How We Investigate

Why This Matters

I wasn’t always a Christian. Although, now that I write that sentence, I’m not sure anyone was always a Christian. Nobody comes out of the womb confessing Christ. John the Baptist may have the strongest argument available, considering he was still in the womb when he leaped at the arrival of the unborn Christ. So perhaps that is not the most useful way to introduce this.

There was, however, a period of my life when I considered myself a pagan. My wife insists I was a fake pagan. That is her assessment, not mine, and since she isn’t writing this article, I am going to continue calling it paganism. Whatever label we eventually agree to put on that period of my life, I spent a meaningful amount of time outside Christianity looking in, and one of the greatest obstacles between me and Christianity was probably not what many Christians would expect.

It wasn’t the difficult teachings of the Bible. It wasn’t even the supernatural side of Christianity. The existence of miracles, angels, demons, resurrection, or a God who acts within His creation was not the great intellectual wall standing between me and belief. Those were claims that could be considered. They could be investigated, argued about, accepted, or rejected. The obstacle I encountered much more frequently was considerably closer to home.

It was Christians.

More specifically, it was people who claimed to represent Christianity while presenting a picture of God that I found very difficult to take seriously.

There is a small scene in the movie Ted, about a stuffed bear that inexplicably comes to life, that illustrates the problem better than a theological explanation probably could. At one point the movie cuts to a caricature of a televangelist screaming, “Look what Jesus did! Look what Jesus did!” To be fair, if a stuffed bear actually came to life, I would now be among the first people suggesting that perhaps we should take a serious look at what God just did. The joke works, however, because nobody watching the movie needs the character explained to them. We immediately recognize him. The television preacher attaching Jesus to something outrageous has become such a familiar cultural character that a few seconds on screen are enough to communicate the entire joke.

Christians should probably spend more time asking ourselves why that caricature is so easily recognized.

Jesus told His disciples that they were the light of the world, a city set on a hill that could not be hidden. He told them to let their light shine before others so that people would see their good works and give glory to their Father in heaven (Matthew 5:14–16). The Christian life was supposed to point beyond the Christian toward Christ. Yet for many people standing outside the Church, the most visible representatives of Christianity have not always looked very much like a light on a hill.

Sometimes Christianity looks like the man on television at three in the morning selling a healing handkerchief. It looks like the preacher explaining that the quickest path out of your financial problems begins by giving him some of the money you have left. It looks like someone promising that God has personally revealed your future to him, provided you remain close enough to his ministry to keep hearing about it. It looks like extravagant wealth accumulated in the name of a man who told a rich young ruler to sell what he possessed and give to the poor. It looks like scandals followed by excuses, failed predictions quietly forgotten, supposed miracles that become considerably less miraculous when someone asks for evidence, and religious leaders whose followers sometimes appear more interested in defending them than discovering whether what they said was true.

Then Christians are surprised when people outside Christianity think this is Christianity.

From inside the Church, we may immediately recognize distinctions that someone outside it has no reason to understand. We know that one preacher does not represent every Christian. We know that a doctrine taught by one denomination is not necessarily shared by another. We understand that attaching a Bible verse to an idea does not establish that the Bible actually teaches it. We may recognize prosperity theology, abusive leadership, manipulative fundraising, or supposed revelation as distortions of Christianity rather than expressions of it.

The person watching from outside may not know any of that.

If a man stands on a stage holding a Bible and tells me that God has spoken to him, he has presented me with a claim about God. If he tells me that God will improve my finances if I first give money to his ministry, he has taught me something about how God supposedly operates. If he promises healing in God’s name, the outcome of that promise affects what I think about the God who supposedly made it. If Christians behave cruelly while repeatedly insisting that their behavior is an expression of Christian faithfulness, I am being shown something that claims to represent Christianity. Someone unfamiliar with Scripture may have no reason to know that the Bible in the man’s hand might actually condemn what the man holding it is doing.

I know this because I once stood on that side of the conversation.

The people making these claims became part of the evidence through which I evaluated the God they claimed to represent. When Christianity looked manipulative, God could appear manipulative. When Christianity looked dishonest, its claims about truth became harder to take seriously. When Christian leaders appeared primarily interested in money, celebrity, political power, influence, or controlling other people, it was easy to assume those things revealed something about the religion that produced them. I did not always know enough about Scripture to recognize that the Bible might be considerably more critical of what I was seeing than I was.

That is one of the reasons this matters so deeply to me now.

When someone falsely attributes something to God, the damage can extend far beyond the person immediately affected. There may be someone who was deceived, manipulated, financially exploited, spiritually abused, or simply taught something that was not true. Those people matter, and what happened to them deserves to be examined honestly. But somewhere beyond them may be another person watching the entire thing unfold and quietly concluding that he has just learned something about God.

Perhaps he has only learned something about us.

Christianity does not require us to defend everything that has ever been done beneath the name of Christ. Scripture itself contains false prophets, corrupt religious leaders, greedy teachers, hypocrites, sincere believers who are mistaken, and faithful servants who sometimes fail spectacularly. The Bible never teaches us that claiming God’s authority establishes that someone possesses it. In fact, Scripture repeatedly warns God’s people about precisely the opposite possibility.

Sometimes, then, defending the character of God requires refusing to defend the person claiming to represent Him.

If something false has been attributed to God, faithfulness requires us to separate Him from the falsehood. If Scripture has been made to teach something it does not teach, reverence for Scripture requires us to examine the interpretation rather than protect the interpreter. If someone claims spiritual authority God has not given him, loyalty to God cannot require unquestioning loyalty to that person. And if Christians behave in ways contrary to the Christ they profess, acknowledging that contradiction is not an attack upon Christianity. It may be an act of faithfulness to it.

That is why these investigations exist.

They are not intended to become a catalog of embarrassing Christians or a place where we gather to enjoy watching people fall. Neither are they an attempt to protect Christianity by explaining away every uncomfortable fact. If Christians have behaved wickedly, truth requires us to acknowledge it. If someone has been falsely accused, truth requires us to defend him. If we investigate something expecting to find deception and discover that we were wrong, then being wrong should be cause for relief rather than disappointment. Our allegiance cannot ultimately belong to the preacher, the critic, the ministry, the movement, the denomination, the investigator, or even our own previous conclusions.

Our allegiance must be to the truth.

If someone standing outside Christianity encounters something disturbing beneath a Christian label, I do not want to tell him to stop asking questions and simply have more faith. I want to ask the questions with him. Did this actually happen? Did God really say what someone claimed He said? Does Scripture actually teach what we have been told it teaches? Does Christianity require the behavior being performed in its name? Does the evidence support the extraordinary claim? Does the person claiming to represent Christ accurately represent what Christ taught?

Those questions are not dangerous to Christianity. If Christianity is true, Christians should want them asked. Truth has nothing to gain from protecting falsehood simply because the falsehood has learned to speak Christian language.

If someone ultimately examines Christ and rejects Him, I cannot force him to do otherwise. Christ never gave me that ability or that assignment. But there is something I desperately do not want to happen. I do not want someone to reject Christ because Christians placed something between that person and Him that never belonged there. I do not want someone to reject greed, manipulation, hypocrisy, deception, abuse, political ideology, spectacle, or human corruption and mistakenly believe that he has rejected Jesus.

If we have shown someone a counterfeit picture of God, the answer is not to demand that he learn to love the counterfeit.

It is to clear it away.

And point him toward Christ.

A Faith That Can Be Examined

If Christianity required us to accept every claim made in the name of God without examination, these investigations would have very little place within Christian life. Questioning a preacher who claims that God spoke to him would become an act of questioning God. Asking for evidence of a reported miracle could be treated as unbelief. Examining the interpretation of a respected teacher might be viewed as rebellion against spiritual authority. There are environments in which Christians are taught, explicitly or implicitly, to think this way. Questions become dangerous, doubt becomes disloyalty, and the person asking whether something is true can find himself treated as the problem. Yet when we open Scripture, we find something remarkably different. The Bible does not teach God’s people to abandon discernment when someone invokes His name. It repeatedly commands them to exercise it.

This principle appears long before the New Testament Church. Israel lived in a world in which prophets claimed to speak on behalf of God, and the Law anticipated the possibility that some of those claims would be false. Deuteronomy 18:20–22 warns about the person who presumes to speak a word in God’s name that God has not commanded him to speak. The claim of divine revelation was not self-authenticating simply because the speaker introduced it with God’s authority. What the prophet said could be tested. If he claimed that God had spoken concerning something that would happen and the thing did not occur, Israel was explicitly told that the Lord had not spoken that word. The failure belonged to the prophet, not to God.

Deuteronomy 13 adds an important complication. There, the issue is not a sign that fails but a sign or wonder that occurs. Even then, Israel is not instructed to surrender discernment because something extraordinary happened. If the person performing the sign attempts to lead God’s people away from the God who had already revealed Himself, they are not to follow him. That principle is extraordinarily important. Scripture does not allow us to reason that an impressive event must authenticate everything said by the person associated with it. Even the extraordinary remains subordinate to the truth God has already revealed. A sign does not become permission to abandon Scripture.

The prophets themselves continue this concern. Jeremiah describes people claiming, “I have dreamed, I have dreamed,” while speaking deceit from their own hearts (Jeremiah 23:25–32). Ezekiel condemns prophets who have seen false visions and announced lying divinations while saying, “Declares the LORD,” even though the Lord had not sent them (Ezekiel 13:6–7). These passages reveal why falsely attributing something to God is so serious. A false prophet is not merely making an incorrect prediction or offering a mistaken opinion. He is placing God’s authority behind words God did not speak. The people hearing him are then forced to make a distinction between the human claim and the divine voice the human being claims to represent.

Jesus does not remove that responsibility from His followers. He reinforces it. In the Sermon on the Mount, He warns, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves” (Matthew 7:15). The warning itself assumes that false prophets may not initially look false. They come dressed like sheep. They appear among the people of God and possess enough outward credibility that Jesus considers it necessary to teach His disciples how to recognize them. He does not tell His followers that evaluating such people demonstrates insufficient faith. He tells them, “You will recognize them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16).

That warning becomes even more striking when Jesus speaks about the signs that can accompany deception. In Matthew 24:24, He warns that false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders in an effort to lead people astray. Whatever conclusions we eventually reach about the precise fulfillment and historical context of that passage, the principle is impossible to miss: the presence of something perceived as extraordinary does not relieve God’s people of the responsibility to discern. Jesus does not teach His disciples to follow whoever produces the most impressive experience. Truth remains the standard by which the claim must be judged.

The apostles carry that same expectation into the life of the Church. John writes, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). The instruction could hardly be more direct. John does not praise indiscriminate spiritual openness. Neither does he instruct Christians to reject every spiritual claim. He tells them to test. Something may claim spiritual origin and still require examination. The Christian response is neither automatic acceptance nor automatic rejection but discernment.

Paul gives the Thessalonians essentially the same posture. He tells them, “Do not despise prophecies,” and then immediately adds, “but test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:20–21). Those commands belong together. Christians are not instructed to become cynical people who dismiss every claim before hearing it. They are also not instructed to become credulous people who accept every claim because it arrived in religious language. They are to test what they receive and hold tightly to what survives that examination. Testing is not the enemy of faith in this passage. It is part of faithful obedience.

Perhaps the clearest picture of this posture appears in Acts 17. Paul and Silas arrive in Berea and begin proclaiming the gospel. Luke tells us that the Bereans received the word “with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11). What makes this passage remarkable is the person whose teaching was being examined. This was not an unknown traveling preacher making questionable claims at the edge of Christianity. This was Paul. If anyone might have been able to demand unquestioning acceptance on the basis of spiritual authority, an apostle of Jesus Christ would seem to qualify.

The Bereans checked anyway.

Luke does not rebuke them for it. He calls them more noble.

They listened eagerly to what Paul taught, but their eagerness did not require them to turn off their discernment. They opened the Scriptures and examined his message to determine whether what they were hearing was true. Their willingness to investigate was not evidence that they lacked faith. Scripture presents it as evidence of something admirable.

That example should profoundly shape how Christians think about authority. If Paul’s teaching could be examined against Scripture, no modern pastor, teacher, author, ministry, movement, denomination, investigator, or person claiming revelation should expect immunity from examination. Respect for Christian leadership does not require surrendering the responsibility God has given His people to discern truth. A teacher may deserve our attention. Years of faithful ministry may give someone credibility. Expertise may give a scholar’s conclusions considerable weight. None of those things transform a human being into the standard by which truth is measured.

Scripture remains the standard.

This also means that asking questions about a claim made in God’s name is not necessarily the same thing as questioning God. That distinction is essential. If someone tells me that God has spoken to him and I ask whether God actually did, I have not denied God’s ability to speak. If someone reports a miraculous healing and I investigate whether the person was actually healed, I have not denied God’s ability to heal. If someone tells me that a particular teaching is biblical and I examine the passage in context, I have not rejected the authority of Scripture. In each case, I am attempting to distinguish what God can do or has said from what a human being claims He did or said.

God is not the claim.

That may sound obvious, but confusing the two can place enormous spiritual pressure upon people. If questioning the messenger is treated as questioning God, the messenger acquires an authority that belongs to God alone. His claims become protected from examination because challenging them carries a spiritual threat. The person listening may begin to fear that asking for evidence demonstrates unbelief, that disagreeing with an interpretation means resisting the Holy Spirit, or that noticing something inconsistent is itself evidence of a rebellious heart. Once that happens, the very discernment Scripture commands can be portrayed as disobedience.

The Bible gives us no reason to accept that arrangement.

The God revealed in Scripture repeatedly tells His people to distinguish truth from falsehood. He warns them that people will speak falsely in His name. He gives standards by which claims can be examined. He praises people who compare teaching with Scripture. He tells Christians to test what they hear and retain what is good. None of this makes sense if genuine faith requires us to stop asking whether something is true the moment someone attaches God’s name to it.

Christian faith therefore has nothing to fear from honest examination. We may sometimes investigate something and discover that our skepticism was misplaced. We may examine an extraordinary claim and find good reasons to believe it. We may open Scripture intending to challenge a teaching and discover that our own understanding needs correction. If truth is genuinely what we seek, those are not failures. The purpose of testing is not to prove that everyone else is wrong. It is to discover what is true and then submit ourselves to it.

That is the posture we want these investigations to reflect. We do not approach every claim assuming deception, and we do not approach every religious claim assuming truth. We listen. We examine. We compare. We ask questions. We search the Scriptures. We follow the evidence wherever it leads, including when it leads somewhere we did not expect or somewhere we would rather not go.

The Bereans received the word eagerly, and they examined it carefully.

We intend to do the same.

Neither Gullibility nor Cynicism

If Scripture commands Christians to test what they hear, then the next question is what kind of posture we should bring to that examination. It is possible to approach every claim with such eagerness to believe that almost nothing could persuade us that it is false. It is equally possible to approach every claim with such determination to disbelieve that almost nothing could persuade us that it is true. Neither posture is particularly interested in investigation. Both have already reached their conclusion before the evidence arrives.

Gullibility is an obvious danger when dealing with religious claims. Christians believe in a supernatural God. We believe that God created the universe, that He has acted within human history, that Jesus Christ was raised bodily from the dead, and that God is perfectly capable of doing things beyond ordinary human ability. None of that means, however, that every person claiming something supernatural has therefore experienced something supernatural. Believing that God can heal does not require believing every healing testimony. Believing that God has spoken does not require believing everyone who says that God spoke to him. Believing that miracles are possible does not require lowering the standard by which a particular miracle claim is examined.

There can be a subtle temptation to treat credulity as though it were a form of spiritual maturity. The person who immediately accepts the extraordinary story may appear to possess greater faith than the person asking questions about it. Requests for documentation can sound cold when placed beside an emotional testimony. Asking what doctors actually diagnosed before celebrating a miraculous recovery can feel almost hostile. Wondering whether information presented as supernatural knowledge might have been available through ordinary means can be interpreted as an unwillingness to believe that God still acts. In those moments, the pressure to demonstrate faith can make simply accepting the story feel like the more Christian response.

But faith in God and confidence in a human claim are not the same thing.

I can believe without hesitation that God is capable of healing cancer while remaining uncertain whether a particular person was healed of cancer. I can believe that God knows every detail of my life without concluding that a stranger who knows something about me must have received that information from God. I can believe that prayer matters while investigating whether a dramatic testimony being used to promote a ministry accurately describes what happened. The question under investigation is not whether God possesses the power being attributed to Him. The question is whether the particular event being presented as evidence of that power actually occurred as described.

