At Religion Dispatches, Anthony B. Pinn writes about Isaac I. Ovid, an ex-minister and son of the founder of his church, who lost between $9 and $12 million donated by congregants to the Local Christian Assembly Church in Queens, New York. Pinn questions the congregants’ willful ignorance of the potential for unethical behavior by Ovid, and, indeed, ministers in general:
While I suspect that at least some of these same church members voiced anger over the unethical practices of Bernard Madoff, they failed to exercise the same suspicion of unrealistic promises made by their former minister-turned-hedge-fund-manager. Both Madoff and Ovid used the connections forged through relationships of ‘trust’ to gain confidence, and played on greed to work their schemes. The difference: Ovid also had the blind trust of a congregation. For Ovid, there was an assumed line of religious knowledge and authority stemming from church founder to founder’s son that allowed him to couple ministerial duties with financial services without significant challenge or question.
While I sympathize in certain ways with those (many of them elderly) who lost money to this fraud, I also believe it is time for church members to re-think the nature and ‘privileges’ of church authority. A ‘calling’ to ministry too often is a catchall providing general access to the lives and resources of church members with few checks and balances. Ministers are free, then, to cloak questionable activities in an appeal to divinely-ordained authority. Too often this shady appeal to a vague ‘right’ to whatever they deem necessary for the ‘good’ of the ‘flock’ trumps reason and common sense. Accountability is pushed to the side.
Read the full post here.
