Is Speaking Up Always the Right Answer?

The silence that has protected too many bad actors must give way to something—not mob justice, but honest, communal discernment.

I came close to being sexually assaulted by one of the most prominent ministers in the country.

I was new to ministry. He was a celebrated man of God, introduced to me by a trusted mentor who had no idea who his pastor really was. The encounter was physically threatening. It was spiritually devastating. And it nearly drove me out of the church altogether.

But beyond my own devastation was the pain I knew my grandmother would feel if she ever learned that this man, and the bishop who was his partner in debauchery, were capable of such depraved behavior.

My grandmother, Mary Pinkard, was a faithful, Pentecostal church mother. She sacrificed greatly to support her church—time, money, energy she did not have to spare. She believed in the ministry with her whole heart. To have told her what I had seen would have been to wound something sacred in her.

I never tried to expose these men.

Instead, I made a quieter decision. I resolved to become the kind of minister my grandmother could respect if she ever knew all my secrets. I would try as hard as I could to become the opposite of what I had seen. That was my answer to the hypocrisy—not a public reckoning, but a private vow.

I won’t pretend it was an easy choice. I thought seriously about leaving the ministry and leaving the church altogether. What I had witnessed shattered my impression of clergy and of the “calling” itself. And I never told my mentor what his pastor had done, because I could not bring myself to destroy his belief in a man he revered. I only told one person about the incident when it happened. And it would be many years before I told anyone else.

Sometimes I still feel guilty for that silence. For the failures I’ve witnessed in leaders— political, business, religious—and chosen not to expose.

Let me be clear about something before I go further. I am not writing this from any lofty position of moral superiority. I have my own failures, my own contradictions, my own places where the gap between who I aspire to be and who I actually am is wider than I would like. I have said things I regret and left unsaid things I should have spoken. I have been impatient when I should have been gentle, and proud when I should have been humble. If someone held a lamp to every corner of my life, there would be shadows enough to shame me.

That is precisely why I have been cautious about lighting lamps in the corners of other people’s lives.

When you operate at certain levels, you come to know things about powerful people that would shock the public. Affairs. Cruelties. Small and large hypocrisies. Over the years, I have developed a set of questions I ask myself before deciding whether to speak:

• Would it benefit anyone to know this?

• Would an exposé actually change the person in question?

• Am I prepared to have my own shortcomings examined with the same scrutiny I am applying to theirs?

Of course, if I have ever known that a crime has been committed, I will certainly report it. I have no hesitation about that line. But for moral lapses—the kind that do not rise to criminality but still wound—I have generally opted out of the business of exposure.

This is not because I think moral failures do not matter. It is because I am not convinced that public shaming reliably produces repentance, and I am certain it often produces spectacle.

And yet I believe religious leaders should aspire to a higher standard of moral excellence than the average person. That is the whole point of the calling. No human being is infallible, but those who stand before congregations claiming to speak for God bear a weight that ordinary citizens do not.

So, the ongoing question—and it is a genuinely difficult one—is this: How much is tolerable, and what must be condemned?

The Catholic Church has been forced to confront this question as it relates to sexual abuse among priests. The reckoning has been agonizing and incomplete, but at least there is a hierarchical structure within which accountability can, in theory, be pursued.

We Protestants have no such structure. A charismatic, popular pastor in a traditional or non-denominational church often answers to essentially no one. Congregants are frequently trained to read any questioning of leadership as a spiritual attack. We need to develop some consensus about what moral and spiritual abuse look like, and how to address them when they occur. The silence that has protected too many bad actors must give way to something—not mob justice, but honest, communal discernment.

For me, the standard has always come back to my grandmother.

What would Grandma think of my behavior, in public and in private?

My grandmother, Mary Pinkard

Mary Pinkard never held a pulpit. She held a pew, faithfully, for decades. She gave out of her meager means rather than her abundance. She prayed for her children and grandchildren by name. And whatever moral authority I have ever been able to claim in this life has been borrowed from her.

That is my earthly ethical guide. It has kept me grounded when institutions failed me, and it has kept me honest when no one was watching. It is not a substitute for accountability structures that the church still desperately needs. But it is, I have found, a surprisingly durable measure of a life.

Whatever else I have gotten wrong—and I have gotten plenty wrong—I want to be someone she could recognize and respect.