That distinction protects faith rather than threatening it. If we become afraid to examine claims because discovering an ordinary explanation would somehow diminish God, we have attached our confidence in God to something God never asked us to defend. When the claim eventually collapses, the person who built his faith upon it may feel as though something about God collapsed with it. A faith that depends upon every miracle story being true, every testimony being accurate, and every spiritual leader being trustworthy is an unnecessarily fragile faith. Christianity does not rise or fall with the credibility of the latest extraordinary story.

Yet there is an opposite danger, and it deserves just as much attention.

Cynicism can disguise itself as discernment.

Once someone has seen enough deception, manipulation, failed predictions, exaggerated testimonies, or religious scandals, it becomes very easy to develop a different kind of certainty. The healing must be fake. The testimony must be exaggerated. The preacher must be lying. The ministry must be motivated by money. The person reporting an experience must be either dishonest or foolish. Evidence is no longer being gathered to determine what happened; it is being gathered to confirm what the investigator already knows happened.

That is not discernment either.

A person who refuses to believe anything can be just as resistant to evidence as the person who believes everything. The direction of the bias has changed, but the problem has not. Both people have placed their conclusion beyond meaningful examination. One says, “I know this came from God, so nothing you show me will change my mind.” The other says, “I know this is fraudulent, so nothing you show me will change mine.” Neither position leaves much room for truth to surprise us.

Christians should be particularly cautious about this because our theology does not permit us to dismiss the supernatural simply because some supernatural claims are false. The existence of fraudulent healing claims does not establish that God never heals. False prophets do not prove that God never spoke through true prophets. Manipulated testimonies do not mean every testimony is manipulated. Discovering that one person fabricated an experience tells us something about that person and that claim. It does not give us permission to construct a universal conclusion that extends beyond the evidence.

The same principle applies to the people we investigate. Someone can be wrong without being dishonest. A person can sincerely believe that something happened when the evidence suggests a different explanation. Memory is imperfect. People misunderstand experiences. They repeat stories they trust without independently verifying them. They interpret events through theological assumptions they may never have seriously examined. Sometimes people exaggerate without realizing how much a story has changed over years of retelling. None of those possibilities should be confused automatically with deliberate deception.

Intent is especially important here. Evidence may establish that a statement was false long before it establishes that the person making it knew it was false. Those are different claims and should be treated as such. If someone reports something inaccurate, we can demonstrate the inaccuracy without pretending that we can see inside his mind. If evidence eventually establishes deliberate deception, we should be willing to say so plainly. Until then, intellectual honesty requires us to distinguish between what someone said, whether it was true, what evidence was available to him, and whether we can reasonably determine what he knew when he said it.

This becomes more difficult when we investigate people or movements we already dislike.

Human beings are remarkably skilled at applying different standards to friends and opponents. When someone we trust makes a mistake, we instinctively search for context. Perhaps he misspoke. Perhaps the quotation was edited. Perhaps he meant something slightly different. Perhaps there is information we have not yet seen. When someone we distrust makes the same mistake, our curiosity about context can disappear remarkably quickly. Suddenly the least charitable explanation becomes the obvious one.

The reverse happens just as easily. Evidence against someone we admire receives endless qualifications, while evidence supporting him is accepted immediately. We may demand extraordinary proof before believing an accusation against our own side while treating a screenshot, anonymous story, or short video clip as sufficient evidence against someone on the other side. At that point, investigation has become little more than a tool for defending conclusions we brought with us.

These investigations cannot work that way.

If we begin an investigation believing that a claim is probably false, that belief may help us identify questions worth asking, but it cannot be allowed to determine the answer. If we begin believing that someone is probably trustworthy, that impression may properly influence how we initially understand his words, but it cannot place him beyond examination. Our assumptions are allowed to generate hypotheses. They are not allowed to become evidence for those hypotheses.

This means we should be able to identify what would change our minds.

If we claim that a particular event was manufactured, we should ask what evidence would demonstrate that it was genuine. If we suspect that someone obtained information through ordinary means, we should consider what evidence would make that explanation unlikely. If we believe an accusation against someone, we should actively look for his response and for evidence that might contradict the accusation. If we believe someone’s defense, we should be willing to ask whether the available evidence actually supports it. An investigation in which no imaginable discovery could alter the investigator’s conclusion is not much of an investigation.

There is also a humility required in saying, “I don’t know.”

Not every investigation will produce certainty. Sometimes records will be missing. Witnesses will disagree. Important events may have occurred decades ago. Evidence may support one explanation more strongly than another without establishing it conclusively. There will be occasions when the most accurate conclusion is that something probably happened, possibly happened, cannot currently be verified, or simply remains unknown. Those conclusions may be less satisfying than a dramatic verdict, but our desire for a satisfying ending does not give us permission to claim more than the evidence allows.

The goal is not to occupy the safest possible position between belief and disbelief. There will be times when the evidence becomes strong enough that remaining perpetually undecided would itself become unreasonable. Discernment does not mean refusing to reach conclusions. When something is well established, we should say that it is well established. When a claim is demonstrably false, we should say that it is false. When evidence strongly supports someone’s account, we should be willing to say that too. Intellectual humility does not require pretending that every possibility remains equally likely forever.

What it requires is allowing the conclusion to come after the examination.

That is the posture we want to maintain throughout these investigations. We will not treat belief as a virtue simply because the claim is religious. We will not treat disbelief as intelligence simply because the claim is extraordinary. We will not assume that every mistake is a lie, nor will we protect deliberate deception by endlessly inventing innocent explanations after the evidence no longer supports them. We will try to remain open enough to be persuaded and skeptical enough to ask the questions that need asking.

Sometimes that will mean discovering that something we doubted was true. Sometimes it will mean discovering that something we wanted to believe was not. Sometimes it will mean defending someone we expected to criticize. Sometimes it will require criticizing someone we wanted to defend. And sometimes, after examining everything available to us, we may simply have to admit that we do not know.

None of those outcomes should frighten us if truth is actually the objective.

The gullible person is afraid to discover that the claim is false. The cynic is afraid to discover that it might be true.

We want to be willing to discover either.

Evidence Matters

Once we have committed ourselves to neither automatic belief nor automatic disbelief, we are left with the harder work of determining what actually happened. That requires evidence. It also requires discipline, because evidence is not simply whatever supports the conclusion we already favor. A compelling story is evidence of what someone says happened. A photograph is evidence of what the photograph actually shows. A video records what occurred within the portion of events captured by the camera. A document establishes what the document contains and, if its authenticity and context can be established, perhaps considerably more. Each can be valuable, but none should be asked to prove more than it actually proves. One of the most important responsibilities in any investigation is learning to distinguish between the evidence itself and the conclusions we draw from it.

That distinction matters because human beings naturally turn incomplete information into complete stories. We see part of an event and infer what happened before and after it. We hear one person’s testimony and construct motives for everyone involved. We discover a suspicious financial transaction and begin imagining why it occurred. We watch a short video and assume that the missing minutes would confirm the interpretation we already formed from the portion we saw. Sometimes those inferences are reasonable. Sometimes they are even correct. But an inference does not become a fact simply because it provides a convincing explanation of the facts we possess.

For that reason, these investigations will attempt to distinguish clearly between what is established, what is supported, what is alleged, what is inferred, and what remains unknown. Those categories are not interchangeable. If a person says something happened, we can establish that the person made the claim even when we cannot establish that the event occurred as described. If several independent witnesses describe the same event, confidence may increase considerably, but their testimony still needs to be evaluated. If contemporary documents independently confirm important details, our confidence may increase further. At some point the accumulated evidence may make a conclusion overwhelmingly reasonable. The language we use should reflect where we actually are along that spectrum rather than where we would like to be.

Primary sources will therefore receive particular attention. Whenever reasonably possible, we want to know what a person actually said rather than what someone else says he said. We want the sermon, interview, broadcast, book, letter, advertisement, court filing, financial record, government document, medical record when lawfully and ethically available, or other original material relevant to the claim. Secondary sources remain valuable, especially when competent journalists, scholars, historians, investigators, or other researchers have already done substantial work. They can provide context, identify evidence we might otherwise never discover, and connect events separated by years. But whenever an important conclusion depends upon something that can be checked against an original source, we should make the effort to check it.

This is particularly important when quotations are involved. A sentence can be quoted accurately and still be represented dishonestly. Words spoken sarcastically can appear sincere when stripped of tone. A qualification given immediately afterward can completely change the meaning of a statement. A speaker may correct himself thirty seconds later. A quotation from one period of someone’s life may be presented as though it represents what he currently believes despite a documented change in position. We should therefore seek enough surrounding context to understand what the person was actually communicating rather than searching merely for the most damaging collection of words we can place between quotation marks.

The same caution applies to photographs and video. Modern audiences understandably find visual evidence persuasive because it appears to allow us to witness an event directly. Often it does. But a camera has edges. It records what happens within the frame while remaining silent about what happens outside it. Editing can remove context without altering a single visible frame. A clip beginning ten seconds too late can fundamentally change how an interaction appears. A photograph may establish that two people were in the same place without establishing why they were there or what relationship existed between them. Visual evidence can be extraordinarily powerful, but like every other form of evidence, it must be interpreted according to what it actually establishes.

Contemporary evidence will generally carry more weight than memories reconstructed decades later. Human memory is not a recording device. People forget details, combine events, absorb information learned later into their recollection of what they originally knew, and sometimes become more certain about memories as those memories become less precise. This does not make later testimony worthless. A person’s recollection may contain information available nowhere else, and important events are sometimes remembered with remarkable clarity. But when a statement recorded at the time of an event conflicts with a recollection offered thirty years later, the difference deserves attention. The passage of time should be part of how we evaluate the evidence rather than something we ignore when the later version makes a better story.

Independent corroboration is equally important. Ten websites repeating the same allegation are not ten independent sources if all ten ultimately obtained the allegation from one article. A documentary, podcast, news report, blog post, and social-media thread may create the appearance of overwhelming confirmation while all tracing back to the same unidentified witness. Part of our work will therefore involve tracing important claims backward whenever possible. Where did this story originate? Who actually witnessed the event? Is there documentation independent of the original allegation? Are later sources reporting new evidence or merely repeating what earlier sources said? The number of times a claim appears on the internet tells us very little if every appearance descends from the same unverified source.

We should apply the same scrutiny to testimony that supports conclusions we prefer. A person who agrees with us does not become reliable merely because he agrees with us. Former members of organizations may possess invaluable firsthand information, but they may also have grievances that need to be considered. Current members may understand events better than outsiders while simultaneously having strong incentives to defend the institution. Critics may uncover evidence insiders ignored. Supporters may identify errors critics overlooked. Financial incentives, personal relationships, theological commitments, reputational concerns, and longstanding conflicts can all affect how people interpret events. None of those factors automatically disqualifies a source. They simply belong to the context in which the source is evaluated.

Extraordinary claims often create another evidentiary difficulty because the testimony itself can be deeply sincere. Someone may describe an experience with tears, visible emotion, and complete confidence. We should not casually dismiss that person as dishonest. Emotional sincerity is evidence that someone may genuinely believe what he is saying, but sincerity alone cannot establish that his interpretation of the event is correct. A person can honestly misunderstand what happened. He can attribute an ordinary event to an extraordinary cause. He can repeat inaccurate information given to him by someone he trusts. He can remember details incorrectly without consciously lying. Respecting someone’s testimony therefore means taking it seriously enough to investigate, not automatically treating either belief or disbelief as the respectful response.

This becomes especially important when testimony concerns healing, prophecy, supernatural knowledge, or other claims attributed directly to God. Suppose someone testifies that he had an incurable disease and was miraculously healed. There are several separate questions hidden inside that statement. Was the person diagnosed with the disease? What exactly was the diagnosis? What was the expected course of the illness? What treatment did the person receive? What happened afterward? Did a physician determine that the disease was gone? Was the original diagnosis mistaken? Did the condition naturally remit? Is there documentation supporting the story? Only after working through those questions are we in a position to begin considering what explanation best accounts for the evidence. Asking them does not dishonor the person giving the testimony. It takes the claim seriously enough to determine whether what is being celebrated actually occurred.

Documentation itself must also be authenticated and understood. A screenshot can be altered. A document can be genuine while being misinterpreted. A financial number can appear enormous until we discover that it represents gross revenue rather than personal income. A legal filing may contain allegations rather than findings of fact. An indictment is not a conviction. A lawsuit is not proof that the plaintiff’s allegations are true. A settlement may resolve a dispute without establishing every accusation made within it. A government investigation can contain evidence worth examining while still being subject to criticism. Labels matter because careless language can transform evidence of an accusation into an assertion of guilt before the underlying claim has been established.

Sources themselves will therefore be visible wherever practical. We do not want readers to be dependent upon our description of the evidence when they can reasonably inspect that evidence themselves. When an original document is publicly available, we should link to it. When a complete interview can be watched, readers should be able to find it. When a quotation comes from a book, article, broadcast, court record, or other identifiable source, we should tell readers where it came from. An investigation becomes stronger, not weaker, when someone skeptical of our conclusion can examine the material we used and decide whether we represented it fairly.

There will, of course, be limits. Some sources may disappear. Records may remain private. Copyright may prevent reproducing material in full. Personal information may need to be withheld. Medical information deserves particular care. Sources may reasonably require anonymity in circumstances where identification could expose them to retaliation or other serious consequences. Evidence obtained unethically does not become acceptable merely because it would make an investigation more interesting. Our desire to know what happened does not eliminate our responsibility toward the people whose lives are involved.

We must also resist the temptation to confuse the absence of evidence with evidence of whatever conclusion we prefer. A missing record does not prove that an event never happened. At the same time, repeated inability to produce evidence that reasonably should exist can itself become relevant. If a claim is presented as extensively documented but the documentation cannot be produced, that matters. If someone claims thousands of objectively verifiable events while offering only a small collection of unverifiable anecdotes, that discrepancy may deserve examination. We should neither demand impossible evidence nor lower reasonable standards simply because obtaining evidence would make a cherished claim uncomfortable.

Perhaps most importantly, evidence must be allowed to work against us.

It is easy to collect material supporting a theory. Once we believe we understand what happened, every new discovery can begin looking like another piece of the same puzzle. The more invested we become in an investigation, the more difficult it can become to recognize evidence that does not fit. That is precisely when contrary evidence becomes most valuable. We should actively ask what would weaken our conclusion, what alternative explanation might account for the same facts, what evidence someone who disagrees with us would emphasize, and whether we have treated evidence favorable to our position more generously than evidence against it.

If evidence overturns our original theory, the investigation has not failed.

The theory failed.

There is an enormous difference.

Our reputation cannot be allowed to become more important than the truth we claim to pursue. If we publish something and later discover that an important fact was wrong, the appropriate response is correction. If new evidence materially changes a conclusion, the conclusion should change with it. If someone demonstrates that we represented him unfairly, we should fix it. Quietly editing an inconvenient sentence while leaving readers unaware that an accusation changed would violate the very standards we expect from the people we investigate. Corrections should be clear enough that honesty costs us something when necessary.

None of this guarantees that we will always reach the correct conclusion. We are human beings examining evidence produced, preserved, remembered, reported, and interpreted by other human beings. We will have biases we do not recognize. We may give too much weight to one source and too little to another. Important evidence may remain unavailable. We may simply make mistakes. The promise we can reasonably make is not that these investigations will be infallible. It is that we will attempt to make our reasoning visible, distinguish evidence from inference, acknowledge uncertainty where it exists, correct errors when they become known, and never knowingly ask the evidence to say more than it does.

Because the purpose of evidence is not to help us win.

It is to help us know what is true.

Everyone Gets a Fair Hearing

An investigation can follow primary sources, collect extensive documentation, and still become fundamentally unfair if we only seriously listen to one side. Evidence does not interpret itself. People disagree about what events mean, why decisions were made, whether accusations accurately describe what occurred, and whether important context has been omitted. If our purpose is to discover what is true rather than merely assemble a persuasive case, then the person, ministry, movement, or idea being investigated deserves a genuine opportunity to be understood on its own terms.

That sounds obvious until the person being investigated is someone we already believe is wrong.

