CREEDE HINSHAW: Sex, money lead to downfall of many

Bill Hybels announced this week that he is stepping down as pastor of Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago. He leaves under a cloud of allegations of overstepping sexual boundaries. The allegations included a variety of charges from unwanted kissing, hugging inappropriately and a consensual sexual relationship. Some of the charges apparently go back 20 years.

Hybels, who has been a stellar leader in the church, is known throughout the country to those who follow the church growth movement. He was a pioneer in the contemporary worship phenomenon, founding the Willow Creek Church almost 40 years ago. If I were to have offered an opinion on him, I would have given him high marks, although I haven’t followed the Willow Creek Church closely over the years.

Hybels denied the charges and his church hired an independent lawyer who set up an investigatory committee that concluded that Hybels was innocent of the innuendos leveled against him. But others, including John Ortberg, himself a key player in evangelical church circles and once on Hybel’s staff, concluded that the investigatory committee did a whitewash.

The precipitating point came a few weeks ago when the Chicago Tribune published a lengthy investigative piece documenting this story in its many facets, interviewing those who said they were victimized, church members and Hybels, who called the allegations “flat out lies”.

But this week the weight of the controversy and the blow-back became too much. Hybels quit, saying he did not want to continue to bring controversy and trouble to his church. He said that, were he to do it over again, he would have done some things differently, attributing – in part — his naivete to his downfall.

Pastors should be above reproach when it comes to human sexuality, but then again, so should all of us. Pastors cannot afford to be naïve in the matter of human relations, but then again, most of us need to be wiser.

Serving as pastor of a local church puts a leader in a vulnerable, high-pressure situation. There will be multiple circumstances, perhaps daily, when pastoral behavior can be misunderstood. Likewise, there will be multiple circumstances, perhaps daily, when pastoral behavior can be understood all too well. Temptations are frequent.

Did Hybels cross a line? Did he believe, like so many powerful people, that he was beyond reproach? Had he been warned years ago? Is he the victim of his own naivete? Is he a completely innocent victim? Did his church, the church he founded, love him so much that they overlooked or justified his behavior? I have no answers to this question.

Furthermore, it occurs to me that I could have written just as easily about the prominent United Methodist pastor Kirbyjohn Caldwell, a Houston megachurch pastor and spiritual adviser to presidents, charged in a federal indictment with fleecing many victims, including his own church members, by allegedly selling fraudulent bonds to them. Sex and money are two of the ways pastors – and the rest of us – get into big trouble.

Contact Creede Hinshaw at [email protected].