a pastor engages these primarily self-focused coping patterns, he will not allow himself to be known and therefore cannot be intimate with his spouse. Instead, he is at risk to seek pseudo-intimacy in a physical relationship meant to soothe his need for attention, stroke his ego through conquest, and gain a sense of safe closeness through sex.
The ministry is a lonely calling, with 70 percent of a representative sampling of pastors reporting that they have no close friends and 45 percent acknowledging career burnout (Steinke, 2006). The average age at which pastors act out with extramarital sexual activity is their early forties (as with other helping professions) (Butler & Zelen, 1977); the average age at which pastors experience burnout is in their early forties as well (Steinke, 2006; Thoburn & Balswick, 1998). The pastors who are more prone to burnout are those who are afraid of intimacy, who overwork out of fears of failure or rejection, or who put their emotional and physical energy into their careers because things are not going well at home. Ultimately, this sense of burnout can lead a pastor to feel resentment toward parishioners and disregard for congregational needs; the pastor may come to view church members as objects rather than persons. When burnout occurs, a pastor may feel anger and fatigue, and have little motivation for spiritual disciplines or accountability. As Wilson and Hoffman (2007, p. 34) stated, “The most miserable people in the world are Christians whose intimacy with God has gone cold.” The combination of loneliness, unbalance, narcissism, lack of accountability to God or man, and burnout creates the perfect storm for lust and sexual misconduct to occur.
Eventually, David was forced to face his demons and understand how the good shepherd had come to engage in the devastatingly harmful behaviors of adultery, murder, and deceit. The reality of his actions—the hurt, pain, and destruction he had caused—were brought front and center through the intervention of Nathan (2 Samuel 12:1–6). The prophets of Israel held a unique place in society; they stood outside the system and, therefore, were able to exhort, rebuke, provide wise counsel, and offer avenues for absolution and reconciliation with God. When a pastor is caught in sexual misconduct, it usually is preceded by a long-standing and pervasive history of illicit behavior. Evaluation and treatment is best administered by someone outside the Church, but this person must understand the unique role of the minister. This outside person must be unbiased and completely honest with the pastor who can, in turn, be completely honest without fear of retribution. Chapters 2 and 5 further discuss issues of evaluation, treatment, and oversight by the local Church and denominational conferences.
Interpersonal Context
The contextual elements of kingship during the early and midlife of Israel reflected a culture of insecurity mirrored in the individual lives of the kings themselves. The reality is that David, a young shepherd, just wanted to be loved by Saul but never felt the security of acceptance by him. David tried the next best thing, marrying the king’s daughter, Michal, who had been given to him under false pretenses, then taken away from him by an increasingly jealous and erratic Saul and given to Palti, a rather pathetic figure. When David became king, he demanded that Michal be returned to him, but she scorned him and only reinforced his feelings of inferiority (2 Samuel 6:15–20). This taking of another man’s woman would be repeated in a kind of compulsive repetition when David took Bathsheba from her husband Uriah. Though Saul’s son, Jonathan, was happy to oblige David with unconditional acceptance, it was Saul’s father-love that David really wanted, never really got, and what led him to try repeatedly to prove himself worthy. The irony is that every attempt David made to win the king’s love only alienated him further, tapping into Saul’s own sense of inferiority as he merely slew his thousands while David slew his ten thousands (1 Samuel 18:7). Those who never obtain the love they seek tend to fall into a desperate striving for what they cannot have; in seeking to procure their sense of value through others, their sense of unworthiness often just becomes reinforced.
Because we live in relational environments, the currency that governs those environments is emotion. But people, including pastors, tend to grapple awkwardly with the emotional roller coaster of compulsion, continuing to repeat the same relational dynamics. They continue with the same compulsive behaviors, hope for different, more emotionally satisfying outcomes, but generally achieve the same barren results. Furthermore, people tend to reenact the emotional climate of childhood in their contemporary relationships, making it easy to understand how emotionally charged marriage, family, and congregational relationships can become (Nichols, 1987). Marriage is the primary place where people reenact scenarios from childhood. Michal at first found David noble because of his heroism. However, when David ascended to the throne and reclaimed Michal, she considered him brutish and ignoble, traits that David probably feared about himself. The result was marital discord that left him open to an affair.
Marital conflict and lack of marital intimacy are highly correlated with sexual misconduct among pastors. In a scientific survey, 41 percent of pastors who acted out sexually acknowledged marital dissatisfaction, and 75 percent of pastors who had marital difficulties of five to twenty years’ duration were at risk for sexual misconduct (Johnston, 1996). Difficulties in the marriage are never a justification for sexual acting out behaviors on the part of clergy. The reality is that the pastoral marriage is a fishbowl where the couple acts out their marriage in front of the congregation. Eighty percent of pastors feel that the ministry is a hardship on their families. If a couple cannot have an emotional intimacy that is naked and unashamed, they often feel forced to hide that fact from their congregation. Thus, the clergy person's failure to address the festering discord in his marriage can explode in the crisis of misconduct. (See chapters 7–10 for issues relating to marriage and sexual misconduct.)
The personal consequences for David and Bathsheba were deadly (the death of their child for the death of Uriah), but the corporate consequences for Israel were catastrophic. As a direct result of David’s acts, rebellion broke out in the land. Absalom, the handpicked successor to the throne, was a dynamic and charismatic individual—making him exactly the wrong person to follow after David. He continued the corruption that David had started with avarice and pride. In the end, he and his rebellion were put down at great cost to everyone.
Churches themselves can be petri dishes that breed dysfunction. Steinke (2006) has noted that congregations can carry viruses of secrecy, gossip, deceit, complicity, and murmuring. One church called in a consultant to assess the life of the Church following the revelation that its pastor had multiple affairs. As the consultant interviewed members of the church and staff he found that, in fact, several of the elders’ wives had been among those who had affairs with the pastor. The elders as a board were in various stages of anger and denial with one another. Among the consultant’s recommendations to the church was that the entire elders board step down and a new board be elected. The board refused this prescription. The sad denouement of this church’s story is that they went on to hire a youth minister who had sexual relationships with several of the girls from the high school ministry. Viruses seek to replicate themselves, have no boundaries, go where they don’t belong, have no life of their own, and feed off of the host (Steinke, 2006). When all of the players—pastor, spouse, parishioners, counselees, and staff members—are playing out primitive scenarios from childhood, the complexities can create environments ripe for sexual misconduct. Examples abound of churches who suffered and sometimes died as a consequence of clergy sexual misconduct. A church with a large congregation of several thousand in Southern California took years to shrivel and die on the vine as a direct result of the pastor’s indiscretion and how it was mishandled.
Environmental Context
King David experienced attraction, arousal, and desire, and he eventually sexualized his relationship with Bathsheba through various machinations including murder. While the cognitive, emotional, and physical aspects of sexual misconduct were very much individualistic, a true understanding of the story of David and Bathsheba requires an examination of the systems dynamics and how they are remarkably similar to those in contemporary ministry. The children of Israel displayed an unremitting distrust of a God whom they could not define in their own terms. In ancient times the gods were regional and when
