Another megachurch pastor has fallen from his position via marital infidelity. This time it involved a megachurch pastor in Orlando, FL.
In his article “Orlando Church Community Reels from News of Another Pastor Scandal,” reporter Jackson Elliott expounds that Zach Van Dyke of Summit Church (Herndon Campus) admitted to an affair.
While this is a truly terrible, the news of another pastor failing in this way is not the focus on this post. I want to highlight a throw away sentence in the article:
Jackson writes,
Parker stated in his now-removed blog that the church had assembled an intervention and care team to help Van Dyke tell his wife and work toward reconciliation.
Do you see the assumption here?
If the team is there to help this fallen pastor tell his wife, the presumption is that she has yet to be told about the affair. So, that means she has not yet been consulted about the fate of her marriage following the revelation of this important information.
“Reconciliation” is assumed.
This troubles me.
Such assumptions fuel a cheater entitlement mentality. It leaves them in the driver seat when they desperately need to learn humility.
The impression such an assumption brings is that the cheater’s wishes are what matter and the faithful spouse simply just has to get along with the reconciliation program like a “good Christian.” It is a doubling down on the cheater-centric assumptions that led to the affair in the first place, in my opinion. It is sick.
A more godly and spiritually healthy approach that respects faithful spouses is to approach the matter with full disclosure and leave it up to the faithful spouse whether they want to explore remaining married to the cheater.
Jesus did not shame or condemn those who divorced a spouse over sexual immorality (see Matthew 5:32, 19:9). This means divorce is a viable option for a follower of Christ to choose in light of sexual infidelity. “Reconciliation” is NOT the assumed outcome!
I wish more pastors and Christians would recognize this. Faithful spouses have real choices to make in this scenario even if they are all bad options because of their spouse’s sins.
Faithful spouses are reeling from the trauma of infidelity discovery and do not need the addition of spiritual abuse to their struggl–i.e. where a Christian leader tries to manipulate them into remaining in an abusive marriage to a cheater. It is past due for pastors and other Christian leaders to give faithful spouses a voice in whether or not to divorce a cheater without shame.
I read the same article. Stopped at the same line and was floored. I eventually kept reading because I figured the word “repentance” was meant to have been used (?). Those words seem interchangeable, but are not. He needs to work toward genuine *repentance* in his life. If reconciliation occurs it is WAY down the road and should not be automatically assumed. Your thoughts are correct about a cheater-centric focus—this is because the therapeutic ethic has been in the pulpit in Christian churches for a while. It infects thinking and the counsel, sadly.