It is everywhere—our fathers, our mothers, our heroes: evangelists, teachers, prophets, pastors exposed for sin, indiscretions, malpractice, ministerial abuse, and all manner of infidelity. The tone is relentless. The language is unforgiving. The cycle feels like a bloodbath.
It is tragic—but it is not new.
The Church has always been led by imperfect people, and Scripture never hides this. From the beginning, God entrusted His work to fallible men and women—some sincere, some faithful, others conflicted, many deeply wounded. Failure among leaders is not an interruption of the biblical story; it is a fact woven into it.
What is new is not the exposure. It is our response. The Apostle Paul addresses both the danger of distortion and the discipline of restoration in his letter to the Galatians. He begins with fracture. In Galatians 1, Paul opens without pleasantries or pastoral cushioning:
“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.”
His concern is not moral collapse but doctrinal drift—who the Galatians allowed to reshape the gospel for them.
Paul does not treat this lightly. He draws a line the modern Church often avoids: loyalty to leaders must never eclipse loyalty to the gospel itself. Even apostles, he insists, are not exempt. “Even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.”
That sentence dismantles untouchable leadership. Calling explains authority; it never licenses alteration. But Paul does not stop at drawing lines. He also teaches us how to respond when those lines are crossed. In Galatians 6, Paul turns from doctrinal fidelity to communal posture:
“Brothers, if anyone is caught in a transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness; keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted.”
Paul does not ask whether failure will occur; he assumes it. And the counsel he gives is not toward concealment or denial, but toward posture—how the people of God respond when collapse is exposed. That responsibility, Paul says, belongs neither to the impulsive nor to the outraged, neither to the loudest voices nor to the passions of the moment, but to those he calls “the spiritual.” By this, Paul does not mean the gifted, the charismatic, the influential, or the pious. He means the mature—those marked by sobriety, restraint, and discernment. This is not a call to mob justice, but a summons to fathers and mothers who know how easily bones break, and how close any of us live to the edge.
Paul then names the aim plainly: restoration. For Paul, restoration does not deny wrongdoing or minimize harm. It moves deliberately toward healing rather than erasure. The word he uses—katartízō—is medical. It evokes the setting of a broken bone, not the amputation of a wounded limb. It assumes real damage, real pain, and real accountability, while affirming that the injured one still belongs to the body.
What we are witnessing in our moment is often not restoration but spectacle—exposure followed by erasure, discipline replaced by deletion. It is excommunication by humiliation. A revisionist impulse that seeks to “purify” the Church by canceling people, dismantling their witness, and attempting to undo their entire contribution. Apostolic admonition does not permit that posture, because how correction is carried out is as theologically significant as the correction itself. For this reason, Paul insists that restoration be conducted in a spirit of gentleness—not weakness, but strength held under restraint. He presses the warning further, reminding those who correct that they themselves are not immune. The danger is not only moral failure, but the slow drift into hardness, self-righteousness, and the loss of humility that once restrained us.
Over the last several days, my social media feed has been filled with pastors, leaders, commentators, and observers opining on all things charismatic—on gifts, movements, and ministries. In the process, unchecked correction has become spectacle. Accountability has quietly dissolved into cruelty. Paul’s warning feels especially apt in this hour. Those who correct without vigilance often become ensnared by the very sins they claim to oppose.
The gravest danger is not fallen leaders, but a hardened Church—one that has forgotten how to heal and learned instead how to cancel, erase, and punish. Such a Church may feel absolved, but it will hollow itself out, losing sons and daughters even as it congratulates itself for having done the “right thing.”
Galatians does not give us the luxury of choosing between truth and mercy. It demands both. Without doctrinal clarity, the Church drifts. Without restorative discipline, the Church devours its own. Restore. Don’t erase. Not because failure is inconsequential, but because Christ did not die to create an audience—He died to form a Body. Our posture has changed. We must not confuse exposure with cleansing, or outrage with holiness. In the name of discernment, we cannot treat the wounded as disposable, nor choose humiliation over sober discipline.
The Church is not called to stone her wounded, but to shepherd her leaders. She is called to set bones—to correct with truth and restore with gentleness—without turning discipline into spectacle. Restore. Don’t erase. Because a Church that forgets how to heal will soon forget the Healer.
Photo Credit: ©GettyImages/RobertCrum
.webp)
.webp)