We have an hour and 15 minutes and we’ve got two more units. The two units are the function of elders in the New Testament, governing and teaching, and the last one is qualifications for elders. Those will easily fill up this time and I want to make sure that you feel free to ask questions along the way.

Pains in Implementing the Ministry of Shepherding

Some of you have asked good questions in the break time here and I hope some of those will come out. I do not presume to have answers for all these questions that you’re answering because while we’ve worked hard to create a structure at Bethlehem, the implementation of the shepherding ministry is the greatest structural frustration of my life in this church. How do we shepherd the 1,200 members faithfully? And then there are hundreds of people who come to this church who aren’t members. The small group system that you create partnering with elders to oversee those people, half your people don’t go to.

So, how do you provide crisis care and know the spiritual whereabouts so that they’re not into sin or drifting away when they don’t participate in the structure that you’ve provided at a volunteer level like the small group system? We just don’t have good answers to that yet. I don’t think you can be satisfied as shepherds who will give an account someday of the souls in your charge by just saying, “Well, they don’t come, so tough.” There needs to be some way where you get at people. You pursue people. According to James 5, you pursue them if they’re sheep that are drifting away into the thicket or ready to fall over a cliff, or about to leave their wife or husband, or starting to commit some kind of financial inappropriate behavior at work, or they just don’t read their Bibles anymore. They hardly go to church. Elders are responsible to figure that out and pursue those people.

Now, there always will be people like that, always in every church. That’s clear from Jesus’ teaching about the parable of the tares and so on. There will never be a perfect church if you get too rigorous and say, “We’re going to have a church where every member is accountable and every member fulfills responsibility for X number of attendance at church and at tithing and this,” you will either go crazy or you’ll have a very tiny legalistic church. You can’t make people. You just can’t make people do all the things they ought to do and not every one of those things is a disciplinable thing. I think discipline really is for the major gross, flagrant, community-known acts, not every little shortfall. How many small group meetings can you miss before you’re disciplined and how many Sunday mornings or Wednesday evenings or whatever can you miss? I just don’t know how you would draw lines like that without going beyond the New Testament.

So, I just say I don’t have answers to all these questions about how to implement the care ministry, the shepherding ministry, but just to say, and I’ll probably say this in 15 years when I’m about to be done here, “We tried hard.” I’ve been here 18 years and here I am saying, “We try. We think about it. We try to put staff in place. We try to put structures in place.” We try, but my oh my, we have a long way to go.

Governing and Teaching

Let’s try to organize what I think has been implicit already as we talk about the function of elders in the New Testament, namely governing and teaching. I’ll try to show why I think those are the two ways and what governing or oversight involves. The responsibilities of elders are summed up under two heads: governing and teaching. Let’s take those one at a time and see the texts that point in those directions.

Governing the Church

First, let’s look at governing. First Timothy 5:17 says:

Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching.

The word “rule” is proistēmi (literally “stand before”). That’s just a vague etymology there, but it’s used for leadership, guidance, and authority several times in the New Testament. He says, “Let the elders who govern well . . .” See, that’s what we’re talking about here. They govern well. That doesn’t mean having slick and efficient meetings. It means are the people cared for successfully? That’s what governing well means. Are they mobilized and taught successfully? Are they giving richly? Are they living upright and godly lives? Have you put structures in place that help them do that and call them to account when they don’t? He continues:

Let them be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching (1 Timothy 5:17).

So, governing here comes from that word “rule.” That’s where I’m getting that and in a minute, I’m going to put number two after governing and include teaching. I’ll come back and I’ll get it here. So, within the elders, the Presbyterian church has often distinguished between teaching elders and ruling elders, and I believe they’ve always said, I hope they do, that the ruling elders still have to be apt to teach because all elders have to be apt to teach according to 1 Timothy 3:2. They have to be able to correct doctrine, but some do it especially (malista). That’s me. I devote my life to studying the Bible and to teaching it and preaching it.

First Timothy 3:4–5 says:

He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?

