Churches protect gifted leaders whose character is failing because they have learned to grade the wrong thing. Pastor Darryl Ford, who grew up inside Detroit’s gospel music world, describes congregations that treated a strong voice or a moving service as proof of a sound life, and that told the people harmed by that life to stay quiet. You can stay in the church without excusing this, he argues. To do that, you have to separate the gospel from the people who misused it, and you have to build the accountability they avoided.
That answer has two halves, and both cost something. The first means naming a pattern many congregations would rather not see. The second means refusing to let that pattern take your faith with it.
What Does Protected Power Look Like Up Close?
Ford’s account starts at home. His father was a well-known gospel singer, songwriter and broadcaster. His mother, Ford says, suffered physical abuse. When she finally brought it to people at church, the response protected the man with the platform. Ford names it directly: “The way that the church would respond would be kind of rooted in kind of clergy protectionism.”
He also recalls the words she heard. People told her that her husband had the Holy Ghost and had spoken in tongues, and so, in their words, “just let the Holy Spirit deal with him.” Then Ford lists what was missing: “There was no real sense of accountability. There was no real sense of calling out what is actually wrong.”
Ford is not asking for anything novel. He names the ordinary parts of church discipline: naming the wrong, calling the man to repentance and having a plan for separation if repentance never came. None of it happened. People invoked the Holy Spirit as a reason to avoid correcting him, and his mother was left to carry the harm alone.
If you are being harmed right now by a leader or in your home, being told to pray about it is not the whole of what God asks of you. Tell someone outside that leader’s reach. Seeking safety is not disloyalty to the church.
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233
RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673
Why Does Talent Keep Outranking Character?
Ford’s explanation is not mainly about villains. It is about what a community rewards. As a boy, he watched the same men who escaped accountability receive constant praise for their preaching, singing and playing. From that he drew a principle he still holds:
“Competency gets praised so much more than character, and all of us are the same. We all feed that for which we’re praised the most. And so if you’re praised for competency, you’ll just keep building up competency and your character just suffers.”
— Darryl Ford
The phrase “all of us are the same” carries the argument. Ford is describing how ordinary people grow, not a rare breed of corrupt leader. Whatever a congregation applauds gets stronger. Whatever no one examines gets weaker in private. By the time weak character becomes visible, the gift has built a platform big enough to shield it.
The audience shares the blame. Ford observes that “people are more willing to endure some of those bad things when you’re rendering a service that people like and love.” Congregations offer protection as readily as leaders demand it, because they want the sermon, the song or the feeling to keep coming.
Is This a Black Church Problem?
Ford is specific about whose experience he describes. He grew up in the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World and the Church of God in Christ, in one city during what he calls its era as the gospel music capital. He does not claim to speak for every Black congregation. When he describes how women around his mother were pushed to tolerate what they should not have, he adds, “Clearly that’s a broad brush,” and acknowledges that plenty of people refused to go along. A pattern a community needs to confront is not a description of the whole community.
His later life complicates any easy reading. As an Air Force member moving from base to base, he tried predominantly white churches, partly hoping to leave behind the manipulation he had seen. Their structures looked safer. Inside, he says, he found the same problems in different language: “Maybe the paint is different and the furniture’s arranged different, but it’s the same broken house.” He also found something new. His gifts were welcomed while his full personhood was not, and he had nowhere to process the pain.
So the broken house belongs to no single ethnic tradition. It is any church that lets gifts replace fruit. Ford still treasures what the churches that raised him gave him: “I would never exchange those things.” The way some of those churches protected powerful men departed from the faith they taught.
If God Is Using a Leader, Doesn’t That Mean God Approves?
This assumption holds the whole system up. Ford puts the confusion this way: “We often confuse gifts of the Spirit for the fruit of the Spirit.” In the churches he grew up in, he says, “that was the litmus test for whether or not you were anointed, was whether or not those gifts were on display. But it rarely was a litmus test whether or not the fruit of the Spirit was on display.” His summary of what he saw is blunt: “I saw a ton of gifts, and I saw a deficiency in fruit.”
He also describes how leaders reasoned with themselves. They thought, “If God’s using me, then he must be approving what I’m doing.” No visible judgment arrived, so the conclusion followed: “But I haven’t seen any consequences, so I must be pleasing him so far.”
Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, answers that reasoning with Saul, who prophesied under the Spirit while pursuing David after God had already rejected him (1 Samuel 15; 1 Samuel 19:20–24). On her reading, God used the moment to protect David, and it was no endorsement of Saul. Interpreters explain that strange scene in different ways. Still, the narrative plainly shows a rejected king in a moment of spiritual power, and that is enough to break the link between visible gifting and divine approval.
Jesus breaks that link more directly. Warning about false prophets, he says, “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). A few verses later he describes people who will point to spectacular ministry:
“Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity” (Matthew 7:22–23).
In the passage, prophecy and miracles prove nothing about the person performing them.
Paul’s list confirms what kind of fruit counts:
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law” (Galatians 5:22–23).
