How do you help a church recover after a pastor’s moral failure? On this episode of Pastors Talk, Jonathan Leeman, Mark Dever, and Thomas Terry talk through Terry’s personal experience shepherding a church after its lead pastor’s moral failure. Terry emphasizes the importance of leaning on other godly men in the church and from other churches when facing this adversity. They finish this conversation by discussing how to rebuild trust and health within the church.

• Thomas Terry’s Story
  
• Standing On The Shoulders Of Other Godly Men
  
• Shepherding a Church Well After a Pastor’s Moral Failure
  
• Rebuilding a Church

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Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

Jonathan Leeman:

Hi, this is Jonathan Leeman and with me is… With me is Thomas Terry, pastor of Trinity Church in Portland, Oregon, and some other guy who hangs around.

Thomas Terry:

Yes.

Jonathan Leeman:

And this is Pastor’s Talk. Yeah. And Pastor’s Talk tries to be the heart, the beating heart of healthy churches everywhere. Learn more at 9Marks.org. Mark, and Thomas, thanks for being here.

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, thanks for having me brother.

Mark Dever:

Thanks for having us.

Jonathan Leeman:

Yeah, indeed. Thomas, you and I have known each other, you and me Mark have known each other for a little while. We’re grateful for your pastoral work. We’re grateful for other partnership opportunities we have had together.

And I think towards the beginning of our relationship, when we first started getting to know you, you went through a very difficult church situation which launched you into your present pastoring. Well, you were already pastoring part-time, and then the lead pastor disqualified himself and you kind of became the de facto and then now full-time pastor of that church, Trinity Church.

And I want to think a little bit about that story, but it’s not just about the story. That’s not the goal. I can tell people to spend 30 minutes talking about that story. It’s to help other churches who are also in situations where maybe an elder or a pastor has disqualified themselves.

My impression is that you guys have done a great job pastoring your church through the disqualification of an elder. So that’s sort of the topic. How do you pastor a church through times when an elder or a pastor disqualifies themselves and lessons you’ve learned that might be beneficial for us, but why don’t you start, brother, by just giving us a quick recounting of what happened?

Thomas Terry’s Story

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, so I started my whole onboarding of eldership started at Trinity Church in Portland, Oregon. I was one of the first members of the congregation, loved the church, and really grew as a Christian in the church. About five years into being a member of the church…

Jonathan Leeman:

You were in full-time music.

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, I was in full-time music running a ministry called Humble Beast. And then about five years into the church plant, the elders approached me and asked me if I would ever consider pastoral ministry.

Of course, I thought it was crazy. No way. It’s just not my deal. However, the opportunity to meet with the elders for a year or a year and a half to learn about what it means to be an elder was appealing to me.

And of course, my schedule gave me the time to do that. So I pretty much learned everything about pastoral ministry from the pastor who had a moral failure. So I functioned as a lay pastor at Trinity Church…

Jonathan Leeman:

He discipled you.

Thomas Terry:

He did, he did very much.

Mark Dever:

Thomas, had you been an elder at a church before that?

Thomas Terry:

No.

Mark Dever:

Had you been a member of a church before that?

Thomas Terry:

Yes.

Mark Dever:

And at that church, had you learned much about being an elder or a pastor?

Thomas Terry:

No. So my framework for eldership was largely shaped by our former pastor, you know, along with other books and other resources to just kind of give me some orientation. But I pretty much learned everything from this man.

So long story short, at the time we had about five elders. One staff elder who was the lead pastor and a bunch of lay guys, we received an email from a man who said basically his wife was having an ongoing affair with our lead pastor. So within a matter of hours, myself and another elder approached our former pastor and confronted him with the email.

Mark Dever:

So you got that email, it’s like a Sunday afternoon.

Thomas Terry:

It was a Sunday afternoon, yeah.

Mark Dever:

You read the email and you think, oh my goodness, you call a fellow elder and the two of you drive over there to his house.

