On Applying for Section Eight

During the first wave of scandals involving parish priests, I wrote TIME magazine to express my opinion that the problem was not exclusively Roman Catholic. I’m pretty sure that the reason it was never printed was because I failed to send it correctly. It is no secret that United Methodist clergy have been free to drink, smoke and divorce more freely over the past half-century, and a couple of adulterous affairs that may have involved homicide found their way into the popular media. But while every corrupt and perverted behavior ranging from pedophilia to sexual assault has been committed by ordained ministers and/or their staffs, I have to give the UM hierarchy credit for doing a much better job of covering-up these scandals than their Catholic counterparts. There was in my mind no little irony that I was being appointed associate pastor to a church smack dab in the middle of Sin City, but the unexpected surprise was to find the whole gamut of ethical and moral infractions thriving at Trinity. Nate Holt had failed to mention to me that it had been necessary for him to admonish Don Smith to stop having physical contact with the children attending the preschool run by Trinity. And remember that Omaha parishioner who confessed to an affair with a UM pastor? It had been at Trinity (although this was a pastor who served years earlier than Don). And this was just the tip of the iceberg. Now that Don had successfully finagled Rick Altman onto staff during the brief period before my appointment commenced, a whole new dimension of fraud, deceit, and criminality was about to unfold. I don’t mind admitting to seeking the professional services of no less than three psychologists and one psychiatrist during my two-and-a-half years at Trinity, because I was more willing to accept that I was losing my mind than to believe that what I was witnessing was actually happening.