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“Should I join an accountability group?”

Jeremy Myers says accountability groups fail miserably in that they “force” members to lie. His sexual temptation accountability group fell apart when police arrested a fellow member and successfully prosecuted him for molestation. Naturally, his attraction to minors had never come up once in all the group’s conversations about lust.

Understandable? I think so. I mean, would you talk about it? I wouldn’t. I’d spend all my energy trying not to even think about it.

The Pros and Cons

Numerous Christian websites say accountability is the bee’s knees, and tell you how to go about setting up your own group. Benefits include “intentional friendships” and helping the people of God to “stay pure and faithful”, “overcome temptations” and grow to be more like Christ. You can even buy an accountability software package with “real time reports” to help you manage your choices more responsibly. Accountability groups and partners usually promote themselves with stock appeals to Galatians 6 and James 5.

On the “nay” side of the balance sheet, accountability group detractors point to the large number of major moral failures among members, the tendency to “game the system”, the inevitable emphasis on works-based Christian living and the focus on sins rather than Christ. Accountability groups provide the appearance of intimacy for people who crave it, but it may turn out the disclosures you hear and make are as authentic and current as your Facebook profile.

That’s not surprising. Groups cobbled together from a single demographic may not be suited to all participants. It is doubtful the young Christian husband whose biggest problem is setting aside devotional time with the pressures of work and family has much useful to say to the single former drug addict secretly craving his old habits, even if the two men are exactly the same age. If they do click and somehow help one another, it’ll be entirely by the grace of God.

Contriving Intimacy

My own experience in life is that you cannot contrive or program intimacy. The more desperately you go after it, the more you drive it away. That includes group settings designed to produce it. They produce a false intimacy instead, one that fools those who participate into believing they are getting to the core of something important and real, when it is often just another layer of self-masking.

Real intimacy is a lovely by-product of trust, and trust is built by knowing one another and living shared experiences of service that lead you to say, “Hey, that guy’s competent” or “That guy’s spiritual” or “That guy’s trustworthy” because you’ve seen them in action and know what they are like. Experience leads you to think, “Here’s somebody I could trust with something difficult. Here’s somebody I know would understand.” When the time is right, you may take advantage of the trust that has been banked.

Real intimacy requires ongoing fellowship, and fellowship comes from getting together over something bigger and more important than either my problems or yours.

Giving an Account

The word “accountable” does not appear in the New Testament. “Account” does, and it’s the familiar Greek word logos, which literally means “word”. Each will “give a word”. But here’s the thing about accountability as the New Testament describes it: it’s all future, and it’s all giving account to God, not to men. Scriptures about giving an account have nothing to do with pre-emptive discussion of temptation or confessing sins and shortcomings to fellow believers, and everything to do with living in perpetual awareness of the future judgment of God. Beware of scriptural terms used in non-scriptural ways!

I have people in my life who call me to account when they see me drifting away from what I ought to be doing in the Christian life, but they are all people who have become part of my life organically: siblings, old friends, coworkers, elders, people I knew from camp, at one time my parents, and so on. We have an investment in one another. We have history. I would do the same for them.

What Produces Holy Living?

If we want to look at what really leads to holy living, the biblical example is Job. How can I say that? Well, God held him up as an example. “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?” If you want to see the ways in which Job’s unique godliness in his day demonstrated itself, you can find them listed here, or just read chapter 31. Isn’t that what accountability groups are trying to produce: a character that causes God to say, “I am pleased with you”?

What produced Job’s godly character? Definitely not a sense of accountability to his fellow men, even his good friends. Not weekly meetings full of self-disclosure and discussion of his temptations. In fact, when Job’s friends start to show up to give advice and support, everything comes off the rails. Imagine if they had been privy to his inmost secrets before they started ripping him to shreds!

Of Himself to God

So are accountability groups a good idea? It depends on what they are attempting to accomplish and how formally and mechanically that is carried off. Some people seem to find them beneficial, but mostly these are women looking for Christian gal pals rather than believers struggling with secret sins they can barely manage, out of control thought lives or disorderly living patterns. Others fear accountability groups don’t work, or do more harm than good.

Even at their best, however, the sort of accountability they foster and promote is nothing the scriptures teach. The bottom line is I am not accountable to you, and you are not accountable to me. When push comes to shove, that reality tends to assert itself. We will never know what is in another believer’s heart, no matter what comes out of his mouth. He may not even know for sure.

What produced Job’s godly character was the fear of God, plain and simple. He saw himself as directly responsible to the Almighty. As we all are. That’s the key to godly, consistent living.