Especially when evangelicals like Matt Chandler get their grubby hands on real power, I really wish that they had some real accountability in their broken system. It’s hard even to imagine how this schmuck has a job still, after all the terrible things he’s done to his congregation. And yet here we are, and more importantly here his church is. This time around, we all found out that he’s been employing his father for years despite knowing about his dad’s history with child sex abuse (CSA). Worse, we found out he’s been keeping that history hush-hush from his own congregation.
Today, let’s look at Matt Chandler’s past to see how it informs his present—and keeps him safely on his throne for the future.
(From introduction: Sex abuse cases in Pentecostalism.)
(This post first appeared on Patreon on 7/19/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is publicly available!)
Everyone, (re-)meet Matt Chandler
Matt Chandler, a younger Gen-X evangelical, leads “The Village Church” (TVC), a megachurch in Flower Mound, Texas. It’s a good drive north of Dallas and nestled in a neighborhood of tightly-packed houses, smaller churches, supermarkets, and a gigantic Plant Fitness Gym. Established in 1978 under another name, it became “The Village Church” after they hired Matt Chandler to lead them in 2002.
TVC is a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) church. On the SBC’s official list of member churches, we find it there. However, you will search in vain on their official website for a single whisper of that fact. It is not on their “Our Beliefs” page, nor in “New Here” or “Mission & Vision.” It’s not even in their Bylaws. If you drill down on their Beliefs page to “Theological Distinctives” and from there to their “Statement of Faith,” they tell us that they “are situated within the evangelical, Reformed and Baptist traditions,” but they still won’t admit they’re SBC. The closest they come to announcing their affiliation is a vague 1845 mention of the SBC on their “About” page.
I will never, ever stop thinking it’s hilarious that the SBC is such a shameful, disgusting mess that even its biggest member churches try this incredibly hard to obfuscate their affiliation. But really, they must. For at least a decade now, everyone in the SBC has known that just knowing that a church affiliates with the SBC is enough to dissuade many visitors from going near it. Finding out after the fact might peeve someone, as a former TVC member has said recently, but chances are good they won’t leave over it.
Matt Chandler leads this deceptive megachurch. And as we will see, there’s a reason why he’s totally okay with being deceptive about his affiliation. He’s got a lot to protect.
In addition, Chandler was the president of Acts 29 for quite some time. Acts 29 is an uber-Calvinist evangelical church-planting group. Before they kicked out their co-founder Mark Driscoll, Driscoll tapped Chandler to lead the organization (archive). At some point, Chandler became Acts 29’s Executive Director and someone else became its president. (We’ll talk more about Acts 29 shortly.)
Matt Chandler rose through the ranks of the evangelical crony network
I could not dig up any information about Matt Chandler getting any advanced degrees. As far as I can tell, he’s only gotten one undergrad degree in, apparently, “Bible.” He got it from from Hardin-Simmons University, located in Abilene. If he pursued any other formal schooling afterward, I can find no evidence of it.
Instead, Chandler appears to have risen through the ranks of evangelical leadership through the crony network. A crony network is a group of leaders who protect each other and guard each other’s interests. They also give each other opportunities like speaking engagements, written recommendations of varying sorts, and conference guest spots. In a dysfunctional authoritarian group, its crony network is a substitute for accountability. As long as an individual crony is still useful or dangerous, his fellow cronies have his back. (When that stops being true, that crony will find out just how sincere his friends are!)
My ex-husband, Biff, also pursued membership in a crony network to get around pesky ministry educational requirements. At the time, this approach involved taking on steadily more and more important ministry roles, kissing lots of ass, getting a reputation as a charismatic and compelling preacher at area churches, and then finally sliding sideways into an official pastor position.
This approach worked. There are likely thousands of Boomer and Gen X pastors who achieved power like this. (Years after it’d stopped being such a common strategy, Babylon Bee lampooned it/archive.) Chandler might just be one of the last Southern Baptist pastors to become a pastor this way.
Biff really only failed because our then-denomination, the United Pentecostal Church, International (UPCI), just wasn’t as big as the SBC. It was impossible for him to strike that necessary balance between the number of people convinced by his lies and the number of people sick of his shit. When an aspiring evangelical leader is particularly odious, the crony network must be very large to absorb his offenses and protect him. Chandler’s potential cronies were far more numerous, so he didn’t have that problem.
Nowadays, I don’t think most denominational churches allow that sideways slide into ministry. They tend to demand formal educations. That hasn’t cut down on the power or numbers of the crony network, but it has changed aspiring leaders’ strategies at least.
In summary, I agree completely with Wondering Eagle, who wrote in 2016:
In the Neo-Calvinist world no one is more dear, more deified and more loved than Matt Chandler. He is the gold standard for many Neo-Calvinists. . .
