Well, well, well. The leader of The Village Church (TVC), Matt Chandler, has finally gotten caught doing something off-limits enough to his church board that he had to take a leave of absence. I’m sure the stories about it vastly minimize what actually happened, but nobody will be shocked to hear that it involves inappropriate communication with a woman who is decidedly not his wife. It’s sad that all the other awful stuff he did had their blessing, and this is what it took to do anything about his odious leadership.
But as they say, at least he’s finally gone. Now we can marvel together at how strange it is that his denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), has so much trouble with sexual misdeeds in its leaders.
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Everyone, meet Matt Chandler
Matt Chandler, who is roughly my age, has for years been the main pastor of The Village Church (TVC). This is a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) church. As a hardline Calvinist, he also leads the Acts 29 church-planting group. We’ve talked about him a few times over the years:
- The initial scandal about Jordan Root and what it says about church covenants
- A five-year follow-up to that story deals more directly with Matt Chandler himself
- In the fruits of complementarianism, his gross views come up
- He shows up in a discussion about the SBC’s 2019 Annual Meeting
- Here, we trace his ascension to Acts 29’s leadership as a Mark Driscoll hire
- And here, Matt Chandler enjoys a far easier path back to his crony network’s grace than some other, less-powerful and less-well-connected leaders
- We cannot get away from this guy: he shows up in American Gospel to tell us all the proper way to Jesus
- Also, he needs us all to redefine love his way
Matt Chandler says that “Rowdy” John Piper shaped him as a person. That explains a lot, as Piper is one of the most repulsive, anti-human-rights evangelical Calvinist on the market today. Matt Chandler said this to his onetime superior officer, Mark Driscoll, in 2008. Alas, the video of him saying it is gone from the internet. Only its shell remains. But La Wiki preserved the relevant information, at least!
(Since I’ve noticed that Mark Driscoll has scrubbed that interview with Matt Chandler off the face of the earth, I’ve taken the liberty of archiving everything.)
More trivia to know
At the time, Driscoll was at the height of his power as a hardline Calvinist evangelical leader. Having started Acts 29 in 1998, he tapped Matt Chandler to lead it a few years later, in 2012. (Driscoll probably was getting too busy with his megachurch to effectively lead Acts 29.)
In 2014, Acts 29 finally fired Mark Driscoll for being an all-around abusive asshat. But the guy he’d hired to lead the group remained.
Despite weathering his own abuse scandal the year before, Matt Chandler had no mercy at all for his vice-president Darrin Patrick in 2016. Dude did something utterly inappropriate. And Matt Chandler fired him from Acts 29 for it.
(In 2020, after enduring the song-and-dance of pastoral restoration and getting hired by a new church, Patrick tragically died by suicide.)
And in 2019, a TVC member brought a lawsuit against Matt Chandler, alleging he’d mishandled her daughter’s sex abuse allegation. The church settled the case in early 2022. This timing will matter in a few minutes.
The 2015 Matt Chandler scandal at TVC
At first, Matt Chandler came to our attention in 2015 when his antics exploded into national news. That’s when a TVC/Acts 29 member realized that her then-husband, Jordan Root, was a pedophile who consumed child pornography. At the time, they were missionaries, but she ended that trip quickly. Once they got back to TVC, she tried to alert the church’s many families to the situation. In turn, TVC leaders sought to silence her—and worse, to protect Root. Most notably, they refused to publicly reveal why Jordan Root had returned from the missionary trip so early.
Then, she annulled her marriage to Root. Eventually, she formally resigned from TVC as a member.
Matt Chandler responded by trying to discipline her for divorcing without his permission. Ignoring that an annulment isn’t at all a divorce, the move just blew everyone’s minds. She’d left. She had never been his to boss around, but now she most especially wasn’t.
It was a really bad look for evangelicals. And it was one of the biggest religious news stories of 2015.
As my follow-up posts indicate, however, Matt Chandler never changed or learned from these mistakes. He is still the same, completely awful human being in 2022 that he was in 2015.
When one’s god is changeless, after all, change itself becomes a sin.
Matt Chandler knows how to marriage the Jesus way!
Like a lot of evangelical leaders, Matt Chandler is full of ideas about how to properly conduct a marriage that will be happy and last forever. He focuses often on marital faithfulness, for some odd reason.
