The newest accountability crisis in evangelicalism has dropped

Evangelicals may fluff themselves up about their dedication to accountability all they like. The truth looks far different. They actually despise accountability, and do everything they can to avoid facing it. The resulting lack of accountability is the biggest red flag about their culture, and the reason why scandals pour more often from evangelical groups than from any other flavor of Christianity. This time around, evangelicals’ latest object lesson to ignore comes from a venerable old church that is imploding.

Situation Report: Park Street Church of Boston, MA and their overall accountability crisis

Over the past year, Park Street Church has been dealing with an accountability crisis.

It’s a historic church in Boston, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1804, so it’s been around for over 200 years. And its list of previous pastors includes some very influential men (yes, men; always, men). We’ll discuss one of them in more detail shortly here. Their current senior pastor is Mark Booker, hired in 2020.

One of their associate/junior ministers, Michael Balboni, already worked there when Booker arrived. Balboni’s worked there since at least 2018. (He shows up on a Park Street Church newsletter from that year.) He seems to have been popular with the congregation. Apparently, though, he had some friction with Booker. I’ve heard rumors that Booker charged into leadership and immediately wanted to make some big changes that other staff members didn’t like.

Over time, Booker’s leadership became increasingly unilateral and dysfunctionally-authoritarian. In other words, he focused on growing his own personal power instead of helping the group achieve its stated goals. And because his leadership was personal-power-focused, his decisions became more and more grating to his subordinates and congregants—and made less and less sense when viewed from the standpoint of the congregation’s stated goals.

Factions sprouted up around him, as we should fully expect to see in dysfunctional authoritarian groups. Some church members jockeyed for his favor, while others sought to undermine him. Booker did nothing to stop any of this from happening. In fact, he appears to have made a slew of hugely unpopular and controversial leadership decisions, which included changing the entire governance structure of Park Street Church.

This friction exploded into outright faction warfare in July, 2023.

When a lack of accountability turns into a major crisis

That’s when Michael Balboni wrote a 17-page PDF letter to his church outlining all the different objections he had to Booker’s leadership of that church. It is a truly impressive letter, very well laid-out in the way of evangelicals trying to win doctrinal arguments. It’s got everything, right down to “the original Greek and Hebrew” analysis that they always think is a slam-dunk.

In October 2023, Booker fired Balboni. Of note, the termination did not follow the church’s informal bureaucratic procedures. Several times, he rejected his congregation’s request for a meeting about the firing.

Over the following months, the congregation grew more and more restive over Booker’s leadership and decisions. Finally, as Christianity Today revealed on February 21, 2024, the congregation pushed through their demand for a review of Balboni’s firing (archive).

Booker, by now clearly deeply worried about the results of that review, tried to get ahead of the congregation by suggesting they also take a vote of confidence in his continued leadership of the church. This vote would be, of course, non-binding. Whatever the results of the vote, he wasn’t going anywhere.

The congregation just had their big meeting yesterday.

An accountability vote, just without any accountability

See, the congregation of Park Street Church consider themselves congregationalists. There’s an official capital-C Congregationalism (archive), which affiliates with the United Church of Christ. The little-c version appears to be simply a style of church administration. That little-c version means Park Street members think a church congregation should run fairly democratically (archive). They want the right to make their own rules and run their church their own way. Congregationalism also tends toward church autonomy, as you might guess. 

I’m not sure when Park Street Church became congregationalist. One source says they’ve been that way for over 200 years. However, one of their most famous former pastors (from 1936-1969), a man apparently considered “a founding father” of modern American evangelicalism itself, was anything but. In a 1981 interview with Christianity Today (archive), Harold Ockenga told them:

What discouraged me the most was that the New Englanders thought differently than people elsewhere. In the Midwest, South, or West, if a preacher has an idea and he wants to put it across, he can put it across. I’d have to suggest it, and suggest it. Then I’d have to let it sit for four or five years until somebody else thought it was his idea and he advanced it. Then we would be able to do it.