Once we become convinced that someone is dishonest, dangerous, theologically mistaken, or otherwise worthy of criticism, there is a powerful temptation to stop listening carefully. Everything he says begins to sound like an excuse. Every clarification becomes an attempt to escape accountability. Every defense becomes further evidence that he refuses to admit what we already know. We may technically include his response while presenting it in such a dismissive way that readers understand they are not expected to consider it seriously. At that point, we have not really given someone a fair hearing. We have simply allowed the defendant a few sentences before continuing the prosecution.

That is not what we want these investigations to become.

When someone offers an explanation for evidence that appears damaging, we should attempt to understand the explanation before evaluating it. If a ministry disputes an accusation, we should determine what specifically it disputes. If a teacher says that a quotation has been removed from context, we should examine the context. If someone argues that an investigator misunderstood how an event occurred, we should investigate that possibility. If there is a public response, correction, interview, legal filing, sermon, article, or other material in which the person addresses the allegations, that response belongs in the record.

Including a response does not mean accepting it.

A person accused of wrongdoing has an obvious interest in defending himself. Organizations have reputations to protect. Ministries have donors, employees, audiences, and institutions that may depend upon maintaining public trust. Lawyers may carefully construct responses to minimize legal exposure. Public-relations statements may answer a narrower question than the one actually being asked. A person may deny something that the evidence overwhelmingly establishes. Giving someone a fair hearing therefore cannot mean surrendering judgment the moment a defense is offered. It means treating the defense as evidence that deserves the same careful examination we apply to the accusation.

The same standard must apply to critics.

It is easy to imagine an investigation as a conflict between an accused person who must defend himself and an investigator who simply reports facts. Real life is rarely that clean. Critics have perspectives too. They can misunderstand events, develop personal grievances, exaggerate what happened, repeat rumors, interpret ambiguous evidence in the least charitable way, or become so invested in exposing someone that admitting an error begins to threaten their own reputation. A person may have done excellent investigative work in one area and still be wrong in another. The fact that someone exposed genuine wrongdoing yesterday does not make everything he says tomorrow true.

That is especially important when earlier investigators have already shaped the public understanding of a person or event. Their work may be indispensable. They may have discovered evidence we could never independently recreate. They may have interviewed witnesses who are no longer alive, preserved broadcasts that would otherwise have disappeared, obtained documents that are difficult to locate, or identified patterns that only became visible through years of research. We should give credit where it is due. But admiration for good investigative work cannot turn the investigator into another authority who is exempt from investigation.

If we can check his work, we should.

The same principle applies when the disagreement is theological rather than factual. If we examine a doctrine, movement, or Christian practice, we should not define it using only its critics. People deserve to recognize their own beliefs in our description of them. If adherents consistently tell us that we have misunderstood what they believe, that should cause us to stop and listen before proceeding. We may ultimately conclude that their position is biblically mistaken, internally inconsistent, or practically harmful, but we should criticize what they actually believe rather than a weaker version constructed for easier demolition.

This is sometimes described as steelmanning an argument rather than strawmanning it. The terminology is modern, but the underlying principle is simply fairness. A strawman takes the weakest, most simplistic, or most absurd version of another person’s position and defeats that instead of engaging the real argument. A stronger approach attempts to understand the position well enough that someone who holds it could read our description and say, “Yes, that is what I believe.” Only then have we earned the right to explain why we think it is wrong.

That may require us to read people we strongly disagree with.

It may require listening to entire sermons rather than collections of controversial clips. It may require reading books written by advocates rather than relying exclusively upon books written against them. It may require learning how a movement understands its own vocabulary, because words can carry very different meanings across theological traditions. It may require acknowledging that a person has made a legitimate biblical point even when we believe his larger conclusion is mistaken. Fairness becomes meaningful precisely when it forces us to say something favorable about an argument we intend to criticize.

The same discipline should govern personal accusations. Human beings are complicated enough that two people can describe the same relationship very differently without either account being entirely fabricated. Churches split. Families fracture. Employees leave organizations angrily. Ministry partnerships collapse. Former friends become public critics. Sometimes the person making an accusation is telling the truth about serious wrongdoing. Sometimes resentment colors the account. Sometimes both parties behaved badly. Sometimes one person possesses information the other does not. We cannot determine which situation we are dealing with merely by deciding whose personality we find more sympathetic.

Power differences deserve particular attention without becoming automatic verdicts. A prominent leader may possess resources, institutional loyalty, legal representation, media access, and an audience that an accuser does not. Those differences can make legitimate allegations extraordinarily difficult to raise and can create powerful incentives for silence. We should take that seriously. At the same time, being less powerful does not make someone incapable of being mistaken or dishonest. Compassion for a person making an allegation and careful examination of the allegation are not competing responsibilities. We can listen seriously without deciding the outcome before the investigation begins.

Anonymous sources require similar care. There are legitimate reasons someone may fear being identified. A former employee may worry about retaliation. A victim may reasonably value privacy. A person may possess important information while having no desire to become a public figure simply because he provided it. We should never treat anonymity itself as evidence that someone is unreliable. But anonymity does limit what readers can independently evaluate, and that limitation should affect the confidence with which we present claims that depend upon it. Whenever possible, anonymous testimony should be corroborated by documents, independent witnesses, or other evidence before carrying the weight of a serious accusation.

Fairness also means allowing people to change.

A quotation can be completely authentic and completely irrelevant to someone’s present beliefs if the person publicly rejected that position years ago. Christians, of all people, should understand that human beings can repent, learn, mature, and change their minds. If someone taught something false twenty years ago and has spent the last fifteen years explicitly correcting it, presenting the old teaching as his current position would itself be misleading. Likewise, a later apology does not retroactively make the original conduct acceptable. The timeline matters. We should attempt to represent what someone believed or did at the time while also acknowledging what happened afterward.

Corrections deserve to be distinguished from evasions. There is a meaningful difference between someone saying, “I was wrong, and here is what I now believe,” and someone repeatedly changing explanations only after earlier versions become impossible to defend. Both involve changes in what is being said, but they may reflect very different things. We should not assume either motive without evidence. Instead, we can document the progression, compare the statements, and allow readers to see what changed and when.

Whenever reasonably possible, serious accusations should also be put to the person or organization being investigated. Not everyone will respond. Some may refuse. Some may send a generic statement. Some may answer only part of what was asked. Others may provide evidence that substantially changes the investigation. The purpose of seeking a response is not ceremonial fairness so that we can write, “We reached out for comment,” before publishing what we intended to publish anyway. The purpose is to give someone an opportunity to identify something we may have missed.

If their answer changes the story, then the story should change.

That may be inconvenient. We may have spent weeks developing an argument that collapses when a previously unavailable document appears. We may discover that the most dramatic allegation in an investigation rests upon a misunderstanding. A person we expected to criticize may provide a completely reasonable explanation. If that happens, our disappointment would reveal that somewhere along the way we stopped wanting truth and started wanting a conviction.

A fair investigation must be willing to lose its villain.

This does not mean that every accusation and defense deserve equal weight. Fairness is not the pretense that all explanations remain equally plausible regardless of the evidence. If one account is supported by recordings, documents, contemporaneous witnesses, and independent corroboration while another consists of an unsupported denial, we should not manufacture uncertainty simply to appear balanced. Giving someone a fair hearing means accurately considering what he says. It does not mean pretending that what he says is persuasive when it is not.

Nor does fairness require false equivalence. Sometimes one person is telling the truth and another is lying. Sometimes one argument is substantially stronger than another. Sometimes wrongdoing is overwhelming and the defenses offered for it are plainly contradicted by the evidence. When that happens, we should be willing to reach the conclusion the evidence supports. The responsibility to listen carefully exists before the verdict; it does not prohibit us from ever reaching one.

The standard we want is simpler than that. Before criticizing someone, we should be able to explain his position fairly. Before rejecting his defense, we should understand what the defense actually is. Before repeating an accusation, we should know where it came from and what evidence supports it. Before attributing motives, we should ask whether those motives can actually be established. Before deciding that someone’s silence proves guilt, we should remember that people have many reasons not to participate in public controversies. Before assuming a critic is lying because we dislike his accusation, we should examine what he has brought forward.

And before publishing any serious conclusion, we should ask a question that may be uncomfortable:

If the person we are investigating sat across the table from us and read what we had written, could we defend not merely our conclusion, but the fairness with which we reached it?

He may hate the conclusion. He may believe we are wrong. He may reject every criticism we make. Fairness does not guarantee agreement. But we should want to be able to look him in the eye and say that we listened, that we considered his explanation, that we looked for evidence that could prove us wrong, that we did not deliberately hide information favorable to him, and that we have not accused him of anything beyond what we can responsibly support.

Because the person on the other side of an investigation is not merely a subject.

He is a person.

And truth does not require us to treat him unfairly in order to find it.

Scripture Is the Standard

Evidence can help us determine what happened. It can establish what someone said, whether an event occurred as described, where information came from, whether a prediction preceded the event it supposedly predicted, whether a person possessed knowledge through ordinary means, or whether an extraordinary testimony survives careful examination. These are essential questions, and we should pursue them as honestly as we can. Yet an investigation involving Christianity eventually reaches questions that evidence alone cannot answer. A recording may establish that someone said something. Medical documentation may establish that a recovery occurred. A financial record may establish where money went. None of those things, by themselves, can tell us whether a teaching is biblical, whether a spiritual interpretation is correct, or whether something should be attributed to God.

For those questions, Christians require another standard.

That standard is Scripture.

This distinction is important because factual and theological questions are often blended together until answering one appears to answer the other. Someone reports an extraordinary event, and because the event appears genuine, the theological explanation attached to it is accepted along with it. Someone discovers an ordinary mechanism behind a supposedly supernatural event and concludes that this disproves the supernatural altogether. A teacher accurately explains one passage of Scripture, and listeners begin assuming that his authority extends to everything else he teaches. A ministry produces visible results, and those results become evidence that God approves of the methods being used. In each case, an observation has been allowed to carry considerably more theological weight than it can support.

We want to keep these questions separate long enough to answer each one properly.

Suppose, for example, that someone claims to have been miraculously healed. The first stage of an investigation can examine the factual claim. Was there an illness? Was it medically diagnosed? What was the prognosis? What treatment occurred? What changed? What documentation exists afterward? Those questions may eventually establish that a recovery occurred which physicians did not expect. That would be important evidence, and Christians should have no theological reason to suppress it. We believe in a God who can heal.

But even an extraordinary recovery does not automatically validate every interpretation subsequently attached to it.

Perhaps the person who prayed for the healing also teaches that Christians can purchase divine favor. Perhaps he claims that his particular ministry possesses exclusive access to God’s healing power. Perhaps he says the healing proves that every Christian who possesses enough faith will receive the same result. Perhaps he uses the event to authenticate unrelated claims about prophecy, doctrine, money, or his own spiritual authority. The recovery itself cannot establish any of those conclusions. They must be examined independently, and when those conclusions are presented as Christian teaching, Scripture becomes the standard by which they are judged.

The reverse is equally important. If an investigation discovers that a supposed miracle has an ordinary explanation, we should not pretend that we have thereby disproved God’s ability to perform miracles. If information presented as supernatural knowledge was available through ordinary research, we may have explained that particular instance without answering every question about divine revelation. If a prediction was vague enough to fit many possible outcomes, we may have good reason to reject that prediction as evidence of prophecy without proving that God has never revealed anything to anyone. Evidence should be allowed to establish what it establishes without being recruited into theological arguments it cannot carry.

This is where Scripture protects us from being governed by spectacle.

Human beings are naturally impressed by what appears extraordinary. A dramatic experience can feel more persuasive than a carefully interpreted passage of Scripture. A person who appears to know something he could not possibly know may command attention in a way an ordinary pastor faithfully teaching the Bible never will. A testimony that produces tears, excitement, or wonder can become enormously influential. None of those responses are necessarily wrong. Wonder is not a sin. Christians have very good reasons to believe that reality contains considerably more than what can be measured in a laboratory.

But an experience does not become the interpreter of Scripture.

Scripture interprets the experience.

This principle is already visible in the biblical material we considered earlier. Deuteronomy 13 presents the possibility of a sign or wonder occurring while the person associated with it attempts to lead Israel away from the God who had already revealed Himself. The Israelites are not told that the impressive event overrides what they know about God. The prior revelation of God provides the framework through which the sign must be understood. Whatever has happened, it does not authorize God’s people to abandon what God has already made known.

The New Testament maintains the same priority. Paul warns the Galatians that even if “we or an angel from heaven” should preach a gospel contrary to the one they had received, that messenger was to be rejected (Galatians 1:8). The hypothetical messenger could hardly be more impressive. An angel descending from heaven would settle most arguments rather quickly. Yet Paul does not tell the Galatians that the extraordinary nature of the messenger authenticates the message. The message remains accountable to the gospel already given.

That principle places an important boundary around spiritual authority.

No teacher becomes greater than the Word he teaches. No experience becomes more authoritative than the revelation by which it must be understood. No apparent miracle gives someone permission to contradict Scripture. No claim of private revelation can be used to overturn what God has publicly revealed. No ministry’s popularity, growth, wealth, influence, reported supernatural activity, or visible success can transform unbiblical teaching into biblical teaching.

The same applies to traditions we personally favor.

It is easy to insist upon biblical authority when examining a movement with which we already disagree. It is considerably harder when Scripture begins pressing against assumptions we inherited from our own church, theological tradition, political community, family, favorite teacher, or previous writing. Yet if Scripture is genuinely the standard, it cannot function merely as a tool for correcting everyone else. We must be willing to place our own conclusions beneath it.

That includes the conclusions reached in these investigations.

We are not approaching Scripture as neutral observers who possess no theological commitments. Nobody does. We have beliefs about God, salvation, spiritual gifts, prophecy, the Church, human nature, and how Scripture should be interpreted. Those convictions inevitably affect the questions we ask and the way we initially understand what we encounter. Pretending otherwise would create an illusion of objectivity that does not exist.

The proper response is not to abandon conviction. It is to make our reasoning visible.

When an investigation reaches a theological conclusion, we should show how we reached it from Scripture. Readers should be able to open the passages themselves, examine the surrounding context, consider alternative interpretations, and decide whether our argument actually follows from the text. If serious Christians interpret a passage differently, we should represent that disagreement fairly rather than pretending our interpretation is the only one anyone has ever held. If our conclusion depends upon a theological premise established elsewhere, we should acknowledge that premise rather than smuggling it into the investigation as an undisputed fact.

This is particularly important when using individual verses. A Bible verse can be quoted accurately and still be used irresponsibly. Scripture was not given to us as a collection of independent sentences waiting to be attached to arguments. Words occur within sentences, sentences within paragraphs, paragraphs within books, and books within the larger story and revelation of Scripture. Historical setting, literary genre, audience, covenant context, and authorial purpose matter. A verse that contains the same vocabulary as our subject does not automatically address our subject.

If we criticize someone for taking Scripture out of context while doing the same thing to prove that he took Scripture out of context, we have accomplished very little.

The standard therefore cannot merely be whether we can find a verse that appears to support our conclusion. We want to know what the biblical author intended to communicate. We want to read enough surrounding material to understand the argument. We want to compare Scripture with Scripture without flattening meaningful distinctions between passages. We want to recognize when something is explicitly taught, when it follows reasonably from several biblical principles, and when we have moved into a theological inference that should be identified as such.

This also requires us to distinguish between biblical commands and Christian wisdom. Scripture does not provide a specific verse governing every decision a ministry, investigator, church, or individual will ever make. Sometimes Christians must reason from broader biblical principles. That is legitimate and unavoidable, but we should be honest when we are doing it. Saying, “I believe this conduct is inconsistent with these biblical principles” is not necessarily the same thing as saying, “The Bible explicitly prohibits this particular action.” Precision matters especially when God’s authority is being invoked.

There is an irony we want to avoid throughout these investigations. We may spend considerable time examining people who have attached God’s authority to claims God never made. It would be remarkably easy for us to condemn that practice while quietly doing our own version of it. If we say, “Scripture says,” then we accept the responsibility to demonstrate that Scripture actually says it. If the conclusion is ours, we should own it as ours. If something is uncertain, we should acknowledge the uncertainty. If faithful Christians can reasonably disagree, we should not manufacture divine authority for our side of the disagreement merely because certainty sounds stronger.

God’s Word does not need our exaggeration any more than evidence does.

