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We welcome you to our site and our hearts. Make yourself at home! Are you struggling with life, marriage or ministry and you are a ministry professional, spouse or someone who loves one? This site is for you. Real humans and real solutions await. Simple fixes and pat answers are scarce but you will find insight, grace and hope. Read Disclaimer, go to Finding Help or click here to contact CRN.
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Featured Article: If Accountability Groups Don’t Work, What Does?
The most common solution proposed to help pastors share their secret struggles is the establishment of accountability groups. This is deemed important because as Gayle Haggard shares in her book, Why I Stayed, “Secrets are what empowers sin.” To effectively curb sin in ministry professional souls and lives the solution is accountability. Right? Probably not. Accountability groups are not effective. They may even be counterproductive.
Every human has secret struggles. Every pastor is human. According to a recent on-line CRN poll, only 3 pastors out of a group of 76 use accountability groups to share their secret struggles. So, who listens to pastors, hearts? Who takes care of the remaining 96%? Spouses, counselors and friends hear the secrets of 28% of those taking the poll. A breakdown indicates 12% told spouses, 9% told counselors and 7 % told friends. The rest? Sixty four percent say they have no one with whom they share their secrets. Exactly twice as many ministry professionals tell no one their secrets as told anyone their secrets.
Knowing Christian Leaders are struggling secretly without sharing these secrets is sobering. “We are as sick as our secrets.” Says the recovery proverb. Potentially the vast majority of ministry professionals are on the path from secret struggles to secret sins to public falls and failures. What can be done? If you read books on the personal lives of pastors you will discover most of these books recommend accountability groups to solve this problem. The solution used the least by ministry professionals is considered the best. No wonder the Church is dysfunctioning so dramatically. I do not believe creating more accountability groups and compelling clergy to meet in them is an effective strategy. Campaigning for this kind of accountability is more likely to be destructive than useful.
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