Pastor Robert Morris applauds during a roundtable discussion at Gateway Church Dallas Campus, Thursday, June 11, 2020, in Dallas. A statement issued on Tuesday, June 18, 2024, said that Morris has resigned after a woman said he had abused her on multiple occasions in the 1980s, beginning when she was 12.What disqualifies a person from pastoral ministry? We’ve seen different answers to that question in the evangelical world recently.
The Southern Baptist Convention reaffirmed its ban on women serving in any pastoral role by expelling a congregation that had a female pastor for women and children. And in North Texas, Robert Morris, the founding pastor of nondenominational Gateway Church, was allowed to resign after a woman came forward to say that he had sexually abused her for over four years starting when she was 12 years old.Unlike in some of these stories, the allegation was known by his previous church.
That’s just part of the circle around one Dallas-area megachurch. The stories are repeated all around the country, with chilling regularity.
The Southern Baptist Convention, to its credit, has at least begun to grapple with the problem of revolving-door abusers. But in the wild world of nondenominational evangelicalism, there’s no mechanism for accountability apart from those interchangeable circles of male leaders, sharing an ethic of male domination and sexual entitlement, and the individual survivors who occasionally become loud enough to supply in public embarrassment what those leaders seem to lack in private shame.
While it is true that God can forgive any sin, it does not follow that every kind of sin is compatible with church ministry. Some offenses are also crimes and need to be dealt with civilly as well as within church structures. Some offenses have implications for their victims that are more important than the self-proclaimed moral struggles of the offender.