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, well first thought was like, this is crazy. This is crazy. But the tone and the way the letter was written, I kind of knew, no, this is the heart of a man who’s bleeding. You could just tell. So that raised the stakes a little bit. So went, and confronted him.

Jonathan Leeman:

But can I just pause and say how grateful I am you guys went straight to the confrontation? You just went straight to him. I don’t know that. I don’t know if that’s typical, but it should be.

Thomas Terry:

Yeah. Well, I attribute that to the grace of God.

Jonathan Leeman:

Yeah.

Thomas Terry:

Just giving us a supernatural boldness as our former pastor was. Pretty, both charismatic and pretty.

Jonathan Leeman:

Strong personality.

Thomas Terry:

Strong personality, yeah.

Jonathan Leeman:

So you drive to his house.

Thomas Terry:

Drive, we meet.

Jonathan Leeman:

The disciple to the discipler.

Thomas Terry:

Basically confront him. He admitted it to us. And the very first thing he said is, can this be something that we just deal with internally, our elders and this other man’s elders? At that point, just brokenhearted.

Jonathan Leeman:

Because he is a pastor of the church.

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, yeah. He was brokenhearted over the situation and just said, just, brother, absolutely not.

Mark Dever:

He was brokenhearted?

Thomas Terry:

I was brokenhearted. I think he was trying to figure out a way to resolve the situation quietly, privately, and kind of sweep it under the rug. But by the grace of God, myself and the other elder was there, just said, no, we’re not going to go that route.

We’ve got to address this. And what’s really interesting is that whole process of confronting sin, church discipline, I actually learned from this man. So I kind of just deployed the mechanism that I was taught.

Jonathan Leeman:

So within, and we don’t need to go blow by blow how it all played out from there, but within a few weeks, he’s no longer the pastor. Did you discipline him from membership?

Thomas Terry:

Yeah. So that’s a complicated reality, both legal and lawyers and things of that nature. But the church did essentially excommunicate him.

Jonathan Leeman:

Yeah. Okay. So.

Jonathan Leeman:

So now this is where I want to…

Mark Dever:

This means that you all determined that he was not repentant.

Thomas Terry:

Yes, we did determine that. We felt like he had worldly sorrow, but not godly grief.

Jonathan Leeman:

Okay, so that is… Maybe there’s more to say about him and his failure and the immediate aftermath. What I’m really interested is in now how you pastor the church. You got a bunch of people who are just going crazy.

I assume some people laughed. I assume broken, all sorts of things. You gotta clean up the mess.

Thomas Terry:

Yes.

Jonathan Leeman:

What now?

Standing On The Shoulders Of Other Godly Men

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, so immediately the elders had to kind of figure out how we’re going to walk through this whole process. And I think one of the things that a lot of people don’t understand is that in the Lord’s kindness, He brought to the table a lot of support.

Other pastors. So essentially we stood on the shoulders of a lot of godly men. Who have gone through very similar things that…

Mark Dever:

In other churches.

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, in other churches. We had strong relationships with other local pastors and they actually came to our aid and helped us through. So right out of the gate, we were standing in solidarity with other godly men helping us through this process.

We did have a lot of folks that left right away. Just for them, it was too emotional, too painful. They just couldn’t see themselves trusting pastors in our context anymore. So they left right away.

Others maintained a lot of suspicion, a lot of heartbreak, a lot of confusion, distrust. And so that began a long process for us of triage. And so that process was very slow, very painful. And the first thing we did was when we announced it to the congregation, we said, we’re going to stay here until everybody has a chance to talk with us and we can…

How To Adress a Pastor’s Moral Failure

Jonathan Leeman:

was like a three-hour meeting, a four-hour meeting.

Thomas Terry:

About a four-hour meeting.

Mark Dever:

And do I recall correctly, a couple of pastors from other churches came and sat on stage with you?

Thomas Terry:

Yes. Yeah. So we had Michael Lawrence, who’s in a neighboring congregation, Hinson Church, and Todd Miles, who also was part of that congregation. We had two of our former elders that we had sent out to plant or revitalize.

