It was a hot summer evening the first time I met Pastor Hanson. He was a small man, but his smile was big and he had an easy way about him that made him feel approachable and trustworthy. He was warm and welcoming and while I didn’t quite feel as though I belonged in his congregation, it wasn’t because he or any of the members were aloof or distant. Quite the contrary, the people who approached me were friendly, curious and eager for me to be included.
The church building was a white rectangle with a tall steeple. It wasn’t very big, but it sat picturesquely at the top of a hill up a long driveway. It was simple, no marquees, no fancy architecture, no banners. It looked exactly as you might imagine a small church in Minnesota might look. The wooden sign at the bottom of the hill said, “Midwest Baptist Bible Church, Pastor Caleb Hanson.”
My husband, also named Caleb, had started making the 45 minute drive from our home to Rochester, Minnesota to visit this church on Sunday evenings about a month prior. We had a local church we attended Sunday mornings, but Caleb wanted to attend this church because they were part of an organization of churches that call themselves IFB, meaning Independent Fundamental Baptist. This distinction was important to Caleb because they believed that the only valid version of the Bible was the King James Version (KJV) and Caleb shared that belief.
I had been a visitor in two other churches that identified themselves as IFB and KJV-only, and it had been my quick observation that the difference in Bible version was not the only distinction. They had rules, referred to as “standards,” that were taught to the church members by the pastor. These rules were very restrictive, so it didn’t take a keen observer to note that this group of people, believing their leaders to have a superior understanding of Scripture, made a choice to live in an isolated social community, under the authority of the pastor.
At the time, I didn’t fully understand how pervasive the pastor’s control was within these churches. Pastor Hanson had such a pleasant personality and kind manner that I simply felt sympathetic towards him and his congregation. I observed them closely and listened to what they said about their pastor and each other. I could see they had shackled themselves to a performance-based religion and by doing so had removed the need for a sensitivity to the Holy Spirit. They could simply follow the rules passed down from the pulpit. Pastor Hanson told them at each church service where they were in error in their lives, and they filled the front of the church and the isles at the alter call after every service. That ritual meant they could leave each gathering confident that they were right with God.
The children in the church knew the expectation well, but they hadn’t perfected the act of sincerity as well as the adults. Every service, young people would be coloring and drawing throughout the sermon, lost to their own imagination, but when that alter call came, they would hop right up from their seats and hurry to the front to kneel, somberly bow their heads and squeeze their little eyes shut. I remember a sermon directed to the role of fathers in the home. I waited to see if the little boys and girls would feel conviction about their inadequacy as fathers. Sure enough, they scurried right up to the front to make their confessions. It is clear, as long as there is an audience to applaud their display of spirituality, they will continue making their trek to the alter.
Sadly, the result of performance-based religion is that the performer loses genuine relationship with God. They miss out on the kind of relationship that is built from consistent time in His Word, continual conversation with Him and the deep intimacy of knowing Him more and more and willingly conforming your life to His leading. There is something indescribably powerful about the process of sanctification-the sovereign Creator God bending to lead and love His beloved. How tragic to have been robbed of such sweetness! There is no shortcut to genuine Christlikeness. The only way to become more like anyone is to spend time with them, know them and mimic them.
Christlikeness is not the same as pastor-likeness, but many find it easier to imitate a human pastor. After all, he is man who can be seen and audibly heard multiple times through the week. It is simply much easier and takes far less effort to accept whatever he says. Following a human means you only have to behave in the prescribed manner when he is watching, but you are free to live anyway you want when he is not present. God, on the other hand is always present and the model for living set through Jesus is perfection!
But when the temptations come, it takes the power of the Holy Spirit to wage spiritual war. The enemy is adept and skilled. He has honed his deception for thousands of years and he knows all too well the how to destroy. This outwardly religious individual lacks spiritual discernment and wisdom. He hasn’t developed a genuine hatred of sin and an internal sensitivity to the Holy Spirit from daily personal relationship with God. He has been pastor-led, not Spirit-led. His convictions were formed at the urging of a man, not from love and obedience to His Savior. He is an easy target.
This was the story of our home. My husband had been trained his whole life to perform and he was an A-list actor. He was respected, admired and well liked in this new church. Months after he began attending the church, I came to learn that he had a history of sexually abusing young children. It was a crushing revelation, and I was reeling from the emotional pain of that new knowledge, but I also struggled to reconcile that reality with the man I thought I knew. I was not the only one. Others who knew him found it hard to believe also. Even though I never doubted the victim’s stories, and in spite of Caleb’s admission that they stories were true, it took an escalation of deviant sexual behavior before I truly absorbed the reality of what I knew.
I wrote an email to Pastor Hanson to share the devastating news, but I received no response from him. I believe that if a person has been sexually attracted to young children and has acted upon that in a criminal manner in the past, that they may still have that attraction and may still act upon it. While I wanted to believe he wouldn’t, I also believe the sexual abuse of a child to be a deeply damaging and abusive behavior and I couldn’t risk it happening again. I was concerned because I knew the church members trusted him and I knew he was working in many of their homes, around their children. I feared further abuse would occur and I wanted to warn them. I wanted my husband to be confronted in a biblical manner, to have accountability and to be supervised around children.
