Brian Houston, the founder and now former pastor of Hillsong Church, was found to have had inappropriate actions towards some women.

All across Christiandom is the question: is it because Hillsong was too big? Is there something we can do?

To me: There is no answer. There is just people.

People are flawed. Some will get caught and some won’t. Some will hurt themselves alone while others will hurt themselves and others. No one will be prefect.

Accountability will help it, but it won’t stop it. Numbers will aggravate the issue but it doesn’t initiate the issue.

Trying to figure out how this can be fixed is an exercise of futility as we are all people.

We as leaders have to yield to the truth of the imperfections of ourselves and everyone around us. We must not make it shameable to take a misstep or a failure. We must actively accept that it is part of being a human based church and the very pivot we anchor ourselves to, the atoning work of the Cross, is a banner for imperfections and frailty.

Hopefully by doing so, we acknowledge our reason for Christian fidelity—we are weak and flawed—and it allows for quick and decisive actions of grace towards the perpetrators and kindness and healing for the victims. “Grace” by removing them from points of authority and allowing them the opportunity to reconnect with their first love—Jesus. And “kindness and healing” by giving the victims the love and care they need to heal—having them separated from their offenders.

This whole debacle is a result of leaving the foundation of the very thing that makes us Christians—our need for the Savior. Once we start to see people beyond flawed and weakened vessels, we then try to protect them from the very thing that required them to be surrendered to Jesus in the first place.

There should be no shame in error. The true shame is acting as though we do not err or are tended to it.

Let’s normalize frailty and failure and weakness in our churches. We’ve all buried the lead: the church are for imperfect people, yet we’re all acting like we’re not and making it a shame when people are.

This whole Brian Houston situation spotlights for me the ongoing idolization of perfection in our churches. We protect people from their own weakness, enabling them to victimize the vulnerable. We make it a shame to mess up or be imperfect, so we cover it rather than expose it acknowledging that it’s exactly why we’re in the Church.

We have enabled a culture of victimization due to our idolization of perfection. From the largest to the smallest, our churches protect the “integrity” of our leaders not because we want to heal people, it’s because we want to appear perfect. And this idolization of perfection, to me, is a farce and a slap to the face of grace. Because we think our leaders cannot be imperfect, we have covers for the faulty and shame for their victims.

Of course these things are going to happen among us. None of us started perfect and we’ll never be even while we’re all striving. We shouldn’t be surprised. Our ideal standard is an elitist one: we should be better because we’re Christians. I say bologna. We are not better and that’s why we’re Christians. That’s the truth of it.

Should we continue in sin that grace would abound? Of course not! But grace is where sin abounds and sin abounds in people.

It’s not about easing up on sin, it’s about understanding our sinful tendencies. We’ve made it an embarrassment to be human.

The more we normalize that we are people who needed and needs Jesus, the less we’ll be shocked about leadership failures because the less we’d be expecting our leaders to be some unrepraochable angels. And for our leaders themselves to know to be wary and watchful since no one will assume their perfection.

True leaders should know and ascribe to the truth: we out of all the people in the church are the ones most capable of abusing and misusing the graces given to us by God and the Church. We will never be perfect. Accepting that and normalizing that will probably keep us all vigilant from pitfalls of our imperfections (instead of what we’re doing now: shaming the very people that did more than they would have ever done because of the grace of God—that made them more than they could have been or imagined.)