They came back in and so basically stood up with all of these men and informed the congregation of what was going on. I think that right there helped our congregation to see, oh, there’s a lot of men here who are standing with us, who can basically affirm our decision and stand with us.

And so that meeting was about four hours and it was painful. I often tell people that if you ever want to find a deterrent from moral failures, if you could somehow… bottle up the cries and the agony that we heard in that four-hour meeting and present it to other folks and say, this is what you will hear if you fail your congregation. I think that in itself would function as a great deterrent. It was heartbreaking.

Jonathan Leeman:

But you got to the end of the four hours.

Thomas Terry:

We did.

Jonathan Leeman:

With a little bit more unity?

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, definitely. I mean, you did have a lot of people that were really upset. And given that the former pastor was no longer there, we had to absorb a lot of people’s anger and frustration.

Jonathan Leeman:

Did Michael or Todd, these pastors from other churches address your congregation or did they just sit on stage and let their presence be felt?

Thomas Terry:

They just let their presence be felt. They didn’t say anything. They respected our elders, but they were there to stand in solidarity with us. Now, what was amazing about this process is for the first five or six weeks, many of these men actually came and they preached in our pulpits.

Jonathan Leeman:

I was gonna ask

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, and they minister to the elders because we obviously needed to be ministered to as well. We were deeply broken. And so, you know, one by one they came and they filled our pulpits and they preached specifically to our issues.

Trusting the Lord when a shepherd goes astray. Lament was the context of one of the sermons. It was really helpful to have these men who have their own congregations come in and… and step in and help us through that process.

And I think it was that that actually helped a lot of the people in our congregation stay. They could see, oh, these men are being helped, they’re being supported. We can trust them because they’re bringing in these other men to help us through the process.

Jonathan Leeman:

I mean, I can imagine if like mom and dad, you know, dad somehow fails me for other dads in the church to show up and talk to me and my siblings, how that will help me not discount all dads and all families and just… all people are terrible. It’s just like, okay, no, my dad failed.

That’s terrible. But the world is bigger, family, there are other good dads out there. Have you seen churches help one another out in these kinds of circumstances?

Mark Dever:

Yeah, I’ve been in exactly the situation that Thomas has been in.

Jonathan Leeman:

Which player? Like stepping in and helping the other church?

Mark Dever:

The situation that he’s been in where his pastor fell. And so I’ve not been in exactly that situation, but certainly, yeah. you know, the church I’d served at formerly after I left, some things came out about that pastor years later.

So I was involved personally in trying to encourage some of the folks there. The church here where I am now, the previous pastor had been in a situation like that. So I came into, I was like the next pastor after him.

Thomas Terry:

I’m so sorry, brother.

Shepherding a Church Well After a Pastor’s Moral Failure

Mark Dever:

Yeah. Well, I knew a bit what that was going to be like walking into it. Yeah. It just takes patience and… not having high expectations.

Jonathan Leeman:

Let’s talk about that. How do you love the congregation after the fact? Yeah. What are some of the things you both learned in that situation?

Thomas Terry:

Yeah. Well, I think in the kindness of God, you kind of, you just kind of fall into triage mode. I think the Lord supernaturally gave us a heart to care for our people. And you’re just kind of caught up in helping folks.

I think one of the things I learned pretty quickly is, now I didn’t do this, perfectly, but I had learned that a lot of people’s suspicion towards me and anger and hostility towards me was really just they were just confused and they were hurt by our former pastor and because I was the one that remained I just had to absorb a lot of that so I had to Process that like man. These people aren’t mad at me. I didn’t do anything to hurt them or cause any suspicion

Jonathan Leeman:

They’re just there and connect you to him.

Thomas Terry:

Oh for sure and in many ways my congregation knew that I was Discipled by this man and everything I learned in ministry I learned from him so there was a sense in which people were confused. How did I not know that this was happening?

