No, You’re Not Protecting the Gospel

I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse, but I’ve been given faces for the anonymous stories of sexual assault, abuse, and harassment I’ve read online. One by one over the past few years, I’ve learned that people I love, wives of my friends, and women who worship at my church share those stories.

Absorbing #metoo and #churchtoo stories as a man, my brain jumps to the perpetrator’s perversion of sex. Instinctively, I shake my head at the demented imaginations, the desperate acts. My hands roll into fists when I think about the emotional scarring. Anger pulses up my neck, as my jaw clinches because of the theft of innocence. 

Recently, I read several #metoo stories in the Old Testament that affirmed those tendencies. One in particular, though, confronted my sense of connection and even complicity to the #meetoo problem: David and Bathsheba. 

Imagine what true crime podcasts today could do with King David’s inappropriate sexual encounter with Bathsheba. They’d play up the subsequent murder of her husband and dozens of his fellow warriors. Multiple Netflix documentaries would duke it out for exclusive angles. Bloggers and vloggers would sit down in the conjecture. Film makers would make Bathsheba sexy or at least a sex object. Our screens would fill with dark hallways and half-lit faces—a Hebrew Game of Thrones. 

We’re no different. Most of us in the church focus on the salacious details of this account, too: the sex, the murder, the cover-up. If you read the account of when Nathan confronted David for his sin, though, God’s holiness was aimed at something else. 

Abuse of power. 

Nathan’s parable doesn’t mention sex, and the death in the story was not analogous to Uriah’s demise. God wanted David to know he had misused his position. Instead of a selfless leader, David had abused his divine appointment. Instead of protecting his sheep, he had devoured them.

As I’ve talked to church victims of sexual abuse and taken in other stories online, their accounts are woven together by that same strand. They share something other than sexual misconduct: abuse of power. Many of the men in organizational power forced their young victims to keep silent. The abusers wanted to guard their reputation, but they sold the secrecy as a way to protect their ministry and even the Gospel. Whether stated or implied, the predators pressured their victims’ secrecy so that it wouldn’t hurt the criminal’s testimony—and by their projection, Jesus’ testimony.

The men who abused girls also abused Scripture. They misrepresented justice. They transferred their shame to their victims. They gave the full weight of their responsibility to confused children and teens. I’ve watched that weight sink beautiful, youthful years. Maybe that’s why Jesus said that those who harm children would do good to have a millstone tied around their drowning necks. 

This abuse of power sounded like “This is our little secret. The Gospel depends on it.” At other times, the words were, “Your unsaved family will never meet Jesus, if you tell people about this.” Sometimes the voice came from the attacker; other times it originated within the victim’s head. As we’ve all heard, it has taken years for the courage to overcome those whispers. Between you and me, I have complied with those demands, too—for decades.

In one of the most vulnerable conversations of my life, though, I finally pushed back on this ideology. “The Gospel didn’t molest [her]! [Her pastor] did.”

Jesus doesn’t need us to protect his reputation. It’s not fragile. Neither is his Gospel. Jesus let a prostitute wash his bare skin with her tears. He stood next to an adulteress, caught in the act. He welcomed a naked thief into his paradise. He ate with scoundrels and hedonists. At no point did he express worry that broken humanity would tarnish his message.

Instead, he railed against white-washed graves, hypocrites, and religious snakes. He unleashed a leather whip and biting criticism on clergy who made exceptions for themselves, who made heavy yokes for the vulnerable, who abused their power.

If you dig into the #metoo and #churchtoo stories of your friends, family, and fellow parishioners, you’ll learn that the men who took liberties with physical and sexual power also abused their power in other ways. They twisted Jesus’ words and added implications between the lines. They crafted convoluted theology, ideology, and pedagogy. They gaslit both their victims and the people who surrounded their victims. They preached against acts they had just performed so that victims couldn’t be believed. They reinforced patriarchal domination instead of what Ephesians actually commands first: mutual submission. 

Jesus stooped to his followers’ feet with a wash basin and a towel. He didn’t associate with people in power other than to confront them. In both James 1 and 1 Thessalonians 2, his scribes wrote that our association with Jesus will be determined by how we treat the vulnerable.

#metoo and #churchtoo are bigger than gross proclivities, sick fetishes, and putrified sex. They display the antithesis of how Jesus wanted power to interact with vulnerability. How we wield our influence and position reveals where our hearts are, where our souls stand. All of us, especially men in charge, need to pursue selflessness instead of power. All of us need to leverage our positions and popularity for those without either. All of us need to amplify quiet voices—and sometimes even unpopular ones.

All of us need to speak truth to power, especially in the church. If there’s anywhere where leaders must be held accountable, it should be where shepherds are called to tend vulnerable sheep. There is no such thing as a “man of the Lord” who takes advantage of women and teens and children. There is no “God’s anointed” who places his millstone on the neck of another. “Thus says the Lord,” wafts to heaven as blasphemy from the mouth of a conniver. So, these men don’t need protection. They don’t need your secret or our compliance. They don’t need your shame or our fear. They don’t need you to swim with their millstone or the rest of us to let you drown.

If you have a #metoo story, you are God’s chosen one—not your abuser. You are someone he calls the church to support and nurture. Your story is part of the reason he came to defeat sin’s curse, why he redeems pain. 

If you are an abuser of any kind, fall to your knees. Beg at Jesus’ feet. Confess your sins to every stakeholder in your life with no caveats or excuses. Step down from power with candor instead of quietly slinking away. Get in a recovery group. Live selflessly. Figuratively amputate the diseased eye or hand that has brought death and hell into your soul.

If, like me, you have escaped the wrong end of a #metoo story, your job is to love deeply and listen fully, to build a sanctuary for those stories to be told. And no maybes about it: it’s time to confront the lies, secrets, and adulterated power that actually do hold back what the Gospel can accomplish.

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Stock photos purchased from iStockPhoto.com