He’s only human. The line arrives fast after a pastor is exposed, and it usually ends the conversation. Churches keep excusing leaders who hurt people because they judge them by gifts the congregation can see, such as preaching, crowds, money and doctrinal alignment, while character and care stay out of view. Speaking up then gets treated as disloyalty. A hard leader can be blunt and still be accountable. A dangerous leader uses the trust of the role and is shielded from correction. Scripture expects you to notice the difference.
Where the excuse comes from
The sentence is not false. Pastors are human. Dr. Maliek Blade, a therapist and author who works with many pastors and leaders, insists on it: Christian leaders are humans functioning in a role, with the same frailties as anyone else. The trouble is what the sentence is used to do. Lisa Fields, founder and host of Jude 3 Project, has watched the pattern often enough to name the sequence: “when leaders fall, the first thing they say is people are human.”
Fields answers with a surgeon. If a doctor removes the wrong leg, he is human too, and nobody thinks that settles anything. The failure lands differently, she explains, “Because this is an assumed expertise.” You let a surgeon cut you open because you believe he is prepared to handle you well. Blade takes the comparison one step further: “when doctors make mistakes like that, it’s called medical malpractice. When pastors make mistakes, we say, well, he’s human.” He proposes a different vocabulary: “So we need to be careful and probably adopt the term spiritual malpractice because that has more severe impacts as well.”
That term changes the question. He’s only human asks whether the leader is a sinner, and the answer is always yes, which makes every failure ordinary. Spiritual malpractice asks whether the leader handled people carelessly with access he was trusted to use well. Blade’s point is that pastors get much of a doctor’s access to people’s inner lives without the training, licensure or oversight that make a doctor careful.
Malpractice is also wider than the scandal people usually picture. Blade takes sexual sin seriously and says it is often under addressed. Fields adds that malpractice covers more. “It’s how you deal with people in trauma, how you counsel them,” she says, and it includes what gets overlooked to protect an institution. Blade describes a common version: a person brings emotional or mental distress, and the leader’s only lens is moral. “So let’s figure out what sin you did that is causing this distress that you’re having.” His verdict: “that’s not really handling people well because people are more complex than that.” He also points to careless words from the platform. “They don’t recognize the impact of their words because of their position.”
Every camp hands out its own pass
It is tempting to treat this as one denomination’s problem or one ethnic church’s problem. The sources resist that. Fields describes a pass on both ends of the theological spectrum. In conservative spaces, a man who says the right things doctrinally can be a tyrant who mistreats his spouse. In progressive spaces, a leader who affirms women in the pulpit and speaks well about justice can still be a womanizer or an addict. Her summary: “So we give people a pass if they say the right things in public no matter what theological spectrum we’re on.”
Blade separates the forms it takes in different church cultures and doesn’t flatten them. In white evangelical settings, as he reads them, sound doctrine becomes the top qualification, as if correct preaching made someone acceptable in every other area. “Someone can preach sound doctrine and, as we know, be a slaveholder.” He raises Jonathan Edwards as a figure whose preaching is celebrated while the people harmed by slavery, and their descendants, get glossed over. That is Blade’s reading of how heroes are remembered. It is a pointed historical charge, and he makes it to show that doctrinal precision has never been proof of a just life.
He then turns to Black church settings and describes something different. As he puts it, the issue there is less about protecting slaveholding preachers and more “this protecting of the institution of the church where we keep pushing leaders forward in spite of their indiscretions.” The currency is not always doctrine. It can be delivery: “pushing people forward if they have the cadence of a preacher, if they hoop, if they draw a crowd, but still not looking at the impact of the things that they’ve said and done.” Blade speaks as a churchgoer describing what he and others can see, not as someone issuing a verdict on every congregation.
Fields names the accounting behind it. A visiting preacher raises money and draws a crowd for revival, and if a few women are harmed while he is in town, the money for community programs gets weighed against them. Comparison then becomes the defense: other churches do it, other groups do worse. Fields rejects the whole method: “that can’t be the metric.” She puts it in terms of judgment: “God doesn’t excuse you for somebody else’s hypocrisy.”
