Confessing Moral Failure, Megachurch Pastor Bob Coy Resigns…
Confessing Moral Failure, Megachurch Pastor Bob Coy Resigns…
Another hypocrite brought down, no doubt preaching against the allure of sin from the pulpit while being drawn like a mosquito to a bug zapper as he sat idly in his hotel room during speaking tours.
Bob Coy was a blessing to our family. During the mid 1990s we were at our wits end, scouring South Florida for a spirit filled church. We were a year and a half into our stay there and were not finding a church worship service which inspired us with truth, passion and the joy of the Spirit. Calvary Chapel of West Palm Beach was a forty minute drive away. It didn’t fit our model of a connected local church with lay leadership. The pastor had a squeaky voice and he preached for over fifty minutes each service. However, what we experienced at Calvary Chapel was a service which drew us into community praise and worship and preaching which inspired and challenged based on digging deep into God’s word.
Bob Coy often talked about his story. He had left the exhilarating and sensual life of a Las Vegas casino entertainment director for the pastorate. He never went to seminary, rather he listened voraciously to Chuck Smith tapes and worked side by side with his brother in a local church. I remember him describing the vision the Lord gave him of Christ’s love for the Fort Lauderdale community and his desire to be true to his wife and family, keeping their picture pasted to his office computer.
Sure, there were things I didn’t care for in the Calvary Chapel model: the leadership structure which equated the pastor to Moses and created a dependence on that individual, the lack of seminary training for pastors, the lack of connection to the historical church through the ages, the “bigness” of the site as an extension of the leader. For the time, I decided to suspend judgment on whether these were flaws or just annoyances to my perceived order of things and thanked God that we were led to fellowship there during our Florida sojourn.
Other than occasionally stumbling across him on a late night radio broadcast or during repositioning our shoebox of sermon cassette tapes in our crammed garage storage, I hadn’t heard much of Bob until this week when my daughter sent me the above article link.
After reading the news, I picked through a couple sites skimming posts which alternately praised or condemned Bob Coy and Calvary Chapel. One comment which caught my attention was an accusation that Coy focused too much on “transformation” and not on the hard effort necessary for Christian living.
What is “transformation”? In Romans 12 Paul doesn’t discuss it as a passive experience, rather as an action which we take- “be transformed by the renewing of your mind”. So it is something that requires my involvement yet at the same time, it is something I can’t do in my strength. Transformation is a work of the Spirit in me. It is a work for which I make myself available. And it has a short half life. Transformation is a journey I undertake when I am keeping “in step with the Spirit” as Paul says in Galatians. What I do apart from the Spirit is a fraud- it looks ok but it has no life. The same way we are continually transformed as we keep in step with the spirit we atrophy as we live in our own strength. Bob Coy didn’t make a big mistake. He made a series of small ones and eventually those mistakes led to one which became extremely noticeable. Most describe the taxonomy of sin as including: the world, the flesh, and the devil. I don’t know if the devil was involved directly in Bob’s demise but for me, I have a sufficient challenge in fending off the world (external temptation) and the flesh (my own cravings). Perhaps some of us take the wrong lesson from King David’s dalliance with Bathsheba: David, “a man after God’s own heart” was hanging out in Jerusalem when he should have been in battle, was looking where he shouldn’t look, drew up a plan to get what he wanted, committed adultery and murder, was confronted, confessed his sin, got to marry Bathsheba in the end and still authored many of the inspired Psalms and was listed in the Hebrews 11 hall of faith. If I’m not constantly in step with the Spirit, I start to think about flirting with sin because I am confident that there is forgiveness and restoration on the far side.
I can’t profess to know what Bob Coy was thinking or experiencing or what his rationalization was for his acts. I only know that in my own power I am capable of similar failures. And I remain convinced that there is a transformation of the Spirit which can change our behavior and fill us with love, power, and forgiveness that we would have no ability to accomplish otherwise. The Holy Spirit used Bob Coy and Calvary Chapel of West Palm Beach in my life. I pray that Bob and his family will invite the Holy Spirit to renew the work of transformation in them.
Trapped In Evangelicalism 
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