FBI: Did Jack Schaap take teen across state lines for sex?

I think one reason why some people react strongly to a possible deception by church leadership is experience. Not too many moons ago, my dh and I left a church because so many problems in the church were addressed in the same manner, with the same attitude- basically “These are good people who made a mistake.” Well, bully for them. What it amounted to was a disdain for NT qualifications for leadership. Sure, we all make mistakes. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Great men are not always wise. Consider thyself lest thou also be tempted. Who doesn’t believe all that?

So- after awhile, you too can have a pastor who needs to be bailed out of credit card debt, whose wife is a Jezebel, whose kids have been habitually immoral- from molestation of young female relatives, becoming pregnant before marriage, and a convicted sex offender-, a youth pastor with a foul mouth and a violent temper, and deacons who are hooked on porn and beat their kids until their behinds are bloody.

Because no one is perfect.

I can’t even begin to describe the damage that has been done, and continues to be done by that church. So the sheep get sheered and slaughtered while the wolves are fat and happy.

Sin starts with excusing the little things, and when it comes to leadership, I think it unwise to go ‘wink wink’ when deacons put their heads together to whitewash or diminish or be ‘tactful’ about immoral and possibly criminal acts by their pastor- who also happens to have been a false teacher for some years now. What Schaap did wasn’t a ‘mistake’, or a brief lapse in judgment. And while I am sure he was not feeling well as all his actions came to light… medical leave? Puhlease.

Paul confronted Peter before all, and let him have it with both barrels- he didn’t form a committee and craft a tactful statement so that Peter could save face and everyone could feel good about themselves.

There isn’t any aspect of this IMO that should be treated as inconsequential. It is important that a young girl’s body and mind and spiritual well-being were compromised. It is tragic that a family has been torn apart, a wife and children betrayed. It is devastating that a church has had to deal with the pain of a leader being so publicly censured. And Schaap himself is obviously in need of serious spiritual help.

But when there is a clear pattern of deception, false teaching, vulgarity in books and from the pulpit, and an apparent desire to ‘serve the greater good’ by circling the wagons in the name of unity or submission to authority or whatever, we cannot sit around like we’re so surprised, or that it isn’t that big of a deal, or that focusing on one aspect is some kind of automatic dismissal of all other aspects of this problem.

I find every single teeny tiny detail of this grievous, heartbreaking, offensive, and shameful. If churches and leadership don’t start taking their Biblical roles and requirements seriously, more and more churches are going to sow the wind thinking they won’t reap the whirlwind.

…and I hate to weigh in on this more, but I’ll take a quick stab.

My issue with the ‘medical leave’ is this…even if the intent was honorable AND ​there was some kind of legitimate medical reason why Schaap couldn’t be in the pulpit, it still wasn’t the whole truth​. Eventually the leadership needed to tell the truth about what was going on to the congregation; anyone who was in leadership at FBC Hammond was going to realize that unless the temptation was to ease Schaap out quietly so that he could go on with his life elsewhere (which I have a hard time believing).

It doesn’t make sense for a church to demonstrate their commitment to truth and integrity ​and godliness by not disclosing the full truth to the congregation when there was no reason to hide it, and I see this soft-soaping of the facts as deceit. That’s a principle that we all teach our kids, and it applies especially to those who lead. This is akin to a deacon or elder saying that “Yes, we found out that the pastor was living a life of hypocrisy and deceit, but we’re going to mislead you until we feel like it’s the right time to tell the truth”. Would anyone accept that of their kids or subordinates?

The most important thing here isn’t the fact that there was immorality/adultery/lying to the people involved - it’s that they denigrated God, and His Name was shamed. David’s confession in Ps. 51:3-4 is right, and it’s what seems to be lacking here (from what I’ve seen) - “Against Thee, and Thee Only, have I sinned”. Until that dimension of the sin problem by both Schaap and ​the FBC leadership is resolved, I don’t see how these actions by both parties are little more than window dressing.

Susan nailed it:

Sin starts with excusing the little things, and when it comes to leadership, I think it unwise to go ‘wink wink’ when deacons put their heads together to whitewash or diminish or be ‘tactful’ about immoral and possibly criminal acts by their pastor - who also happens to have been a false teacher for some years now. What Schaap did wasn’t a ‘mistake’, or a brief lapse in judgment. And while I am sure he was not feeling well as all his actions came to light… medical leave? Puhlease.

Paul confronted Peter before all, and let him have it with both barrels- he didn’t form a committee and craft a tactful statement so that Peter could save face and everyone could feel good about themselves…But when there is a clear pattern of deception, false teaching, vulgarity in books and from the pulpit, and an apparent desire to ‘serve the greater good’ by circling the wagons in the name of unity or submission to authority or whatever, we cannot sit around like we’re so surprised, or that it isn’t that big of a deal, or that focusing on one aspect is some kind of automatic dismissal of all other aspects of this problem.

I find every single teeny tiny detail of this grievous, heartbreaking, offensive, and shameful.

I have to agree with Jay. I teach my children that lying includes any attempt to deceive, to convey a message that is intentionally different from what is actually happening. That’s exactly what a medical leave excuse is - deception - even if there is some truth to it.

One of the ways we illustrate deceit to our kids is when people come over to our house and see how many books line the walls. The most common question asked is “Have you read all these books?” and I asked my kids if it would be honest of me to smile and answer “I’ve read some of them twice”. That statement is the truth, but it 1) didn’t really answer the question 2) leaves the impression that I have read all of them AND read some of them twice.