So that was you know, that was confusing that was hard for me But I think I just became preoccupied with caring for people I just didn’t consider you know, I didn’t get angry at people who were frustrated I wasn’t because I just I could see why they were hurt I mean, I was hurt.

Jonathan Leeman:

So much good pastoring is that though, isn’t it? People come in, they have various hurts, various baggage, and they’re gonna lash out, and you learn not to take it personally.

And you manfully absorb that blow to the chest and love them. Like, there it is, that’s leadership right there.

Absorbing Your Congregation’s Frustration and Anger

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, in many ways that’s what Jesus does for us. He absorbs our sin, you know? And so this is a good way for us to model how we’re gonna care for them. We just absorbed a lot of their frustration and anger.

I think a few things, we were over-the-top transparent with everything. So I think oftentimes when you’re going through a crisis, you think, well, I can’t tell people everything. I can’t be completely honest about everything.

And there’s a sense in which we just decided right away with our members and the privacy of our member meetings, we were going to be over the top transparent. We were going to communicate everything.

Mark Dever:

And that’s not the culture that the previous pastor had engendered.

Thomas Terry:

No. No, so that was foreign.

Mark Dever:

Not only about his own sin but just generally in his ministry.

Thomas Terry:

Correct.

Mark Dever:

philosophy.

Jonathan Leeman:

Cards close to the chest.

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, absolutely. Kind of autonomous, you know, loner, you know, I do what I want to do. I don’t really tell people what’s going on. I just preach.

Jonathan Leeman:

Were there threats, legal threats that he would have issued saying don’t tell people and you know, decide no, we’re going to tell people anyway?

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, we got cease and desist letters from his attorneys. Uh, basically said we couldn’t use his name publicly. It was just messy.

Mark Dever:

So did you just say the one who must not be referred to?

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, we just… Well, in the kindness of God, because of the music business, I had access to a lot of lawyers and attorneys. So I was able to, in a short period of time, reach out and get counsel on how to handle the situation.

So basically, we wrote everything, sent it to my lawyers, and I protected legally to say this. My lawyer said, yes, yes, no, don’t say this, don’t say that. But we were able to communicate everything by just not saying his name publicly.

So yeah, that’s the ugly side of it is that it was really tricky to navigate. So we’re managing people, managing legal, it was just complicated.

Jonathan Leeman:

Okay, lesson one, don’t take things personally. Lesson two, be transparent. Lesson three, yeah, bone up on your legal knowledge. What else, what other lessons? Things you did to love them in their lack of trust.

Thomas Terry:

Yeah. Well, I think part of the process was realizing our church is going to be forever different. And so there’s going to have to be some significant culture changing that needs to happen. And so you have to learn the dance of moving quickly with certain aspects of how culture will change, but then also moving incredibly slow because you are dealing with people who are suspicious.

Jonathan Leeman:

I understand the words you’re using right now, but I don’t know what you’re talking about. Like what are you moving fast and moving slow on?

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, so if you were to step into our previous elder structure, it was obviously largely different than what it is now. It wasn’t a plurality of elders. It might have been presented as a plurality of elders, but it was really like heavy-handed, elder-ruled, you know, first among equal, but to the most sinister way.

Jonathan Leeman:

Yeah, I got it.

How to Maintain a Healthy Eldership Culture

Thomas Terry:

And so we had… to quickly shift culture among eldership, how is that gonna work? But you have to communicate that well and slowly with the congregation, how we think about the structure of the church, how that’s gonna change, how we’re gonna be more healthy.

You immediately start thinking in more healthy categories. But of course, you can’t just turn the switch and say, hey, we’re changing everything. You have to be very patient and very slow. Because you’re simultaneously helping people who are hurting, who don’t want change that quickly.

Jonathan Leeman:

I recall you also saying at some point in the conversation, recognizing, no, there are things in this church and the culture that we think are good and beautiful and that we want to preserve and not let go of.

Whereas there are other things in the culture of the church that have been engendered that we need to discard. How did you walk us through that?