There will also be occasions when Scripture corrects the emotional conclusion toward which an investigation naturally pushes us. We may discover conduct that makes us angry and then encounter biblical commands concerning truthfulness, justice, mercy, forgiveness, enemies, repentance, or our own pride that refuse to let anger determine how we respond. Scripture is not merely the standard we apply to the person under investigation. It is the standard applied to the investigator while he is investigating.

That may be one of its most important functions in this project.

We can gather facts about another person’s failures while remaining blind to our own. We can expose greed while becoming addicted to the attention an exposé receives. We can condemn manipulation while presenting evidence manipulatively. We can criticize someone for loving a platform while quietly building our own. We can correctly identify false teaching and become proud of our ability to identify it. The Bible we open to examine someone else remains open in front of us as well.

Scripture therefore serves two purposes in these investigations that must never be separated. It helps us evaluate claims made about God, and it continually evaluates the people doing the evaluating.

Evidence may tell us what happened.

Scripture helps us ask what God has said about it.

And before we use that Scripture to examine anyone else, we must remain willing to let it examine us.

By Their Fruit

Evidence can tell us whether a claim is true. Scripture can tell us whether a teaching is faithful to what God has revealed. Yet Jesus gives His followers another category to consider when evaluating those who claim to represent God: fruit. “You will recognize them by their fruits,” He tells His disciples while warning them about false prophets (Matthew 7:16). That instruction is simple enough to quote, but applying it responsibly requires considerably more care. Christians can easily turn an examination of fruit into a moral scoreboard by which we decide who appears righteous enough to belong to Christ. That would misunderstand both Jesus’ warning and the gospel itself.

Christians fail.

I certainly do. I fail in my actions, my thoughts, my words, my patience, my priorities, and in ways I probably do not recognize until someone else points them out to me. Christianity has never taught me that following Christ means I have finally become capable of producing enough goodness to demonstrate that I deserve Him. It has taught me almost exactly the opposite. The more honestly I examine myself, the more apparent my dependence upon Christ becomes. Jesus tells His disciples, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Whatever genuinely good fruit appears in the Christian life is not evidence that we have finally learned to become righteous independently of God. It is evidence of the grace of God working within people who continue to need Him.

That distinction must remain firmly in place whenever we examine someone else’s fruit.

The standard cannot be whether the person under investigation has sinned. If discovering sin were enough to settle the matter, every investigation could end before it began. Scripture does not hide the failures of God’s people. Abraham lies. Moses acts in disobedience. David commits terrible sin. Peter denies Jesus three times. The disciples argue about which of them is greatest. Churches established by the apostles struggle with division, pride, sexual immorality, greed, doctrinal confusion, favoritism, and countless other failures. The New Testament does not present the Church as a collection of people who no longer sin. It presents a people continually dependent upon the mercy and transforming work of God.

This means a Christian’s failure cannot automatically be treated as evidence that his profession of faith is false. A pastor losing his temper does not immediately make him a false teacher. A Christian behaving hypocritically on one occasion does not prove that everything he believes is fraudulent. Someone making a bad decision does not authorize us to reinterpret his entire life through that decision. Christians can fail badly. Sometimes they can fail publicly. Sometimes the consequences of those failures can be devastating.

Fruit asks us to look deeper than the existence of failure.

We are looking at what a life, teaching, ministry, or movement consistently produces. We are looking at patterns. We are looking at what happens when wrongdoing is exposed. We are looking at whether truth is welcomed or resisted, whether correction produces repentance or retaliation, whether money remains a tool for ministry or gradually becomes one of its controlling purposes, whether authority is used to serve people or to protect the person possessing it, and whether those who come under someone’s influence are consistently being directed toward Christ or increasingly toward the leader himself.

Paul’s description of the fruit of the Spirit gives Christians an unavoidable point of comparison. He speaks of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22–23). These qualities do not describe a technique for identifying Christians by personality. A quiet person is not necessarily more spiritual than an energetic one. Gentleness is not weakness, joy is not perpetual cheerfulness, and patience does not require tolerating abuse or falsehood indefinitely. Paul is describing what the Spirit produces, and those qualities stand in deliberate contrast to the works of the flesh immediately preceding them: sexual immorality, idolatry, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, and the other manifestations of fallen human desire.

That contrast becomes important when a person claims unusual spiritual authority. The greater the claim, the less reasonable it becomes to treat character as irrelevant. Someone may speak eloquently about God, draw enormous crowds, build a successful organization, report extraordinary experiences, or demonstrate remarkable charisma. None of those things appear in Paul’s list of the fruit of the Spirit. A ministry can be impressive without being healthy. Growth can demonstrate that something attracts people without demonstrating that God approves of everything being done to attract them. Wealth can establish financial success without establishing divine favor. Influence can tell us that someone possesses influence.

None of those things are fruit merely because they are visible.

Jesus’ warning in Matthew 7 makes that particularly important. He does not merely warn about people whose ministries appear obviously ridiculous. He warns about false prophets who come in sheep’s clothing. The problem is precisely that outward appearance can be persuasive. A person can look like someone who belongs among the sheep. Religious vocabulary, biblical quotations, apparent sincerity, confidence, spiritual experiences, and visible ministry success can all contribute to that appearance. Jesus directs His disciples beyond the appearance toward what the tree actually produces.

Yet even here we must resist the temptation to pretend that we can see someone’s heart.

We cannot.

An investigation may establish that someone repeatedly lied. It may establish that he exploited people financially. It may document patterns of cruelty, manipulation, sexual misconduct, dishonesty, or abuse of authority. Those facts may provide serious reasons to evaluate the fruit of his life or ministry. But there remains a difference between examining observable fruit and claiming access to a person’s standing before God. We should be extraordinarily cautious about announcing who is or is not genuinely converted when Scripture has not given us the ability to inspect another person’s heart.

There are circumstances in which Scripture requires churches to make judgments about profession and conduct, including church discipline and qualifications for leadership. There are also biblical warnings about professions of faith contradicted by persistent unrepentant lives. We should not weaken those texts simply because they make us uncomfortable. But neither should an investigation become an exercise in confidently announcing the eternal destiny of everyone whose behavior we find reprehensible.

Our responsibility is considerably more concrete.

We can examine what someone teaches. We can examine what he does. We can examine the patterns visible over time. We can examine whether his claims are truthful. We can examine how he treats people. We can examine what happens to money entrusted to him when that information is legitimately available. We can examine how he uses authority. We can examine whether accusations are addressed honestly. We can examine whether correction is received or attacked. We can examine whether the ministry’s public message and private practices appear consistent. Those are observable things.

And perhaps one of the most revealing forms of fruit appears after failure.

Repentance matters.

The distinction between a Christian who sins and a person who refuses to acknowledge sin is significant throughout Scripture. David’s life contains grievous sin, but Psalm 51 gives us a window into what happens when that sin is brought before him. Peter denies Christ, but his story does not end in the courtyard. The Corinthian church requires severe correction, yet Paul’s letters continually call sinners toward repentance and restoration. Christianity does not promise that God’s people will never fall. It does insist that sin should not be made comfortable when it is brought into the light.

This means the response to correction can sometimes tell us more than the original failure.

Does the person admit what happened, or does the explanation change every time new evidence appears? Does he accept responsibility, or does every apology eventually become an explanation of what everyone else did to him? Does he attempt to repair damage where possible? Does he submit to appropriate accountability? Does he accept consequences, or does forgiveness become something he demands from others as a means of escaping those consequences? Does he demonstrate patience while trust is rebuilt, or insist that anyone who remains cautious is refusing to forgive?

Those questions matter because repentance is more than embarrassment at being exposed.

Paul describes “godly grief” as producing repentance, contrasting it with the grief of the world (2 Corinthians 7:10). John the Baptist similarly tells those coming to him to “bear fruits in keeping with repentance” (Luke 3:8). Scripture therefore gives us reason to expect repentance to produce something observable. Words matter, but the credibility of those words grows when subsequent conduct begins to correspond with them.

This is particularly important for Christian leadership because Scripture does not treat leadership as an entitlement.

Paul’s qualifications for overseers in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 focus heavily upon character. An overseer is to be above reproach, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and not a lover of money. He must have a good reputation with outsiders. Titus similarly emphasizes that an elder must be above reproach, not arrogant, quick-tempered, greedy for gain, or undisciplined. These qualifications make it impossible to argue that giftedness alone qualifies someone for ministry leadership.

A person can be extraordinarily gifted and biblically unqualified.

He may still be an excellent speaker. He may still understand Scripture remarkably well. He may possess tremendous organizational ability. Thousands of people may continue wanting to hear him. None of those things erase the character requirements Scripture places upon those entrusted with leadership. The Church does not belong to the most talented person in the room, and a platform does not become someone’s permanent possession because he once built it successfully.

This also means forgiveness and qualification must not be confused.

A Christian leader can commit wrongdoing, genuinely repent, receive complete forgiveness in Christ, be lovingly restored to fellowship with other believers, and still face consequences that make returning to a particular position of leadership inappropriate. Forgiveness answers one question. Qualification for office answers another. Treating permanent restoration to ministry as the necessary proof that Christians truly forgive someone places the individual’s platform above the biblical requirements for the office.

There may even be circumstances in which accepting disqualification becomes one of the clearest fruits of repentance.

A person might acknowledge that his own actions have destroyed the trust necessary for the ministry he once held. He might recognize that belonging to Christ is more important than returning to a pulpit. He might accept that he can worship, serve appropriately, love his family, participate in the life of a local church, work an ordinary job, and live faithfully without ever again being Pastor Somebody. There is nothing spiritually inferior about an ordinary Christian life lived quietly before God.

The gospel does not promise us platforms.

It promises us Christ.

That distinction matters enormously for these investigations because our purpose is not to identify imperfect people and remove them from Christianity. We are imperfect people. We need the same grace we hope they receive. Nor are we attempting to establish that every serious failure permanently disqualifies someone from every form of Christian service. Different sins, circumstances, offices, patterns, and evidence require careful biblical consideration.

We are asking what the tree produces.

We are asking whether the claims made in God’s name correspond with truth, whether the character surrounding those claims increasingly reflects the God being proclaimed, and what happens when failure is exposed. We are examining patterns rather than demanding perfection. We are looking for repentance rather than pretending Christians never sin. We are taking biblical qualifications seriously without confusing ministry qualification with salvation.

And while we examine the fruit growing on someone else’s tree, we must remember that Jesus’ words do not give investigators permission to stop examining our own.

The question is never simply whether they need Christ.

We do too.

The Person Before the Case

Investigations have a way of flattening people. By the time most of us encounter the subject of an investigation, we already know why the person’s name matters. There has been an accusation, a scandal, a controversial teaching, a failed prediction, a financial question, an extraordinary claim, or some other event significant enough that people have begun examining it. Search results lead with the controversy. Videos place the accusation in the title. Articles summarize a life through whatever eventually made that life newsworthy. Before long, a human being who has lived for decades becomes almost indistinguishable from the worst thing associated with his name.

We do not want to investigate people that way.

Before we examine the case, we want to meet the person.

That means our investigations will generally spend time understanding where someone came from before concentrating on where he eventually ended up. We want to know about childhood, family, religious upbringing, education, early influences, important relationships, theological development, entry into ministry or public life, and the experiences that shaped the person we eventually encounter. Where reliable information exists, we want to understand the world in which someone developed his beliefs rather than beginning his story on the day those beliefs became controversial.

Where people come from matters.

It matters for all of us. None of us arrived at our present beliefs, habits, fears, ambitions, strengths, weaknesses, and assumptions without a history. We were raised by particular people in particular places. We learned what was normal by watching the people around us. We encountered teachers who influenced us, communities that reinforced certain ideas, experiences that changed us, successes that encouraged particular behaviors, failures that frightened us away from others, and relationships that helped shape the people we became. Some of those influences were good. Some were destructive. Many were probably so ordinary that we rarely think about them at all.

Understanding those things about another person does not require believing that his past determines his future. It certainly does not mean searching someone’s childhood for an explanation that excuses everything he later does. Human beings remain morally responsible for their choices. A difficult childhood does not make deception acceptable. Poverty does not make greed inevitable. Religious abuse does not justify abusing others. Growing up surrounded by a particular belief does not permanently remove someone’s responsibility to examine whether that belief is true.

Explanation and excuse are not the same thing.

That distinction allows us to take someone’s background seriously without turning biography into amateur psychology. We should be cautious about looking backward from a known outcome and inventing a neat psychological explanation for how someone arrived there. Human lives rarely unfold as cleanly as documentaries make them appear. A childhood event may have profoundly affected someone, or it may be something an investigator finds interesting decades later while the person himself barely remembers it. An early experience with poverty does not give us permission to announce that a later pursuit of wealth was caused by childhood insecurity. A difficult relationship with a parent does not authorize us to diagnose every future conflict as unresolved parental trauma.

Sometimes we simply do not know why people become who they become.

We can tell the story without pretending that we do.

That means biography itself must be investigated with the same care we apply to controversial claims. Public figures often tell stories about their own lives, and those stories deserve to be heard. Autobiographies, interviews, sermons, ministry biographies, family accounts, and personal testimony can provide information unavailable anywhere else. They also represent the person’s own recollection and interpretation of his history. Wherever possible, significant biographical claims should be compared with independent records and contemporary sources. If something can be verified, we should verify it. If a story comes only from the person telling it, we should not automatically reject it, but neither should we quietly transform an autobiographical claim into an independently established fact.

This is especially important because personal histories can become part of public authority. Stories about poverty, persecution, conversion, military service, miraculous experiences, academic achievement, criminal backgrounds, supernatural encounters, dramatic rescues, or extraordinary sacrifice can affect how audiences understand the person telling them. Sometimes those stories are simply memories shared because they matter. Sometimes they become part of a ministry’s identity or a public figure’s credibility. The more weight a person places upon a biographical claim, the more reasonable it becomes to ask what can actually be established about it.

But verification is not the only reason to begin with biography.

We begin with the person because we do not want the accusation to become the person.

There is a dangerous comfort in dividing the world into ordinary human beings and villains. Villains are easy to investigate because they do not require much empathy. Once someone has been placed into that category, every detail of his life can be interpreted through the assumption that he was always moving toward the thing for which we now know him. His successes become manipulation. His kindness becomes image management. His friendships become strategic relationships. His religious convictions become calculated performances. Even genuinely good things must somehow contain the seeds of whatever eventually went wrong.

Real people are more complicated than that.

Someone who later commits serious wrongdoing may also have genuinely loved his family. A teacher who eventually teaches something false may have taught many things that were true. A person who becomes consumed by money may once have been remarkably generous. Someone capable of manipulating people may also have helped people without manipulating them. A religious leader who eventually abuses authority may have entered ministry sincerely believing that he wanted to serve God. Human beings are capable of contradictory things because human beings are not fictional characters written around a single defining trait.

Scripture itself refuses to flatten people this way.

David can be the shepherd who trusts God before Goliath, the king who desires to build a house for the Lord, the psalmist whose words have comforted God’s people for thousands of years, and the man who takes Bathsheba and arranges Uriah’s death. Peter can confess that Jesus is the Christ and moments later rebuke the Messiah he has just confessed. He can promise that he will never abandon Jesus, deny Him three times, weep bitterly, be restored, preach at Pentecost, and later behave hypocritically toward Gentile believers until Paul confronts him. Paul can persecute the Church with tremendous zeal and later spend his life suffering to proclaim the Christ whose people he once persecuted.

Scripture does not need to erase the good to tell us about the bad or erase the bad to tell us about the good.

Neither should we.

This does not mean every investigation must become an exhaustive biography. Some subjects will require considerably more background than others. An investigation into a movement may need to focus on ideas and institutions rather than one person’s childhood. A narrow factual question may not require decades of personal history. We should not collect private details simply because they are interesting, and someone’s family should not become investigative material merely because they happen to be related to a public figure. Biography should serve understanding, not curiosity for its own sake.

Privacy continues to matter even when someone becomes publicly controversial.

Spouses are not automatically responsible for each other’s conduct. Children do not inherit accusations against their parents. Elderly parents, siblings, former partners, employees, neighbors, and friends should not become characters in a public story unless their involvement is genuinely relevant and responsibly documented. There is a difference between understanding someone’s background and rummaging through everyone around him in search of material that might make the story more dramatic.

