When a congregation has a scandal, the bad apple is identified and removed. The congregation grieves, is reassured, and is told the situation has been dealt with. And the barrel is untouched.
Then, some years later, the next occupant of the same structure produces the next scandal. Everyone is astonished. The pattern is never noticed, because each instance is explained as an apple.
This article is about why that happens, why Scripture refuses to let us explain failure that way, and what to do instead.
The attribution error
Human beings systematically over-attribute other people's behavior to their character and under-attribute it to their circumstances. Watch someone act badly and the automatic explanation is that is the kind of person he is. Watch yourself act badly and the explanation is the situation forced my hand. The name for this is the fundamental attribution error. Few findings in social psychology are more reliable.
The error is also comforting. If the scandal was caused by a bad man, then removing the bad man solves the problem, and the rest of us, who aren't bad, are safe. If the scandal was caused by a structure, then the structure is still here, we're all inside it, and the next person to stand where he stood is in the same danger.
So the church, like every institution, reaches for the apple.
Three levels, not two
The most useful framework for seeing past the apple has three levels. The dispositional level is the level of bad apples, where the person did it because of who he is. At the situational level, the level of bad barrels, he did it because of the conditions he was placed in, such as the pressures, the ambiguity, the exhaustion and the absence of oversight. The systemic level belongs to the barrel-makers. These are the institutions, policies, incentives, and authorities that create and legitimate the situations, and they are almost never held to account, because accountability stops at the barrel.
The framework was built from the study of military abuses in which ordinary soldiers did terrible things. The soldiers were guilty, but the framework's question was why these soldiers, in this place, and the answer was conditions somebody built: no training for the role, no functioning supervision, punishing shifts, ambiguous orders left to the lowest ranks to interpret, and a physical environment that degraded everyone in it. The official inquiries found failures of command and policy running well above the people who were prosecuted. Then the system, like systems everywhere, located the apples, punished them, and declared the barrel sound.
The famous prison experiment associated with this framework needs a caution, because it's no longer usable as evidence. There was no control condition, the guards were coached, and the participant behind the most famous breakdown later described it as a performance. Cite the framework and the documentary record of real institutions, and leave the experiment out.
Safety science says the same thing
A different field reached the same conclusion with better evidence. I bring it in because nobody can answer it.
Investigators of catastrophic accidents in aviation, medicine and nuclear power found they're almost never caused by a single person's error. Every complex system has multiple layers of defense. Each layer has holes. An accident occurs when the holes in several layers happen to align, so that a hazard passes through all of them at once. The last person to act (the surgeon, the pilot) is the one whose hole was visible when the thing went through. And he's the one who gets blamed.
Blaming him is unjust, and it is also useless, because the holes in the other layers are still there, and the next person to stand where he stood will meet the same alignment. Serious industries now investigate failure by asking what let it through in place of who did it.
Scripture refuses the apple
When the prophets explain Israel's failure, they point to structures and never to a single bad man.
Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel... Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks?... The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken. (Ezekiel 34:2-4)
The shepherds is plural, a class and an arrangement. Instead of naming one bad king, Ezekiel describes what the whole shepherding system had become, and what it did to the sheep as a system: they were scattered, because there is no shepherd (34:5).
The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so. (Jeremiah 5:31)
Three parties make up one system. The prophets say what pays, the priests rule by it, and the people prefer it. Nobody in that sentence is a villain. Everybody is inside a structure that rewards the wrong thing. Jeremiah's diagnosis falls on the structure.
And the book of Judges closes with the most systemic sentence in the Old Testament: In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes (Judges 21:25). A reader might expect a book full of atrocities to blame uniquely evil men. Judges explains them by an absence in the structure.
Paul does the same at Corinth. The scandal is one man, and Paul's concern is the whole: Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? (1 Corinthians 5:6). The man is to be dealt with, but the diagnosis is about what the body tolerates, and the remedy is addressed to the body.
The church application
Every congregational scandal has a recognizable barrel. There's the single-hub structure that manufactured one man's authority and gave him no peer, and the absence of anyone whose office made correcting him safe. There's the financial arrangement that made him uncorrectable, because the church's income depended on his presence. The room had no periphery, no small units where his conduct could be seen up close. Information flowed only through him. And the honour economy rewarded him for the very traits that undid him.
Remove the man and every one of those is still there. The next man walks into the same hub, the same lack of peers, the same financial dependence, the same room, the same flow, the same rewards. And the congregation, having explained the last failure by character, has no vocabulary for seeing the alignment forming again.
That's why be not conformed to this world (Romans 12:2) is a structural command. The schema (the shape) is what conforms. And a moral response to a systemic failure leaves the shape intact.
The diagnosis must explain the sincere
Intra-ecclesial apologetics has a rule that the diagnosis must explain the sincere. Any account of the church's dysfunction that requires the pastor to be a hypocrite, the elders to be cowards, and the members to be sheep has failed as an explanation, because most pastors aren't hypocrites, most elders aren't cowards, and most members aren't fools. They're sincere people inside a structure that produces predictable results.
The rule rests on accuracy, though it can sound like softness. An explanation that requires villains doesn't fit the data, because the data is mostly good people. There's charity in it too, because it lets a congregation examine its structure without having to first accuse its leaders.
What to do instead
When something goes wrong, refuse the apple. Ask the safety investigator's questions.
What let this through? Which layers had holes, and where did they align? Who had the information and couldn't say it, and why? What did the structure reward, and did it reward this? If we replaced this man with a saint, what in the arrangement would still be pushing the saint toward the same failure?
Then change the barrel. Add the peer and build the channel that doesn't run through the leader. Break the financial dependence and create the periphery where conduct can be seen. And when the next man comes, put him into a structure that would catch him, because the next alignment is already forming. Since character isn't a layer of defense, structure has to be.
Woe be to the shepherds is addressed to a system. If you fix the system, you have done what the prophet asked. If you remove one shepherd and keep the system, you have done what the barrel-makers always do.