I did not set out to write a book. I want to say that plainly at the start, because everything else I have to tell you today depends on it.
For more than two decades I served as a lay elder. I sat at the table. I read the reports, weighed the decisions, and believed for most of those years that the room I sat in was healthy because the men in it were good. Some of what I learned at that table I am glad to know. Some of it I would give a great deal to unlearn. And some of it cost me a wound I am not going to describe today, except to say this: if you have ever been handed a sorrow by the very people you served beside, you already know its shape.
People who carry a wound like that generally want one of two things. Some want to tell everyone. Some want to tell no one and quietly leave the whole subject behind. I was the second kind. So the last thing I expected, in the years that followed, was to find myself writing a book about church leadership. And yet on Monday, August 17, a book with my name on it arrives, and today I owe you the story of why.
The Sentence That Would Not Leave Me Alone
Paul opens his second letter to Corinth with a doxology that sounds, at first, like pure relief. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Corinthians 1:3–4 ESV).
Read it slowly and you find something more demanding than relief. There is a purpose clause buried in the middle of the sentence: so that. God comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction. The comfort has a destination beyond the comforted. It arrives the way a lamp arrives in a dark house—lit, and meant to be carried from room to room.
That is a hard sentence for a private man. It means the comfort God worked into me during the hardest season of my life was never only about me. The comfort was never mine to keep. Paul does not treat consolation as a keepsake. He treats it as a commission.
Why I Didn’t Want To
Let me be honest about the reluctance, because I think the reluctance is the most important part of the story.
I did not want to go back to the wound. Writing about church leadership meant sitting with everything I had seen and everything I had been, for months at a stretch, with the lights on. Anyone who has done real work on an old injury knows why a man might put that off.
I did not want to be misunderstood. A book about the failure of church leadership, written by a man who carries a wound from church leadership, will look to some readers like a long letter of revenge. I knew that before I wrote a word, and I feared it more than I feared the writing. So let me say here what the book itself says early. There is no scandal in this book, and no villain. The man it questions first is its author. It names no church and settles no scores. It is a diagnosis of something much quieter and much more common than scandal—the ordinary drift by which good men who love Scripture come to lead in ways Scripture would not recognize. I did not write it because I sat across from monsters. I wrote it because I sat at the table, and I drifted with the room.
And I did not want to presume. Shelves already sag under books about church leadership, written by men with credentials I do not have. What I have is twenty-plus years in the chair, a wound, and the comfort that found me inside it. For a long time I told myself that was not enough to justify a book.
What Changed
The purpose clause kept working on me.
It worked on me every time a reader of these articles wrote to describe a church situation I recognized down to the furniture. It worked on me every time I talked with an elder—and I have talked with many—who said some version of the same quiet sentence: something is wrong at our table, and I do not know what to call it. It worked on me every time I heard from someone in a pew who had raised an honest concern and been told the trouble was her own heart.
Each time, I noticed the same thing. What these people needed was not my opinion. They needed what I had been given. The diagnosis I had paid years to learn. The vocabulary for the drift. The assurance that they were not crazy and not alone. The path back toward health that Scripture has held out the whole time. Comfort, in Paul’s sense of the word—not a pat on the shoulder, but strength brought alongside.
Jesus said something to Peter on the worst night of Peter’s life that I have come to hear as the pattern for all of this: “but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers” (Luke 22:32 ESV). When you have turned again. The failure was not the end of Peter’s usefulness. It was the curriculum for it. What he would have to give his brothers afterward was precisely what he learned in the sifting.
I stopped asking whether I was qualified to write the book and started asking whether I was permitted to keep declining. Comfort that stops with the comforted was never fully received.
What the Book Is
So: the book. It is called unBiblical Eldership: Recognizing the quiet failure of church leadership — and recovering from it, and it releases under the Wounded Shepherd name.
It is written for two readers. If you sit in a pew and were told the trouble was your own heart, the book deals honestly with you—about what you saw, and about what to do with it now. If you sit at the table, as I did, and something in the room has begun to trouble you, it will help you name what you are seeing, and then it will hand you the repair. Not exposure. Recovery. A leadership brought back near the Shepherd it serves.
It took longer to write than I planned, because I kept having to stop and let it read me. I hope that shows.
The Commission Is Yours Too
Before I tell you how the book arrives, I want to widen the lens, because Paul’s sentence was not written to authors.
Whatever affliction you have carried—and among the readers of these articles, I know something of what is carried—if comfort found you inside it, that comfort came with the same purpose clause attached. Somewhere near you is a person sitting in the early dark of the affliction you know from the inside. The one thing they most need to hear is the thing you are uniquely able to say: I have been where you are, and God did not leave me there.
You do not need to write a book to hand on the comfort you were given. You need a cup of coffee and an hour, and the willingness to say the quiet thing out loud. The Father of mercies rarely wastes a wound; He turns wounds into credentials, and sufferers into the very comforters they once needed. If you take one sentence from this article into your week, let it be this one: your comfort is also a commission.
And if you are still in the early dark yourself—if there is no comfort in your hands yet to pass along—then hear me clearly: nothing in this article is asking anything of you. Receiving comes first. It is not a lesser season. It is where every comforter I have ever trusted began.
The Book, and an Invitation
unBiblical Eldership arrives Monday, August 17.
Between now and then, I am gathering a launch team, and the team is forming now. Early readers receive the full book immediately as a digital advance copy. The copy is a gift either way. If the book earns it, an honest review during launch week would help it find the elders and church members it was written for, and honest is the only kind I want. Reviews are encouraged, never required. Everything is explained, with a short signup form, at unbiblicaleldership.com.
If that invitation is not for you, this last word is. The book exists because a sentence in 2 Corinthians would not leave me alone, and the sentence is still true whether or not you ever read a page I wrote. The God of all comfort is not finished comforting. What He hands you in the dark, He means for you to carry into someone else’s. The comfort was never mine to keep. Yours is not either.