He loves his wife, OKAY? From Faithful/Faithless, May 24, 2015:
I plan dates with my wife. There is not a human being on earth I love more than Lauren Chandler, not one. “Not your children?” No, those kids are going to get out of my house. My wife is going to be with me to the end. I love my wife more than I love anyone else on earth, and I plan dates, and in that planning, she has never felt robbed of my desire for her or love for her.
Why marriages experience problems with sex and money, from The Mingling of Souls: An Interview With Matt Chandler, unknown date:
Now it’s important to note that a failure to understand and apply the gospel manifests itself in a multitude of ways. . . what we see most often aren’t really issues with sex and money, but a failure to understand our identity in Christ, the role God’s called us to in marriage, and the mutual godly submission the gospel should create.
On the state of his early marriage, from What is Marriage? May 28, 2017:
The first six or seven years of my marriage were awful. . . I mean bad bad. I would lay in my bed at night and think, “Oh, my God. Is this the rest of my life? Surely, this isn’t the rest of my life.” She was in bed next to me, not going, “Gosh, I’m so glad I did this,” but feeling some of the very same things I was feeling: trapped, unable to get out of one another’s way, unable to figure this thing out, lost, and not really knowing what to do.
I wonder what they argued about? But don’t worry, he Jesus-ed his way to a perfect marriage. From 10 Questions on Dating with Matt Chandler, February 14, 2015:
This is how the gospel has worked in my own life and in my own marriage. Lauren was able to be very empathetic and compassionate and gracious and not demanding while the gospel did its work of healing and repairing the broken parts of me.
I’m appalled, frankly. And lastly, Matt Chandler on why people totally misdefine love, also from that undated interview:
I’m afraid that love is completely misunderstood in our over-romanticized age. It’s become a junk-drawer word most often used to describe some fluttery flirty feeling that has no weight underneath. It seems many believe love is simply and purely emotive. . . We are not under an emotive contract, but a covenant before God to be faithful to our spouse regardless of our emotional state.
Yep. Still appalled.
Overreach is kind of a pattern with Matt Chandler
In a lot of ways, Matt Chandler has managed to turn marriage into the least appealing proposition to ever involve consensual sex. But he’s no different from countless other hardline evangelical leaders (in and out of Calvinism, no doubt).
And you might have noticed that control-lust and overreach are just sorta an ongoing pattern for him in a lot of ways. The way he views divinely-mandated masculinity and femininity alone guarantees that any evangelicals who take marriage tips from him will be miserable.
So is dishonesty. You might notice in that masculinity link above that he gave that speech much earlier in his career. Here’s how he describes his early marriage there:
I’ve been married for eight years, I’ve been with Lauren for ten, and I’m dysfunctional and come from a very dysfunctional background. And so our first couple years of marriage were very, very difficult. And it wasn’t just my junk; she had some junk too. And when you put two dysfunctional people in a house together, it goes bad. And the Lord was really, really merciful, and the last four years have been just a dream.
One wonders just what the timeframe here actually was, and if he was downplaying even “the first six or seven years.” That is a long time to be miserable in a marriage.
Regardless, Matt Chandler really knows how to perform the ideal script of evangelical marriage:
Oh yeah, it’s super-hard and tough cuz of SIN SIN SIN! But a couple gets through that adjustment with Jesus Power, and they become ultra-fulfilled eventually by Jesus-ing their li’l hearts out.
So how’d all that Jesus-ing work out for Matt Chandler?
A couple of days ago, we learned that Matt Chandler had to take a leave of absence from his cushy gig at TVC.
It seems that a few months ago, our super-fulfilled, Jesus-Power-activated pastor-husband-bro-dude had been caught sending “inappropriate messages” via Instagram to a woman who most distinctly is not his wife.
Nobody’s sharing any details of just what the messages involved, of course. Matt Chandler himself says that they weren’t “romantic or sexual,” just “unguarded and unwise.” He said his church leaders simply felt that “the messaging was too frequent, familiar and resulted in ‘coarse and foolish joking.'”
I’m betting it was quite embarrassing for him when one of the woman’s friends told him she was concerned about these messages. He says he then brought her concerns to the church leaders, who then checked out the messages and began a legal investigation of all his social media. I’m sure that smarted, as well, even if TVC’s leaders have chosen not to share the results of the investigation.
