Chapter One

A crisis of leadership faces both the world and the church. As I write these words, the headlines in the secular press are all about leaders in the corporate world who have been guilty of appalling moral negligence. They have bankrupted major corporations because of their own personal greed. They have engaged in illegal insider trading. They have lied, cheated, stolen, and swindled. The scope and scale of corporate corruption in the world today are almost inconceivable.

In the political realm, the picture may be even more bleak. The moral scandals that rocked the Clinton White House changed the climate of American politics. The lesson of that episode (as far as some politicians are concerned) seemed to be that a person can lie and cheat and lack moral integrity—and yet not necessarily forfeit his career as a politician. Personal integrity, apparently, is no longer a requirement for political office. In the post-Clinton culture, a serious moral indiscretion seems to be no significant impediment to candidates for public office.

In the visible church, sadly, things are little better. The televangelist scandals of the 1980s seem to be all but forgotten. Nothing much really changed in the wake of the scandals. If anything, the state of so-called "Christian" television is far worse than it was before. Most Christian TV celebrities are still making greedy, nonstop appeals for money. Christian recording artists keep embarrassing the church with scandalous moral failures. And we still regularly hear of pastors who discredit their ministries and disqualify themselves by defaulting in the one thing that m