We also need to be careful about the particular kind of empathy biography can create. Learning about someone’s suffering can make later wrongdoing easier to understand, and understanding can sometimes make condemnation emotionally more difficult. That is not necessarily a problem. It may be one of the reasons biography is valuable. But compassion cannot be allowed to erase accountability any more than accountability should erase compassion.

We can understand why someone may have become vulnerable to a particular temptation and still say that he surrendered to it.

We can recognize the pressures surrounding a decision and still say that the decision was wrong.

We can grieve for what happened to someone and simultaneously grieve for what he later did to others.

Christianity gives us room to hold those truths together because Christianity’s understanding of humanity is already complicated enough to contain them. Human beings bear the image of God, and human beings are fallen. We are capable of extraordinary love and astonishing selfishness. We create beautiful things and destroy good things. We sacrifice for others and rationalize our own desires. We can sincerely love God and still fail Him terribly. We can convince ourselves that something serving our interests is actually serving His.

That is not a description reserved for the people we investigate.

It describes us.

And that recognition changes the emotional posture of an investigation. The question stops being merely, “What kind of person could do something like this?” and becomes something more uncomfortable: “How does a human being arrive here?” The first question can create distance between us and the subject. The second reminds us that the distance may not be nearly as great as we would prefer to imagine.

Perhaps someone began with sincere motives and compromised them gradually. Perhaps money changed the incentives around him. Perhaps an audience rewarded certainty more than honesty. Perhaps a community reinforced beliefs that should have been questioned. Perhaps early success made later correction increasingly difficult. Perhaps fear of losing a reputation became stronger than the willingness to admit error. Perhaps none of those explanations fit at all.

We should investigate before deciding.

But whatever explanation the evidence eventually supports, the person remains a person.

That matters particularly when wrongdoing is real. It is easy to speak about forgiveness when the sinner remains abstract. It is considerably harder when we have spent weeks documenting what a particular person did, reading the testimony of people who were harmed, following money, examining lies, listening to manipulation, and confronting the consequences. The more thoroughly we understand wrongdoing, the easier it can become to allow righteous concern about the wrongdoing to harden into contempt for the person.

Knowing the person before the case gives us something to remember when that temptation arrives.

The individual whose actions anger us was once a child who knew nothing about the controversy that would eventually surround his name. He has people who love him. He has experienced joy, disappointment, fear, hope, success, embarrassment, grief, and all the ordinary pieces from which human lives are built. Most importantly, regardless of what our investigation eventually establishes, he remains someone made in the image of God.

Nothing we discover can revoke that.

There may be conduct we condemn. There may be teaching we call false. There may be claims we demonstrate were fabricated. There may be circumstances in which justice requires serious consequences and Christian faithfulness requires unusually strong language. Human dignity does not require us to pretend evil is less evil than it is.

It requires us to remember that the person responsible for it never stops being human.

That is why, whenever the nature of the investigation allows it, we want to begin before the scandal, before the accusation, before the controversy, and before the name became shorthand for whatever eventually happened.

We want to begin with the person.

Because if we cannot remember someone’s humanity while telling the worst parts of his story, we will have difficulty remembering why we should hope for the best possible ending to it.

The Same Standard Applies to Us

There is a danger in spending too much time investigating other people. After enough hours examining someone else’s contradictions, failures, questionable decisions, false statements, and sins, it becomes remarkably easy to forget which side of the table we are sitting on. The investigator possesses the documents. The investigator asks the questions. The investigator identifies the inconsistencies and eventually writes the conclusions. The person being investigated becomes the one whose life requires explanation, while the person conducting the investigation quietly assumes the role of the one qualified to explain it.

Christianity gives us no basis for becoming comfortable in that position.

We are not righteous people investigating sinners.

We are sinners investigating claims.

That distinction must remain at the center of everything we do here. It is easy to examine someone else’s greed while ignoring our own relationship with money. It is easy to document another person’s pride while becoming increasingly proud of our ability to expose it. We can criticize someone for building a platform around himself while quietly becoming protective of the platform created by criticizing him. We can expose manipulation while learning that outrage increases traffic. We can condemn someone for refusing correction while becoming defensive when readers correct us. We can spend so much time identifying the ways other people have shifted their attention away from Christ that we fail to notice when our own attention has shifted toward being right.

None of those dangers are hypothetical simply because our intentions are good.

Good intentions have never made human beings immune to temptation. In fact, believing that our purpose is righteous can sometimes make temptation more difficult to recognize. If we become convinced that our work is defending God, protecting Christians, exposing deception, or helping people discern truth, then almost anything that advances that mission can begin to feel justified. Harshness becomes courage. Pride becomes confidence. Obsession becomes diligence. Unfairness becomes necessary because the person we are investigating is dangerous. The audience becomes evidence that God is blessing the work. Criticism becomes opposition to the mission rather than something we might need to hear.

The language can change while the human heart remains remarkably familiar.

This is one reason Paul’s warning to the Corinthians deserves to remain close to anyone doing work like this: “Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12). Paul does not tell Christians to study the failures of others so that they can become confident those failures could never happen to them. He gives the opposite warning. Seeing someone fall should make us cautious about our own footing.

That is not always our instinct.

When we encounter spectacular wrongdoing, we naturally create distance between ourselves and the person responsible for it. We tell ourselves that we would never do something like that. Perhaps we would not. There are actions we sincerely find reprehensible, temptations that hold little attraction for us, and decisions we cannot imagine ourselves making. But there is a difference between saying that we currently hate a particular sin and claiming that we understand everything we would do under circumstances we have never experienced.

Peter provides an uncomfortable biblical example. On the night Jesus was betrayed, Peter was certain about himself. When Jesus told the disciples that they would fall away, Peter answered, “Though they all fall away because of you, I will never fall away” (Matthew 26:33). His confidence was not merely that he hoped to remain faithful. He knew what kind of man he was. Other people might abandon Jesus, but Peter would not. Even when Jesus told him directly that he would deny Him three times, Peter insisted that he would die before denying Him.

A few hours later, a servant girl asked him a question.

Peter’s failure should make us cautious about confidently describing what we would never do.

It is easy for me to look at someone who has used religion to become wealthy and believe that if I possessed the same opportunity, I would behave differently. I hope I would. I want to believe I would. If I genuinely possessed something that could heal the sick, relieve suffering, or rescue people from financial desperation, I want to believe my first instinct would be to give it away rather than discover how much desperate people would pay me for access to it.

But would I?

That question is more useful than confidently announcing that I would never do what someone else has done.

What would happen if enormous amounts of money began arriving because people believed I possessed something spiritually valuable? What if thousands of people told me that my ministry had changed their lives? What if employees depended upon that ministry for their livelihoods? What if admitting one serious mistake threatened not only my reputation but an organization I had spent decades building? What if an audience rewarded certainty and punished hesitation? What if every compromise produced enough apparent good that I could explain to myself why the compromise was necessary?

I know what I hope I would do.

Christianity has taught me not to place too much confidence in the righteousness of the man answering the hypothetical question.

The point is not that everyone would inevitably make the same choices. Human beings encounter similar temptations and respond differently. Some people walk away from money because accepting it would violate their conscience. Some confess wrongdoing when concealment would be easier. Some surrender positions of authority rather than manipulate others to keep them. Some tell the truth knowing that the truth will cost them enormously. God’s grace genuinely produces courage, generosity, integrity, and self-control in His people.

The point is that I cannot attribute those things ultimately to my own moral superiority.

Jesus tells His disciples, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Paul asks the Corinthians, “What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). Those questions leave very little room for the investigator to stand above the person being investigated and congratulate himself for being made of better material. Whatever good exists in us is something for which we should thank God, not evidence that we have graduated beyond dependence upon Him.

This changes the way we should respond when an investigation reveals something ugly.

Our first response may rightly include anger. Scripture does not require indifference toward deception, exploitation, abuse, or the misuse of God’s name. There are things that should anger us because they harm people and dishonor God. But anger can quickly become contempt, and contempt tells a different story. Anger can say, “This should not have happened.” Contempt begins saying, “I am not like the kind of person who could do this.”

The gospel makes that second declaration difficult to sustain.

Christianity does not teach me that Christ rescued me because I belonged to the better category of human beings. It teaches that I needed rescue. Whatever differences exist between my sins and another person’s sins, neither of us possesses a righteousness capable of making Christ unnecessary. I do not stand before God because my failures happen to be less publicly embarrassing than someone else’s. I stand because of Christ.

That should create humility without creating moral confusion.

Recognizing our own capacity for sin does not mean pretending all sins are identical. Saying, “I could fall,” does not require us to excuse someone who has. Acknowledging our dependence upon grace does not prevent us from identifying deception, protecting people from abuse, demanding accountability, or concluding that someone is unqualified for Christian leadership. Paul could call himself the foremost of sinners and still confront false teaching. Jesus could command His followers to examine themselves while also warning them about false prophets. Humility and discernment are not enemies.

Humility changes the spirit in which discernment operates.

It also means that the standards established throughout these investigations apply to our work. If we expect someone else to represent quotations in context, we must do the same. If we criticize another person for making claims without evidence, we cannot make unsupported claims about him. If we expect someone to acknowledge inconvenient facts, we cannot hide evidence inconvenient to our conclusions. If we believe public teachers should correct false statements, then public errors in our investigations require public correction.

There cannot be one standard for the investigated and another for the investigator.

This includes theological examination. We will inevitably approach investigations with existing convictions. We have interpretations of Scripture we believe are correct. We have theological movements we find persuasive and others we believe are mistaken. We have experiences that influence what immediately seems plausible to us. We have people we naturally trust and people who make us suspicious almost immediately.

Those instincts cannot become exemptions from examination.

If someone we strongly disagree with makes a sound biblical argument, we should acknowledge it. If someone from a tradition we distrust is falsely accused, we should defend him against the false accusation. If evidence supports a claim we expected to disprove, we should say so. If Scripture exposes an error in something we have taught, our responsibility is not to protect our previous teaching but to correct it.

The moment our identity becomes dependent upon never being wrong, truth becomes dangerous to us.

That danger is particularly serious for anyone who develops an audience. Readers may begin trusting our judgment. Listeners may repeat our conclusions without checking the evidence themselves. People may assume that because earlier investigations were careful, later ones must be correct. We may eventually find ourselves receiving exactly the kind of uncritical trust that these investigations encourage people not to give to anyone.

We should reject that invitation.

Check our work.

Read the sources. Open the passages. Listen to the complete statement when it is available. Consider explanations we may have missed. Tell us when something does not add up. Do not substitute our judgment for your responsibility to discern. If these investigations teach readers merely to transfer unquestioning trust from one collection of religious personalities to another, we will have failed at one of the things we are trying to accomplish.

We should especially welcome correction that is true.

That will not always be comfortable. Nobody enjoys discovering that something he researched carefully contains an error. It becomes even harder when the error is public. Pride can immediately begin constructing defenses: the mistake was minor, the larger point remains true, the critic is hostile, everyone knew what we meant, correcting it will give ammunition to people who dislike the project. Some of those observations may even be accurate.

The error should still be corrected.

If we expect repentance from people whose failures are far more serious than a mistaken date, an inaccurate quotation, or an unsupported conclusion, then we should be capable of demonstrating the smaller form of humility required to say, “We were wrong.”

The same principle applies beyond factual mistakes. There may be times when our tone becomes unfair. We may write something while angry and later recognize contempt in language we initially considered justified. We may discover that we attributed motives the evidence did not establish. We may become so familiar with an investigation that we stop seeing the person and begin seeing only the case. When that happens, the solution is not to point toward all the things we got right.

It is to correct what we got wrong.

This is not merely an investigative standard. It is a Christian one.

Self-examination should therefore accompany every investigation we conduct. Not the performative humility of adding a paragraph saying that none of us are perfect before spending ten thousand words explaining someone else’s failures. Actual examination. What assumptions did we bring into this? What outcome did we want? Did we become emotionally invested in proving something? Did we enjoy finding damaging information? Are we being as charitable toward this person as we would be toward someone we admire? Are we withholding a conclusion because we fear criticism? Are we reaching one too quickly because we know it will attract attention? Has the work become more about our reputation than the truth?

And perhaps the hardest question of all: are we still looking toward Christ, or have we become fascinated with everyone who is not?

These investigations will examine human failure. Some of that failure may be spectacular. There will probably be moments when the distance between what someone publicly claimed and what the evidence establishes is difficult to comprehend. When those moments come, we should tell the truth about them.

But we should never allow another person’s failure to become evidence of our own righteousness.

The proper Christian response to seeing someone fall is not simply, “Look what he did.”

It is also, “Lord, keep me near You.”

Because the same Christ by whom we measure the claims of others is the Christ without whom we can do nothing.

When Our Focus Shifts

Most serious failures do not begin at the point where the rest of us finally notice them. By the time an investigation begins, we are often looking at the end of a much longer story. A ministry has become extraordinarily wealthy. A leader has accumulated unusual power. A teacher can no longer admit that he was wrong. A person who once seemed interested in serving others now appears primarily interested in protecting himself. From the outside, the contradiction can become so dramatic that we wonder how anyone could possibly have arrived there. The temptation is to imagine that the person must have always been what we now see.

Sometimes that may be true. Some people deliberately deceive others from the beginning. Scripture gives us no reason to pretend otherwise. There are people motivated by greed, power, attention, sexual access, influence, or simple dishonesty who discover that religion provides an effective means of obtaining what they want. An investigation should remain open to that possibility when the evidence supports it. But it would be a mistake to assume that every corrupt ending requires a corrupt beginning.

Sometimes people drift.

That possibility may be more frightening because it is considerably easier to recognize in ourselves.

A person can begin doing something for reasons he sincerely believes are good. A pastor wants to teach Scripture. A ministry wants to help people. An author wants to communicate ideas he believes matter. A missionary wants to reach people with the gospel. A teacher wants others to understand God more clearly. An investigator wants to expose deception. None of those ambitions are inherently corrupt. Many are genuinely good.

Then success arrives.

More people begin listening. The church grows. Donations increase. Books sell. Videos receive attention. Invitations arrive. Employees are hired. Buildings are purchased. Families begin depending upon the organization for income. An audience develops expectations about what the person will say and how confidently he will say it. What began as a ministry can gradually become an institution, and institutions create pressures that did not exist when the work began.

Money is one of the most obvious examples because Scripture speaks about it so frequently. Money itself is not evil, and possessing it does not establish corruption. Christians can build businesses, earn substantial incomes, own property, save for the future, provide generously for their families, and use wealth to accomplish tremendous good. Scripture’s warning concerns the love of money, which Paul describes as “a root of all kinds of evils” (1 Timothy 6:10). The danger is not found merely in possessing resources but in what happens when acquiring or preserving them begins controlling our decisions.

The transition may not announce itself.

A person who once asked, “How can I help these people?” may gradually begin asking, “How can I keep this ministry growing?” Those questions can overlap for a long time. Growth may genuinely allow more people to be helped. More revenue may fund more ministry. A larger audience may spread a message farther. There is nothing inherently suspicious about wanting good work to expand.

But eventually another question can quietly enter the room: “What happens to me if this stops?”

Now the stakes have changed.

Perhaps the ministry pays the mortgage. Perhaps dozens of employees depend upon it. Perhaps the leader’s identity has become inseparable from the title before his name. Perhaps his family has grown accustomed to a lifestyle the ministry provides. Perhaps admitting that an important teaching was wrong would threaten book sales, speaking invitations, donors, or an audience built around that teaching. Perhaps telling the truth about one embarrassing event could jeopardize an organization doing other genuinely good work.

At that point, compromise can begin presenting itself as stewardship.

The lie is no longer simply a lie. It protects the ministry. Concealing the mistake preserves people’s faith. Silencing a critic prevents division. Manipulating a story keeps donations coming so the organization can continue helping people. Refusing to admit error protects the congregation from confusion. Every compromise can acquire a righteous explanation when enough apparently good things depend upon it.

This is not only a danger associated with money.

Attention can become its own currency.

Human beings like being listened to. We like being told that our work matters. We like discovering that people value our opinions. There is nothing inherently sinful about appreciating encouragement, and Scripture itself contains examples of Christians encouraging one another and honoring faithful service. But an audience can slowly change the relationship between a person and the truth.

People tend to reward certainty.

