UNITED STATES
The American Conservative
By ROD DREHER • June 17, 2014
Last week, Leadership Journal, a publication of Christianity Today, published an anonymous essay by a former youth pastor. It started like this:
Seven years ago I was hired by my church to be the new youth minister. The youth group was on life support at the time, with only a few students involved. My wife and I, newly married, already had good relationships with the students and their parents and, with my college ministry experience, I seemed to be the perfect fit for the position.
The ministry grew steadily. Within a few years the group that once struggled to fill a minivan was taking over 40 students to camp every summer. Teens were involved in every area of our church. The students were participating in local, regional, and international missions, and were inviting their friends to our activities. The gospel was being taught, and students were accepting Christ, getting baptized, and serving.
You can read the whole thing in PDF format here, but not on the Leadership Journal website. Instead, this is what you get there:
We should not have published this post, and we deeply regret the decision to do so.
The post, told from the perspective of a sex offender, withheld from readers until the very end a crucial piece of information: that the sexual misconduct being described involved a minor under the youth pastor’s care. Among other failings, this post used language that implied consent and mutuality when in fact there can be no question that in situations of such disproportionate power there is no such thing as consent or mutuality.
I think this is too bad. I’m glad they published the piece, and am only sorry that they didn’t do so with better framing at the beginning and the end, to anticipate the objections and deal with them.
The essay is valuable for at least two reasons. First, it shows how this youth minister allowed himself to fall into this grave sin, which is, of course, also a crime. The self-pity (“my wife isn’t paying enough attention to me”), the rationalizations, the secrecy, the all-consuming vanity (he loved being the center of attention in the youth group) — it’s all very human, and very real. If I were teaching a pastoral class at seminary, I would hand this essay out, along with strong warnings to my students to beware these danger signs.
Second, the essay itself shows how the prisoner, though he claims to be 100 percent to blame for his fate, still doesn’t appear to own up to the full consequences of what he did. The first clue is his description of the relationship as an “extramarital affair.” Which it was. But it was also statutory rape, because the female involved was a minor. This is what upset so many readers, and led to CT taking the entire essay down. I think that was an overreaction on the part of readers, and of CT.
The author did, at the end, concede that his partner was, in fact, a minor, and in an update, conceded further that she was a victim, and could not have legally consented to what happened. That wasn’t enough for the critics. I wish CT had left the piece up, but also published strong, reasonable criticism of it. If the piece fails to convey a proper sense of the author’s horror at the magnitude of his sin/crime, perhaps that is part of the lesson it teaches: that sex offenders are so narcissistic that they fail to see their victims as full persons. Or perhaps it was simply an editing oversight. It’s hard to know.
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