However, TVC’s message to its congregation doesn’t mention the bit about the friend. And it phrases Matt Chandler’s situation as a leave of absence. None of the stories I’ve seen (like this one from Baptist Press, the SBC’s official news site) mention a timeline for his triumphant return, either.
No word yet, either, on whether or not Acts 29 will keep him as their president.
Is this reaction just bad timing, or is it an attempt to minimize the full extent of wrongdoing?
I gotta tell you, I strongly suspect that this was not the only woman Matt Chandler was messaging on social media. Further, I suspect that he went a lot further in his “coarse and foolish joking” than we’re hearing from any official sites. It just seems beyond bizarre that this is what finally got TVC to boot him, even temporarily-indefinitely.
But it might just be a matter of extremely bad timing. A few months ago would have been around May, which is when the SBC got hit smack in the face with an abuse report that just about rivals the Catholic child-rape scandal. If this unnamed friend of his Insta gal pal showed up right around then, it might explain a far more intensive examination of Matt Chandler’s behavior. That it was Matt Chandler in particular, the pastor who had been in the news already with that abuse-mishandling settlement and the 2015 scandal around Jordan Root, might only have exacerbated whatever response TVC officials might otherwise have made.
Whatever the case, at the time this friend came forward, the SBC’s top brass didn’t know yet that the Justice Department had taken an interest in that May abuse report. That wouldn’t happen until mid-August, and that link characterizes their interest as “recent.” However, throwing the book at any potential abuser would have likely looked like the smartest move any church leaders could make, and that decision might go far with the Justice Department.
Nonetheless, gosh do evangelicals seem to have a lot of trouble with their leaders doing this sorta thing.
I mean, all they did was appoint themselves the speakers for an infinitely-powerful god of justice and love, then demand our obedience to it
By now, evangelical sexual purity is worse than a joke. When we get the news, we roll our eyes: oh boy, yet another evangelical leader has been caught doing something sexual he knows he shouldn’t be doing. Whether it’s having a standard-issue affair (or two, or countless affairs), sexually abusing the help, employing a handsome pool boy to satisfy their wife while they watched, or getting high on meth in preparation for a full-contact massage from another man, evangelical men just don’t seem to be able to actually live the formula they prescribe for their followers.
And that’s not counting the youth pastors who keep abusing their young charges. I can’t even keep track of how often that kind of news article crosses my desk.
The roadmap that people like Matt Chandler prescribe for marital happiness and sexual fidelity just doesn’t work. Pretending to Jesus super-hard doesn’t make it easy or even possible to follow rules that were never designed to work in the real world. If there’s not a god at the center of all that roleplaying, it’s just going to lead to a lot of heartache—if not some serious accusations that could lead to prison time and a lifelong listing on the sex offenders’ registry.
It just does not speak well, does it, for these self-appointed spokespeople for a real live omnipotent god of justice and love?
Oh boy! Now Matt Chandler gets to go through pastoral restoration!
One of the funniest things about this story is the knowledge that there is no way, no how that Matt Chandler will get out of this mess without undergoing the same humiliating process of pastoral restoration that he demanded of other people under his authority. I can’t wait to see who in his crony network will administer it, what that guy will require of him, and how long it’ll take before he’s allowed back into the network as a full member again. Or even if he ever will be.
And just imagine: He’ll have to contend with Acts 29, too. As I said, we don’t know yet what they’ll do to him. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
One big possibility is him doing what his onetime boss Mark Driscoll did: thumb his nose at them and quit out from under them once he sees what they want him to do, then go start his own church somewhere far away, where he’ll try to reestablish his kingdom and start back up doing all the stuff that got him in trouble at TVC in the first place.
But it’s not going to matter if Matt Chandler hunkers down and Jesus-es super-mega-hard for months on end. It doesn’t matter if he has the Christian equivalent of a Rocky-style jogging montage every day from now on. The restoration process, like every other Christian process, operates as a substitute for the hard work of figuring out why he keeps disobeying a set of rules he insists his flock follow at the risk of punishment from King Him, and then setting in place the discipline and habits he’ll need to follow them.
If evangelical men could actually do that work, they wouldn’t need evangelicalism.
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