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, well, that took a long time. Because even in my own mind, the man who discipled me, the man who mentored me, I was confused for a long time. Like, what do I throw out?

What do I keep? I mean, the church discipline mechanism was great. That was obviously used against him or for his benefit or would have been used for his benefit. All that I was taught in the pulpit by this man, do I throw it all out or do I keep it?

I think this really time helped me to realize that what was said, the theology, and what was preached was right, though the man was not living according to what he preached. I had to reconcile that as a pastor.

Then my congregation had to figure out what they do with his previous sermons. Do they throw everything out or do we appreciate that? Which was good.

Mark Dever:

Did you find in his teaching and encouragement to practice church discipline generally, or is that a new theme? In other words, had he unwittingly prepared the congregation to do what needed to be done with him or had he always kind of not gone to that area?

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, I don’t think he ever. pursued church discipline in a way that was helpful. I think his theology was so precise that he built a mechanism to be precise, but he never really practiced it.

But in his precision of teaching it, we used it. So it was helpful in that regard.

Cultivate a Culture of Discipleship

Jonathan Leeman:

You know, the thing is though with church discipline, you know, we hear 9Marks often talk about before you practice discipline, you want to be cultivating a culture of discipling where tough, awkward, embarrassing conversations are an ordinary part of the culture of the church.

So if you’re not willing to confess or invite a brother to confess or challenge a brother and sin in private, be very slow before you go out and do it in public. So there’s all of this cultural stuff that I’m assuming, and sitting under your ministry for years, Mark, I mean, how many times have I heard you say, let’s pray?

Mark Dever:

Fire me.

Jonathan Leeman:

Well, that, no, but I’m thinking even before that, which is, hey, let’s pray that we as a church are willing to have tough, awkward conversations together in which we’re challenging each other and so forth. I’m guessing he never said those kinds of things.

Thomas Terry:

No.

Jonathan Leeman:

Because he’s living in the dark.

Thomas Terry:

Yeah. But that was part of deculturating that.

Jonathan Leeman:

Right.

Thomas Terry:

We had to build a new culture that was a culture of confession, owning sin, repenting, you know, transparency among elders. All of that was culture change.

Jonathan Leeman:

There was none of that. Very little of that.

Thomas Terry:

Very little of that. It was prior to what I would call the bomb. It was really like the one man. Pulpit performance. Everything was built around this man’s personality and his gifts.

Jonathan Leeman:

How many years ago did the bomb go off?

Thomas Terry:

Five years ago.

Jonathan Leeman:

Okay, fast forward five years.

Mark Dever:

It’s been five years?

Thomas Terry:

Yeah.

Mark Dever:

Wow.

Jonathan Leeman:

That is crazy.

Thomas Terry:

Yeah.

Jonathan Leeman:

I assume that is a part of your culture in your church now. This sort of transparency, discipleship,

Thomas Terry:

It is. Now it is, yes.

Jonathan Leeman:

We’re living the real Christian life together.

Thomas Terry:

Yes.

Jonathan Leeman:

Which is like God in his mysterious providence uses this to be,

Thomas Terry:

he does.

Jonathan Leeman:

I’m going to benefit and edify all of these people. in this way.

Thomas Terry:

I’m going to purify my church.

Jonathan Leeman:

Yeah, that’s right.

Mark Dever:

I can think of one pastor whose church recently went through a natural disaster and he said, as terrible as it is, it’s quickly bringing to the fore that there can be many changes in the church done much more quickly than there could have been if this hadn’t happened to the church.

Jonathan Leeman:

Yeah, right.

Thomas Terry:

And that’s what’s happened at Trinity.

Jonathan Leeman:

How did the elders care for each other? The five or four?

Thomas Terry:

Five at the time. Well, the first thing we did is establish health. Between us and that was being honest.

Jonathan Leeman:

What does that mean?