We used to keep quite a large sum in reserve for emergencies—like bringing missionaries home, or to use if the church burned down. It was $300,000 or $400,000. We were supporting 145 missionaries. Well, one of my men got the idea we ought to spend everything. We had a knock-down, drag-out fight one night in the board of deacons. I told them that as long as I was pastor, I was going to have the say as to where we spent our money. He finally came around, but it wasn’t easy.

That doesn’t sound congregational at all to me, but whatevs. Nobody can make modern evangelicalism make sense. Their entire worldview rests on the proposition that P can too = ~P.

From a congregational standpoint, though, it makes sense that Park Street Church’s members wanted to review Balboni’s firing. That was their right. Acting as the King of Park Street Church as usual, Booker simply tacked on his non-binding vote request to that review.

How the meeting turned out

Is this reminding anyone else of a very similar meeting from the Christian fantasy novel This Present Darkness? Because it’s really reminding me of that big subplot!

In the book, the TRUE CHRISTIAN™ pastor accidentally gets hired by a committee for a little bitty church in a small college town. When he arrives, he immediately starts pushing his congregation to Jesus harder than they really want to. Worse, he wants them to Jesus correctly rather than in some wishy-washy way! And he wants to follow his own quirky li’l take on Jesus rules in leading them, which means he kicks out a prominent, longtime church member who has for a long time openly engaged in an extramarital affair.

The kicked-out guy and his friends start conniving to fire the pastor. In a big showdown, the congregation votes on whether to keep the pastor or fire him. Thanks to angelic interference, the vote narrowly passes to keep him. Hooray Team Jesus! (In the end, the kicked-out guy repents, ends his affair, and rejoins the church as a TRUE CHRISTIAN™. Of course.)

In this real-life situation, Park Street Church voted 67%-33% to affirm Mark Booker’s pastoring of them (source; archive). But at least a few congregation members objected to the vote having been non-binding. And Michael Balboni was on hand as well, offering a speech about Booker’s authoritarian style of leadership and unilateral decision-making:

The former minister said the glory of God had departed from the congregation, referencing 1 Samuel 4:21 [the naming of Ichabod]. Nevertheless, he said, the conflict is not over.

“This is my last word. I will not give up. And I will not give in. Until there is a fair process that hears what has happened to me, what has happened to other ministers, I will not stop,” Balboni said.

The Park Street clerk has approved a petition to call a special meeting in April to review the elder’s decisions to dismiss the charges Balboni brought against Booker.

So they need to have another meeting about these new accusations. 

This meeting didn’t do much at all to end the explosive atmosphere at Park Street Church, I’m afraid. A few weeks ago, Wartburg Watch discussed the fracas (archive), saying it would threaten the church’s age-old and remarkable stability. I’d agree. The people who were upset with Booker are still upset. His supporters and favor-seekers still kiss his feet.

As for Booker himself, he might be very pleased indeed that his obviously-self-serving non-binding vote passed. But he didn’t win what he really wanted: The crown and scepter he sees as his by divine right.

How accountability should work

Officially, evangelicals are all about accountability. We’ve touched on this facet of their character before, but I want to show you just how important accountability is to them, at least in theory.

To evangelicals, accountability means being subject to others. They hold others accountable for their behavior and Jesusing. At the same time, they are in turn accountable to others for their own behavior and Jesusing. Those holding an evangelical accountable have the personal power to force that person to change behavior or even beliefs. If someone disobeys the people holding them accountable, they can expect some sort of punishment or retaliation.

Because evangelicalism is authoritarian to its core, most evangelicals don’t even know how to deal with egalitarian decision-making or group dynamics. Nor would they relish such an experience. They think everything goes haywire when nobody has the trump card and final call on decisions, that groups can’t possibly last long without one person being able to override all the rest.

(This attitude particularly extends to marital relationships. Evangelical men often express pity for men in egalitarian marriages, which they mistakenly imagine are full of fights and endless discord. They also mistakenly think that egalitarian marriages are doomed from the start. My happy, fight-free, egalitarian 20-year marriage would like a word with them there, but I know they’d never believe me.)

By carefully setting up a system where all group members are both accountable to others and hold others accountable to them, evangelicals believe they can Jesus merrily forever together and never have any problems.

