The author
Randy Sedláček served as a lay elder off and on across some two decades, including a season as board chairman. He writes not as a seminary-trained scholar or a professional minister, but as a layman who sat at the table where such things are decided—who saw both the health and the harm of church leadership up close, who failed in ways he does not excuse, and who has spent the years since searching the Scriptures for what he wishes he had seen sooner.
He no longer serves in church leadership; for now, he and his wife, Kathy, attend a congregation not as leaders but as those being ministered to, in a season that requires it. Married more than forty years, they have two grown daughters and six grandchildren they cherish.
He is the founder of Wounded Shepherd, a ministry for believers and leaders wounded by church leadership and longing for its repair, where he writes at wounded-shepherd.com and on Substack. More than anything in these pages, he hopes you are left looking past the author to the Chief Shepherd.
How this book was made
I used artificial-intelligence tools as a drafting and editorial partner in writing this book—to help me draft, organize, sharpen, and test what I was trying to say. I want to be plain about that, because a book that asks leaders to stop hiding things has no business hiding its own workings. What the tools did not do is think for me. Every conviction in these pages, every reading of Scripture, every judgment about what was true and what was mine to say, I weighed and I own. The experience behind the book is mine, the responsibility for it is mine, and where it errs, the error is mine and not a machine's. I have tried to offer it the way I would want anything handed to the flock to be offered—honestly, and without pretense about where it came from.
Where Randy writes
Wounded Shepherd is a ministry for believers and leaders wounded by church leadership and longing for its repair. Randy writes there weekly.
- wounded-shepherd.com (opens in a new tab)
- Substack (opens in a new tab) , where the writing arrives by email