We’ll talk more about this when we get to qualifications and ask, “Okay, how successful does he have to be if this kid ever mouths off at him? Does he have to get off the council if his kid skips school one day? Or how bad can a teenager get before his dad shouldn’t be an elder?” That’s not an easy question. I’ve been through pain with my kids and shared it with those who should know and we wept together and cried together and now things are good, but I don’t say it to my family because I think it would be too big for them to carry. I’ve said to myself, my kids and my wife can destroy my ministry according to this verse.

The point here is simply that the reason for looking at a man’s family is to see if he can govern. It’s the same word. Can you manage your household? Do you know how to lead a wife and children to the Lord in devotions? If you can’t lead devotions at home, you’re not going to be an elder in this church. I don’t check up on the elders carefully, but we do remind each other around our council, “How’s it going at home? Are you beginning to slip into careless activity?” If you can’t gather a few children and a wife and lead them in prayer and sing a song and pray together and teach your children how to pray, for example, how in the world are you going to lead a huge family to God in prayer and in the word? So, governing, overseeing, or managing would be another word for it there.

Shepherds of the Flock

I’m continuing texts now that points towards governance. The duty of elders to oversee or shepherd the flock implies a governing or leading function. Acts 20:28 says:

Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.

This is so crucial that we don’t see the power dimension, the authority dimension, and the oversight dimension as something that gives you a right to lord it over others, but rather to shepherd. Shepherds care for sheep. They rescue sheep. They feed sheep. They comb the wool of sheep. They stay out late at night to protect the sheep from wolves. Shepherd the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood.

First Peter 5:1–2 says:

So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed: shepherd the flock of God . . .

First Thessalonians 5:12 says:

We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you (proistēmi) in the Lord and admonish you . . .

I’m simply pointing out here that there are leaders in this church who do this sort of thing. There is no reference to elders in this verse, I know that, but the function of the leader is governing and the natural assumption is that the leaders are elders that Paul had appointed according to Acts 14:23.

Authority and Submission

Here’s the last text on governing, and then we turn to teaching:

Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account (Hebrews 13:17).

Obedience and submission implies a role of leadership and governance, and again, the reference is probably to the elders, though the leaders are not described as elders explicitly. My simple point is there are these texts that say the leaders of the church have a governing, overseeing, leading, managing role. That’s not just to be done by the congregation as a whole. If you have a tiny little house church, it may be that the distinctions are almost negligible because everybody knows everybody and all the meetings are everybody together, but once you broaden out to just 30, 40, or 50 people, you immediately have to have somebody coming to the top who tends to organize, manage, think through, solve problems, make suggestions, and lead.

I’d love to do a seminar right after this one on just the nature and the dynamic of leadership because I think in a healthy church, the saints love to be led well. They love to be led well — led with prayer, led with the word, and led with humble service. They don’t want bumblers making stupid decisions or passive pastors and elders who just never dream any dreams. People start asking, “What are we doing? What are we going to do? How are we going to win people to Christ? How are we going to do missions here? How are we going to train people? You guys got any ideas? Do something.” That makes the church really sick and just sad. That’s a much greater danger than to have visionary leaders who are just trumpeting vision and then effectively recruiting the troops to follow.

When does somebody’s eldership over me end? If I moved or I was a missionary for 10 years or I was a part of a church and now I moved to another church?

It’s probably ambiguous at certain kinds of leavings, but I think if everyone were taught to plug in significantly to the local church where they are, that would be the point where you shift your leaning on leadership. As long as a person is a member here, we should feel the responsibility, but we shouldn’t abuse membership by stopping coming or leaving and starting to go to Spring Lake Park Baptist and leave your membership here for three years. That’s a mistake and that creates the ambiguity of your kind of question. Who are my elders? Well, it should be Spring Lake Park.

Now, of course, there’s a transition period whether you move to Colorado or if you go to California or New York or whatever. There’s a transition period where you look for a church and find a body of believers and then fold in and sometimes you’re not sure and so take a year and during that time, it’s ambiguous, but I think you should feel free to write letters back or make calls back and say, “I’m having trouble finding a church and I’m drying up out here. Would you pray for me and we should feel some sense of responsibility?” We should say, “Yes, we’ll pray for you and whatever little clusters of small groups you were in, they still care about that.”