Often, you’ll see this system called discipleship or church covenants. The idea is that a powerful person within the group disciples subordinates, meaning he holds them accountable for their behavior and punishes them when they step out of line. Entering into a covenant with a church’s leadership becomes this big huge serious commitment endorsed and demanded by Jesus himself. And like all covenants, of course, a follower’s obligations do not change if the other party doesn’t fulfill their covenantal promises. (That’s why covenant marriage, valid in only a few states, makes divorcing almost impossible; archive.)

Accountability in the wild

From a hardline Catholic site (archive), since hardline Catholics are no different from hardline evangelicals:

Accountability is an indispensable aspect of discipleship for a variety of reasons. When we are not held accountable by someone else, it requires heroic effort to consistently do what we need to be doing. Our fallen human nature makes it easy for us to cut corners, give excuses for our bad behavior, and become sloppy in every area of our life, not least in our discipleship.

From a Cru (Campus Crusade for Christ) site (archive):

1. “Accountability helps curb unproductive behavior. But accountability shouldn’t just be about identifying and harping on one another’s weaknesses.” [In other words, that stuff is definitely part of it.]
2. “Accountability allows you to receive helpful counsel. This is another case where true accountability is only possible when we choose to be transparent and open with our accountability partners.” [Clearly, evangelicals often aren’t.]
3. “Accountability helps you achieve goals. Accountability partners can help you choose goals, set up steps for achieving them, and provide follow-up and encouragement to keep you on course.” [OR ELSE.]
4. “Accountability keeps you engaged. In this way, accountability is less about monitoring one another’s behavior, and more about helping each other maintain your first love (Revelation 2:4).” [Oh, but it’s definitely about monitoring behavior, though!]

We get a more direct Jesusy demand from Accountability2You (archive), a company that sells spyware to evangelical accountabilibuddies:

Our Lord Jesus wants His church to love one another as a community of saved sinners who help one another become more like Him in daily practice.

And from Barna Group (archive), a for-profit evangelical survey house, we get this complaint from 2010:

Because the underlying theme of the Christian life is one of being transformed from a selfish and self-driven individual to one who lives for and surrenders control of one’s life to God, the practice of accountability for life choices and behavior is central to that process of transformation. Yet, a national survey by the Barna Group among people who describe themselves as Christian and involved in a church discovered that only 5% indicated that their church does anything to hold them accountable for integrating biblical beliefs and principles into their life.

I don’t think much has changed there, either.

How that actually works out

In the mid-2010s, I saw a stronger push in evangelicalism for discipleship and church covenants, but I don’t think it caught on overall. As evangelical leaders slowly caught on to their decline, they thought that seizing more power over their flocks would stop it and reverse it.

That’s just how dysfunctional authoritarians operate. The only tool they have is chains. Their only response to any problem is to loop more of those chains around those flocks they still control. Since they’re only there to grow their own personal power, their leadership is substandard and obviously self-serving. Their decisions make no sense from any other viewpoint. As a result, nobody sensible would follow them if they were open about what they want. So they learn to lie to get into positions of power and to pretend they’re totally all about whatever the group values. Once they’re there, they can start whittling away at all the checks and balances, all the accountability measures, that the group has. That’s what Mark Booker appears to have done. In their February 21st writeup, Christianity Today offered this insight (relink):

“I embraced this new context and was received as an ordained minister in the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference (of which Park Street is a member church),” he [Booker] said in an email. “We are committed to discerning God’s will together as a congregation through the means prescribed by our polity.”

Booker’s critics point out, however, that he started making changes to the church’s decision-making process almost as soon as he took charge. One of his first moves was to end a senior leadership team. 

