The affair started across the room in a Sunday school class when the pastor’s wife received a text from a handsome member of the congregation. The text was a simple, “What a pretty dress, you look beautiful today.” This compliment brought something alive in her she hadn’t experienced in a long time. She began trying to remember the last time her husband – pastor of a large church – had given her a compliment. Thus began a six-month affair before its discovery. It is one of dozens of stories that therapist Trudy Johnson can tell about the pressures of serving the church, not as the pastor, where the strains and stresses might be expected, but of the wife of the pastor.

Try asking 80 church executives if the “secular” media are friends or foes. Every time I take this poll at a church leadership conference or seminary, one or two hands timidly go up for “friends.” The rest go sky high for “foes.” What’s your vote? Over the course of his prolific career, Cal Thomas has been one of America’s most popular media commentators on television, radio and in print. While the mainstream media often is biased, Thomas believes the bias “isn’t always deliberate.” Often, a reporter’s bias is borne out of a bad church experience or personal tragedy that produced deep feelings of disappointment with God.

In a Peanuts episode, Charlie Brown feverishly searches for a quarter he has dropped in the dark. Standing under a porch light, Lucy offers some sage advice; “Why don’t you look over here where there is more light?” This cartoon, dredged up from childhood memory, brings to my mind the approach many churches take in fraud prevention. Despite evidence to the contrary, they continue to look for fraud weaknesses in the wrong places, or at least in using the wrong methods. They do this by often utilizing methods that are the most expensive while at the same time being the least effective, the most notable example of this is over-reliance on the external audit.