October 3, 2022
Ya know, I’ve always kind of liked Matt Chandler.
A while ago I remember watching a video that featured him and other mega-pastors, such as Steven Furtick and Carl Lentz (back when he was still around) and while the other pastors on the panel all seemed like clowns just riding the wave of popularity until they inevitably got caught doing something they should not have been doing, Matt Chandler always seemed very level-headed, gentle, patient, and just an all around good dude.
And he probably still is. But that doesn’t mean he won’t slide into your DMs.
I’m not here to shit all over Matt Chandler the same way I’ve shit all over other pastors and churches that have been caught doing bad stuff. I’d happily shit all over Matt Chandler if what he did was bad enough, but in my opinion, what he did wasn’t really that bad.
I know The Village Church—of which he was head pastor—has a higher standard for their employees (which is good) and it seems Chandler has a higher standard for himself (which is also good), but in my view, the story just kind of made me roll my eyes and mutter, “Come on.”
If you don’t know what I’m referring to, Matt Chandler was approached by a woman from his church several weeks ago who was worried that he’d been having an inappropriate messaging relationship with a friend of hers over Instagram. At the time, Chandler didn’t think he’d done anything wrong, but nevertheless reported the woman’s concern to church elders and immediately told his wife. So right off the bat, he handled it a lot better than most of his fellow megachurch pastors who worked very hard to cover up their wrongdoing.
An investigation ensued, and the elders found nothing sexual or romantic about the messages. Still, they decided they were “too frequent and familiar” and placed Chandler on a leave of absence. He announced this leave himself on August 28, 2022—once again, handling it better than most other megachurch pastors who get caught.
I’m a bit torn on this one, to be honest—probably because what Chandler did wasn’t as bad compared to what others in similar positions have done. In the video of Chandler’s confession to his congregation, he stated that both his wife and the woman’s husband knew about their messaging. With all these people aware of what was happening, it’s hard for me to be shocked and appalled.
On this blog and in my book, I’ve written about how suppression does not work. I usually write about this in terms of sexual energy. And in a way, DMing a woman over IG can be outlet for sexual energy, albeit a very mild one. When talking about inappropriate sexual sins, the Church tends to direct its focus toward single men in their early twenties who aren’t married yet (the only demographic of people that the Church thinks is inappropriately sexual, for some reason), but it also applies to men who have been married for a long time, such as Chandler. In a way, being in a monogamous long-term relationship or marriage can also bring about it’s own form of suppression, although people don’t often like to talk about that. I’ve written more about that in my article Why Sexual Compatibility Matters.
Here’s another point about this story: say you are someone who is super furious and pissed off that Matt Chandler did this. Perhaps you thought you’d never see the day where he’d commit some sort of indiscretion. This goes back to the “Bad Apple Falacy” that I wrote about in my article There Are Never Just a Few “Bad Apples.” There were hundreds, possibly thousands of people who went to The Village Church every Sunday and thought things such as, “We weeded out those devious bastards Carl Lentz and Mark Driscoll who gave Christianity a bad name. Thank God for men like Matt Chandler who step up to fill in their gaps.” Well, they were thinking that for months while Chandler was DMing this woman. This kind of naughty activity is always happening for a long time before things ever actually come to light. Just because you think there’s no scandal in the Church happening at the moment only means that someone hasn’t been caught yet. There’s a scandal happening somewhere. As you read these words, some pastor somewhere is doing something he shouldn’t be doing, and he hasn’t been caught yet. He might not be caught for another year, but eventually, he will.
It all just points to the impossible standard that modern Christianity demands. Pastors and church leaders across the nation and the world get up on stage every Sunday and pretend like they are the example of how to live, when in reality what they’re teaching is an impossible standard, proven even more by when they eventually fail to uphold it.
I take no pleasure in seeing Matt Chandler go down. Again, I always kind of liked the dude. But I know there are tons of other high profile church leaders out there who are watching this situation and squirming a little bit because they know precisely what’s in their own Instagram DMs. They haven’t been caught yet, but they will. Just wait and see.