The internal diversity matters. Fields and Blade are both describing church culture from the inside, and neither thinks this is the only story. Blade notes, with approval, that more pastors are taking sabbaticals or stepping away for mental and emotional reasons. He describes interviewing his own brother, a pastor, and pressing him on the hardest skeptical questions instead of giving him an easy conversation. Those are signs that some leaders and congregations already reject the pass. The pattern is common enough to name. It is not a fixed trait of any community.
Why the room stays quiet when people already know
Excuses explain why harm is tolerated. Silence explains why it continues. The sources point to several causes, and none of them requires anyone to approve of what the leader did.
The first is economic. Blade compares church culture with the entertainment industry, which pushes performers onto stages they are not well enough to stand on because tickets need to sell. “If you’re profitable, you’re profitable. If you draw a crowd, you draw a crowd.” He adds a complication many critiques skip: “the people hurt the leaders too.” Congregations and fellow elders can grind a leader down for what he produces. His answer is not to excuse the leader but to change the culture: “we need to move away from this culture of keeping the show going and actually care for these leaders’ wellness as well.” Fields traces the slide this causes, from loneliness to burnout to failure. “People don’t fail intentionally, usually. There’s a process.”
The second is shallow friendship among leaders. Fields describes a leader in crisis whose ministry partners sent texts saying they were praying, and nobody called. “It’s a very passive way of engaging people.” Blade, whose research focuses on men in counseling, says pastoral circuits run on camaraderie without depth: “we’ll spend time together, we’ll share space, but not share all of who we are, not share depth.” A leader with no close peers has no one near enough to see the pattern or tell him the truth. Blade connects this back to the people in the pews: “if you don’t even go there with your own self, it’s hard to go there with other people.”
The third is selective courage. Fields has met leaders who denounce false teachers online and then decline when offered a direct conversation with one. “For some people, they are only courageous in the pulpit.” Her diagnosis is short: “You don’t have courage to talk to people.” She also names loyalty to benefactors. People overlook damage done by someone who once helped them financially, the same favoritism they are quick to condemn in public life. She points to Romans 2, where Paul turns on the person who condemns others while doing the same thing: “for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things” (Romans 2:1).
The fourth is how institutions treat the person who speaks. Blade describes himself as direct by temperament and by training as a counselor. “I deal with it with care, but I’m not going to brush this under the rug.” Then he adds: “The most resistance I’ve gotten has been from Christians.” The complaint is about image and saving face. His summary of the result: “We reward the people that are docile and quiet, and we demonize the people that are calling out the problems.”
Where the theological line falls
The cultural excuse rests on a theological confusion: since all have sinned, judging a leader’s sin feels like hypocrisy. Scripture does not treat leadership failure as ordinary. James warns, “My brethren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation” (James 3:1). In context, James is addressing teachers in the church and the power of the tongue. The point is not that teachers sin more. It is that their words carry farther and are weighed more heavily.
Ezekiel 34 is a prophetic indictment of Israel’s rulers, using the shepherd image common in the ancient world for kings and leaders. “Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks?” (Ezekiel 34:2). The charge that follows is about neglect and domination, not doctrine: “The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick,” and “with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them” (Ezekiel 34:4). The text is addressed to Israel’s leaders, not directly to modern pastors, but it shows how God evaluates people entrusted with others: by how they treated the vulnerable.
Paul’s qualifications for overseers move the same way. They focus on temperament and conduct, including “no striker” and “not a brawler, not covetous” (1 Timothy 3:3), and they include a test from home life: “For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?” (1 Timothy 3:5). Peter tells elders to lead “Neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:3). None of these passages measures crowd size or vocal skill.