I’m sure that surprised some folks at Park Street Church, but it didn’t surprise me. Evangelicals have no way whatsoever to assess the true nature of anyone seeking positions of power within their groups. Because there’s no Jesus in their religion to magically help them with this discernment, they have to trust the outward signs of piety and stated doctrinal stances of their candidates. These are all very easy to fake. In Park Street Church’s case, they usually demand a rigorous education and training from their ministers, as Wartburg Watch mentions in their own writeup as “an example of the quality of training usually found in the pastoral staff at PSC”:

Michael Balboni, Ph.D., Th.M., M.Div, is a congregational pastor and theologian. He has served both as a congregational minister in Boston and an intentional Christian community of healthcare students and professionals. He holds a Ph.D. in practical theology from Boston University and completed post-doctoral training at the Harvard School of Public Health and at Harvard Divinity School. As an Instructor at Harvard Medical School and a palliative care researcher he has published approximately fifty articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. As a theologian, his focus has included the development of a theology of medicine and a concentration in the theological underpinnings related spiritual care in a pluralistic, secular medical context. [Source; archive]

A requirement for rigorous education and training can certainly help! But when a cunning candidate—like, um, Mark Booker—obfuscates his qualifications, evangelical hiring committees often won’t catch the problem until it’s far too late. As Wartburg Watch also notes:

There is a concern that Pastor Booker’s training at Oxford does not meet the US standards for a Master of Divinity due to the peculiarities at Oxford where Booker received his divinity training. I have been researching churches and pastors for fifteen years. I have never found it more challenging to locate a pastor’s credentials. Even in his letter to the congregation, he defended his degrees yet didn’t elucidate them. There is a simple fix, and it will quell the concern. Release a carefully documented résumé. I genuinely don’t understand why he doesn’t do this.

Oh, but I understand completely why he doesn’t. He knows the answers won’t make anybody happy. When evangelicals obfuscate and hide the truth, when they refuse to speak plainly, that’s the only reason you’ll ever find for it.

And now, Booker’s doing his best to shift away from congregationalism to his more favored leadership structure. Park Street Church is likely doomed at this point.

The problem with evangelical-style accountability

If I had to name one reason why evangelical-style accountability fails so often, I’d have to cite evangelicals’ loss of cultural and coercive power. No matter how official-looking their covenant legalese, Americans still have a perfect right to associate and dissociate from groups any time they please.

Further, there are very hard legal limits on exactly how much punishment evangelicals can inflict on disobedient sheep. Once a pew-warming sheep frolics out of their former pasture, those laws can slam down hard on any accountabilibuddy who tries to reel them back.

For years, watchdog sites like Wartburg Watch have warned evangelicals about giving too much power to their church leaders (archive):

I am the “Dear Abby” on how to get out of a church when the church appears to want to apply retroactive church discipline. Retroactive church discipline is a term I believe I invented to describe what some poor souls experience. Everything is going well. Then the member gets the heebie-jeebies about the church and leaves. Except, the church declares the individual to be suddenly, and without notice, “under church discipline.” They are then told that they must do something, depending on the church, to secure their release from the church discipline dungeon.

Two cases came to mind immediately when I read that:

• In 2012, when powerful Calvinist megapastor Mark Driscoll’s small group leaders meddled in the love life of a member even after he left their church (archive), it spelled the beginning of the end of Driscoll’s entire empire. As it happened, those small group leaders were not some isolated situation. They were, rather, a sign of significant authoritarian dysfunction at the megachurch. By 2014, Driscoll had quit. His megachurch disbanded. He ended up pastoring a small church in Arizona, where no doubt he’s acting up in the same ways he always has.
• In 2015, while on a missionary trip abroad, a missionary wife discovered that her husband, Jordan Root, consumed child pornography and had for years. She demanded they return home to The Village Church (TVC) in Dallas, Texas. There, she obtained an annulment of their marriage and tried to raise awareness of what her husband was doing. In response, her pastor, Matt Chandler, citing discipleship as his primary concern, tried to yank her back into her marriage and shut her up before his large congregation found out that an actively-offending pedophile was in their midst with their pastor’s full knowledge and protection. Alas for him, she had quit TVC two weeks earlier. Chandler ended up eating crow over that. Oh, and his creepy and thinly-veiled sermon about the incident backfired too. (He turned out to be a hypocrite, of course. In 2022, he got in trouble over sexually inappropriate behavior online with a woman who definitely wasn’t his wife. But he’s still named as TVC’s Lead Pastor on their staff page.)

