Executive Director Brian Howard, who has provided day-to-day leadership for Acts 29 since May 2020, will continue to lead Acts 29 in our commitment to plant disciple-making churches worldwide."Īccording to his online church profile, Chandler married his wife in 1999 and they have three children. The Acts 29 Board has decided to follow the lead of TVC and ask Matt to step away from his Acts 29 speaking engagements during this time. "The elders of The Village Church decided that Matt’s leave of absence would be from teaching and preaching.
The organization released a statement to USA TODAY on Tuesday: Lindsey Eenigenburg, the church's executive director of administration told USA TODAY on Tuesday that "a strong team of pastors" will preach in his absence.Ĭhandler is also president and chairman of Acts 29, an organization dedicated to starting new churches. I feel like I'm embarrassing my wife and kids, ” Chandler told the congregation Sunday. “I’m held to a higher standard and fell short of that higher standard.” “I’m just really embarrassed, feel stupid. The timeline for his return will be determined by expectations the elders have laid out for his development, the statement said. The statement said his leave of absence is "both disciplinary and developmental, which allows him to focus on growing greater awareness in this area." They revealed that (he) did not use language appropriate for a pastor, and he did not model a behavior that we expect from him.” “While the messages were not romantic or sexual in nature, the frequency and familiarity of the messages crossed a line.
The investigators’ report led the elders to conclude that Chandler had violated the church's internal social-media use policies, and "more importantly that, while the overarching pattern of his life has been 'above reproach', he failed to meet the (Bible's) standard for elders of being “above reproach” in this instance," the statement reads. The elders, the statement continues, then commissioned an independent law firm to conduct a review of Chandler's messaging history across social media platforms, his cellphone and his email. That same evening, Chandler shared those concerns with his wife, Lauren, and two elders, in an effort to address the situation, The Village Church wrote in an Aug. “My wife knew that, her husband knew that, and yet there were a couple of things that she said that were disorienting to me.” “I didn’t think I had done anything wrong in that,” Chandler, 48, told the congregation. In the statement recorded and shared to the church’s website, the pastor explained that a few months back, a woman approached him in the church’s foyer with concerns about “how I was (direct messaging) on Instagram with a friend of hers.” Matt Chandler, the lead pastor at the Village Church in Flower Mound, about 30 miles northwest of Dallas, told his congregation on Sunday the move was prompted by what the church’s leaders called inappropriate messages between the pair. A Texas megachurch pastor is taking a leave of absence after his church learned of frequent messages between him and a woman who is not his wife.
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