No one likes a back seat driver least of all one criticizes your driving style loudly and in public. I confess I am guilty of backseat driving. In my last post (Establishing Trust Through Emotionally Healthy Leadership), I started out by speaking up about being an emotionally healthy church but I ended it with back seat driving comments for church leadership. That was not appropriate. I am grateful to those on the Leadership team who gently pointed it out to me. I apologize and ask for forgiveness.

Leadership has a hard enough job sorting through all the pastoral and governance concerns to worry about me telling them how they ought to run the church. They are the ones with the responsibility not me, so it was fair for a number of them to express their concerns and feelings about my directive comments. I should have addressed these comments directly to them rather than posting them at the end of my blog.

The problem with doing that in a blog on the Internet is that once you say something it immediately becomes public property and you can't really undo what you did.

So I need to make it a part of the public record that I was wrong to be critical or directive in my writing about transitions at our church. I stand behind and pray for the leadership and I wish them well as they navigate through some difficult waters.

Apologizing publicly when you have screwed up is actually one of the things recommended by Peter Scazzero in his book The Emotionally Healthy Church. It is a part of his chapter on Living in Brokenness and Vulnerability.