Jeff Zaslow, at the Wall Street Journal, had a great article yesterday (12/28): “What to learn from high profile blunders.” It contains advice from top-tier communications and public relations consultants, on how to handle mistakes. The first three bits of wisdom?

• Fear the Web.
• “I’m sorry” doesn’t cut it.
• You’re not always right.

The best line notes that listeners expect more than a mere ’sorry.’ “Everyone says, ‘I’m sorry.’ That’s very ’80s,” says Karen Friedman, a communications coach in Blue Bell, Pa. “It’s like saying to someone, ‘I love you, now sleep with me.’ It’s empty, hollow and, quite frankly, pathetic…”

Looking back on high-profile church blunders this year, the same advice is helpful. One doesn’t have to look very far for examples of poor church communication that take a situation from bad to worse.

Brannon Howse, of World View Weekend, writes a thought-provoking post: “Why Many of Today’s Evangelical Pastors are Cult-Like.”

It’s a good question. Brannon’s getting at a particular failure in the 21^st-century church’s immune system – some call it ‘cult-like leadership,’ others call it “spiritual abuse,” and others the “CEO/Pastor.”  Whatever you call it, churches have experienced a cluster of pastoral accountability failures, and people are starting to take note.

A similar pattern of failure and awareness happened in the corporate world a few years ago – the all-powerful CEO gave way to stronger, uninterested directors.  Congress passed the Sarbanes Oxley reforms to rebuild confidence in publicly traded corporations.  Today, there’s an argument about whether those reforms were the right ones, but no one advocates running a company like Enron or Tyco were run in the 1990s.  Those days are behind us.

Churches, I think, are run like companies from about five to ten years in the past. Churches adopted the all-powerful, unaccountable pastor model a few years after all-powerful, unaccountable CEOs were all the rage.  But the Pastor/CEO is running into the same problems that Corporate CEOs encountered earlier in the decade.  The Pastor can do whatever he wants, and quickly.  But what if the decision is wrong?  And not ‘wrong’ as in ‘poor taste in music,’ but wrong as in embezzlement, covering up for molesters, or helping ministers abandon their children?   Most churches make us pick from bad choices: leave or publicly divide the church.

Is 2007 the right time for reform? A “Sarbanes/Oxley” for the church?  Not a new law, necessarily (though the government historically steps in when churches refuse to do what they are supposed to do), but a new paradigm.  What’s the right balance between pastoral ‘efficiency’ and ‘accountability’?  What should we be doing differently?

Steve Gaines’ comments to Bellevue Baptist from Wed. night are on-line [audio here]. Two things jump out:

1. That ovation. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

2. The new committee is more likely to divide than heal. The committee has been asked to investigate two very important matters: Paul Williams’ conduct, and church policies (particularly relating to children). But many people will be unsatisfied if there isn’t a fair study of Pastor Gaines’ conduct — this committee cannot answer that question, fairly, and hasn’t been asked to do it. If people become convinced a church won’t answer important, hard questions, the whole church suffers, whether those remaining know it or not.

Steve Gaines (of already-beleaguered Bellevue Baptist Church) has been rocked again, by allegations that he was told six months ago that a minister on staff had sexually abused children in the past, and Gaines did nothing about it.

The Commercial-Appeal has more, including calls for Gaines to resign, from Michael Spradlin, President of Mid-America Seminary, and interim at Germantown Baptist, the other Memphis baptist behemoth. I’m certainly sad to see Adrian Rogers’ once-shining church get dragged through so much.
Gaines at least gets partial credit for recognizing one problem: Once the shepherd knows of a danger, he still has to herd the sheep away from it, and to make sure that it does not spread. “Christian Counseling” wasn’t a full response from a shepherd.
But Gaines hasn’t mentioned problem two: how could he believe this man was still qualified to minister under I Tim. 3?