Beyond Accountability Systems

The recent news of Christian author Philip Yancey’s affair hit me hard. 

 

For decades, I’ve loved and appreciated his writing.

Nearly thirty years ago, I remember reading What’s So Amazing About Grace? and being struck by Yancey’s honesty and helpful reevaluation of why grace seemed supplanted by the much easier operation of legalism. In elegant, simple prose, he questioned why Christians were known more for what they were against rather than the beauty and power of undeserved favor.

He referred to it as the “scandal of grace.”

And now this scandal.

It seemed so antithetical to who he appeared to be via his writing and work at Christianity Today. And, of course, lots of pundits and posters had their ideas of what went wrong. You know, the usual diagnoses—everything from an absence of accountability to the lack of authentic community to willfully stepping into compromising contexts to sheer hypocrisy to whatever.

I’m afraid I’m not in the circles that knew him, so I have no idea what the actual issue was. And this easily slips into the world of church gossip. Our best response? Pray for mercy.

But, yes to that litany of possible missteps or willfulness. I think we all agree that guardrails are critical.

But here’s the thing: we can have those mechanisms in place, but in the end we will only be as accountable as we want to be. It’s that simple. We have the uncanny power to protect our shadow self.

I once had a brief conversation with a young woman who had been molested as a teenager by her father, a pastor. She entered a downward spiral of anger and shame following her parents’ divorce, immersing herself in a world of drugs, looking for something/anything to medicate her pain.

After not seeing her for many years, one night following a church service, a woman approached me to say hello, and I had to flip through my memory files to remember who it was. And then it struck me: it was the young woman. I asked her how she was doing and she replied, “Okay,” and that she was finally seeing a therapist. I congratulated her for that step. She nodded, then said bluntly, “But I’ll tell you this: it’s easy to bullsh*t a therapist.”

I assumed that the darkest parts of her life may have felt too painful to expose or what it had led her to do in her life. But I don’t really know. Only she did.

Her story, though not atypical, was one of extreme hurt. But we all have the capacity to withhold parts of us from those around us, and if we dive deep enough, even ourselves. We all have the capacity to BS.

Of course the systemic guardrails are helpful. But we will still only be as vulnerable as we want. We can suppress as much as we want and leak only the information we prefer.

But there is One who cannot be fooled. And that is where a very misunderstood verse comes into play: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.  PROVERBS 9:10

I must expose my shadow self to the fear of God.

I will only be as accountable as I want to be. Knowing that reality should cause me to fear God in a way that allows the light in.

No one else—and no other system—can do that. It can help, but in the end, it’s simply me.

There is an alternative, though. There is a time in the story of humanity when “Everything that is hidden will be shown, and everything that is secret will be made known.”  LUKE 12:2

I think I prefer the former approach. 

Dave Workman | The Elemental Group

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