Yet the leaders of the “young, restless, and reformed” have not typically allowed that concern to curtail their comments in the past. Many of them have been outspoken about the teaching of Joel Osteen, for example. In their early days, when the Emergent Church was vying with the new Calvinism for pole position in the American evangelical world, they launched regular, and often very thorough, critiques of the Emergent leaders. In retrospect, however, it is clear that these were soft targets. Their very distance made them safe. Problems closer to home are always much harder to speak to, much more likely to earn opprobrium from one’s friends, and thus much more likely to be ignored. The result, however, is that some leaders become very accustomed to always doing things their way. All of us who are thought of as Evangelical or Reformed now live with the bitter fruit of that failure of leadership.
—Carl Trueman, “Mark Driscoll’s Problems And Ours” (HT: God in the Wasteland)
Whenever there are problems like this I always wonder what the elders are doing. About two years ago I was in a church where the pastor was accused of plagiarism…It was a difficult time. The pastor admitted to some copying, but made it sound like an accidental oversight…just a little slip of the pen. I later ran into one of the elders who had resigned over this matter and he was more angry with the elders than he was with the minister. They were not willing to do their job. He had demonstrated that the copying was on a much bigger scale. The elders stood by the pastor, not willing to consider the gravity of the offense. I think in many cases elders do not appreciate the importance of their role in the church.
As boxing promoter Don King said, “Only in America.”