And that is why, as long as there are unaccountable but powerful leaders out there who take advantage of the decent, honest evangelical people who fund the operation (and lots of whom attend the churches where many of us minister week by week), we have to hope that there will be those who can neither be bought nor bullied but who will continue to point this sorry fact out to all who will listen.  

 
Regarding recent posts concerning recent events, I have been asked why I take so much pleasure in attacking God’s people. That is an interesting comment, remarkable for its claims to telepathic insight into my thought processes and one that perhaps requires a small clarification on my part: criticism of certain leaders of evangelicalism who seek to exert massive influence in the evangelical world but who eschew proper accountability to that world is not identical with criticism of God’s people tout court.

It is specifically criticism of a leadership and a leadership culture which considers itself in practice accountable to nobody but itself and those to whom it chooses to listen, and which seeks to control the flow of news in such a way that, once the Top Men have agreed to the story, any dissent from that story can be dismissed as the mean-minded and malicious ranting of the envious and excluded. That is a typical ploy used by unaccountable leadership in all spheres, from the political through to the religious: identify any specific criticism of the leadership as general criticism of the whole and then treat it as detrimental to the common good. To quote a certain leader from biblical times, ‘Is that you, you troubler of Israel?’

And that is why, as long as there are unaccountable but powerful leaders out there who take advantage of the decent, honest evangelical people who fund the operation (and lots of whom attend the churches where many of us minister week by week), we have to hope that there will be those who can neither be bought nor bullied but who will continue to point this sorry fact out to all who will listen.

In the meantime, in case you have missed them, here are some other links to articles which have interesting comments on the plagiarism/ghosting affair: World chimes in here; there is an interesting blog here; and, for purposes of nostalgia, another word of prophecy here. A key paragraph in the latter post reads as follows  — which, just to be clear, is not an attack on ordinary, decent evangelical people whose honest, hard earned cash funds the operation but on some of those who claim to lead them:

Underlying it all, of course, is American conservative evangelicalism’s dirty little secret: the movement, such as it is, embraces mutually incompatible views of the ministerial calling which presumably must rest on mutually incompatible theologies of ministry. There are those who think ministry is, above all else, about preaching the word in the local congregation and that that is to be the pastor’s top priority bar none, from the choice of passage to its final delivery. And there are those for whom ministry is – well, to be honest, I do not really know what exactly they think it is. I cannot describe it because websites such as this are just more evidence that, whatever it is, I do not have the categories to explain it sympathetically to others.

Dr. Carl Trueman is Paul Woolley Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary and pastor of Cornerstone Presbyterian Church in Ambler, PA. This article first appeared at Reformation 21 and is used with permission.