I haven’t heard about many cases like these since about 2015. The word must have gotten out. Even the most dysfunctional authoritarian knows that the laws protecting Americans from stuff like “retroactive church discipline” cannot be ignored, sidestepped, or hand-waved away.

Those same laws prevent any higher-level accountabilibuddies from enforcing their demands. All their subordinate needs to say is “…. OR WHAT?” and the game is finished—unless the subordinate cares about rising through the ranks of their church. Chances are good that a church leader will be unable to offer any non-church-related punishments.

And the other big problems with accountability

Remember that Cru listicle (relink) about all the Great and Glorious Benefits of Jesus-Flavored Accountability? Every point in its list also subtly warns evangelicals about the serious downsides of the practice.

And it should. In many ways, accountability as practiced by evangelicals looks a lot like what Scientologists do to their own members (archive; see also this WaPo article). They demand to know all of their subordinates’ secret thoughts and sins. It all might seem very innocent, like the people receiving these confessions just want what’s best for their subordinates. But when the time comes to strike, higher-ups don’t hesitate to use what they’ve learned as blackmail and extortion if those subordinates try to leave or step out of bounds.

Worse, remember that evangelicalism is, at heart, a shallow and appearances-based system. Evangelicals mistakenly think they have some way to discern the truth and figure out what’s fake, but they don’t. As I said, they rely entirely on outward signs to make their judgments. If someone holds back in confessing their struggles and sins, evangelicals sure won’t know about it unless they’re well-connected with the town’s gossip vine.

So anybody confessing a lot of problems following evangelical rules gets compared to the rest, who are holding back so they seem more Jesusy than they really are. That honest person can easily face stigmatization that the less-forthcoming people simply won’t. When it comes time to pick the leader of the next committee, the picker will choose the person who seems more fervent and devoted to their faith.

Worse still, there’s no real evidence supporting evangelicals’ claims about their accountability systems (archive). It just sounds so incredibly super-Jesusy that evangelicals hear about it and glom right on. They think it must work if it’s got all those Bible verses supporting it! Instead of working as promised, however, these systems seem only to embolden hypocritical leaders to prey upon their overly-trusting flocks. The sheer number of scandals erupting from churches using these systems speaks for itself.

No evangelical with any sense should submit to accountability procedures or sign church covenants or discipleship agreements. And no leader worth following should ever demand such things of their followers. Unfortunately, one of the worst downsides of accountability enters the picture if a subordinate does care about their standing at church. In that case, accountability leaders can really inflict a lot of abuse without worrying about any repercussions to themselves.

Once accountability is lost, it’s really hard to get it back again

So now we look back at Park Street Church and their current struggles, and we can easily see where their pastor has carefully sheared through any lines of accountability that could stop him from hijacking their church. 

And yes, I mean hijacking. I agree with Wartburg Watch here (relink, and emphases come from the original source, as always):

It is my opinion that a church takeover is in play.

It appears the word “congregational” is being deemphasized. [. . .] The Congregational Church model seems to be on the outs, and a “new way” with “elders in charge” is being ushered in.

It’s already done, too. All that’s left is the cleanup on Aisle 7.

By now, Mark Booker has already trimmed away and fired most of the staff members who opposed his style of leadership. He’s also changed the church’s rules to suit himself. Nobody’s left who can hold him accountable, and no procedures remain intact enough to do the job anyway.

There’s no doubt in my mind that he’ll figure out who voted against him and try to drive those people away if he can’t get them to bend the knee to him. His “non-binding” vote of confidence was simply meant to intimidate the church members opposing him (namely, that 1/3 who voted against him).

You may count on this, too: Booker knew, roughly at least, what the results of that vote would be ahead of time. He’d likely been asking around about the matter before proposing it in the first place. No dysfunctional authoritarian lasts long without having a good idea of exactly how much power he holds. It’d be surprising, too, if he didn’t specifically ask his supporters to show up for the meeting.

Whatever machinations he put into play, they worked. And they worked precisely because evangelicals have completely mangled the entire concept of accountability.

Strangely, no angels were on hand this time to sway the vote. Whatever good memories Park Street Church’s members have of their time there, it seems like those times have come to an end.

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