I also agree with his assertion that “Matt Chandler is the brand who must be protected at all costs.” Indeed, I saw similar assertions all over the Christ-o-sphere and from former TVC members.
A quick review of Matt Chandler’s stunningly bad judgment
I’ve written about Matt Chandler a few times in the past, so I won’t retread that wheel. However, I still think it’s important to at least briefly note this guy’s long-established history of piss-poor judgment calls.
In 2010, he slammed an anonymous critic for not revealing their real name, calling that person “a narcissistic zero.” It’s not uncommon at all in dysfunctional authoritarian systems for people to do that, since criticisms often spark vicious retaliation. At least we know that congregant’s concerns were completely valid!
In 2015, one of his congregants outed her husband—a fellow congregant as well as a missionary working for TVC—as a consumer of child pornography. Chandler’s galaxy-brained response was to pull out the stops to punish her for annulling her marriage. He also tried very hard to keep the situation secret from his congregation. Of note: The whistleblower left TVC fairly quickly, but he still tried to punish her. Only once the incident went viral nationwide, he offered a mealy-mouthed apology to her.
In 2017, TVC fired a youth pastor, Anthony Moore, for a “sin issue.” Chandler does not tell his congregation exactly what happened, nor inform Moore’s next employer. In 2020, that employer found out what happened: Moore had secretly videotaped another man who was showering. TVC said the victim “didn’t want to talk about the experience,” which they thought gave them the go-ahead to keep it all secret.
In 2019, a longtime volunteer with TVC’s youth ministry, Andy Landrum, admitted to sexually abusing children at his workplace (a school). As a response, Chandler decided to have a super-duper-secret meeting about it—and invite only parents of children attending one of TVC’s campus churches. Though church leaders did report the situation to the police, they also tried very hard to keep the situation a secret from the congregation. That might explain why they also failed to notify any parents who no longer attended TVC but whose children might have come into contact with the abuser.
Also in 2019, an alleged sex abuse victim of another youth minister sued TVC for gross negligence. Boz Tchividjian, a famous advocate for sex abuse reform, lamented that TVC seemed completely unwilling to face any accountability in this matter. Among other things, the lawsuit accuses TVC leaders of trying to keep this abuse a secret from the congregation.
In 2020, Matt Chandler fired Steve Timmis from Acts 29 leadership. Timmis’ utter inability to lead without abusing and bullying others had been a growing and rising concern for years, but nobody had dared to talk about it until things came to a roaring head. Christianity Today presented a great number of shocking accusations about it. Worse, Baptist News quotes Chandler trying to blame the situation on a brain tumor from many years ago. (Their writer quips: “there is no room in penal substitutionary atonement for brain tumors.”)
In 2021, Matt Chandler complained that Americans weren’t using his redefinition of love anymore. I had a good time tearing that assertion to bits. But even using the apparently-perfect redefinition of love, Chandler couldn’t stop himself from behaving inappropriately with another woman. He admitted to it in August 2022, then stepped down temporarily from ministry. When he returned that December, his congregation gave him a literal standing ovation.
In 2023, Wartburg Watch reported that churches were leaving Acts 29 due to “transparency and financial issues.” Strangely, Matt Chandler isn’t even revealing if Acts 29 pays him, much less how much he’s getting.
And now, the latest Matt Chandler news
Last week, Matt Chandler had to admit that for almost 20 years, he’d allowed TVC to employ a man with a known history of child sexual abuse.
Worse, that man was his own father, Steven Chandler.
And even worse, TVC employed Steven Chandler as a janitor. In other words, he had unfettered, unrestricted, unsupervised access to the entire church campus. For the first two years of his employment, his very own supervisor had no idea what he’d done in the past.
The news broke July 10 on the “Bodies Behind the Bus” podcast, which interviewed some former members of TVC. One of the guests, Chris, said he’d been the chairman of the TVC elder board. (That is a powerful committee of men tasked with hiring, advising—and sometimes reining in—the pastor. Most evangelical churches have something like it.)
Chris claimed that in 2019, right as the expose on sex abuse in the SBC, “Abuse of Faith,” hit headlines, he felt pangs of guilt over keeping Steven Chandler’s past a secret. He wanted to warn TVC that this man had a past history of sexual abuse. However, Chris says, a lawyer representing TVC told the elder board advised against it. So did Josh Patterson, one of TVC’s top pastors.
Instead of telling the congregation about this potential danger in their midst, and instead of even investigating to ensure he hadn’t hurt anybody else, TVC fretted about how all of that might affect Steven Chandler’s feelings—and ultimately the board decided to celebrate that Jesus had totally fixed him. As far as I can tell, they spared not a single thought for any of Chandler’s victims or potential victims.
And as far as I can tell, they still haven’t.