The second confusion is that silence is the Christian response. Blade answers it directly: “we have to disassociate Christianity from being nice.” He does not mean cruelty. He means that the gentlest-sounding option is not automatically faithful. His distinction: “Peacemaking is actually dealing with the issue at hand and fighting through the difficulties to get to true peace, whereas peacekeeping is just keeping up the image.” Jeremiah described leaders who did the second: “They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14).
For people who think their own failures disqualify them from saying anything, Blade is blunt: “If truth is truth, it doesn’t matter who the messenger is.” Galatians 6:1 assumes the person correcting is also vulnerable. It calls for restoration “in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.” Self-examination is required. Silence is not.
Last, the protective instinct misunderstands God. Blade says God “does not need us to fight on his behalf to protect his image,” and points to the Bible itself, which records the failures of its heroes: “if God didn’t feel the need to hide the ugliness, then why are you?”
How to tell a hard leader from a dangerous one
Not every leader who frustrates you is harming you. Blade himself is confrontational, and his directness is not malpractice. He also warns against the most popular label. “It’s possible for someone to demonstrate narcissistic traits and not actually have narcissistic personality disorder,” he says, and that diagnosis belongs to professionals such as psychiatrists. In his experience, people “call someone a narcissist when they have repeated bad experiences with them.” You do not need a diagnosis. You need to see the pattern.
Drawing on the distinctions in the sources, a hard leader and a dangerous one tend to differ like this:
- A hard leader may be blunt from the pulpit. A dangerous one does not recognize, or does not care, how his words land because of his position.
- A hard leader may call for repentance. A dangerous one treats every case of depression, anxiety or trauma as hidden sin and pushes people away from qualified care.
- A hard leader can be corrected by peers who know him. A dangerous one has mentors and protégés but, in Fields’s words, leaders like this “don’t deal well with peer relationships that are up close.”
- A hard leader’s mistakes get addressed. A dangerous one’s indiscretions are repeated, known and managed while he keeps being platformed.
- Around a hard leader, people can disagree openly. Around a dangerous one, the people who name problems are the ones who lose standing.
The last two markers are less about one person than about the system around him. That matters because harm is rarely sustained by one person. Fields notes that the dynamic can run in more than one direction: “Some parishioners prey on preachers because they like the power or the dynamic.” The question is not who is purely innocent. It is whether anyone with authority is allowed to say stop.
When a problem is a personal offense, Jesus gives a starting point: “go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone” (Matthew 18:15). That passage addresses one believer sinning against another. It does not require someone harmed by abuse to meet alone with the person who hurt them. Sexual abuse, assault and threats belong with law enforcement and trusted outside help, not only with church process. If you are being abused by a partner or someone in your home, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
What you can see differently now
Blade explains why church hurt goes so deep. For many people, their introduction to God came through the leaders who taught them. “So if those people misbehave, that affects how they view God.” The wound affects how a person thinks about God, not only about the leader.
That is why the distinction matters. Jude 3 Project holds that the failures of leaders are real and grievous, and that they are not the failure of Christ. Jesus described the hired hand who “careth not for the sheep” (John 10:13) in the same passage where he says, “the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). He knew there would be hirelings. He drew a sharp line between them and himself.
Once you see the culture behind he’s only human, you can stop accepting its terms. The relevant question was never whether a pastor is a sinner. It is whether people in his care were handled faithfully, and whether anyone close enough to know was willing to say so. Fields’s friend learned this through a divorce: their church planting training asked whether her husband was sound and whether he could preach, but “not a lot was focused on, like, emotional health.” A church that starts asking those questions before the next crisis is not being disloyal. It is taking leadership as seriously as Scripture does.
Go deeper in the Jude 3 library
- How Do You Recognize and Heal From Spiritual Manipulation by Church Leaders (Article)
- How Do You Recognize and Heal From Spiritual Manipulation by Church Leaders (Study guide)
- When Is It Okay to Leave a Church (Article)
- When Is It Okay to Leave a Church (Study guide)
This article draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation with Lisa Fields and Dr. Maliek Blade. Hear it in full on the Watch page.