“I know what happened” usually attracts more attention than “I am not sure.” A dramatic prophecy is more interesting than ordinary biblical teaching. A spectacular testimony spreads farther than a complicated story with several possible explanations. A confident political prediction generates more excitement than admitting that Scripture does not answer every policy question. An investigator who promises to expose a villain may attract more interest than one who spends three weeks researching something and concludes that the accusation cannot be established.

Eventually the audience can begin teaching the speaker what kind of person it wants him to become.

The danger becomes especially severe when identity becomes attached to the role. A person is no longer simply someone who teaches; he is the teacher. He is no longer someone who believes he has received a particular insight; he is the prophet. He is no longer someone examining evidence; he is the investigator who exposes frauds. He is no longer a Christian with political opinions; he becomes a champion of a movement. Once a public identity forms around a role, information that threatens the role can begin feeling like information that threatens the person himself.

Then admitting error becomes much more expensive.

If I say something foolish in a conversation with my wife and realize five minutes later that I was wrong, the consequences of admitting it are usually limited to the unbearable experience of allowing her to know she was right. If I build a career, ministry, audience, and reputation around the same claim, acknowledging the mistake may require dismantling something much larger than my pride.

The truth did not become less true.

It simply became more expensive.

Power can create the same pressure. Leadership necessarily involves authority. Churches need pastors and elders. Organizations need people capable of making decisions. Ministries require structure. Expertise sometimes deserves significant deference because not every person possesses the same knowledge or experience. Authority itself is not the problem.

The problem begins when authority stops functioning as stewardship and becomes possession.

Jesus presents leadership among His people in deliberate contrast with the rulers of the nations who “lord it over” others. “It shall not be so among you,” He tells His disciples, explaining that greatness among them should take the form of service (Matthew 20:25–28). That standard becomes increasingly difficult to remember when thousands or millions of people treat someone’s words as unusually important.

A leader may gradually surround himself with people who agree with him. Sometimes this happens deliberately. Sometimes it happens naturally because disagreement becomes exhausting when one person controls promotions, salaries, opportunities, access, or status. People learn which questions are welcome and which create problems. Those willing to challenge the leader disappear while those skilled at affirming him remain. Eventually the leader may sincerely believe that nearly everyone who knows the situation agrees with him, unaware that the environment around him has been filtering disagreement for years.

Success can make that isolation worse.

If the organization continues growing, the growth itself may become evidence that the leader’s decisions were correct. If people continue being helped, criticism can appear petty beside the visible results. If thousands testify that the ministry changed their lives, the testimony can become a shield against the smaller number saying that something is seriously wrong. Good fruit in one area begins being used to excuse bad fruit in another.

This is why apparent success cannot be our final measure of faithfulness.

Something can work and still be wrong.

Manipulation can raise money. Fear can motivate people. Exaggeration can attract attention. Charisma can build audiences. Political anger can produce loyalty. False certainty can make people feel safe. None of those outcomes tell us whether the means used to produce them honor Christ.

Tribalism creates another kind of shift. Human beings naturally organize themselves into groups, and groups can accomplish wonderful things. Churches, denominations, theological traditions, ministries, political communities, academic institutions, and friendships give us places to learn and belong. But belonging creates incentives of its own.

Once someone becomes ours, we become remarkably creative in defending him.

We interpret his words charitably. We search for context. We remind everyone of the good things he has done. We distrust his accusers. We explain that the situation is complicated. Sometimes all of those responses are appropriate. The problem becomes visible when we refuse to extend the same charity to someone outside our group.

The reverse is equally dangerous. Once someone becomes theirs, ordinary mistakes become evidence of corruption. Ambiguous statements receive the worst possible interpretation. Rumors feel plausible because they fit what we already believe about the other side. Their scandals represent the entire movement while ours are isolated failures that should not define everyone.

Before long, truth is no longer the highest loyalty.

The tribe is.

Fear can produce similar distortions. A leader may know that something is wrong and still fear what will happen if he acknowledges it. A Christian may defend a teacher because questioning that teacher feels like questioning an entire theological system upon which much of his faith has been built. A ministry employee may remain silent because his family depends upon the paycheck. A congregation may ignore warning signs because losing its pastor would feel devastating. A public figure may continue defending an indefensible position because changing his mind would mean facing an audience that trusted him.

Fear does not make the resulting choices right.

But understanding the fear helps us understand how ordinary human beings make them.

This is the lens we want to carry into these investigations. When we discover serious wrongdoing, we want to ask not only what happened, but where the shift occurred. Was there evidence that the person always intended to deceive? Did a sincere ministry gradually become something else? Did success alter incentives? Did money become necessary to sustain an expanding organization? Did a leader become insulated from correction? Did an audience reward increasingly extreme claims? Did a movement become more important than the truth? Did fear of losing everything make confession progressively harder?

Sometimes the evidence will allow us to answer those questions.

Sometimes it will not.

We must resist inventing a psychological narrative simply because it makes the story compelling. We cannot look into another person’s heart, and we should not pretend that we can identify the precise moment someone’s motives changed unless the evidence genuinely allows us to do so. But we can examine structures, incentives, decisions, statements, patterns, and changes over time. We can ask how the environment surrounding someone may have rewarded certain behavior and punished other behavior.

Most importantly, we can turn the question back toward ourselves.

What would make me shift?

How much money would need to depend upon my work before telling an inconvenient truth became difficult? How large would an audience need to become before losing it frightened me? How many people would need to tell me I was uniquely gifted before I began believing that ordinary rules should not apply to me? How much good would an organization need to accomplish before I started convincing myself that protecting the organization justified something I once knew was wrong?

I would like to believe the answer is that none of those things could move me.

Peter would probably advise caution.

The better protection is not confidence that we are immune to the failures we investigate. It is keeping our focus where it belonged before the money, audience, platform, title, tribe, institution, or reputation ever existed.

Christ.

Everything else can be lost.

A ministry can close. An audience can leave. A career can end. A reputation can collapse. Money can disappear. A title can be surrendered. An organization we spent our lives building can continue without us or cease to exist entirely. Some of those losses may be painful beyond anything we can presently imagine.

But none of them is Christ.

Perhaps one of the most dangerous moments in any Christian work arrives when preserving the thing we built for Christ becomes more important than remaining faithful to Christ.

That shift may happen dramatically.

More often, I suspect, it happens one reasonable compromise at a time.

Truth Without Contempt

There is a point in some investigations where uncertainty begins to disappear. The records line up. The contradictions cannot reasonably be explained away. A claim proves false. A pattern becomes visible. Perhaps someone knowingly deceived people, exploited their trust, abused authority, manipulated Scripture, fabricated experiences, concealed wrongdoing, or used the name of God to obtain something for himself. At that point, fairness does not require us to soften the conclusion until it becomes meaningless. If the evidence establishes something serious, we should be willing to say something serious.

But there is a difference between reaching a severe conclusion about what someone has done and learning to despise the person who did it.

That difference matters to us because investigations naturally create conditions in which contempt can flourish. We may spend weeks or months immersed in someone’s worst decisions. We read accusations, examine contradictions, listen to people who were hurt, watch old footage with the benefit of information the original audience did not possess, and repeatedly encounter behavior that may become increasingly difficult to excuse. The person under investigation can slowly stop appearing to us as a complicated human being and begin appearing as the sum total of everything wrong we have discovered.

Then something subtle can happen. We stop merely wanting the truth exposed and begin enjoying the exposure.

That is a line we do not want to cross.

There is nothing wrong with feeling satisfaction when deception is stopped, when vulnerable people are protected, when truth becomes known, or when someone who has abused authority can no longer continue doing so. Justice is good. Accountability is good. Bringing something hidden into the light can be good. Scripture does not require Christians to respond to evil with indifference or to pretend that exposing wrongdoing is somehow less loving than allowing it to continue.

Yet there is another kind of satisfaction that can attach itself to those good desires. It is the pleasure of watching someone we dislike suffer. It is the excitement of discovering another humiliating detail, not because that detail is necessary to establish the truth, but because it makes the person look worse. It is the temptation to choose the most embarrassing photograph, the cruelest description, or the most degrading joke because the audience will enjoy it. It is the moment when accountability becomes entertainment.

The internet is particularly good at teaching us to enjoy that moment.

Public controversies quickly become spectator sports. People choose sides. Clips are edited for maximum humiliation. Screenshots become jokes. Every new development provides another opportunity for someone to perform outrage before an audience that already agrees with him. A person’s collapse becomes content. The worse things become for him, the better things become for everyone producing material about him.

An investigation conducted in that environment must be unusually careful about what success begins to mean.

If our success depends upon another person’s continued wickedness, something has gone wrong.

That is worth considering seriously. Investigative work can create a strange incentive. If we spend months researching someone and build an audience interested in that person’s wrongdoing, genuine repentance could become inconvenient. The person we have been criticizing might admit what he did, attempt restitution, abandon the practices we condemned, step away from a position he no longer qualifies to hold, and begin quietly living a different life.

Would we be happy?

We should be.

If instead some part of us feels disappointed because the villain has ruined the story, then the investigation has begun changing us in precisely the kind of way these investigations are supposed to examine.

Jesus does not give His followers permission to hate people because we have correctly identified their sins. His command concerning enemies is considerably more difficult than that: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). Paul similarly instructs Christians, “Repay no one evil for evil,” and tells them not to be overcome by evil but to “overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:17, 21). These commands do not require us to call evil good. They tell us something about the kind of people Christians are supposed to remain while confronting it.

Love and accountability therefore cannot be treated as opposites.

If someone is deceiving people, love for those being deceived may require exposing the deception. If a pastor is abusing people under his authority, love may require removing his access to those people. If someone is making false claims in God’s name, love for God, the Church, the person making the claims, and those listening to him may all require saying plainly that the claims are false. There are situations in which refusing to confront someone would be easier for us but worse for everyone involved.

Biblical love is not the refusal to make judgments.

It is the refusal to stop seeking another person’s good.

That includes the person responsible for the wrongdoing.

This is where Christian investigation should look different from simple outrage. We may reach conclusions that make someone angry. We may publish evidence he desperately wishes remained unknown. We may conclude that a ministry should end, that restitution should be made, that victims deserve justice, or that a leader is no longer qualified to hold Christian office. None of those conclusions require us to hope that the person’s life is destroyed.

We should want something better for him.

We should want him to tell the truth.

We should want him to stop harming people.

We should want him to make restitution wherever restitution is possible.

We should want him to accept whatever consequences justice requires.

We should want him to discover that losing a platform, reputation, fortune, ministry, career, or public identity is not the same thing as losing everything.

Most of all, we should want him to know Christ.

That desire cannot be reserved for people whose sins are easy for us to forgive. The gospel becomes remarkably unimpressive if grace extends only to people we already find sympathetic. Christianity makes a far more radical claim. The person whose actions disgust us remains someone to whom repentance and reconciliation with God can be proclaimed.

That does not mean repentance should be manufactured for the sake of a satisfying ending. We should not announce that someone has changed merely because he apologized. We should not pressure victims to trust someone because he has adopted Christian language. We should not confuse tears with repentance, public embarrassment with godly sorrow, or a carefully written statement with transformed character. The same evidentiary standards that govern the investigation should continue when evaluating what happens afterward.

Nor does love require reconciliation in every human relationship.

Forgiveness, trust, reconciliation, and restoration are related but distinct realities. Someone can forgive a person without placing himself back into a dangerous situation. Trust can reasonably require time and evidence before it is restored. Some relationships may never return to what they were. Legal consequences do not disappear because someone repents. Financial restitution may still be owed. A person who has demonstrated himself unqualified for leadership does not regain a pulpit simply because Christians rejoice that he has turned from his sin.

Grace does not require pretending consequences are hatred.

Sometimes accepting consequences may become part of repentance itself.

This distinction is especially important because appeals to Christian forgiveness have sometimes been used to silence people who were harmed. A victim raises a legitimate concern and is told not to gossip. Evidence appears and people are instructed not to judge. Someone asks for accountability and is accused of bitterness. A leader apologizes and everyone harmed by him is expected to restore immediate trust or risk being accused of refusing to forgive.

That is not what we mean by truth without contempt.

We do not want to protect wrongdoers from accountability by weaponizing grace against the people they harmed. Neither do we want to protect ourselves from the demands of grace by turning wrongdoers into creatures beyond redemption. Both errors are easier than holding justice and mercy together.

Scripture refuses to let us choose the comfortable half.

There is another reason contempt is dangerous: once we despise someone, our ability to investigate him fairly begins to deteriorate. Evidence that humiliates him becomes easier to believe. Ambiguous facts receive the worst possible interpretation. Rumors feel plausible because they fit the person we have constructed in our minds. We stop asking whether an accusation is true and begin asking whether it sounds like something “a person like that” would do.

Eventually contempt becomes an evidentiary shortcut.

We must resist that.

A person can be guilty of ten terrible things and innocent of the eleventh. Establishing dishonesty in one area may properly affect how cautiously we evaluate someone’s unsupported claims elsewhere, but it does not turn every accusation into fact. If someone we have strongly criticized is falsely accused of something, the standards established earlier in this article do not suddenly disappear. We should be willing to say that the accusation is unsupported. If the evidence establishes that it is false, we should defend him against it.

Even people who have lied deserve not to have lies told about them.

That may be one of the clearest tests of whether truth or contempt is governing us.

Our language matters for the same reason. There is room for humor in these investigations. Some claims are genuinely strange. Human beings are funny, sometimes unintentionally, and pretending otherwise would make both our writing and our understanding of people less honest. We are not interested in producing sterile reports from which every trace of personality has been removed.

But humor should have limits.

We can laugh at an absurd claim without laughing at someone’s suffering. We can point out an obvious contradiction without turning someone’s appearance, family, illness, poverty, age, or unrelated personal weakness into the joke. We can use satire to expose an idea without allowing mockery to become the primary way we teach readers to view the person behind it.

The question is not simply whether a joke is funny.

I am capable of finding things funny that probably should not make it into print.

The better question is what the humor is doing. Is it helping expose the absurdity of an argument? Is it making a difficult subject easier to understand? Is it allowing us to acknowledge something genuinely ridiculous without pretending otherwise? Or is it teaching us and our readers to enjoy degrading another human being?

That distinction will sometimes require judgment, and we will not always get it right. When we do not, the same correction standards apply here that apply everywhere else.

There will also be moments when anger is appropriate. Jesus Himself could speak with extraordinary severity about religious hypocrisy. The prophets were not timid when confronting people who oppressed others while claiming God’s favor. Paul publicly confronted conduct that threatened the gospel and the Church. Christian gentleness does not mean speaking about every form of wickedness in the emotional register of a customer-service representative.

Some things should make us angry.

The question is what our anger produces.

Does it drive us toward truth, justice, protection of people who are being harmed, and ultimately toward Christ? Or does it become something we feed because anger feels good when an audience shares it? Does righteous anger remain grief over something that should not be happening, or does it slowly become pleasure that we have found another person worthy of our scorn?

That is a distinction we will have to examine continually.

Because there is a human being at the other end of every investigation.

He may have done terrible things. He may have lied while holding a Bible. He may have exploited people who trusted him. He may have caused damage that cannot be completely repaired. The evidence may require us to describe those things in uncomfortable detail and reach conclusions that permanently alter how readers understand him.

None of that removes the image of God.

And none of it changes what Christians should ultimately hope happens next.

We do not want the liar to become better at lying.

We want him to tell the truth.

We do not want the greedy person merely to lose his money.

We want him to discover a treasure greater than money.

We do not want the abusive leader merely to lose his authority.

We want him to learn what it means to serve.

We do not want the false teacher merely to lose his audience.

We want him to know and proclaim what is true.

We do not want the sinner destroyed simply because we correctly identified his sin.

We want repentance.

That hope does not weaken an investigation.

It reminds us why a Christian would bother conducting one in the first place.

Repentance, Consequences, and Forgiveness

If the purpose of an investigation is not destruction, then we need to be clear about what we hope happens when wrongdoing is actually established. It is easy to say that we want repentance. Christians use the word frequently, and in a general sense almost everyone agrees that repentance is preferable to continued sin. The difficulty begins when repentance becomes concrete. What does it look like when someone has spent years deceiving people, abusing authority, teaching falsely, exploiting trust, or building a public identity around something that an investigation demonstrates was untrue? What should happen if that person eventually admits it?

The Christian answer begins with extraordinarily good news.

There is forgiveness in Christ.