Matt Chandler has capitalized on the worst flaws in evangelicalism
Evangelicals have a strong tendency to build Potemkin villages—facades—to make themselves and their groups look better. To get to the real truth, we must dive between the lines. We must drill down to what they’re not saying, and we must read what they are saying with Martian logic.
Many years ago, I described Martian logic as “irrationality dressed up in rationality’s old prom dress and heels” and “lunacy disguised as common sense.” Evangelicals use Martian logic because they don’t have a real god making their broken system work as it should. However, not all of them want to just flat-out lie about their system’s failures. So they try to hide those failures behind pretty words.
For example, check out this 2017 post from The Gospel Coalition (TGC) about Acts 29 (archive). It’s about how Acts 29 was totally “thriving” and “growing” after separating itself from Mark Driscoll. And within just its first few paragraphs, we’re already hearing about its dealbreaking flaws:
- “a sophomoric, brash harshness”
- “spirit of immaturity”
- “cult of personality” (around Driscoll)
- “When you’re young and your churches are primarily small, it is easy to misunderstand, to not be gracious, and to create straw men to attack and tear down” (that’s a quote from Chandler himself)
- serious arguments exploding constantly from the group, along with deep frustrations
We’re supposed to think these flaws just went away after a major reorganization post-Driscoll. Indeed, we’re told that Chandler’s leadership led to significant changes:
The retreats became more humble and gracious, [Ryan] Kwon said. [. . .] Assessing potential planters, which “used to be done in a hard-core tone, to beat them up,” also changed[. . .] In addition, there began to be more room for those who weren’t white males. [. . .] The attitude toward women—which could dip into a harsh patriarchy—also eased.
This is horrifying. It is not the win these TGC numnuts think it is.
Steve Timmis shows up in that writeup as well—as the only person in a room full of obvious yes-men who dared to push back against any of Chandler’s ideas. He’s also the one who apparently inspired Acts 29 to focus internationally, rather than on primarily the United States.
In dysfunctional authoritarianism, without significant changes in leadership, flaws do not magically fix themselves. “Jesus” didn’t make Acts 29 any different. With Chandler at the helm, all that could change is cosmetic and temporary in nature. The folks involved with Acts 29 learned that to their detriment well before Steve Timmis’ abuse finally became public knowledge.
Matt Chandler is a perfect illustration of the utter failure of evangelicalism
When we look at what Matt Chandler has said about himself, it raises even more red flags. He’s simply not honest about his flaws. Instead of getting real help for them, he relies on Jesusing to make him appear squeaky clean. But if Jesus isn’t doing anything for anyone, then he’s just in a state of deep denial. Even on a personal level, that’d be bad. For the leader of a megachurch and a huge evangelism group, it’s catastrophic.
In 2006, after describing the terrible things men in his family had done, he describes the effects of this legacy:
“And it’s created in me issues. Self-hate. Lust. Anger. It’s created in me those things. And I seized the opportunity for those things. And so every once in a while, I get hung up and I need to go get some help.” [. . .]
“Thirteen years, I’ve been following Jesus. Thirteen years. Thirteen years,” Chandler reflected in his sermon. “And you know what? I have experienced a lot of freedom from my junk. But let me be completely, completely honest with you. Sometimes I really still have to wrestle it.”
As Baptist Press points out, he is worryingly vague about both his behavior and how he’s Jesused his way out of it all. Rest assured he still suffers from all of those things. And he still “seize[s] the opportunity” to do them. Nothing has changed.
Perhaps the fundamental flaw: a punishment-oriented worldview
Perhaps worse, he thinks people aren’t honest about their current and past sins because they lack faith. Faith in what, you might ask? Faith that Jesus can magically heal them of wanting to do those things.
I really like how that Baptist Press writer links Matt Chandler’s constant wrongdoing with his fundamental belief in punishment as a divine requirement:
Powerful men who come from generations of abuse, who fear their churches and their names being taken down, who consistently are dishonest about their sin, and who fear God might not heal them are simply living out the fruit of a theology that claims justice is punishment.
Before men like Chandler can be completely honest with us, they have to be honest with themselves. They don’t believe God really can heal them because they don’t believe in a justice of healing love, but in a justice of retributive punishment.
That’s possible. A lot of people reach for punishment before any other kind of response. They believe in “karma” as a way to balance the scales—in divine judgment—in a cosmic daddy-cop who will totally spank humans who don’t follow his rules. Such people cannot conceptualize any other way of living.
But as the old saying goes, they say they want justice when what they really want is mercy. When it comes to them and their own flaws and off-limits desires, they’ll always be able to find a million reasons why they’re exempt from their own rules.
In a nutshell, that’s why evangelicalism is so completely ineffective at truly changing anyone—or even producing groups that can work together in harmony to achieve their own goals. It’s why evangelicals hate accountability like they do, and why they are so good at protecting their leaders from any brush with it. It’s also why evangelicals have come up with all kinds of substitutes for real personal change, including their pathetic fake therapy called “Biblical counseling” and their performative farce of “pastoral restoration.”
