Biblical Eldership, Forged in Hard-Won Experience

A word from the author

For some two decades, off and on, I’ve served as a lay elder—through healthy seasons and painful ones. I helped plant a church, and I watched good people, myself among them, choose the quiet of the table over the hard word that needed saying.

I write as the first person this message corrects. When accountability was needed most, my own failure took the shape of silence: I feared what honesty would cost more than I feared God. I’ve since been set aside from a leadership role I held—but the truer story isn’t that I was the faithful man wronged by fearful men. I was a fearful man among fearful men, and I’m still learning to abide.

Wounded Shepherd exists to help elder boards do the honest self-examination I didn’t —before the wounds, not after. Not exposure, but repair. The reason to read on isn’t dread. It’s hope.

— Randy Sedláček