Public performance of vulnerability to sin is not part of the minister’s calling. The congregants, if well-catechized, all know he is a sinner. They need no more information than that. The temptation to say more is a function of our therapeutic society and thus part of the larger cultural problem, not a solution. 

Another well-known minister has resigned from his pastoral office due to a previously undisclosed inappropriate relationship. The twist in this grimly familiar tale is that he had largely built his ministry around his struggle with homosexual temptation and his advocacy for celibacy. His fall is thus a sad blow not only to him and his congregants, but also to those in the wider church who have championed the same cause.

Much of the subsequent commentary on his fall has focused on whether his theological positions left him vulnerable to such an outcome. But there is a broader question here that all Christians in America need to ask: Is the real problem the cult of vulnerability, which now shapes so much of pastoral ministry?

Philip Rieff observed that the rise of the modern therapeutic society transformed the role of culture and its institutions. In the past, culture pointed people outward and shaped them into members of society. In Aristotle’s Athens, that meant acquiring the virtues needed to belong to the polis. In medieval Europe, it meant being formed by the church calendar and its rituals into faithful members of Christendom. In the nineteenth century, it meant learning the skills and attitudes that made one a productive member of an industrialized society. In the modern therapeutic culture, human happiness, broadly understood as a sense of immediate, psychological well-being, became the imperative—and the direction of culture flipped. Now it pointed not outward but inward, serving the felt needs of the individual.

In such a world, the pressure to rethink all cultural roles, particularly those of a previously prescriptive character, is intense. Teaching is reoriented around the child’s feelings. Physicians become “service providers.” And institutions that demand a sacrifice of the self to a greater good—the nation, the church, the family—become less plausible and must change or fade away. And in ministry, the model of pastor as fellow-struggler, whose spiritual battles need to be performed in public, emerges.  

There are numerous problems with this culture of ministry. The pastor who publicizes his sexual temptations risks attracting predatory congregants or walking into a honey trap. 

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