Every item describes character. None describes a talent.
The strongest objection is that God has always worked through deeply flawed people. That is true, and Scripture never hides it. It also narrates their sins as sins. David’s adultery and murder are told in full, and the prophet Nathan confronts him to his face (2 Samuel 11–12). The Bible describes a gifted sinner without endorsing his sin. When God uses a flawed leader, that is grace toward the people being served. It settles nothing about whether the leader’s private life is acceptable.
Who Pays When Character Gets a Pass?
In Ford’s account, women pay first and most. He describes churches full of women longing for godly men, and men with microphones who exploited that longing. He recounts sexual assault handled poorly, and churches that, when staff members got women pregnant, paid for abortions or relocated the women to other cities. His verdict: “Women were treated not as image bearers, but they were treated as commodities.”
The theology around it made things worse. Ford remembers one church where the teaching was “it’s the woman’s job to keep the man saved.” When a man cheated, people asked what his wife had failed to do. He also describes pressure on people harmed by future leaders to stay silent: “There’s always this pressure to forgive without genuine reconciliation,” a habit of “looking at forgiveness as just pure passivity.” The result, he says, is “rhythms of contrived reconciliation, but not real ones.” Forgiveness in Scripture is real, and it never requires a victim to pretend nothing happened or to walk back into harm.
Women around his mother urged her to treat her husband’s provision as enough. Ford says she came to see otherwise: “Provision alone isn’t love.” He adds, “Now love will bring provision, but provision doesn’t automatically mean love.” A man who brings home a paycheck, or a pastor who gives a platform and a sense of belonging, can still fail to love. Confusing the two keeps people in place long after they should have been protected.
The cost was not abstract. Ford says his mother died at 54, and he connects part of that to the harm done to her body. Of a church that would have heard her and advocated for her, he says, “I think she’d be here.”
Ford ties this imbalance to a proverb:
“Divers weights, and divers measures, both of them are alike abomination to the LORD” (Proverbs 20:10).
Its first setting is dishonest trade. Ford applies its principle to the unequal care, concern and justice churches give women compared with men. The application reaches beyond the marketplace, but the moral logic holds: God hates a double standard.
How Do You Stay Without Excusing It?
Ford understands people who leave. What keeps him in is an image he says he has to preach to himself. Someone shows off an amazing tool and then uses it to wreck your new car. Your first instinct is to distrust the tool. But, he says, “the issue was never the tool. The issue was the fool that was misusing the tool. The issue was the broken tool wielder, not the tool itself.”
He means it concretely. The Scriptures that were twisted to silence his mother also contain what a church needs to confront sin. Ford points to Corinth, where Paul writes:
“It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father’s wife. And ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he that hath done this deed might be taken away from among you” (1 Corinthians 5:1–2).
Paul’s rebuke falls on the congregation as much as the man. The Corinthian church had made peace with sin in its own body, and Paul told it to act. The churches Ford grew up in had the same letter in their Bibles and chose not to follow it. That is why he blames the people and keeps the faith.
Staying without excusing also asks something of you. Ford’s own approach suggests several concrete commitments for anyone who decides to stay:
- Check why you come. Ford asks every churchgoer, “Am I coming as a family member or am I coming as a consumer?” A consumer wants “a great sermon, I’m getting a great song, I’m getting a great feeling,” and will overlook what it costs others. Family asks how the leader and his household are actually doing, and refuses to be the applause that shields him.
- Believe the person who speaks up. When someone tells Ford they were hurt, he says he does not start by explaining why they misunderstood. He starts with the admission that he may have hurt them. You can give the same hearing his mother never got.
- Keep truth-tellers close. A mentor told Ford that leaders need “people in your life with whom you can share things that could potentially get you fired,” people who will still speak truth back. That is not only advice for pastors. Anyone carrying church hurt needs people close enough to say when bitterness is starting to steer.
- Get real care. Ford says his mother needed help “both spiritually and medically” and faced shame for seeking it. If church harm has left you with grief, anxiety or trauma, counseling is not a lack of faith. It is stewardship of the life God gave you.
Ford’s church defines humility as “the ability to say, I would never put that past me.” That sentence protects in two directions. It keeps you from assuming a beloved leader could never do harm. It also keeps you from assuming you never could. Ford admits anger alone did not protect him: “I think I could outrage myself out of ever being guilty of that. But it doesn’t work that way.” Without people close enough to name his blind spots, he says, “it’s very likely that unchecked I’ll become the thing that I hated the most.”
He also warns against a counterfeit of honesty. Telling your story matters, but “if transparency doesn’t lead to transformation, then it’s just an exercise in voyeurism.” Naming what happened is where staying begins. It is not where it ends.
No one can find a church without broken people in it. What you can look for, and help build, is a church that asks about a leader’s fruit as seriously as it celebrates his gifts, and that hears a woman like Ford’s mother the first time she speaks. Ford pastors a congregation today because he decided the Bible that was used against her also condemned what was done to her.
