We saw a gap.
When a pastor falls, there is help for him. There are restoration programs, counselors, and books. But the church he leaves behind, the congregation, the staff, and the elders holding it together, is largely left to figure it out alone.
Who helps the church? That question became After The Fall.
In the absence of help, churches improvise. A leadership team that has never done this before writes the announcement themselves, decides on their own how much to say, and hopes the questions settle down. They rarely do. What is left unsaid gets filled in by rumor. The people carrying the most pain are often the least likely to be asked how they are. And a year later the church is quieter and smaller, and no one can point to the moment it happened.
None of that is a failure of character. It is what happens when good people are handed a crisis nobody trained them for, at the exact moment they are least able to think clearly about it.
After The Fall was founded by Bob and Becky: forty-three years married, more than forty of them in church ministry.
Bob Branch
Co-founder, pastor
Bob grew up in the Deep South and Colorado and came to Christ as a teenager. He met and married Becky while in grad school, helped plant a church in Boston, then served as its lead pastor for 10 years before taking a 2 year break from ministry to work on their marriage. They planted The Springs Church in Temecula 31 years ago and are retiring soon.
Bob holds a BSBA from the University of Denver and a master’s from St. Stephen’s University. He and Becky recently started After The Fall Ministries to shepherd congregations and leadership teams after their pastor’s moral failure.
He enjoys playing guitar, long walks, golf with his sons-in-law, church history, Clive Cussler books and dates with Becky at Moonlight Beach, with Taco Stand shrimp burritos!
Becky Branch
Co-founder, licensed marriage and family therapist
Becky, the daughter of a church planter, grew up in New England in a family of seven. She met and married Bob 43 years ago, raised a family with 4 kids (and raised a husband, too), and has led and served in various ministries in the church over 42 years.
She holds a BA from Cal Baptist, and an MFT from Loma Linda University and is a licensed marriage and family therapist serving both San Diego and Murrieta. She also works heavily with couples in recovery from moral failures and those with various kinds of addictions.
She and her husband, Bob, live in Murrieta, CA. She enjoys investing in her kids and grandkids (6), reading, running, healthy cooking, DIY projects and dates at Moonlight Beach.
Helping churches move forward after a pastor’s moral failure: understanding what happened, processing what was lost, navigating hard decisions, and moving toward health, hope, and renewed mission.
We work with the whole church rather than one part of it, because a congregation and its leaders are living the same event as two different stories, and a church only recovers when both are cared for.
Our dream is bigger than us: a national network of trained, trusted people, so that when the worst season of a church’s life arrives, help is never far away.
Two people cannot reach every church that needs this. So the work is being built to be handed on, and what we learn in each church becomes training for the next person who does it.
We do not come to investigate, to assign blame, or to tell a church what it must decide. Those decisions belong to your elders, your denomination, and where it applies, to the authorities, and they stay there. We are also not a restoration program for the pastor; that work exists elsewhere and is not ours. What we bring is a steady outside presence for the church left standing, and the experience of having watched other congregations come through this.