It is incredibly ironic that the fruit of a leader’s identity in Christ is what tempts him to look elsewhere for identity. Somewhere, without a conscious rejection of his gospel theology, he has exchanged the stability of vertical identity for the instability of horizontal identity. Because he has made this exchange, his heart is exposed to a variety of ministry idolatries (e.g., knowledge, power, control, position, success, acclaim, lifestyle ease), and he is not the same person and does not function in the same way that he did in the early days of his ministry.
