Last week I told you why I wrote a book I did not want to write. This week, instead of telling you anything more about it, I want to let the book speak for itself.
What follows is the opening chapter of unBiblical Eldership, adapted for this space. I chose it because it is where everything starts — not with a scandal, and not with an argument, but with a feeling I carried for years before I could name it. If you have read these articles for any length of time, you have met pieces of this story. Here is where the book tells it from the beginning.
One note before we begin. The chapter closes by pointing at the pages that follow it, because that is what opening chapters do. I have left that as written. The book arrives Monday, August 17; today, chapter one is yours.
Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. — Acts 20:28 ESV
The room was warm. That is the part I keep returning to.
I remember the table, the coffee going lukewarm in paper cups, the easy laughter of men who genuinely liked one another. Our chairman was the kind of man you wanted in the room—steady, well-liked, quick with a kind word. Our pastor preached with real passion, the sort that made you glad you had come. I had been invited to serve as an elder, and I was honored. I was excited. I did not yet understand the magnitude of what I had said yes to, and looking back, that was a mercy. If I had known what lay ahead, I might have hesitated. But God prepared me for the journey and led me through fires I could not have imagined from that warm and pleasant room.
What I am about to tell you is not a story about obviously bad men in an obviously broken church. It is the opposite. The early years felt positive and safe. The people were kind. The preaching was sound. By every visible measure, things were well.
And yet.
Somewhere in those good meetings, in those safe years, I began to sense that something was amiss.
I could not have told you what. It was not a scandal. No one was caught in sin. No budget was embezzled, no doctrine denied. It was quieter than that—quiet enough that I spent a long time wondering whether I was imagining it. And the unease is easy to misunderstand. We did pray. We read and prayed over the requests our people submitted; our pastor often opened with Scripture and gave us time to reflect on it together. These were not empty meetings, and they were not faithless men. The spiritual elements were real and they were sincere.
But they sat at the opening and the edges. The bulk of our attention and our energy—the long middle of every meeting—went to the operation. To running the thing. We would pray over the requests, and then we would talk about the building, the budget, the programs and schedules and the hundred logistical questions that keep an organization moving. The prayer was the doorway. The operation was the room.
What we rarely returned to, once the meeting was truly underway, was the flock.
We rarely asked who among our people was wandering. We rarely asked which sheep was sick, which family was quietly coming apart, which young believer was drifting toward the edge. We rarely asked whether we ourselves—the men entrusted with souls—were walking closely with God. We were managing an institution well. We were shepherding very little. And the strange thing, the thing that took me years to put words to, was that nobody seemed to notice the difference. The meetings ran smoothly. Everyone went home satisfied. The machine worked.
And as the church grew, the machine demanded more. This is the part I have thought about most in the years since, because I think it is where the drift quietly accelerated. Growth brought new questions, and they were not bad questions—how to make room for the people coming in, whether to buy property, when to build, what staff to hire, how to welcome the newcomer and the seeker who did not yet know Christ. We leaned outward, toward the ones not yet in the room, and there is nothing wrong with leaning toward the lost. But somewhere in all that motion, the flock already gathered slipped from view. We stopped asking after the sheep we had, because everything seemed to be running smoothly—and smoothness felt like proof that all was well. That is exactly how it happens. We did not decide to stop shepherding. We simply assumed that because the numbers were healthy, the people were too. Success became the anesthetic. We lost touch with the flock without ever once choosing to.
That was the unease. Not that anything was visibly wrong, but that the wrong thing was at the center.
You have had a version of that feeling yourself, I suspect.
When you are a believer—when the Spirit of God lives in you—a disquiet like that is not always to be explained away. We are quick, in our embarrassment, to dismiss it. I’m being negative. I’m being divisive. Who am I to question men more seasoned than I am? And sometimes, yes, our unease is only our own pride or impatience wearing a spiritual costume. We should be honest about that. Not every uneasy feeling is the voice of God.
But sometimes it is.
