Today's Bishops

Excerpt from Chad Hall on The Rise of the New Bishops at Out of Ur

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I’ve been thinking lately about how influential a few leaders are in evangelical Christian America – especially among younger Christ-followers. Such leaders exercise a tremendous amount of influence on the thought and practice of other church leaders. I’ve come to think of them as the real bishops of today.

Just like the earliest church fathers, today’s bishops earnestly seek to discern what faithfulness is and then dispense their discernment among followers. Oh yes, and just like the old bishops, the new ones sometimes disagree and dispute what it means to be faithful and the dispute can carry over to their followers (as an earlier post re: Rob Bell and Mark Driscoll demonstrated).

So what gave rise to these new bishops? Three primary factors…

First, denominations are waning and few church leaders look to denominational leaders as experts on how to think theologically or practice church ministry well. ...

Second, geography has shrunk through the use of media such as the internet and especially the blogosphere, thus giving the masses access to leaders they’d otherwise never have encountered. ...

Third, there seems to be a growing populist mindset among our generation that prefers to select our leaders rather than have them selected for us. ...

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