When a congregation has a scandal, watch what happens. The bad apple is identified. He's 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, and everyone is astonished, and 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's 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. It's called the fundamental attribution error, and it's one of the most reliable findings in social psychology.
It's 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: bad apples. The person did it because of who he is. The situational level: bad barrels. The person did it because of the conditions he was placed in — the pressures, the ambiguity, the exhaustion, the absence of oversight. And the systemic level: the barrel-makers. The institutions, policies, incentives, and authorities that create and legitimate the situations — and that 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 question was never whether the soldiers were guilty; they were. The 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. And then the system did what systems do: it located the apples, punished them, and declared the barrel sound.
One caution belongs here. The famous prison experiment associated with this framework is no longer usable as evidence — the guards were coached, the most famous breakdown was later described by the participant as a performance, and there was no control condition. Cite the framework and the documentary record of real institutions, not the experiment.
Safety science says the same thing
A different field reached the same conclusion with better evidence, and it's worth having because it's unanswerable.
Investigators of catastrophic accidents — in aviation, medicine, 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 isn't merely unjust. It is 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 this way: not who did it but what let it through.
Scripture refuses the apple
The prophets never explain Israel's failure by a single bad man. They explain it by structures.
Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel... Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! shouldn't 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 — plural, a class, an arrangement. Ezekiel isn't naming one bad king. He's describing 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, 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, and the structure is the diagnosis.
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). The explanation for a book full of atrocities isn't that the men were uniquely evil. It's 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 barrel, and the barrels are recognizable.
The single-hub structure that manufactured one man's authority and gave him no peer. The absence of anyone whose office made correcting him safe. The financial arrangement that made him uncorrectable, because the church's income depended on his presence. The room that had no periphery — no small units where his conduct could be seen up close. The information that flowed only through him. The honour economy that 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
There's a rule in intra-ecclesial apologetics: 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.
That rule isn't softness. It's accuracy. An explanation that requires villains doesn't fit the data, because the data is mostly good people. And it's charity: 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. Build the channel that doesn't run through the leader. Break the financial dependence. 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, and character isn't a layer of defense. Structure is.
Woe be to the shepherds is addressed to a system. Fix the system, and you have done what the prophet asked. Remove one shepherd and keep the system, and you have done what the barrel-makers always do.