7 Easy Steps For Disgraced Pastors To Get Back Into The Spotlight ASAP

Are you a pastor who just had a major scandal go public? Perhaps an affair, or some kind of moral failing hidden beneath the shiny surface of your life that disqualified you from being a pastor?

Whatever the case, you need to realize that this is is a very difficult time for you and your church family. You need to be focusing on the only real important thing right now: how quickly can you get back into ministry?

Thankfully, The Babylon Bee has your back. Follow these seven easy steps, and you’ll be back in the limelight getting all the glory again in no time!

1.) Issue a public apology for getting caught. Get your PR people to draft up an apology where you sincerely ask for your people’s forgiveness for being so careless that you got caught. Make sure you don’t actually take any real blame for your actions. Really, it was your church’s fault for putting so much pressure on you, if anything.

2.) Agree to step down from ministry for a reasonable period of time, like two or three weeks. Say you’re getting counseling or going to rehab, blah blah blah. It doesn’t really matter. Make sure the period of time isn’t so long that people forget about you though. We’d say two weeks or MAYBE three is a good rule of thumb before you can be restored and act like nothing happened.

3.) Move to a different city. The whole city probably heard about your indiscretions, so move a few thousand miles away where your actions won’t haunt you on every street corner. Sure, you left your church a smoldering nuclear fallout zone, but hey! Your career is the important thing here.

4.) Plant a new church without ever mentioning your previous failings. Start up a new church plant like nothing is wrong. If someone says, “Hey, aren’t you that one pasto—” immediately cut them off and have your security team toss them out.

5.) Establish yourself as an authority in the very area you screwed up in. If you destroyed an entire church through your actions, consider hosting a healthy church seminar. If you cheated on your wife, start a parachurch ministry for healthy marriages. If you imploded from trying to constantly grow your church as if it were a publicly traded company, start a church growth consulting firm. You get the idea.

6.) Keep any new or recurrent scandals under the rug as long as possible. Evangelicalism will forgive you for one scandal, maybe even two. But by your third or fourth scandal, they might start to catch on. Any time you have a moral failing or discover some ugly scandal within your ministry, take steps to keep that skeleton in the closet as long as you possibly can. Sure, people are getting hurt, but you’ve got your book sales to worry about, after all! And what could be more important than that?

7.) Ascribe any opposition you face to Satan. Especially people suggesting that your sins necessitate a much longer period of restoration before you return to the pulpit, if ever you do. BOOM—that’s the devil for sure.

Good luck to you. Now get back in that pulpit!

Get Free Access To Our Brand New Site: Not the Bee After creating The Babylon Bee in six literal days, Adam Ford rested. But he rests no longer. Introducing Not the Bee — a brand new humor-based news site run by Adam himself. It's loaded with funny content and all the best features of a social network. And the best part? Everyone with a subscription to The Bee gets full access at no extra cost. Get FREE Access *with premium subscription to The Babylon Bee