Not until Pastor Hanson caught Caleb sexually harassing a woman in the church was Caleb finally asked to leave the congregation. However, he was encouraged to go to another IFB church despite the fact that he had not repented of sin or restored relationship in his current church. Pastor Hanson did call the pastor of the new church, and give him some history on Caleb, but again the pastor chose not to reveal to his congregation that there was a potential predator (and an adulterer) in the church. So, another unsuspecting congregation welcomed him into their building. This pastor, Pastor Clear, pastors in Rosemount, Minnesota, which is over an hour from Caleb’s home, so he decided to additionally attend another church in Rochester, Minnesota on Wednesday evenings. The pastor of this church, Pastor Noonan, was also warned that a previous child predator and an adulterer was joining their congregation and again chose to welcome him and ignore the biblical mandate for church discipline.
God gave us in the Bible a clear way to lovingly discipline within the church with the desire to bring a sinner to repentance. Matthew 18:15-17 says this:
If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.
Furthermore, Paul tells the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 5:11:
But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people.
But don’t misunderstand the heart of God as being unkind. Oh no! His desire is to see the sinner repent and to restore him to fellowship. It is a mercy to remove him from the security and community of the church, so he will be grieved by his sin and separation and long for restoration and fresh relationship with God. It is loving to choose the greater good. James 5:19-20 says,
“My brothers and sisters, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring that person back, remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of their way will save them from death and cover over a multitude of sins.”
God understands the tremendous consequence of sin and He has instructed His followers to take sin seriously out of love for His Bride, the church.
I wish my experience was an isolated event occurring only in these three churches but sadly, it is not. It is not even the first churches to look away form Caleb’s sexual and physical abuses. In a religious community where the pastor acts as the mediator between God and man, contrary to Scripture (1 Timothy 2:5), man need only take direction from a pastor. If Caleb continues to follow the outward standards imposed from the pulpit when he is in public view, then he is in good standing in the IFB church community. There is no concern for his eternal future, no relief from the enemy who continues to destroy him. At no point was he so loved by any pastor that they would hold him accountable, require him to submit to the legal authority (Romans 13:1), call him to repentance to the victims, his family and the church. His reputation (and likely the reputation of the pastor) have been held at a higher worth than God’s.
1 John 4:16b says that “God is Love”. God cannot behave in way that is contrary to who He is. God’s direction to the church on how to handle church discipline is loving, it is meant for the eternal, not temporal good, of the individual. To ignore it is not just un-biblical, it is deeply unloving. It is self-serving and self-righteous to presume to be wiser than God. God sees what we cannot see (1 Samuel 16:7), He sees a person for who he truly is and knows him better than he knows himself. It is arrogance for a pastor to believe that he understands sinners better than God and is in a position to usurp God’s direction and replace it with his own plan for reconciliation.
God knows that some will claim to be Christ-followers, but will live contrary to their claim. He has already instituted a way to ferret out those fraudulent followers and He has done so in the most merciful and kind way possible-by confronting them with sin and separating them from the church now, with the desire that this will result in genuine repentance and rescue from eternal punishment. Genuine Christ-followers must see the big picture-life is a vapor (James 4:14). It is far better for sin to run it’s course and the consequences of it to come down hard and fast now and to drive a person to the loving arms of Jesus, than for them to suffer through all eternity.
1 Corinthians 11: 1-15 says it better than I can. Paul is addressing those who have fallen for the deception of the smooth talking “super apostles” (vs 5). He passionately ensures them that his rebuke is out of love for them (vs 11). He concludes with this commitment in verses 12-15:
“And I will keep on doing what I am doing in order to cut the ground from under those who want an opportunity to be considered equal with us in the things they boast about. For such people are false apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve.”
Those words are every bit as relevant today as they were at the time of Paul. Nothing has changed-there are still those who appear righteous and who consider themselves to be godly church leaders, but are in actuality masquerading. Welcoming congregations, seemingly kind pastors and simple, charming churches can still be enemies of God if their foundation is not His Word and if every member is not, above all, a servant of Christ. In Matthew 10, Jesus was asked what the greatest command of all was. His response was,
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” Matthew 10:37
What does love look like? Jesus answered that:
“If you love me, keep my commands.” John 14:15
The church of Christ, the genuine, God-loving, Jesus-imitating, bride of Christ will find the treasure of knowing Christ a pleasure so unsurpassed by any other earthly thing, that they will refuse to stand in the way of others but will plead with them to recognize their sin and their need for a Savior. Believers will be unsatisfied with only hearing about God from the pastor, they will need God and His Word like they need oxygen. The church building will be a safe place, filled with those controlled by the Holy Spirit and submitting themselves to be willing slaves of Jesus Christ.