For example, Noël and I left Lake Avenue Congregational Church in 1971 where we had been plugged in for three years, that’s all. But we really plugged in. I taught seventh grade boys. I taught ninth grade boys. I taught one adult Sunday school class. I had a disciple relationship with a senior pastor for about six weeks. We plugged in with all our might during seminary into this local church, all right? Then we decided we’re going to Germany for three years. Now in Germany, we never joined a church. That church and one man in particular on the council of elders wrote to me almost monthly, hoping that I would come back there someday and let them do whatever ordination might follow, and that resulted in my being ordained at Lake Avenue Congregational Church in 1975, 4 years later.

He cared for me and others that we had befriended, but when we left, they all prayed and gathered around us and said, “May the Lord open up a structure for you into which you’re enfolded in small groups for nurture,” and God answered those prayers in incredible ways. So, that was like a missionary situation, I think. It was temporary, but ideally I should have joined a church in Munich for three years. There were language problems. There were cultural problems. There were other things. I just left my membership there. I would say let’s try to teach our people that if they change churches, they should change membership and do it as quickly as they can, and if you jump from church to church because your job moves you every six months or so, join a new church every six months.

Membership does not have to be a long thing. It means, “I’m here and I want to be responsible to you. I want you to teach and care for me and love me while I’m here. I’m part of this body and I’m here as long as I’m here.”

What if somebody is running from spiritual authority trying to get away from the church? Do the elders have responsibility?

The answer is absolutely yes. James 5:19–20 says you should pursue the sinner and pluck them and save them from the flames. You leave the 99 and you go after the one. That’s what the shepherd does and that’s what we’re not as good at. I’m just tipping my hand here. I would like to see in the year 2000, a new staff member at this church whose main job would be called something like “pastoral care/congregational care” or something like that. We would lift certain things from David Livingston. He does everything and we install him and say, “Your job is to create structures and oversee structures of our members so that number one, we know the spiritual whereabouts of everybody who’s on this covenant membership list.”

That’s a huge job, but otherwise we’re just playing games with membership. I just thought of somebody last night. Noël said to me, “Where’s so-and-so?” I said, “Huh, I haven’t seen them for a long, long time.” I would tell you who they were, but I don’t want to expose that. I’m a really busy person. Do I call all those people up? I mean, there’s so many like that. We need a structure for that and we need structures for discipline — for those who are running and others who’ve just stumbled and fallen and a loving embrace would bring them back or encourage them. We should have someone who could say, “Get your membership changed for goodness’ sake. It’s been five years and you’re going to this other church and you’re functioning there. Stop this negligence.” And there would be a couple of other things.

But we as elders are so busy and have so many things on our plate. We push that to the back over and over and over again to our own discredit. We don’t follow through on knowing the spiritual whereabouts of our covenant members.

Teaching the Church

Here’s the second function of elders. There’s the general management, governance, oversight, and it’s done mainly through teaching, not just formal teaching in classes and pulpit, but word use in counseling settings and in small group settings. It’s the use of the Bible in powerful, effective, convicting, winsome ways. Pastors and teachers are pictured as one office so that the pastor whom we have identified as an elder has the responsibility of teaching. Ephesians 4:11 says:

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ . . .

The teaching function there seems to be folded right into the pastoring dimension and that’s to equip the saints for the work of the ministry to the upbuilding of the body of Christ.

We should constantly have a view to use the word of God to equip saints to do ministry. Use the word of God to equip saints to do ministry. Be thinking of mobilization all the time. First Timothy 3:2 says:

Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach . . .

We’ve seen that the overseer and elder are the same office. This qualification is not included in the list of qualifications for deacons. First Timothy 5:17, we’ve seen already. It says that those who labor in preaching and teaching are the elders. It’s not that all don’t have to be able to teach, they do, but some labor in it. That is, they devote more time and energy to it, perhaps earning their living by it. Each elder is vested with the right to teach and exercise authority in the church and must have the qualifications for it. Titus 1:9 I read to show that it may not necessarily mean an upfront charismatic kind of gift in communication, but he must hold firm the sure word as taught.

