I am reading through Robert Culver's systematic theology, with varying degrees of profit. Twitter followers have enjoyed quotations I've lifted out and shared, some by Culver, some of those Culver quotes.
This falls into the latter category. I don't know much about the writer (Nathan Hatch of Notre Dame University, then Wake Forest University), but these remarks are dead on-target, could have been written by David Wells or even Carl Trueman
The evangelical movement is amazingly dynamic: entrepreneurial, decentralized, and given to splitting, forming, and reforming.…
The tendency is for us to anoint as leaders those who build a mass following in the free religious market. The thorny problem is that these leaders are not necessarily wise churchmen. They are more likely to be those who assume prominent political roles or who build mass special-purpose ministries. To the extent that this is the case, we allow the market to set the terms of church leadership.
The long-term question for evangelicals is what kind of shepherds we will follow, whether we will follow leaders whose interest is the well-being of the church itself, men and women who are theologically savvy, historically informed, and committed to seeing the church prosper in all of its dimensions and for all of its people.
[Nathan O. Hatch, Wheaton College Alumni Magazine (Summer, 1999), pp. 10, 11; quoted in Culver, R. D. (2005). Systematic Theology: Biblical and Historical (p. 807). Ross-shire, UK]Explains — or at least properly frames — a lot, doesn't it?
