We each can name far more pastors who are faithful in their marriages than those who are not. And I suspect we would also say that it’s those faithful marriages, those ordinary, daily testimonies of richer or poorer, sickness and health, for better or worse that most influence us. One marriage fails that we might not presume, but many—many!—marriages are, by God’s grace, faithful that we might not despair.

My husband and I bought a house today. It’s a green house on a little hill, built in 1927, and owned since 1966 by the local fire chief and his wife, now recently widowed. “Oh, the Flaherty house!” people around town said to us, “What a great family! What a great house!”

And so we bought it—the well-loved kitchen and bedrooms and front porch—the settings of half-a-century’s worth of lazy Saturdays and Sunday dinners and hectic Monday mornings. And lugging our cardboard boxes through the door, we found a note on the kitchen counter: “We hope,” she had written in the fragile penmanship of the elderly, “you have many happy years as we did in this home.” My house tells the story of a happy marriage.

The church, too, is a kind of house (1 Pet. 2:5, Heb. 3:6). Yet, tragically, the marriage stories of its well-known members and leaders are not always the happy kind.

Tullian Tchividjian, a pastor in my own denomination, recentlyresigned over an affair. He joins what seems like a long list of pastors whose reputation for sin now precedes them. Turning in disgust from our unrelenting newsfeeds, we might shake our heads and sadly accept the pronouncement of a Christian Postop-ed: “Moral failings among [Christian] leaders are becoming an epidemic.”

We are right to lament moral failure. Forgiveness and reconciliation are central to our Christian faith, but Tchividjian’s sin (and the sin of every pastor who is unfaithful) will still have grave consequences for himself and for the lives of his wife, his children, and the woman with whom he committed adultery. The effects will extend to the members of his church and to those who have read his books or listened to his sermons.

And as secular news outlets like Time, NBC, and People report the events to a watching world, Tchividjian’s actions bring shame on his own name, on the name of his faithful grandfather Billy Graham, on the office of pastor, the Christian church, and, for many, on the name of Christ himself.

Whenever a Christian leader fails to exemplify Christ in his marriage (Eph. 5:25-28), we must grieve. Yet, perhaps this disease of pastoral unfaithfulness has not reached the “epidemic” status many assume.

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