When the Charges are Made in Your Church (Originally posted on Wednesday, February 4, 2013)

A friend working on his Marriage and Family Therapy program invited me to comment on what it's like to be in charge and have to walk through the investigation, prosecution and nightmare of child molestation charges in the church. I can only offer my impressions, having experienced it more than once. I know it has great, even devastating effect on the accusers and accused, but my knowledge of that comes by observation only and is second hand. It must certainly be awful, but I'm hardly qualified to speak to that with the authority of experience.

When it's on your watch and you report it and know all those involved - alleged victim and alleged perpetrator - it is one of the hardest and most solitary things to walk through. At least as hard as comforting a family shell shocked by suicide, as hard as speaking with the young couple who have lost a very young child. It's on level with the numbing difficulty of being the one spiritual guide in the room when they tell the already sick guy the cancer is fast, always nasty and terminal.

It's disorienting.

It's like being in a large, familiar room and every bit of light goes out. As you start fumbling around you realize somebody, somehow has quickly rearranged the furniture and nothing is where you remember it. They've added things too and the doors aren't where they're supposed to be.

The whole experience ages you and you realize again what nobody cares to hear: that ministry and leadership is not what people think it is. You don't know which end is up, but your prayer life does deepen because words spoken to other folks don't communicate like they used to, so you pray. It's only then that you start to realize that maybe the room is bigger than you thought and there is a way out and someday, once you get past the clutter, you might just find it.

Of course, the agonies endured by the others involved must be horrific. Guilty, not guilty, real, distorted or false accusations - it all has to be chaos and misery for everyone. I only know what I know and remain the world's foremost authority on my own experience and opinion.

If the whole point of this exercise - for me - is God's way of getting me to pray better or more, I would prefer to read a book by one of the Puritan divines or attend a seminar. Like W.C. Fields said, "all in all, I would rather be in Philadelphia".