The Scariest Word in Pastoral Ministry

Bifurcation.

When I was in seminary, Diane Langberg came and spoke to one of our classes. In addition to counseling victims of all kinds of horrific abuse around the world, Dr. Langberg had quite a bit of experience working with pastors who had fallen into sexual sin.

When she explained how men who (almost universally) began with good intentions fell into moral failure that devastated their families, ruined their ministries, and preyed upon the sheep they were supposed to be protecting, she used the word “bifurcation.” That is to say, over time there grew up a split in these men’s lives. They began to say and teach and proclaim one thing to the world, while doing and loving a very different thing in their private life. Their work as a pastor began to become disconnected from their personal lives. It became more like a job to be done; it just happened to be a job where you had to talk about God.

And here’s the scary part: for most of them, they barely realized it. It was a process of small compromises and increased tolerance for sin that eventually left them far down a path they didn’t know they were on. It didn’t begin as outright, intentional hypocrisy. It was much more subtle than that. In fact, many of them had so successful split their private lives off from their pastoral ministry that they hardly even acknowledged that what they were doing was wrong until it was far too late.

Of course, this split in our lives doesn’t only manifest itself in sexual sin. It can also manifest itself in the other areas like greed, laziness, neglect of your family, and personal unkindness.

Here are some early signs of a dangerous bifurcation in your life (Deepak, maybe you could add more):

1. If you are a seminary student (or a pastor), do you study God’s word and theology with a heart devoid of worship? If you begin to read about God simply in order to master the content for an exam or sermon, you will find it easy to speak with clarity about things and ideas that you don’t really believe or know in your heart.
2. Are you well known by anyone else? Do you confess your sin to another person? Or are you the only one watching over your soul? Usually someone who doesn’t want to confess their sin has sin in their life that they don’t want to be threatened.
3. Do you assume that if other people approve of you, God approves of you? Do you judge your conduct by the approval of a congregation that barely knows you, or by the standards of the God before whom all things are laid bare? Let’s face it, in this day and age, it’s not that hard to hide something in your life from the people in your church. Don’t think that just because they think you’re a godly man, you really are.
4. Do you find yourself condemning sin publicly, even as you indulge it privately? Can you read Deepak’s post about pornography and approve of it, maybe even send it along to some other people, and then go look at some porn? Is your conscience seared to behaviors that would have been repulsive to you ten years ago?
5. Do you do the work of the ministry without passion for Christ’s glory? It’s possible for preaching and counseling and evangelism to simply become the tasks on your job description. You might do them with a certain degree of competency and excellence, because that’s the kind of guy you are. You’d probably also be a good lawyer or mechanic. But you’re no longer passionate about seeing Christ glorified through the things that you do all day, so it doesn’t seem to matter whether or not you live them our in your private life.

I think this is a danger for anyone engaged in pastoral ministry.

If you find yourself heading down this path, I’d urge you to expose your life to the light. Find someone safe to talk to, someone who will neither coddle you nor reject you. And most all, flee to Christ. He’s the source of all grace and forgiveness and mercy and health. Go to him with your sin, don’t try to hide from him any longer.