.
Even when a system holds a pastor accountable, the pastor’s response matters. If they reach for loads of grace without demonstrating changed behavior, repairing the harm they’ve done, committing to turn from their failings, and being willing to sit down for as long as it takes for God to do the work of restoration, they aren’t demonstrating integrity.
And they most definitely aren’t above reproach.
Restoration Does Not Require Restoration to Leadership
But I think there’s one more distinction we have to make here as well. Restoration of a person does not require restoration to a position.
A pastor can repent, heal, repair the harm they’ve done, rebuild relationships, and experience the full grace and mercy of God.
And none of that means they should automatically return to pastoral leadership.
I think this is where churches get themselves into trouble. We become so concerned with proving we believe in grace that we rush to put people back into their positions and act as if nothing ever happened. It’s almost like we believe the only evidence of true forgiveness and grace is if everything goes back to the way it was before.
Sometimes, though, accountability means things don’t go back to the way they were. Sometimes accountability means things have to change.
Trust takes time to rebuild. Sometimes authority has to be removed. Sometimes access has to change. And sometimes the most faithful thing a church can do is to insist that a leader step aside and give the people who were harmed the time and space they need to heal, without requiring those same people to participate in the leader’s restoration.
And sometimes, a person can be fully forgiven, fully restored, and fully loved by God without ever stepping into the role of pastor again.
This isn’t cruelty.
It isn’t hypocrisy.
And it isn’t a failure of grace.
It is the recognition that pastoral leadership is not something we protect at all costs.
The sheep were never meant to be sacrificed to save the shepherd.
Maybe when a leader fails, we quit asking how quickly we can get back to normal and start asking a much harder question:
“What would truth, repentance, accountability, safety, and repair require of us now?”
Questions to Sit With
When a church leader causes harm, who does the church seem most concerned with protecting — and what does that reveal about the health of the system?
Have you ever seen grace, forgiveness, or unity used as a reason to avoid accountability? How did that affect the people who were harmed?
If a church truly centered truth, repentance, accountability, safety, and repair after a leader failed, what might it have to be willing to change or lose?
I write in two spaces. A Seat at the Table is where I explore faith, healing, and making room for honesty after it’s been made complicated. Ink & Intention is for writers who want to show up with clarity, discernment, and integrity—especially online.
I’m also the author of Breathing Again and several guided journals, and I work with writers who want thoughtful, grounded support as they find their voice and shape what comes next.
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