There’s a firm hold. When you’re interviewing these men, you try to discern, “Does he have a firm hold here on the sure word as taught? Can he get his head into the head of the apostles, and does he have a firm hold on it? Or does he sound like he doesn’t really know what he believes? Or does he sound fragile so that if a strong charismatic voice leading in another direction came along, he would just flop and fall into line with that new teaching?” Well, he’s not going to make an elder if he lacks firmness. It’s so that he may be able to give instruction. Now, that may be private like Priscilla and Aquila with Apollos in his house. They took him aside and set him straight. And it also involves an ability to refute those that contradict sound teaching.

A young man three weeks ago walked to the front and he said, “I was converted in Korea about five years ago and I knew nothing and I went to the church that I was sent to and now I think the church was a cult.” He was referring to the Church of Christ — the branch of it that views baptism as necessary for justification and who think all other baptisms are defective such that the only Christians belong to their church and so on. He was in torment and he said, “I need somebody to help me because I’m not sure what I believe about this.” Our elders should be able to help him, all of them. Not all elders need to be able to do public preaching.

Here’s the conclusion on this point. The function of elders may be summed up under two heads: teaching and governing. They are the doctrinal guardians of the flock and the overseers of the life of the church, and they are responsible to God for the feeding and care and the ministry of the people. Any questions before we turn to the qualifications for elders?

How do elders guard the time for study and meditation and prayer while undertaking the necessary oversight and governance of the church?

It will necessarily involve some pretty practical things. Everyone in this room would say, “Why in the world are elders talking about parking until midnight? Don’t you have a parking committee? Can’t you have some deacons to do that?” The answer is, we may have made a mistake that night. The other answer is it takes a lot of work to put in place the kinds of structures that make sure things like parking and finance happen. Or consider greeting ministries on Sunday morning. Building a new building that reflects the values of this church is another thing, which we are on the brink of doing. That old sanctuary there is going to fall down if we don’t take it down. The way that ministry intersects with practicality forces governors to do some of that overlap.

So I hear the problem that you’re raising, and I would say we need to encourage each other and help each other to be students of the word. We need to tell each other, “Make sure you get up early enough or stay up late enough or carve out a time in the middle of the day when you are meditating on the word.” Then the elders who are lay elders and have jobs besides all this governing need to say to those of us whom they pay to do this full time, “You be sure that you do the hard work so you understand this complex issue of God’s foreknowledge, or baptism, or something, and write things for us to read.” Help us because we can’t read all those books. We can think we can read our Bibles, but there’s a distinction of balance here.

The “especially” of 1 Timothy 5:17 comes into it. You’re one of those “especially” people. Your elders need to say, “David, we will help you,” and your deacons need to say, “We will help you because we want you to spend X amount of time in prayer and in study so that you can feed us in our various settings, and in this council on Sunday,” and whatever. The way the rubber is probably going to meet the road is for you to be constantly in touch with those people saying, “I’m really frustrated because I’m getting these calls and I’ve got to do this and this, and I haven’t read a book in six months. Do you think that’s healthy for us long term?” They’ll hopefully say, “That’s not healthy long term. We have to help you.” Then you devote till midnight working out some structure that figures that out.

In my case, my sort of week and job description and allocation of energies has changed every couple of years the whole time I’ve been here. As the church has grown, there’ve been more staff or less staff. There have been different challenges. There’ll come a season where there’s a building season and we just say, “Okay, in 1996 we’re going to raise $1.1 million here. John, you with us? You’re going to help us?” That means back burner to the books. You got to be in every small group, about 25 of them for a season of three months here. I say, “All right, I’ll give myself to that for these three months, but don’t make me do this forever. Okay?” There’s seasons in your life where you make adjustments.

Right now, I’m in a season and my life has taken on a form that’s totally different than any of yours, I’m sure, in the way I apportion my week and the amount of time I give to this or that. So, just be flexible and grow with your church and be open and talk with those deacons and elders to make sure that for some of you in the “especially” category, the time for prayer and study is being carved out. That’s different from the others. All elders don’t have to spend the same amount of time in study and prayer, but some should be especially doing it.