A Healthy Culture is a Transparent Culture

Thomas Terry:

I mean, no one ever asked our former pastor, like, how are you doing, brother? Spiritually, how are you like, how are you doing with your thought life and how are you keeping lust in check?

Those conversations just never happened. I think the pseudo piety of our former pastor just we just assumed, oh, he’s just he’s not even wrestling with these things. So we weren’t asking those questions.

But the first thing we started doing was saying, oh, we need to open this up completely. What are the areas that we need to be completely transparent with each other about? And then just a culture of encouragement.

We decided that we were going to diversify the pulpit and that helped to, I’m sitting under other men preaching to my soul. They’re sitting under my preaching. That actually helped to mitigate some of the personality that was so dominant in the culture of our church.

Yeah, so we just were more in tune. We were more sensitive and that tends to happen when you’re deeply hurt. You begin to start thinking in different categories.

Jonathan Leeman:

Last question from me. I remember you telling me at one point that this whole experience pushed you a little bit into 9Marks world.

Thomas Terry:

Indeed it did.

Jonathan Leeman:

Explain.

Thomas Terry:

Well, a lot of the men that came to our aid right away, they kind of came from that 9Marks world. And I think about, you know, Michael Lawrence and Todd miles, they were just very gracious.

And even as we thought about kind of revitalizing our church, cause that’s essentially what happened. We revitalized the church. It forced me to start asking bigger questions on what is a healthy church.

Rebuilding a Church

How can we rebuild this in a way that is healthy? And I think 9Marks just kind of gave me the infrastructure and the framework for building a healthy church. So we patterned our eldership after 9Marks.

We started patterning the way we engage with the congregation after 9Marks. Everything we kind of just learned from 9Marks. So both from people as well as the resources, I think man, the Lord really used this situation to help me see, no, there are other brothers that are doing church in a very healthy way.

And I just wish that our congregation always had those healthy mechanisms in place. It would have saved us a lot of pain and a lot of brokenness.

Jonathan Leeman:

I remember when the Me Too and then those Church Too movements happened back when, what, 17, 18, 2018. And just thinking to myself, we’ve been talking about this stuff for years and putting the culture and structures in place to deal with precisely these things.

People are calling them for all sorts of other… solutions, third-party investigations, a presbytery, whatever. It’s just like, no, you just need a healthy church. This is in a culture of discipling and transparency and all the things we’ve been talking about, church discipline.

That’s how you ferret out this stuff and then address it. Well, brother, I’m grateful to God for you and the way he used you. I think it’s a lot of hard. It’s really hard a lot of times when you’re to say that a disciple of a man to then turn around and confront that man, or this is my father.

God used you to do that. And the congregation, whether they realize it or not, is very much reliant on the other elders if the senior pastor disqualifies himself.

Thomas Terry:

Absolutely.

Jonathan Leeman:

In the same way, they’re reliant on the other elders if any elder disqualifies himself. And it’s easy in those moments for the other pastors to sort of circle the wagons. You didn’t do that.

And you dealt honestly, directly, humbly, and courageously in that situation. I think you set a good example for all of us. So thank you. And the church, even the people who left are indebted to you in that. So.

Thomas Terry:

God has been exceedingly kind to the church and he’s shown me what I’ve known theologically to be true in reality, that he will sustain his church, that he cares for his people, and that he uses elders to lovingly lead their people. He’s just demonstrated that and I’m so thankful for the Lord’s help in preserving his church because a bomb like this goes off and you pretty much, and this is what was told to me by a lot of people.

Man, this is the death blow to your church. Now that’s what was told to me, but God was very kind and God would have been very kind to just say this was a horrible thing that went on. I’m removing –

Jonathan Leeman:

We’re closing the doors.

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, we’re closing the doors. We had other healthy churches in Portland we could have pushed people into, but God decided to demonstrate the beauty of his glory by sustaining the church. Yeah, so I’m super thankful.

Jonathan Leeman:

Thanks for your time, brother.

Thomas Terry:

Yeah, thank you.

Mark Dever:

Thank you.