Take down that post?

As if it had been too long since the last evangelical church sex abuse scandal, Leadership Journal (an imprint of Christianity Today) posted a long online article this month titled “My Easy Trip from Youth Minister to Felon”. Tagged as an article on topics including “adultery”, “failure”, “sex”, and “temptation”, it’s a long-ish first-person account of a youth pastor describing his progression into what sounds like an extramarital affair. Then on the last page you find out the “other woman” in question was a teenager in his church. Suddenly a cautionary tale about temptation turns out to be a story about a pastor grooming and abusing an underaged girl in his congregation. Disgusting.

My intent here isn’t to provide a full summary or address the article - RawStory.com reported on it and many Christian bloggers have chimed in. The Twitter hashtag #TakeDownThatPost quickly sprang up, and I found myself sympathetic.

But then my friend Randy chimed in with a slightly different approach. And that led me to a different, more interesting question. Rather than calling for the editors of the publication to reconsider and take down the post, might it be more appropriate to simply raise awareness that the publication has chosen to post such content, and then let people form their own opinions of the publication and its editors?

Now that’s a conundrum.

What’s the right approach?

Because on one hand Randy’s proposed approach seems pretty attractive. It allows me to just state the facts. If anything, the factual headline (RawStory.com: “Ex-Youth Pastor describes felony sex crimes as extramarital friendship in Christian Journal”) draws far more attention than a “#TakeDownThatPost” hashtag. And let’s face it, if some organization with which I didn’t expect to align did something like this I wouldn’t be campaigning for them to self-censor - I’d just point out where I thought they went wrong and leave it at that.

But this is Christianity Today we’re talking about. I typically respect them quite a bit. Only two weeks ago I recommended their editor Mark Galli’s recent piece on sanctification. Their executive editor Andy Crouch wrote one of my favorite books from last year. I’d like to think there’s some restorative action I could encourage rather than just throwing them under the bus. And to simply draw attention to their unwise action and let others draw conclusions seems an awful lot like I’m trying to drag Christians’ names through the mud, which also doesn’t seem like a good idea.

If you can’t say something nice…

I suppose there’s another option: just don’t say anything. It’s not like the world is looking to me for comment on every issue, right? I was starting to feel that way and then I saw the story going around Facebook and local friends personally looking into it. Now I feel some amount of compulsion to comment, if only to let them know that they’re not alone in being upset about CT posting this article.

So where does that leave me?

I’m not a CT subscriber, so I can’t vote with my feet by cancelling a subscription. I sent an email to the editor of Leadership Journal this morning expressing my concern. I don’t feel like there’s a lot of value in actively joining the Twitter crowd and propagating the hashtag. So what else do I do? (Do I need to do anything?) Pray for the situation, sure - for the victim, the jailed man, the countless other victims out there. But other than that I’m not sure there’s much to do, or much more to say that others aren’t saying more eloquently than I would.

If the abuse scandals of the Catholic church, Sovereign Grace Ministries, Bill Gothard, Vision Forum, and others haven’t yet made it clear enough to us in the evangelical church: covering up, weasling around the topic, addressing it as only sin/repentance and not as a crime, characterizing pastor/youth sex as ‘relationships’ rather than predation - this has got to stop. Let’s not bring even more disrepute to the church than the abusers already have. Let’s again call our elders to be above reproach, and hold them to it.

While we may all personally want to shy away from casting the first stone, God is not mocked. As a church body it’s well past time that we find the pile of millstones and remind ourselves how Jesus advised they might be used.