What I Wish I'd Learned From Hershael York

(Over the next few posts, I’m going to talk about sev­eral rea­sons why the book “Fallen Pas­tor” is for any­one con­cerned about the future of the church. We are in the midst of a cri­sis and need to under­stand how to approach it).

Lis­ten to me. When I grad­u­ated from THE South­ern Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary in Decem­ber of 2000, I thought I was the bomb. Mas­ter of Divin­ity at my side, I saw great things — in my mind.

I don’t think that made me too dif­fer­ent than many other sem­i­nary grad­u­ates. Well, at least the pride­ful ones. In my mind, I was going to bag a smaller church, move to a medium sized church, then WHAMMO! I was going to be sit­ting pretty at a megachurch one day. Heck. I deserved it. I had a sem­i­nary degree. In the mid­dle of all those church exchanges, I was going to earn my Doc­tor of Min­istry (so every­one would have to call me “Doc­tor Ray”, of course) and I would be sit­ting pretty.

If you read my blog, you know what hap­pened to me in 2009. I com­mit­ted adul­tery. Pas­toral min­istry was a thing of the past. It was long gone. My rela­tion­ship with my first wife was over and irrec­on­cil­able. I mar­ried Alli­son and we moved on. I started anony­mously blog­ging after that and wrote a book about what hap­pened and how future pas­tors could avoid the temp­ta­tion of moral failure.

I inter­viewed a lot of fallen pas­tors. Their sto­ries broke my heart because they sounded iden­ti­cal to mine — and I’ll blog about that later.

But I also inter­viewed a lot of experts. One in par­tic­u­lar was Her­shael York. His offi­cial title is the Vic­tor and Louise Lester Pro­fes­sor of Chris­t­ian Preach­ing at The South­ern Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary. He is also the Asso­ciate Dean of Min­istry and Proclamation.

I inter­viewed him for my book. But before I get to that, let me tell you what I thought about him when I was at seminary.

I was scared to death of him. I heard hor­ror sto­ries. “If you want an easy ‘A’, don’t take Dr. York. Seri­ously. He will tear you up and spit you out.” Then I would hear this: “But if you want to become the best preacher pos­si­ble, take him as many times as you can. He will make you into an hon­or­able preacher and a man of God.”

I heard one apoc­ryphal story (apoc­ryphal mean­ing, ‘If it isn’t true, it should be’) that a stu­dent went up to him and said, “I want you to grade me as hard as you can on my ser­mon.” He agreed. After the stu­dent min­is­ter was done, Dr. York gave him the heavy hand on every­thing he had done wrong, but said, “You have a great heart and a ton of poten­tial. You will do well.”

That scared me. I stayed far away from Dr. York while in sem­i­nary. I got ‘A’s’ while in sem­i­nary in my preach­ing classes. But I’ll tell you this — all of my friends who took him for preach­ing have become phe­nom­e­nal min­is­ters of the gospel. They took him and his lov­ing crit­i­cism and became bet­ter men for it. Thank God for men like Her­shael York.

It wasn’t until over a year ago that I even talked to him. I was a mis­er­able fallen pas­tor look­ing for help with my book. I heard that he had a heart for fallen pas­tors. At that time, I had per­ceived him to be some sem­i­nary pro­fes­sor liv­ing in an ivory tower, ready to destroy any­one who was full of sin. But I was ter­ri­bly, ter­ri­bly wrong. My first instinct came when I got his voice­mail. It said, “You know who it is, you know what to do.” BEEEEEEEEEP. I let my daugh­ter, who was 12 at the time lis­ten to that. She loved it so much it’s her voice­mail to this day.

When I inter­viewed him about fallen pas­tors and what they go through, I found a man who was so lov­ing, so car­ing, and yet so pas­sion­ate, I found myself being coun­seled by his words. While I was talk­ing to him, I sud­denly wished I had taken him for every class pos­si­ble while I was at Southern.

He lis­tened to my story of my fail­ure, hurt for me and asked me ques­tions. Then he was very hon­est with me. Scrip­turally hon­est with me. It was more than an inter­view. It was him help­ing me in my process. One of the first things he said to me was this about pas­tors who fall:

“It’s like a dia­mond being cut and pol­ished. I saw this hap­pen once in Tel Aviv. I asked the man cut­ting the dia­mond, ‘What hap­pens if you make a misk­take? What hap­pens if you cut too deep?’ The cut­ter said, ‘Well, then I have to go and cut every other side exactly like that to match.’ So I said, ‘If you mis­cut you’ve dimin­ished the value of it.’ He said, ‘Absolutely.’ I think of it like that. A man who has fallen, there’s no ques­tion he’s dimin­ished some­thing. He’s still a dia­mond and of great worth, but he’s not what he could have been had he not fallen.”

