Gabriel Mizrahi

Is that businesswoman running a Fortune 500 cutting-edge AI company, or is she a businesswoman selling homemade candles at the farmer's market?

It's the same thing with pastor.

I'm Lutheran, and most of us in the main line have a master's degree from an accredited seminary.

Many mainline seminaries, including mine, do extensive psychological evaluations done by secular firms for new students.

I also took one unit of clinical pastoral education working in a hospital under professional supervision.

My seminary required that.

That's one kind of pastor.

But lots of people, charlatans, hucksters, poorly trained people, etc., call themselves pastor.

Now, that's not to say that a trained pastor can't do awful things.

Some do.

They are flawed human beings like anyone else.

But some pastors don't have training, don't understand confidentiality, don't understand their state's mandatory reporting laws, and so on.

There is a lot more to pastoring than just loving God, which hopefully every pastor does.

It drives me crazy and makes me sad when I hear about abuse, coercion, manipulation, and the like done in the name of God.

So when I hear stories like the one Jordan shared about the pastor who told the husband what the wife said in counseling, it drives me up the wall.

And since you're going to read this letter on air, I can't say what I said when I heard you tell that story.

Doing what that pastor did is pastoral misconduct.

It's abusive, and it is not Christian behavior.

Moreover, morality from scripture is more complicated than simply citing a verse.

Christian ethics involves wrestling with the tenets of our faith and trying our best to apply them to modern life.