That statement is easy to make abstractly and considerably more difficult to believe when we attach it to someone whose actions genuinely anger us. Yet the gospel does not divide humanity into people whose sins are forgivable and people whose sins finally exceeded the reach of Christ. Paul reminds the Corinthians of the kinds of lives from which some of them had come and then says, “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified” (1 Corinthians 6:11). Paul himself never forgets that he once persecuted the Church of God. His past is not hidden to make his apostleship more respectable. It becomes part of his testimony to the mercy of Christ.

No investigation we conduct can uncover a person who no longer needs the gospel.

And no investigation can uncover a person for whom we should stop hoping that the gospel takes hold.

That does not mean repentance is simply saying the right words after the evidence becomes impossible to deny. Biblical repentance is more substantial than public embarrassment. A person can regret being exposed without regretting what he did. He can apologize because an apology is the fastest path toward restoring his reputation. He can admit only what has already been proven while continuing to conceal everything else. He can describe the pain caused by “the situation” without ever acknowledging the choices that created it. He can even use the language of grace, forgiveness, and restoration as a means of returning as quickly as possible to the position from which he fell.

Christians should be cautious about confusing any of those things with repentance.

When Zacchaeus encounters Christ, his response includes a willingness to make material restitution to those he has defrauded (Luke 19:8). When John the Baptist calls people to repentance, he tells them to “bear fruits in keeping with repentance” (Luke 3:8). Paul speaks similarly of deeds appropriate to repentance (Acts 26:20). None of these passages teaches that repentance earns forgiveness. Forgiveness is not purchased by performing enough corrective actions. They do show, however, that Scripture expects a genuine change of mind and direction to become visible in the life that follows.

For someone whose wrongdoing has been public, that may require public honesty.

If I privately sin against one person, repentance does not ordinarily require publishing the details for strangers to consume. There is no virtue in unnecessarily broadcasting private sin. But if someone has publicly taught something false, publicly claimed authority he did not possess, publicly raised money through deceptive claims, or publicly built trust upon a fabricated story, private regret cannot repair the public falsehood. The people who were misled deserve to hear the truth with something approaching the visibility with which they originally heard the error.

The scope of the correction should reasonably reflect the scope of the harm.

That may be costly.

A genuine confession may require someone to say things that damage his reputation. Restitution may require surrendering money he would rather keep. Correcting years of false teaching may require contacting people who once trusted him. Telling the complete truth may expose additional wrongdoing that could have remained hidden. Repentance may produce legal, financial, professional, relational, or ministerial consequences that an incomplete confession might have avoided.

The existence of those consequences does not make repentance less genuine.

Sometimes accepting them is part of what makes repentance credible.

This is where forgiveness and consequences must be carefully distinguished. Christians believe in the complete forgiveness available through Jesus Christ. We do not believe that forgiven people are therefore transported backward through time into a world where their actions never occurred. A thief can be forgiven and still owe restitution. A criminal can genuinely repent and still face a lawful sentence. A spouse can forgive betrayal while recognizing that trust has been severely damaged. A church can forgive a leader while concluding that he no longer meets the biblical qualifications for leadership.

Forgiveness does not require pretending the past did not happen.

Neither does it require victims to make themselves vulnerable to the same harm again.

This distinction is particularly important in Christian communities because the language of forgiveness can be misused. Someone who has harmed others may insist that continued accountability demonstrates unforgiveness. A victim who remains cautious may be told that Christians are commanded to forgive. A congregation may be pressured to restore a leader quickly because refusing to return him to the pulpit supposedly denies the power of grace.

But forgiveness and restoration to authority are different questions.

The gospel answers whether a repentant sinner can be reconciled to God.

The qualifications for Christian leadership answer whether a particular person should be entrusted with Christian leadership.

Those questions should never be confused.

Paul’s qualifications for overseers in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 are not suspended when someone has an impressive testimony of restoration. Christian leadership requires character. A man entrusted with oversight is to be above reproach, self-controlled, respectable, not violent, not quarrelsome, not greedy for money, and well regarded even by outsiders. A serious pattern of conduct may damage those qualifications in ways that cannot simply be repaired by waiting until public attention moves elsewhere.

That does not mean every sin permanently disqualifies every Christian leader from every form of ministry. Scripture does not give us a convenient table listing every possible offense beside a mandatory number of years away from leadership. Circumstances matter. Patterns matter. The nature of the office matters. The seriousness and duration of the conduct matter. The degree to which trust was violated matters. Churches must exercise biblical wisdom rather than creating universal rules Scripture itself does not provide.

But there are circumstances in which permanent disqualification may be the faithful conclusion.

And if that conclusion is correct, accepting it may become one of the strongest evidences of repentance.

Imagine someone who has spent much of his life in public ministry finally acknowledging that serious things he did were wrong. Perhaps he confesses that he lied. Perhaps he admits that he manipulated people, abused authority, fabricated claims, or enriched himself through deception. He makes restitution where possible. He corrects the public record. He apologizes without qualification to those he harmed. Then, rather than immediately beginning a restoration campaign designed to return him to the stage, he says something much harder:

I should not be a pastor anymore.

That statement would not mean Christ rejected him.

It might mean he finally understood that Christ is enough.

There is a strange assumption within celebrity Christianity that restoration to Christ must eventually culminate in restoration to a platform. Someone falls, disappears temporarily, undergoes a vaguely defined process of restoration, and eventually returns to preaching as though standing behind a pulpit were the natural completion of forgiveness. But the New Testament does not present public ministry as the prize received by sufficiently repentant Christians.

A person does not need a ministry to have Christ.

He does not need an audience.

He does not need a title.

He does not need people buying his books, attending his conferences, watching his broadcasts, or introducing him as Pastor, Apostle, Prophet, Bishop, Reverend, Doctor, or anything else.

He can become simply a brother.

There is something profoundly beautiful about that possibility.

A person who once measured his life by crowds could quietly worship among them. Someone who once depended upon being heard could learn to listen. Someone who built an identity around spiritual authority could sit under the ordinary care of local church leadership. Someone who accumulated wealth through wrongdoing could spend years making restitution without turning the restitution into another ministry brand. Someone whose name was once known by millions could become largely forgotten by the public and still be completely known by God.

That is not the sad ending.

For a Christian, that can be an extraordinarily good ending.

It may also be difficult for the people who were harmed to celebrate immediately. We should respect that. A victim is not required to become the public spokesperson for someone else’s redemption story. Someone who suffered because of another person’s actions may continue experiencing consequences long after the offender repents. Forgiveness does not require forgetting trauma, abandoning healthy boundaries, withdrawing legitimate testimony, or pretending that restitution completely repairs what cannot be replaced.

The repentant person should not demand those things.

If repentance is genuine, he should increasingly care more about the people he harmed than about how quickly those people affirm that he has changed.

He may need to live faithfully without receiving the public redemption arc he wants. People may remain skeptical. Some relationships may never be restored. Search results may continue displaying the worst things he ever did. Articles like ours may remain online because the historical record remains true even after the person changes.

That creates a responsibility for investigators as well.

If someone we have investigated genuinely changes, we should tell that part of the story too.

We should not freeze a human being permanently at the worst moment we documented because that version of him makes a more compelling article. If meaningful repentance occurs, if restitution is made, if false teaching is publicly corrected, if a person accepts accountability and demonstrates over time that something has changed, the investigation should acknowledge it. The original facts do not disappear, but the story has acquired new facts.

Those facts matter.

This is especially important because repentance usually requires time to evaluate. Anyone can release a statement. Anyone can become emotional in an interview. Anyone can disappear for several months while public attention cools. Genuine change becomes easier to recognize when it persists after the immediate pressure has passed. Does the person continue telling the truth when doing so no longer provides public-relations value? Does restitution continue quietly? Does he accept accountability when no audience is watching? Does he remain content outside the position he once fought to preserve?

Time can reveal fruit that an apology cannot.

We should therefore resist both premature celebration and permanent cynicism. We do not need to announce someone’s complete restoration forty-eight hours after a confession. Neither should we construct standards for repentance so impossible that no amount of evidence could ever persuade us that someone changed. If we say that repentance is what we hope for, we must leave open the possibility that someday we may actually witness it.

And when we do, Christians should rejoice.

Jesus describes heaven rejoicing over a sinner who repents (Luke 15:7). The father in the parable of the prodigal son does not mourn because the son who was lost has ruined a perfectly good cautionary tale by coming home. He celebrates because his son “was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found” (Luke 15:24).

The older brother has considerably more difficulty with that ending.

That warning belongs to investigators too.

We can become so invested in being correct about someone’s wrongdoing that his repentance begins to feel like an intrusion upon our verdict. We can know every detail of what he did, understand why consequences remain necessary, and still become the older brother standing outside while grace celebrates something we have not yet learned how to celebrate.

We do not want to become that person.

If someone has deceived people, we want the deception to stop. If he has taken what was not rightfully his, we want restitution. If he has abused authority, we want people protected and the authority removed. If he has taught falsely, we want the teaching corrected. If he is no longer qualified for ministry, we want him to accept that without treating the loss of a platform as the loss of Christ.

And then we want something far greater than winning an investigation.

We want a brother.

Consequences may remain.

Trust may take years to rebuild.

Some positions may never be restored.

The historical record should remain truthful.

But none of those things require us to abandon hope.

The best possible ending to an investigation is not that we were right about someone’s sin.

It is that one day the person himself agrees, turns from it, and discovers that Christ was worth more than everything repentance cost him.

The Repentance Fund

If we are going to say that repentance is the ending we hope for, there should be something in the way we conduct these investigations that demonstrates we actually mean it. It is easy to write that we hope someone changes. It is easy to conclude an article with a reminder about grace, pray that the person repents, and then move immediately to the next investigation. Meanwhile, nearly every incentive surrounding investigative media points in the opposite direction. Scandal generates attention. Controversy generates discussion. A person continuing to behave badly creates follow-up stories. Someone quietly admitting he was wrong, making restitution, accepting consequences, and disappearing from public ministry is considerably less useful to an industry built around keeping people angry.

We want to create at least one small incentive pointing the other way.

So we are establishing what we are calling the Repentance Fund.

For every investigation we complete, we will put twenty dollars into the fund. The amount is intentionally modest. We are not creating a financial prize capable of motivating someone to manufacture repentance, nor are we pretending that twenty dollars somehow compensates for the cost of admitting years of wrongdoing. If these investigations eventually become numerous, the fund may grow into something more substantial, but its primary purpose will remain symbolic. Every completed investigation adds something to a growing declaration that we would rather eventually write a story about repentance than spend the rest of our lives writing stories about failure.

The money will remain there while the investigations continue.

The total will be displayed publicly on the Investigations page so readers can see it grow. Every time another investigation concludes, another twenty dollars will be added. We will not withdraw the money because we found a better use for it. We will not quietly redefine its purpose when the total becomes large enough to be inconvenient. The fund exists for the person we hope someday gives us a reason to empty it.

That raises an obvious question.

What would someone have to do to receive it?

The answer cannot simply be, “Apologize.”

We have already discussed why repentance cannot be reduced to a statement. Public figures become remarkably skilled at producing apologies that acknowledge enough to relieve pressure while avoiding the substance of what happened. An apology can be sincere, carefully manufactured, or some complicated mixture of the two. We have no desire to sit in judgment over another person’s heart, but if the fund is supposed to represent the repentance we have described throughout this article, there should be observable reasons to believe something has genuinely changed.

The specific evidence will necessarily depend upon the investigation.

If the wrongdoing involved false teaching, repentance should include correcting the teaching. If it involved fabricated claims, repentance should include acknowledging that those claims were false. If money was obtained through deception, restitution should be attempted wherever reasonably possible. If people were harmed, the person should acknowledge the harm without demanding that those people immediately forgive, trust, or publicly defend him. If the conduct demonstrated that someone no longer meets the biblical qualifications for Christian leadership, repentance may require accepting that the appropriate future is outside that leadership rather than beginning a campaign to regain it.

We are not looking for perfection.

That would defeat the entire point.

The person who repents will still be a sinner. He may explain himself awkwardly. He may misunderstand parts of what happened. He may continue holding theological beliefs with which we strongly disagree. He may become frustrated with us and believe portions of our investigation were unfair. He does not need to agree with every sentence we have written about him, endorse this project, become our friend, or adopt our theological tradition.

He does not even need to like us.

That seems only fair. Depending upon what we wrote about him, I can imagine several understandable reasons he might not.

What matters is whether the central wrongdoing established by the investigation has been honestly confronted. We are looking for truth where there was falsehood, correction where there was error, restitution where something was wrongly taken, accountability where authority was abused, and sustained change rather than a temporary performance designed to survive a scandal.

Time will therefore matter.

We will not empty the fund because someone releases a statement on Tuesday. Genuine repentance does not need to prove itself through some arbitrary probationary period we invent, but the purpose of the fund requires enough time to distinguish sustained change from immediate damage control. If someone publicly confesses wrongdoing and then quietly demonstrates over time that his actions correspond with that confession, the evidence becomes considerably stronger. If he accepts consequences rather than fighting to escape them, stronger still. If he continues doing what is right after the cameras and critics have moved elsewhere, that matters.

We also need to be clear about what the fund is not.

It is not payment for repentance.

No amount of money can purchase what Christ gives freely, and twenty dollars multiplied by however many investigations we conduct would be a particularly strange attempt to try. We are not offering someone money to confess something he did not do. We are not creating a bounty for the first person willing to use Christian language convincingly enough to satisfy us. We certainly are not suggesting that receiving money from an investigator somehow verifies someone’s standing before God.

The fund says something about us more than it says something about them.

It forces us to put a small cost behind our stated desire for repentance.

Every investigation will require enormous amounts of time. Some may become articles, podcast episodes, videos, or eventually books. If those projects develop audiences, there will be financial and reputational incentives associated with them. That creates a danger we have already discussed: we could eventually benefit from the continued existence of the very behavior we claim to oppose.

The Repentance Fund is a small act of resistance against that incentive.

Each time we investigate someone, we add twenty dollars to the amount we hope to give away.

We want the balance to grow because careful investigations take time, not because we want the people we investigate to remain unchanged forever. The running total should become increasingly uncomfortable. If we reach twenty investigations, there will be four hundred dollars sitting there reminding us that we have not yet seen the ending we hoped to see. At fifty investigations, there would be a thousand. If the fund ever becomes large, we should not look at the total with pride.

We should wonder why we still have it.

And then, hopefully, someday someone ruins the whole thing.

Perhaps it will be someone we investigated years earlier. Perhaps his name will have largely disappeared from public conversation. Perhaps we will learn that he admitted what he did, corrected what he taught, made restitution where possible, stepped away from a ministry he was no longer qualified to lead, submitted himself to an ordinary local church, and spent enough time living differently that the change becomes difficult to dismiss as public relations.

That would create a much more enjoyable investigation.

We would go back.

We would examine the repentance with the same care we examined the wrongdoing. We would speak with people where appropriate. We would look at what was corrected, what restitution was attempted, what consequences were accepted, and what the intervening years appear to show. We would apply the same rules we established at the beginning: neither gullibility nor cynicism, evidence rather than assumption, a fair hearing, Scripture as our standard, and an awareness that we still cannot see another person’s heart.

And if the evidence convinced us that we were witnessing the kind of repentance described throughout this article, the fund would be his.

Every dollar.

Not because he earned forgiveness.

Not because his past disappeared.

Not because receiving the fund restored him to ministry.

Not because we suddenly became the authority responsible for certifying genuine Christians.

We would give it to him because we said from the beginning that this was the outcome we wanted, and when God gives us the privilege of seeing something good, Christians should be capable of celebrating it.

Then the balance returns to zero.

The next completed investigation puts twenty dollars back into the fund, and we begin hoping all over again.

There is something about that reset that matters to me. The goal is not to build the largest Repentance Fund possible. A massive balance would mean that investigation after investigation had passed without the particular kind of story we hoped eventually to find. The best possible future for the fund is therefore not perpetual growth.

It is repeatedly going broke.

I would be delighted to spend years putting twenty dollars at a time into an account only to have repentant people continually empty it.

There may even be a day when someone who once possessed enormous wealth, influence, or public recognition walks away from all of it because faithfulness to Christ requires him to do so. Perhaps he once measured success in millions of dollars and millions of followers. Perhaps genuine repentance costs him most of both. If that person accepts those consequences, tells the truth, and quietly disappears from the platform he once fought to maintain, there will be something almost comical about us arriving at the end of that story with whatever relatively tiny amount has accumulated in our fund.

