I hate to admit that when I see a headline like the one above I always want to click through to find out who failed. Is it someone I know? Is it someone I dislike? Is it someone I feel in competition with? Every time I click on a headline about a fallen pastor I’m the one that falls. Why do we secretly rejoice when someone else fails?
The other day our oldest granddaughter slipped and fell, busting her lip on our kitchen floor. Thankfully, though there was a little blood and a lot of tears, she wasn’t seriously hurt. By the time I got home she was snuggled up with her mom holding a bag of ice against her swollen lip. Her younger sister, three year old Mollie, was sitting on the kitchen floor blowing soap bubbles with my wife, Sherry. As Sherry told me about Maggie’s accident Mollie’s smile disappeared, she looked up, tears brimming in her eyes, and said, “Me too”. She felt so much empathy for what her sister experienced it was as though she had fallen as well.
I want to have that kind of empathy for other pastors. I hope my heart to break when I hear of a pastor failing morally. I hope I can be excited when a new church succeeds and crushed when a church plant fails. I want to pray every day for other pastor’s kids, and I want to be more interested in the health of their marriage than the size of their budget.
The next time I see a story outlining the details of a pastor who’s fallen I pray my response isn’t self-righteous smugness, I pray my response will simply be, “Me too, I’m another fallen pastor”.