A husband with a job and a wife and three kids is very busy. They need to have quiet time when studying with their family at home. That’s why that’s the bar you have to climb over.

That’s very good. The comment was simply made that this qualification, which is about where we’re going to turn to now, of being able to manage your household well means that in the actual nitty-gritty, slogging it out, if a man has a wife who needs attention and 2–5 kids who need a father and need to be with him on the floor, sometime during the day playing together, plus he has a job at church, plus he has a job at work, he has to figure that out. If he can figure that out, then he might be fit to help the church figure out her spiritual needs as well.

Biblical Qualifications for Elders

The issue of whether elders should be men or women or both is covered in the TBI Seminar on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. I know if you’re from another church, that doesn’t help you any because you’re not free to be here probably on Wednesday nights, but if you are free, the next two Wednesday nights is when I’m going to be tackling this. This coming Wednesday night, we’ll be winding up the marriage dimension and then we’ll be taking the function of whether women should be elders and why or why not.

I’m not going to deal with that here. I’m just going to assume that elders are men and ask what kind of men they should be. Qualifications of elders according to 1 Timothy 3:1–7 are as follows:

The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task.

Aspiration becomes significant and I just put the little Greek words over here for any of you who want to look at those. At least one way for a man to attain the role of elder is to aspire to it. In fact, since it is the duty of elders to do their work with gladness and not under constraint or for the love of money (1 Peter 5:1–3), this should be thought of as one of the elder’s qualifications. Nobody should be an elder who doesn’t want to be an elder because 1 Peter 5:2 says, “Let him do his job eagerly.” If you can’t do it eagerly, you should take a break.

Now that may be an overstatement because everybody has seasons of discouragement and I wouldn’t want to resign every time I went into one of them, but if that becomes chronic, I probably need to step back, ask for a sabbatical, or leave of absence or something. You say, “I haven’t loved the ministry for six months. I’m just slogging it out every day, and hate everything I do. I’m just tired of this thing.” If I get to that point, I need to be honest with my elders and say, “You better give me a break or send me packing because I’m not doing anybody any good probably.” If you go into that kind of darkness for a week or a month, give yourself some room there to get over whatever it is that might’ve brought that on.

Aspiration I think is important. No pressure should be used that would result in an unwilling half-hearted service.

Irreprochable

The passage continues:

The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. Therefore an overseer must be above reproach . . .

Let me just explain to you what you’re looking at here. I adapted a little bit in preparation for this class, but not much. This comes from a document that we produced before we chose our first elders in 1991 and 1992, and we made an effort as a council of deacons on their way to becoming elders as to what each of these words meant so that we would know. There’s 17 of them in this, and some overlap in Titus. We want to know. We have to get its meaning here. What’s going on so that when we interview guys we can ask them about meaning and application in their lives. So, that’s what you’re looking at here is our effort to do that and we’ll try to make that document available eventually. It needs to be cleaned up a little bit, but we will make it available.

Elsewhere in the New Testament, the word “irreproachable” is used only in 1 Timothy 5:7, where widows are to be without reproach by putting their hope in God and not living luxuriously or sumptuously or self-indulgently, and 1 Timothy 6:14 where Timothy is to keep the commandment irreproachable until Jesus comes. The word seems to be a general word for living in a way that gives no cause for others to think badly of the church, or the faith, or the Lord. This tells us nothing about the sort of thing that would bring reproach on the church of the Lord, but it’s coming at the head of the list. It’s interesting. This is first after aspiration. Coming at the head of the list, it puts a tremendous emphasis on what a person’s reputation is. The focus here seems to be not a person’s relationship to the Lord, but how others see him.

It seems, therefore, right from the outset that the public nature of the office is in view with its peculiar demands. So, I’m arguing there that a person who’s persistently behaving in ways that bring reproach from outside upon the gospel or the church or Christ, you need to look long and hard as to whether he’s fit to be an elder. Now you have to be careful here, don’t you? Because Jesus had enemies and who doesn’t have enemies if he’s being a righteous person? Paul said, “If you desire to live a godly life, you will be persecuted.” Well, I’ll tell you, when people persecute Christians, they say nasty things. They reproach them. So being above reproach can’t mean never having an unbelieving person speak an evil word against you when Paul says, “If you want to be godly, they’re going to speak against you.”