Here you go.

Twenty dollars at a time.

It will not replace what repentance cost him.

It is not supposed to.

It will simply mean that somewhere, while we were documenting the reasons he needed to change, we were also saving something because we believed change was still possible.

And if that day comes, the article we write about it may be the most important investigation on this site.

Not because we caught someone doing something wrong.

Because we finally got to watch someone make it right.

Why We Hope We’re Wrong Sometimes

There is a strange danger built into investigative work: once you begin investigating something, you can start wanting there to be something to find. Time has been invested. Sources have been collected. Questions have been asked. An article may already be taking shape. Perhaps readers know an investigation is underway and are waiting to see what it reveals. Suspicion gradually becomes a theory, the theory becomes a story, and before long discovering that the original concern was unfounded can feel less like good news and more like a disappointing ending.

We want to reject that instinct before it has the opportunity to take root.

An investigation that discovers an accusation is false has not failed.

It succeeded.

If someone is accused of fabricating a miracle and the available evidence ultimately supports his account, that is a good result. If a preacher is accused of stealing money and financial records demonstrate that the accusation was based upon a misunderstanding, we should be relieved. If a quotation that appears horrifying in isolation becomes perfectly reasonable when we listen to the entire sermon, we should restore the context rather than search for another quotation capable of rescuing the story we expected to write. If someone is accused of misconduct and the evidence establishes that he did not do it, the most important conclusion we can publish is that the accusation was false.

Truth does not become disappointing simply because innocence is less dramatic than guilt.

This sounds obvious, but the incentives surrounding public investigations can make it surprisingly difficult. A headline announcing that someone has been exposed attracts attention. A thumbnail promising shocking evidence creates curiosity. A months-long investigation ending with, “We looked carefully and could not substantiate the accusation,” does not carry quite the same emotional force. There is always another accusation available, another interpretation to explore, another suspicious detail that might keep the story alive.

That creates a dangerous temptation to move the standard after the evidence has already answered the original question.

Suppose we begin by investigating whether someone fabricated a particular event. After examining the evidence, we conclude that the event appears to have occurred substantially as described. We can accept that conclusion, or we can quietly change the investigation. Perhaps the event happened, but the person probably exaggerated some other detail. Perhaps his motives were questionable. Perhaps there are unrelated things about his theology we dislike. Perhaps another story circulating online will finally establish what we originally expected to find.

At that point, we are no longer following the evidence.

We are hunting for a conviction.

These investigations must never operate under the assumption that appearing on this site means someone must eventually be found guilty of something. Being investigated is not itself evidence. Suspicion is not evidence. An accusation is not evidence that the accusation is true. Even a reasonable basis for beginning an investigation does not predetermine where that investigation should end.

Sometimes questions deserve answers, and the answer is that nothing improper happened.

We should be willing to publish that.

There is an important distinction here between proving an accusation false and being unable to prove it true. Evidence does not always provide the clean ending we would prefer. Sometimes an allegation can be disproven. Sometimes the available evidence strongly supports it. Sometimes the evidence is mixed. And sometimes, after examining everything reasonably available, we simply cannot determine what happened.

Those conclusions should not be collapsed into one another.

If an allegation is false, we should say that it is false. If we cannot substantiate an allegation, we should say that we cannot substantiate it. We should not transform “unverified” into “false” simply because we like the person being accused, nor transform “unverified” into “probably true” because we dislike him. Likewise, the absence of enough evidence to reach a conclusion should not become permission to preserve the accusation indefinitely through suggestive language.

“I don’t know” is sometimes the most truthful sentence an investigator can write.

That may be particularly difficult when the investigation concerns supernatural claims. We may encounter stories that appear extraordinary and for which no obvious ordinary explanation can be established. In those circumstances, intellectual honesty requires us to resist two opposite temptations. We should not declare something miraculous merely because we cannot explain it, but neither should we invent an ordinary explanation simply because our preferred worldview requires one.

Sometimes the evidence may take us farther.

Suppose we investigate a claimed healing expecting to discover exaggeration. We obtain medical records where ethically and lawfully appropriate. We confirm the diagnosis. We speak with relevant witnesses. We verify that the improvement occurred. We investigate possible treatments and alternative explanations. After doing everything reasonably available to us, suppose the evidence supports the central factual claims.

Then we should say so.

Perhaps we will still disagree with theological conclusions someone attached to the event. As we have already established, evidence that an extraordinary recovery occurred does not automatically authenticate every teaching of the person associated with it. But we cannot allow theological disagreement with someone to pressure us into denying factual evidence favorable to him.

If something extraordinary happened, we should be capable of being impressed.

We are Christians, after all.

We already believe God is capable of doing considerably more extraordinary things than anything we are likely to encounter during one of these investigations.

The same willingness to be surprised must apply when examining people. Someone we suspect of dishonesty may tell the truth. Someone with a terrible reputation may be falsely accused. Someone whose theology we believe contains serious errors may behave with remarkable integrity. Someone who has previously lied may be telling the truth this time. Someone we strongly dislike may deserve our defense against an accusation made by someone we generally trust.

Truth does not care whether those combinations are convenient for us.

Our responsibility is to care about truth enough to accept them.

This is one reason investigations should be allowed to change direction. We may begin researching one question and discover that our assumptions were wrong. Perhaps the real story is different from the one we expected. Perhaps the supposed scandal dissolves completely. Perhaps the most interesting discovery becomes how an innocent accusation spread and why so many people believed it. Perhaps our own willingness to believe the allegation reveals something worth examining about the communities in which we participate.

Sometimes the investigation may end with an article explaining why we are not publishing an accusation.

That is still work worth doing.

There is another person whose reputation may depend upon our willingness to accept that outcome.

It is easy to discuss false accusations abstractly until our own work contributes to one. A person’s name can be damaged much faster than it can be restored. An allegation may spread to thousands or millions of people while the correction reaches only a fraction of them. Search engines can preserve accusations long after they have been disproven. A headline can become part of someone’s public identity even when the article beneath it eventually changes.

That creates an obligation to be especially careful when an investigation clears someone.

The vindication should not be buried.

If we publicly raise a serious question and later discover that the answer favors the person being investigated, the correction deserves visibility comparable to the original concern. We should not quietly modify an old article while allowing readers who encountered the accusation to continue believing something we now know is false. If our work contributed to damaging someone’s reputation unfairly, correcting the record is not an optional act of generosity.

We owe him the truth too.

This becomes even more important if we were the source of the error. We may misunderstand a document. We may trust a source who turns out to be unreliable. We may connect two facts that were actually unrelated. We may interpret someone’s words incorrectly. We may simply make a mistake despite sincere efforts to avoid one.

If that happens, our responsibility is straightforward.

Say we were wrong.

Not, “Some readers may have interpreted our previous statement differently than intended.” Not, “New information has emerged that has caused the situation to evolve.” Not a paragraph of explanation designed to ensure that everyone understands how reasonable we were when we made the mistake.

Sometimes the correct sentence is simply:

We were wrong.

There is freedom in being able to say that.

The person whose identity depends upon always being right eventually becomes afraid of evidence. Every correction threatens his credibility. Every challenge becomes something to defeat. Every critic becomes an enemy. Before long, protecting the appearance of infallibility becomes more important than the truth that originally gave the work value.

We have no interest in building that kind of authority.

These investigations will be conducted by fallible people. We will make judgments based upon incomplete information. We will interpret evidence. We will bring theological convictions, personal experiences, assumptions, and blind spots into the process. Careful methodology can reduce error, but it cannot transform us into something other than human.

Readers should therefore expect corrections when corrections are necessary.

More importantly, we should hope that sometimes the thing requiring correction is our suspicion itself.

There is something spiritually healthy about wanting an accusation to fail. If someone claims that a Christian leader stole money, I would prefer to discover that he did not. If someone claims that a ministry fabricated a testimony, I would prefer to discover documentation demonstrating that the testimony was accurate. If someone reports abuse, we must take that report seriously and investigate it carefully, but I would still prefer to live in the world where the abuse never occurred.

The alternative would mean that another person was actually harmed.

That should matter more than the quality of our story.

This also provides a useful test of our motives. When evidence begins clearing someone, what happens inside us? Do we feel relief, or do we immediately begin searching for another way to preserve our suspicion? When an accusation collapses, are we glad that the person did not do what he was accused of doing, or frustrated that weeks of research no longer produce the conclusion we expected?

Those reactions may reveal something about whether we are still investigating for the reasons established at the beginning of this article.

We said that truth matters.

That commitment has to include truths favorable to people we expected to criticize.

We said that people matter.

That must include the reputation of someone falsely accused.

We said that the character of God matters.

That means we cannot use dishonest methods while claiming to defend Him.

And we said that repentance is the ending we hope for when wrongdoing is real.

But sometimes there is an even better ending.

Sometimes the person never did the thing in the first place.

On those days, there is no Repentance Fund to award, no dramatic confession to analyze, and no satisfying downfall to document. There may simply be an allegation that did not survive examination and a person who deserves to have that said as clearly as the accusation was originally made.

We should celebrate those investigations too.

Because we are not collecting villains.

We are looking for truth.

Look to Christ

An article about investigation can easily leave the wrong impression. After spending this much time discussing false claims, failed leaders, evidence, manipulation, money, power, theological error, human weakness, and the responsibility to test what we are told, a reader could reasonably reach the end believing that the lesson is simple: trust no one.

That is not the lesson.

If these investigations eventually teach people to approach every pastor with suspicion, every testimony with contempt, every church with distrust, and every Christian claim with the assumption that someone is probably trying to deceive them, then we will have replaced gullibility with cynicism and accomplished very little. Discernment is not paranoia. Christianity does not call us to spend our lives looking suspiciously over our shoulders, waiting for the next person to disappoint us.

People will disappoint us anyway.

Pastors will fail. Teachers will be wrong. Churches will make bad decisions. Ministries will sometimes lose their way. Christians we respect will behave in ways that confuse us. People whose books helped us understand Scripture may later say something foolish. Someone who once demonstrated remarkable integrity may eventually compromise it. A person we defended may prove that our confidence was misplaced.

And investigators can fail too.

We can misunderstand evidence. We can become biased. We can allow anger to affect our judgment. We can interpret Scripture incorrectly. We can trust the wrong source, miss important context, become too confident in our conclusions, or simply make mistakes. Everything we have written about the dangers of money, influence, pride, reputation, tribe, and protecting a platform applies to us just as surely as it applies to anyone whose name may eventually appear beneath the Investigations heading.

So please do not replace unquestioning trust in them with unquestioning trust in us.

That would miss the point entirely.

Read our sources. Check our quotations. Watch the complete interview when it is available. Read the documents. Consider the response from the person we criticize. Open your Bible and examine the passages for yourself. If our argument depends upon Scripture, read enough Scripture to determine whether we have handled it honestly. If our factual conclusion depends upon evidence, look at the evidence where you reasonably can.

Be a Berean with us too.

There is something beautifully freeing about that. We do not need to become another authority standing between Christians and the truth. We do not need readers who believe something because our name appears above the article. We would rather help people develop the habits necessary to examine claims for themselves.

That means these investigations should eventually make themselves less necessary.

If reading them teaches someone to ask better questions, recognize the difference between testimony and verification, notice when Scripture has been removed from context, distinguish an accusation from an established fact, seek the strongest version of an opposing argument, recognize his own biases, and remain willing to change his mind when evidence requires it, then he will not need us to tell him what to think every time another controversy appears.

That is a good thing.

The goal is not to build followers of an investigative project.

The goal is to help form discerning followers of Christ.

That distinction becomes particularly important because Christianity was never supposed to rest upon the credibility of its most visible representatives. Our faith does not depend upon every pastor being faithful. It does not depend upon every Christian behaving consistently with what he professes. It does not depend upon every reported miracle being genuine, every testimony being accurate, every ministry using money wisely, or every person who claims to speak for God actually having heard from Him.

Thank God for that.

If Christianity depended upon Christians never embarrassing Christ, the faith would have collapsed before the New Testament was finished being written.

Peter denied Him.

Thomas doubted.

The disciples argued about greatness.

The Corinthians turned the Lord’s Supper into something Paul could barely recognize.

The Galatians began wandering from the gospel they had received.

Peter later behaved hypocritically toward Gentile believers badly enough that Paul confronted him publicly.

The New Testament does not conceal those failures. It preserves them.

That should tell us something about where Christianity expects our confidence to rest.

Not in Peter.

Not in Paul.

Not in the Corinthians.

Not in a denomination.

Not in a ministry.

Not in an investigator.

In Christ.

Paul captures something essential when he tells the Corinthians that he determined to know nothing among them “except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). Elsewhere he reminds them that no one can lay a foundation other than the one already laid, “which is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11). Christianity has always possessed a center, and whenever something else begins occupying that place, even something good, we are in danger of forgetting what the faith is actually about.

That includes good teachers.

Christ gives teachers to His Church. We should be grateful for faithful pastors, scholars, elders, evangelists, authors, and ordinary Christians who help us understand Scripture. There is nothing spiritually mature about refusing to learn from anyone because human beings are fallible. The Church is a body, and Christians need one another.

But there is a difference between learning from someone and building our faith upon him.

A faithful teacher should make Christ larger in our vision, not himself.

A faithful pastor should want his congregation capable of opening Scripture without him.

A faithful ministry should not require people to believe that access to God runs through its organization.

And a faithful investigator should not want readers dependent upon his verdict before deciding what is true.

John the Baptist gives us perhaps the simplest model: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).

That is an extraordinarily difficult principle for anyone with an audience.

Platforms naturally work in the opposite direction. Success means more people know your name. More people recognize your face. More people quote your words. More people ask your opinion. Eventually a person can begin believing that increased attention toward himself is evidence of increased effectiveness for Christ.

Sometimes it may be.

Sometimes Christ may be disappearing behind him.

We should be willing to ask which is happening here too.

The name at the top of an article does not matter nearly as much as whether the article points beyond itself. The Investigations page does not exist so that readers eventually conclude that we are the trustworthy Christians who can protect them from the untrustworthy ones. We are capable of the same human failures we have spent this article discussing.

We need Christ too.

That is not a disclaimer added for humility.

It is the gospel.

There was a time when I stood outside Christianity looking in, and some of what I saw made Christianity difficult to take seriously. I saw people claiming to represent God and assumed, reasonably enough, that they were showing me something about Him. Sometimes they were. Sometimes they were not.

I wish I had understood the difference sooner.

I wish I had known that rejecting the man selling God did not require rejecting God.

I wish I had known that questioning the person claiming divine authority was not the same thing as questioning Christ.

I wish I had understood that Christianity itself gave me permission to test what I was seeing.

More than permission.

It told me to.

That is ultimately what I hope these investigations can offer someone standing where I once stood. Not a demand that he ignore what he sees. Not an excuse for every Christian failure. Not an argument that the Church has never harmed anyone, that religious people never lie, or that everyone invoking the name of Jesus deserves trust.

Look carefully.

Ask the difficult question.

Examine the evidence.

Listen to the person being accused.

Read the source rather than the headline.

Test the teaching against Scripture.

Refuse to believe something merely because you want it to be true.

Refuse to reject something merely because you want it to be false.

Correct yourself when you are wrong.

Tell the truth when it costs you.

Show mercy without abandoning justice.

Hope for repentance without pretending consequences do not matter.

Remember the humanity of the person who angers you.

And when Christians fail to look like Christ, do not make the mistake I once made of assuming that their failure tells you everything you need to know about Him.

Look past us.

Look past the preacher.

Look past the prophet.

Look past the teacher.

Look past the movement.

Look past the investigator.

Look to Christ.

Because eventually every human being we place our confidence in will remind us that he is human. Some reminders will be small. Others may be devastating. We should learn from them, correct what needs correcting, protect people where protection is necessary, forgive where forgiveness is called for, and tell the truth about what happened.

But none of those people were supposed to be the foundation.

Jesus was.

These investigations exist because truth matters, people matter, and the character of God matters. We will do everything we reasonably can to discover what is true, represent people fairly, correct ourselves when we fail, and hope for repentance when wrongdoing is established.

Then, when all the evidence has been examined and all the words have been written, there is one final thing we hope every investigation accomplishes.

Not that you trust us.

That you see Christ more clearly.