He was one of the first peo­ple who heard through my anger, my prob­lems and spoke directly to me. He read my book and I don’t think he agreed with all I had to say, but he let me quote him any­way. But one quote he gave me is one that I keep close to my heart every day. He said this: If a fallen pas­tor is going to make it in this world, “his repen­tance has to be more noto­ri­ous than his sin.”

We talked about pas­tors who are look­ing for com­fort beyond their spouses. Men who break and find a woman who is meet­ing their needs. He brought it down to very sim­ple terms for me:

“Every time you have an affair with any­body, I don’t care who you are, in a sense, you’re hav­ing an affair with a fan­tasy and not a real per­son. Because the per­son you’ve got to pay the mort­gage with, deal with the kids’ soc­cer sched­ule with, the one whose vomit you wipe up when they’re sick, that’s the real per­son you live with. Twenty min­utes in the sack on a Tues­day after­noon is really not love. You’ve got to tell your­self that. You’ve got to awaken your­self to the fact that it’s fan­tasy. If you end up with the per­son you had an affair with, I guar­an­tee you once you get mar­ried you have to face the same issues and same strug­gles. You can­not take two totally depraved human beings, stick them in the same house and not have friction.”

Finally, I asked him, “When does a church give up on a pas­tor? How long do they wait for him to be repen­tant? How long do they walk with him?” This ques­tion had haunted me for a long time and Dr. York gave me a very down to earth answer:

“A church’s pos­ture has to be guided by whether or not there is repen­tance, because your pos­ture has to be one thing if a per­son is liv­ing in defi­ance and embrac­ing their sin. Then you have to con­front. 1 Corinthi­ans 5 kicks in and Paul describes as turn­ing them over to Satan for the destruc­tion of the flesh. There’s noth­ing pretty about that. But if a per­son is bro­ken and repen­tant over their sin, even if they want to be and they’re not there yet, but they want to be. They may say, ‘It’s hard for me to leave this 23 year old girl who thinks I hung the moon and go back to a wife I strug­gled with for the past 20 years, but I want to do that because it hon­ors the Lord.’ Well, if a guy says that, then by all means, you’ve got to walk that walk with him, or see that some­one does. Because some­times the unity of the church mat­ters too and the lead­ers in the church have to take care of the church but what they can­not do is just aban­don the one in sin and say, ‘Well, you’re on your own.’”

I love Dr. York. He’s been at the fore­front of a lot of polit­i­cal issues in the Blue­grass state and hasn’t backed down. He is a man of great char­ac­ter and loves his wife deeply. He knows what is at stake for pas­tors and lets the men he teaches at sem­i­nary know the dan­gers. I am proud of him and that South­ern has such a great man there to help them.

I was intrigued recently by a Twitter/​Facebook inter­ac­tion he had regard­ing the removal of Joe Paterno’s statue at Penn State.

His first post said this: The removal of the Paterno statue is bru­tal evi­dence of the lim­i­ta­tions of human judg­ment. “All of our heroes are flawed – except One.”

Of course, he got some flak from peo­ple who didn’t under­stand the point he was try­ing to make. Then he posted this: “Will they be tak­ing Michelangelo’s David down now?” The idea is that since David com­mit­ted adul­tery and killed Bathsheba’s hus­band, should we take down Michelangelo’s David? Excel­lent point. But he still got grief.

Then, the most beau­ti­ful post of the day, which I ref­er­enced in a recent post of mine: “To clar­ify my pre­vi­ous tweets, I fully sup­port the removal of the Paterno statue. My point is that the peo­ple we idol­ize are all fallen.”

When I inter­viewed him, that was the under­ly­ing idea. We are all fallen. Every one of us. Every one of us is moments away from a fall. But that’s why we all need to be sur­rounded by account­abil­ity, strong wives, and an under­stand­ing of the fear of God.

In fact, he told me at one point — and I don’t have the exact quote — that if he fell from the min­istry, he would have noth­ing. He’d be deliv­er­ing piz­zas. He has an amaz­ing fear of God, some­thing that is strangely miss­ing from this soci­ety and from many of our pas­tors. It was miss­ing from me.

When we lack the fear of God, we will no longer fear man. Or our sin. Or our­selves. That’s what Dr. York taught me. I wish I had learned it from him sooner. I wish I hadn’t been afraid to take his classes when I was a stu­dent at Southern.

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All quotes from Dr. York were taken from his Face­book page or from “Fallen Pas­tor: Find­ing Restora­tion in a Bro­ken World” by Ray Car­roll. This post was approved by Dr. York before it was pub­lished and I am indebted to him for that.