unBiblical Eldership: Recognizing the quiet failure of church leadership - and recovering from it

This title may read like an accusation. If you are an elder and your guard just went up, that instinct - to defend the office - is a right one. So hear this first: this book is not an exposé. It names no church and settles no scores. It is a diagnosis of something quieter: the ordinary, unremarkable drift by which good men who love Scripture come to lead in ways Scripture would not recognize. No scandal required, and no villain - the author writes as a lay elder of more than two decades who sat at the table and drifted with the room.

If you sit in a pew and were told the trouble was your own heart, these pages will deal honestly with you - about what you saw, and about what to do with it now. If you sit at the table and something in the room has begun to trouble you, they will help you name it - and then hand you the repair.

Written for lay elders, deacons, pastors, and church members trying to make sense of a leadership that looks successful and feels wrong, unBiblical Eldership moves from diagnosis to repair: how business models quietly replace biblical shepherding, how an elder board drifts from oversight of souls to management of an organization, how accountability erodes without anyone deciding it should - and what recovery asks of the men at the table and the people in the pews.

The diagnosis and the repair are grounded throughout in careful study of the passages that define the office: 1 Timothy 3, Titus 1, Acts 20, and 1 Peter 5.

That is the aim of every page: not exposure, but recovery - a leadership brought back near the Shepherd it serves.