Presbyterian church polity can help us here.
It is a saying as old as Shakespeare that ‘men should be what they seem.’
Scripture says there should be no disjunction between the heart, character, and life of a man who is called to proclaim God’s Word and the content of the message he proclaims:
“Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee” (1 Tim. 4:16).
In other words, there should be no gap or inconsistency between what we are privately and what we appear to be in public. Anything else is hypocrisy. As ministers we are called to be as holy in our private relationship with God, in our role as husbands and fathers in our families, and as shepherds among our people as we appear to be on the pulpit.
We should live by the Word we preach; we should be transcripts of our sermons. Our churches should uphold the standards of the Bible for the daily life and conduct of officers and members. It is so easy to cultivate a pious image; it is much more difficult but much more profitable to sanctify the Lord God in our hearts and serve Him with fear and trembling. Personal integrity is a discipline of true godliness.
Presbyterian church polity can help us here. It is a basic principle of that polity that the authority given by Christ to church officers is joint authority that is exercised by officers assembled together in church courts.
A minister or elder by himself is simply another member of the church and should also. be subject to church discipline like any other member By contrast, the pre-Reformation church had succumbed to one man rule, with popes and bishops and even parish priests lording it over others.
A Presbyterian minister must be accountable to his fellow office bearers, locally and in the higher courts. To act independently of the courts of the church is to usurp and abuse your authority.
When authority is abused, the world has every right to be hostile toward us. Today in America—and no doubt Korea as well—many ministers have forgotten this. They act as if elders and deacons are just there to serve their wishes. They have abandoned the whole concept of biblical, servant leadership.
And once they abandon servant leadership, they make themselves vulnerable to all kinds of temptations, such as inappropriate sexual advances and adultery, sermon plagiarism, man-pleasing, power-grabbing, and financial abuse. The list of spiritual and moral failures in both the American and Korean church is embarrassingly long. And sadly, ministers who perpetuate these abuses, instead of being disciplined and deposed, often receive little admonition and stay in power far too long.
All this shames the church in the eyes of the world.
The world has every right to expect the church to act like the church.
When the church loses its saltiness in the world and increasingly acts like the world rather than like the church, we ought not be surprised when the world despises the church’s hypocrisy since the world is living in that hypocritical environment continually and knows what it is like.
Joel R. Beeke, Puritan Reformed Theology: Historical, Experiential, and Practical Studies for the Whole Life (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2020), 665–66
“This chapter [How to Battle Hostility and Secularism] ]was originally an address before Korean pastors in May of 2014 in California on how to battle hostility and secularism in Korean churches” (663n1)
iustitia aliena 
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