Finding More of God When Our Leaders Fail Us
By remembering Ex Opere Operato
It’s that time between Christmas and New Year when I am unsure what day of the week it is. And it is a time to look back over the last year before looking forward to the next.
We continue to reach for metaphors that have the capacity and ability to describe and diagnose the unfolding meta-crises around us. So many things have been manifest and revealed this last year. Subterranean ideologies have reached the surface in explicit, bold public expression—the seismic shaking of things to the surface as a sociological and spiritual liquefaction takes place.
A continued shaking of the church has seen the moral failings and abusive behaviour of several more high-profile Christian leaders made public.
There are so many dimensions and dynamics to leadership failings. My focus here is on something most pernicious: how God could have touched people's lives through such leaders.
When faced with revelations of fallen leaders, it is normal to ask how God could have used them and to doubt if our experiences were real.
Good Guys vs Bad Guys: The binary of identity politics
Our world of identity politics exacerbates this dilemma, reducing someone in totality into one dimension of their being of binaries of all good or all bad. BTW what I write here is not an apologetic for leadership failings and mistreatment of others. Some people are so extantly abusive that it is their primary nature - there is no excuse for them. But others are broken human beings, stumbling over their unmet emotional needs as we all often are.
People let us down, hurt us, betray us. Such is life and living for all of us. It is natural but ultimately damaging if we always conflate the integrity of a person completely with the authenticity and validity of our experiences.
And it is not just issues of abuse that cause us to query the validity of our experiences; other issues can assail us over the authenticity of our encounters with God through others. I have friends who have questioned their conversion experience when the person who led them to faith has then lost faith and declared themselves to be non-Christian.
In one sense, all this is nothing new; as we see in the bible, God uses broken, mixed-up people like you and me. Thank goodness. God’s people in history have wrestled with this dilemma of how our experiences of God are related to but separate from the merits of the persons involved in our experiences.
A Mixed Bag: The Donatists
One pivotal moment was with the Donatists in the very early 4th Century. Many Christians, including clergy, handed over religious texts to Roman authorities and performed pagan sacrifices to avoid persecution.1 After the persecution ended, a debate arose over whether clergy and Christians who had committed these acts could continue in the church. Concerning priests, it was doubted whether the sacraments they had previously administered were valid, let alone ongoing ones. The Donatists argued that clergy must be faultless for their priestly service to be bone legitimate and that the church was a place for ‘saints’ and not ‘sinners’.
The Donatists were asking similar questions about the failings of their leaders and fellow church members, of how God could be at work in compromised and compromising people. At the time, the Church realised something very important was at stake about the work of God in our lives. So much so that it declared Donatism to be a heresy.
Augustine refuted Donatism and asserted that God’s saving grace was conveyed ex opere operato, literally from “the work performed” and not ex opere operantis, meaning "from the agent's activity”, i.e. not from the nature of the priest.
What these [priests] administer,” wrote one Augustine scholar, “is the baptism of Christ, whose sanctity cannot be corrupted by unworthy ministers, any more than the light of the sun is corrupted by shining through a sewer.”2
In other words, God does the work, not us.
Thank goodness. Even in the best of us, it is by God’s grace that He works through us. Augustine also explicated something related that should also be reassuring to us: that the Church is a Corpus permixtum - a mixed bag of saints and sinners. We are saints who sin and sinners who are also saints (BTW this did not mean Augustine and the church thought leaders and members were exempt from accountability and discipline).
Finding God in All Things: It was never about the leader
If what we experienced depended on the merits of the person we experienced God through, it was likely never from God in the first place.
So many moments of my early most ‘pure’ Christian experience now seem - with hindsight - so fragile and vulnerable—moments of an intense encounter with God where I was blissfully unaware of the ecclesial geopolitics and leadership frailties around me.
There is a danger as I get older that I will increasingly see and place restrictions on God’s work through others due to disappointments and hurt—others of me and mine of them. Maybe the ability to accept and receive the work of God through the ‘mixed bag’ of others is part of ‘Finding God in All Things” within Ignatian Spirituality.
Finding God in all things is at the core of Ignatian Spirituality and is rooted in our growing awareness that God can be found in every one, in every place and in everything.3
After all, nothing can separate us from an encounter and experience of God’s love. We can see and know God's sovereign and gracious interventions through the worst of things and people, whilst yearning and working for the best of people and ourselves.
Here is a slight paraphrase of Romans 8 with Ex Opere Operato in mind.
35 Can anything ever separate us from Christ’s love? Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted, or hungry, or destitute, or in danger, or threatened with death, or let down by our leaders?..37 No, despite all these things, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ, who loved us. 38 And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love, nor the abuse of others. 39 No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.
As with all things in life and history, the Donatist controversy was complex and wide-ranging.
Robert Paye, The Dark Heart Filled With Light.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts here, Jason. Many find it difficult to hold the paradoxes of life- the both/and. Often we default to either/or thinking. This is especially prevalent in many church settings, where if you do this and not that, then that’s evidence you are a true Christian. Deconstruction of one’s theological framework is so difficult because if a person questions or no longer adheres to that structure, then there’s nothing left. So many walk away from the faith. By neglecting to provide a broader historical perspective of the Christian faith, the Church has failed in its discipleship model. I see this often in the directees I meet with for spiritual direction. Finding God in all things is difficult when you’ve been told that God and following God has to look a certain way. It takes years to untangle the dualistic theologies that were inherited through the generations. Even more difficult is moving to a posture of compassion for people and systems still embedded in either/or ways of thinking/being. They want to burn it all down or leave it all behind. It takes time to find the third way, the way of Jesus.
Thanks Jason. I think we often desire to live in a world of absolutes when we are surrounded by relatives (no Christmas pun intended). That the Church is a Corpus permixtum is a truth that we don't always find easy to assign to our leaders and yet it is the essence of the gospel: that all have fallen short of His glory including those who influence us, whether they be leaders, parents, guardians,...
The fallen world is a mismatch of power and authority, use and misuse. Although these situations are truly traumatic they are opportunities for us to grapple once more with areas of our blindness over what is grace, pride, forgiveness, sin, justice, freedom, identity,... and the completed work of the Cross.
Thank you Jason for your writings. They are thought provoking.