They mystery of reclaiming a prophet

Adventist Today recently offered this program 

Eric Anderson, “What Would Adventism Be Without a Prophet?”
Here is a 60-second snipped clip:

Well, I keep thinking about how we're defining prophet and I found that the definition that I offered in reclaiming the prophet was for some people a a tremendous watering down uh an evasion. 

Maybe I should quote that. Um, and I'm a little mystified. I still don't understand this. Why this is a bad way to define the term prophet. I wrote the authors of reclaiming the prophet will often employ the term  prophet to describe Ellen White. The point is not to mystify readers nor to hide ordinary thoughts or central historical context. Using non-technical layman's language is a prophet is a person who in God's name persuades a leader who changes people's behavior. And I went on to talk about her achievements and the ways in which uh we need to take those into account. That bothered some people and they thought that was um explaining away a prophet. That was a a bad definition of a prophet. I still don't quite get that a leader is a person who in God's name persuades. That sounds like a prophet to me. Quite quite an interesting approach 1:15:38

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLxn2k3WcoM 

I am unsure why he is mystified because, in fact, his definition is simply a slightly obscured meaning of prophet, but certainly covers what prophet means. A prophet in the Bible is someone chosen by God to speak for God, acting as a messenger to convey the message God wants to the people. So why do I say his definition uses an obscuring meaning? Because in his definition, the most important part seems to be glossed over. "prophet is a person who in God's name". 

So before anyone listens to "the persuades a leader to change other people," they would have to accept that the prophet is speaking in God's name, which parts are really the parts God wants to convey. That is the entire problem with Ellen White, someone with numerous false prophecies and a known serial plagiarist speaking in God's name at all. There is also the second problem with the redefinition in that it is addressed to leaders; it is up to the leaders to change people's behavior. If you had a prophet, should the information be limited to leaders? Why would that be?

The more I hear from these writers of Reclaiming the Prophet the more I think that what they really want is to be the academic leaders who explain Ellen White to the Adventist Church. They want to have the historical context to interpret Ellen White. So that the people in higher education, the Ellen White Scholars and the Adventist historians can tell the rest of us what Ellen White meant and did not mean. So they can tell us when Ellen White contradicts herself which principle will rule. Some will even say to take her only in a pastoral role. That may sound good, but if your pastor was plagiarizing others' sermons and using false history and numerous pieces of Biblical fiction, that is things that are not in the Bible but pretended to be part of the Bible. Would you really even take that person in a pastoral role? At best, you might see them as having some sort of devotional material that, if you can avoid all the problems, might be encouraging in some way. This seems to be the great hope of Progressive Adventists, but I don't see it as much to be hoped for, I think it is an attempt at church control, which I have for quite some time said is what Progressive Adventists have really wanted. But I don't think that a change in bureaucracy is really a cure for Adventists problems.