Defrocked: Good News from a Bad Pastor for a Better Church

After public exile, Lillian Daniel found unexpected grace, deepened faith, and a new vision for a church that embraces honesty, healing, and restoration.

Pastor Lillian Daniel crossed a line that threatened to cost her everything. But the resulting scandal, which led to a yearlong exile from ministry and changed the whole trajectory of her life, also offered a pathway toward faith, hope, and a new vision for what the church can be for all, including those who stumble.

At a time when the church is facing both decline and its own public scandals, this is a story of what Daniel discovered about sin, repentance, and restoration only once she had fallen, as she puts it, "into the ditch," like the man left and ignored on the side of the road in the parable of the Good Samaritan. She realized that her understanding of what she was supposed to be as a pastor and as a Christian needed to shift dramatically, and she came away with new perspectives on what the church needs to become if it is to make it through its own time in the ditch. With its personal narrative of failure and redemption and hard-earned perspective on the church's internal processes, Daniel's story will be particularly valuable for church leaders navigating investigation procedures or seeking to build systems marked by transparency, healing, and restoration.

With soul-searching honesty, Daniel describes the isolating experience of being investigated by the church, as well as the good news she found along the way. She explains how the vital confidentiality protections put in place to protect victims can also overwhelm the whole church system, including those in charge of the process. And it is within that process that she found out who would show up and who wouldn't, witnessing surprising grace in the unexpected company of wise, caring people who helped her make her way back after her transgression. Through those connections and deep reflection, she reconnected with the God who, it turns out, had never left--whom she'd spent more time talking about than talking to. Ultimately, through this experience, she saw that the church will survive only if it shows up for everyone--saints, sinners, and everyone in between. This is the vision she has for the church today.

Emphasizing compassion, repentance, and the spiritual work it takes to relate to those who stumble, Daniel reminds us that the ditch is the place to which the gospel speaks most deeply. It turns out to be a place not simply of disgrace or injury but also of humor, hard work, unexpected guides, and vital insight, where the God we have always been dependent on comes to find us. And it's in that ditch, a place of real and lasting hope, where we can come together to begin building a better church.