Pastor Matt Chandler Put On Indefinite Leave Over Inappropriate Communications - Divorce Minister
So a church leader must be a man whose life is above reproach.
-I Timothy 3:2a, NLT
Pastor Matt Chandler was placed on leave because of his online behavior. In particular, his DMing of a married woman was considered.
Here’s a statement from The Village Church leadership:
“We are strong proponents of brothers and sisters in Christ being friends, but there are boundaries around what’s appropriate in these kinds of friendships. …. In this case, while the messages were not romantic or sexual in nature, the frequency and familiarity of the messages crossed a line. They revealed that Matt did not use language appropriate for a pastor, and he did not model a behavior that we expect from him.”
You can listen to Chandler explain the situation around the 22 minute mark in his statement during the Church service here.
Chandler and the leadership statement both name this relationship exceeded what is appropriate for a brother-sister relationship. It “crossed a line.” So, it was more than an innocent relationship between an adult man and adult woman who are not married to each other.
I do applaud The Village Church elders for holding Pastor Matt Chandler accountable as Chandler mentioned to his credit.
The sense I get from Chandler’s statement and the leadership’s statement is this relationship got out of hand. It sounds like Chandler deluded himself into thinking this relationship was innocent until confronted by someone who put it in a different light.
My suspicion is that the “disorienting” statements delivered by the confronting person was about feelings developing towards Chandler by the married woman in his DMs. But we do not know.
What we do know is the elders decided Chandler was having an inappropriate relationship with a woman who was not his wife. His “messages crossed a line.” That is suggestive of an illicit emotional connection. The subtext of this is pretty clear to me:
They are saying, in my opinion, that Chandler had an EMOTIONAL AFFAIR without explicitly saying he had an EMOTIONAL AFFAIR.
Too bad, though, they shied away from calling it for what it was.
This could have been a teaching moment for the whole congregation about how easily emotionally illicit relationships–i.e. emotional affairs–can develop even without our consciousness of them initially. Yet that teaching moment was missed.