We don’t have to tell lies to tell lies.

Too much cruelty is masked behind ‘honesty’ and being ‘blunt’, and too many deceptions hide behind tact and diplomacy and the ‘need to know’.

I haven’t excused the “medical leave” thing. If you look at what I’ve said about it, I think that’s pretty clear. But they moved past it to a better place, and did so fairly quickly.

Forgiven sinners who believe in grace shouldn’t spend a lot of focus on errors that someone has moved past. They got counsel, then did the right thing. They only told partial truth on Sunday, but they rectified it by Tuesday. Good. Somebody once said, “Go and sin no more.”

Galatians 6:1 is a nice verse. II Chronicles 30:17-20 is an example of God’s heart when someone, imperfectly, begins to move in the right direction. They are in the process of washing years of dirt off of their church, they’ve made a start, and we’re objecting because they used dirty water to begin with. Well, yes, it was dirty water, and it would have been better if it had been clean water, but at least they were starting the job, and they are doing it better now.

Grace. It’s kind of a neat thing. Rarely does it make harsh accusations about problems that have already been corrected. Generally, it says, “Praise the Lord we’re not doing THAT anymore” — and moves on.

Brent: Charitable, I believe, means we always avoid attributing negative motives when the facts could also fit alternative motives. Some of the condemnatory comments on this thread have gone beyond objecting to the medical leave, into attributing extremely negative motives (I’m not talking about you). The facts do not require such attributions, and the later actions militate against those attributions.

Thus, we can charitably say that medical leave should never have been granted. We cannot in this case, I believe, accuse men who on an interim (and brief) basis said something that was technically true, with a malicious intent to deceive, as some have done. Charity forbids it. The facts would fit with an intent to deceive, but they would also fit with incompetence, shock, lack of clear thinking, poor guidelines / policies, and probably a few other explanations. The followup events would strongly weigh towards one of those latter explanations.

Charity never excuses wrong actions, but it does affect how we view and talk about them, and how we approach the question of motives.

JG,

Do you move past sin by ignoring it and pretending it never happened? Or do you move past it by acknowledging what you did wrong and seeking to rectify it?

Chip, if they had not demonstrated repentance by making things clear only a few days after, then you would have a case. They changed their minds, made things clear, and made the right decision in the end.

If God continued to hold you accountable for all your errors prior to repentance, where would you be?

You are being unreasonable and unforgiving.

How am I being unforgiving when no forgiveness has been requested?

Less than a week after the immorality/abuse/specific offense for which he was fired was discovered, the congregation knew everything. The leadership seems to at first have headed in a well-practiced potentially dishonest direction, but almost immediately changed course and, for whatever reason (and not all the potential reasons for such transparency are honorable), told the truth.

Move on. There’s no “there” there. “Father forgive them they know not what they do,” comes readily to mind on this specific, relatively minor failing.

There are lots of fish to fry in Hammond. This isn’t one of them.

Asking for forgiveness is only one evidence of repentance. The best evidence is a change in behavior, which is evident in this case.

Even if asking for forgiveness were required, they don’t have to ask me or you for forgiveness, because they haven’t wronged us. But if I had been a member of FBCH (can’t imagine that EVER happening :)), you know what? I probably wouldn’t tell them they needed to ask for forgiveness for that. Because I’m willing to put myself in their shoes and say, “You know, that wasn’t great, but I understand the pressures they were under, and they’ve made it right now, so I’m not going to worry about it. We’re going in the right direction.”

As to how we should “move past sin”, you asked about MY sin. What I should do in moving past MY sin is far different from how I should respond to the sins of others. Often, we should “move past sin” when it is the sin of others and they have changed their behavior by simply moving on.

Here on this thread we are being told (by people who manifestly don’t know all the facts) the motives of these men, and we are being told, effectively, that these men have not repented, so we can sit around our computers and let them have it.

We’ve been Zichtermanned in our response to these situations. Jump to conclusions, find the worst interpretation for events, trash people’s motives, assume conspiracy and coverup everywhere, and whatever you do, proclaim loudly how bad other people were. We’ve moved from sharpening each other to scalping others.

No thanks. I’ve driven over the Calumet River too many times. Ick.

While I believe that we should stop short of saying there are no medical problems (since we don’t know), are we really to believe that it was just a coincidence that the medical issue got bad enough on the exact same weekend that Schaap was discovered in this matter? I am a man of faith, but I don’t have that much faith.

As I said in my first post, there may be medical reasons, but even if that is the case, it was still not the real reason. And that’s why I find it disingenuous to say that the reason for the leave was medical. That appears to be a very transparent attempt to avoid saying what it was.

So at the end of the day they did better later, but there’s a lesson here, and that is to only say things that are true. Give real reasons, even if not the full reasoning. Or say nothing at all. But don’t mislead people to think it was one thing, when it was actually something else.

Or maybe they just, as a group, decided to follow the Scripture injunctive of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes to not speak or react in a “hasty” manner until all were convinced by the evidence that what was apparently so was absolutely so. After all, the evidence will speak for itself, and the truth of that evidence won’t alter over a day or two, but the truth of that evidence will convince over a day or two.

But we know that couldn’t possibly be true. After all, it involved Hammond, and we all know that Hammond is only capable of deceit and cover-up.

I love charitable spirits.