If Matt Chandler really felt his dad was totally magically cured of wanting to sexually abuse children, then he had nothing to lose in warning his church that someone with such a history held the keys to every single room in that church. But he sure didn’t do that. It’s not even the first time he’s ever decided to conceal bad news from his congregation. This incident is another point along the trendline pattern of behavior for him.
Even by evangelical standards, though, Chandler’s decision to conceal his dad’s past is a really shocking example of poor judgment. He is not someone who should be leading a church. And for him to try to blame his decisions on a brain tumor and his supposed lack of a “right frontal lobe” just tells me even more loudly that he needs to be stripped of power and never hold it again.
He’s a Calvinist, after all, so it’s not like he’s afraid he’ll go to Hell unless he’s a pastor. Dude’s preordained, don’tcha know!
And the other: Fundamental disrespect for his own congregation
We all deserve the right of consent. Part of that right involves being informed enough to be able to meaningfully consent. If you want to get someone’s money, time, affection, or whatever, and you withhold information from them that you should be reasonably expected to know could be a dealbreaker, then you are deceiving them and denying them the right of meaningful consent.
But Matt Chandler couldn’t tell his congregation the entire truth. He selectively shared snippets of the truth to selected people, but over and over again I read his church members saying they didn’t know the full extent of what Steven Chandler did. Given the recidivism rate of child sex abusers, the chances of him abusing a child at TVC are extremely nonzero.
When evangelical leaders conceal major dealbreakers from their congregations, that is a violation of those people’s right to make meaningful decisions for themselves. And this one involves their own children’s safety.
The pity is that evangelical leaders have by now so poisoned their followers’ minds against human rights that the flocks probably won’t ever realize just how abusive this situation is.
Of course, Matt Chandler still expects his followers to donate money to his clubhouse! But they don’t get to know how the sausage gets made.
All of this is just business as usual for evangelicalism
With that said, I disagree with Baptist Press that something strange is “happening to megachurch pastors in Dallas.”
Nothing strange is happening. Yes, a bunch of evangelical ministers from that area, including Chandler, are, indeed, getting outed with scandals of mostly sexual sorts.
However, this ain’t anything new. They’ve always been like this. In fact, they were likely even worse years ago.
All that’s changed from decades past is that even fervent, churchgoing evangelicals nowadays feel less inclined to keep pastors’ hypocrisy and misjudgments a secret. Much of the abuse allegations being voiced lately seem to have occurred many years ago, which tells me volumes about how safe sex abuse victims felt to speak out back then.
Just imagine what we’d have heard in the 1980s, if they had felt safe enough to speak! But hypocritical ministers had a lot of protection back then. They could mete out considerable retaliation to anyone who tried to speak the truth. Even in the mid-2010s, underage girls were still getting accused of leading ministers on and causing their own sex abuse. In the “Abuse of Faith” reports, victims’ fears of retaliation figured prominently in their decisions to keep quiet for years on end.
The crony network will come in clutch for Matt Chandler
Even with the outcry about his father, Matt Chandler has little to fear. He will likely simply weather this scandal and get ready for the next one to be revealed.
Even if he loses his church, his cronies can still hire him for speaking engagements and conferences. And some church in their network will rehire him without hesitation, or perhaps some evangelical-owned school will. SBC cronies have already rescued Paige Patterson from his own incompetence in that same exact way. In 2021, Yellowstone Christian College hired him as a three-year trustee (archive).
As for Mark Driscoll, after flouncing away in 2014 from Mars Hill, the church he ruled over with an iron fist and a lot of bullying, he started a new church in Arizona almost immediately. That happened so fast that Christian Today ran an article titled (archive): “Fast-track restoration: Why is Mark Driscoll already back in church leadership?”
Because I’m feeling helpful today, I’ll tell them exactly why:
Mark Driscoll lost a lot of his crony network’s support after his huge drama explosion in 2014. Years ago, we tracked that support using his books’ endorsement blurbs. Dude went from having the biggest names in his business in those endorsements to literal whos. That’s why he’s still rotting away in a teensy-weensy church in the butt-crack of Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s also why he’s huckstering his heart out at events like that recent men’s conference he made all about himself.
Don’t be sad for him. He hasn’t learned a single thing. He deserves far worse than irrelevance.
For now, that same crony network seems intent on keeping Matt Chandler where he is, despite Chandler deserving the same fate and more. I’d be surprised if they aren’t already protecting him now. But if they pull the rug out from under him, nothing can save him. So we will soon see if he is still the gold standard for Calvinism—and therefore worth his cronies’ effort.
NEXT UP: Let’s explore the culture of Christian visions. We’ll learn the secrets of creating and presenting totally divine visions to get results in evangelical churches. See you soon!
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