Sometimes the disquiet you cannot name is the Shepherd Himself, stirring something in a heart that is paying attention. Sometimes the Spirit grieves before we have the words for why, and that grief leaks into us as a vague and persistent sense that this is not right. Do not trust every flicker of discomfort. But do not be too quick to silence the ones that will not leave. Bring them to Scripture. Bring them to prayer. Test them. But do not assume, as I too often did, that because you cannot yet name a thing, the thing is not real.
I sat in that warm room for a long time, sensing and not naming. The sensing was a gift I was slow to receive.
Eventually the unease pressed me toward the only thing I knew to do: I went looking. I borrowed a book on biblical eldership from my father, who had served as an elder himself before helping to plant a church, and I began—quietly, almost privately—to study what Scripture actually said about the men who lead Christ’s Church. What that study began to reveal belongs to the next chapter. I started reading, and I started to wonder. I wondered whether all of us around that table truly understood what we had been ordained to be. I wondered whether some of us—myself included—met the qualifications Scripture lays down. I tried not to judge. I am not sure I always succeeded. But I had begun, at last, to look.
Here is what I have learned since: the feeling came before the failure. Years before anything broke in the open, the wrongness was already there—small, quiet, easy to miss, sitting at the center of a healthy-looking room. It did not announce itself. It waited.
This is the thing almost no one tells you about unbiblical eldership. We imagine it arrives as a crisis: the fallen pastor, the church split that makes the local news, the leader exposed. And those things are real, and we have all watched them happen, sometimes to churches and names we admired from a distance. But those public catastrophes did not begin as catastrophes. They began as something small enough to dismiss. They began, almost always, as a quiet substitution that no one named in time—shepherding traded for management, soul-care traded for administration, the flock traded for the machine—a substitution that looked, in its early years, entirely fine.
A physician does not run tests to prove you are sick; she runs them to catch what can still be healed, while it can still be healed. The whole purpose of learning to recognize this early—of taking your own quiet unease seriously instead of explaining it away—is hope. What is caught early is most easily healed. The catastrophes we have all grieved were, once, exactly the small and nameless thing you may be feeling right now. The difference between the two is often only this: whether anyone was willing to look.
The Apostle Paul, saying farewell to the elders of Ephesus, gave them the charge that those long-ago meetings of mine had quietly forgotten. “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood” (Acts 20:28 ESV). Careful attention—to yourselves, and to the flock. Not to the building. Not to the budget. Not first to the operation, but to the souls and to your own soul. Peter would put it the same way: “shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight... not for shameful gain, but eagerly” (1 Peter 5:2 ESV). The work was never mainly to run something. The work was to care for something—something purchased at a price beyond reckoning.
If you have sat in a pew, or a meeting, or a quiet car ride home, sensing that your church had somehow become more like a company than a family, and wondering whether the problem was simply you—I want you to know that you may not have been imagining it. And you are not alone in having felt it. For most of my years of service I assumed the unease was mine to manage and mine to suppress. I now believe it was a mercy: an early warning, perhaps even a prompting of the Spirit, offered while there was still time to listen.
Something was amiss. I could feel it long before I could say it.
But a thing that can be felt can be named. And a thing that can be named can be faced. The pages ahead give that quiet wrongness its name—what I finally found when I went looking, and why I have come to believe it is the hidden root of so much of the harm done in Christ’s name by the very people charged with preventing it.
It begins, as so many costly things do, with a substitution we never quite noticed we had made.
That is where chapter one ends, and where the book begins its real work: giving the quiet wrongness its name, and then handing you the repair.
unBiblical Eldership arrives Monday, August 17. If you would like to read the whole book early, the launch team is still forming, and early readers receive the full book immediately as a digital advance copy — a gift either way, with an honest review during launch week encouraged and never required. Everything is explained at unbiblicaleldership.com.
And if none of that is for you, the chapter still is. If the feeling it describes is one you know, you were not imagining it, and you were never alone in it. That is why this chapter comes first — and why it is yours today, whether or not you ever read page two.