another one bites the dust

Don't isolate yourself. Maintain good boundaries with the opposite sex and be accountable to others. Love your family as well as your work, and be home with them sometimes. Your ministry's success does not equal your personal worth. It's not about you so take the ego down about five notches, please.

You've heard it all before (except maybe that last one--that was a Jen addition). But it bears repeating because once again a young, dynamic leader has flamed out and left a tsunami of grief and pain in his wake. Several years after planting a church and leading it through a time of growth, he resigned as senior minister, left his wife and two children, and confessed to a relationship with his wife's best friend. (This woman, also a church member, just served her husband with divorce papers and is lobbying to get custody of their four children, and the house; she and ex-pastor, new-boyfriend want to live there.)

Don't try to figure out who; it's not one of "our" guys, and it's probably no one you'd recognize. The point isn't his name, anyway--the point is variations of the same story could be told and retold with many different names in the starring role.

I am not in a church leadership position. I am not married.  I don't have to deal with the complex pressures and temptations that accompany a marriage or a senior pastor job description.

So I am not offering any advice to the guys (and gals) messing up. I am making a suggestion to the rest of you, though--those who are leading others and who are staying married: although the previously-mentioned tidbits of wisdom seem straightforward to me, they are obviously not cutting it with those in the trenches. It's time to address the causes of minister meltdown, because churches are drowning in the effects.