So you have to be discerning as a council here as to whether the stumbling blocks that this guy is putting in the way of other people are unwarranted stumbling blocks. Is he bringing reproach that if he didn’t say it that way, if he didn’t do that, they wouldn’t respond that way? Each one of these things is going to be tough and there’s going to be a way you can misapply it and a way you can apply it correctly. These lists are by no means exhaustive and they are not in themselves without ambiguity. I’ll say at the end, these are not exhaustive lists. Do you know what’s missing entirely from both the lists of Titus and Timothy? There’s not a word about prayer. Isn’t that amazing? There’s nothing that says, “Don’t steal, don’t kill, or don’t lie,” although there would be implications. These are not exhaustive lists. So above reproach means don’t cause unnecessary criticisms from outside to arise to Christ.

A One-Woman Man

This is the controversial one. We could spend all the rest of our time on this. It probably wouldn’t be wise to do it. We’ve touched on it. The word is a one-woman man, and the one is foremost. The word order emphasizes the word one. So, it’s not likely that Paul meant to say that the elders have to be married, but if they’re married, they should be married to one woman. There are words for married he could have used. He could have said they need to be married. The word order would probably have put husband in the prominent place if that were his intention.

Moreover, Paul was not married and he thought singleness was an excellent way to be freer for ministry (1 Corinthians 7:32). It would be odd if his counsel in 1 Corinthians 7:32 that he wished all people to be single like himself meant, “And none of you can be elders if you’re totally devoted to the Lord.” It would be strange. So, I can’t bring myself to think that’s what he meant. In verse four, Paul gets to the issue of how well a man manages his household. So the point here is probably not the man’s competence as a husband because that’s dealt with later. The point probably coming right after irreproachable is one of notoriety. What is this man’s reputation with regard to whether he has had one wife or not? It appears that the public standard will be high.

Here are the three options that I’ll lay out for you. Does it mean that the elder (1) may not be a polygamist? (2) May not remarry after the death of his first spouse? Or (3) may not be remarried after divorce? What is the meaning of the elder must be the husband of one woman? Now, this is very controversial. I’ve talked to some of you already and I know how painful this can be. I’m sure there are divorced people in this room and you’re wondering if you’re going to wear the big D letter on your shirt for the rest of your life and be a second-class citizen and so on. Those would be the feelings that begin to crop up inside a person who’s divorced and remarried. Let’s walk our way through this. I’ll give you my reasons for arguing for this third position, which is what I think it means.

The main argument against number one, namely polygamist, is the use of the parallel phrase (“one woman man”) in 1 Timothy 5:9 in reference to widows whom the church was to enroll in a welfare service order. She must be one man’s wife. It’s exactly the same words reversed to apply to a woman. There it was one woman man, and here it’s one man woman applied to the widows. Since polyandry, that is a woman having several husbands at once, was simply not a practice, this very probably means that the woman had not divorced and remarried, not that she wasn’t a polyandrist.

Since the phrase in relation to women cannot refer to polyandry, it likely does not refer to polygamy for the men. That’s my main argument against polygamy being addressed there. Now, by implication, I think polygamy is wrong. I mean, I think it’s wrong from Jesus’s teaching that every man should have his own wife and from Genesis 2:24 and elsewhere. It’s something to be moved beyond. I just don’t think that’s what Paul is addressing here because the phrase doesn’t refer to that in relation to women. But now I have not defended this position yet. I think it means she should not have remarried after divorce while her husband was still living. Why do I think that? Where do I get that?

The phrase in1 Timothy 5:9 did not mean that the widow was excluded from the order if she had remarried when her first husband died. Why? Because in 1 Timothy 5:14, the younger widows were encouraged to remarry. Paul said, “I want you to remarry.” He didn’t like what became of these younger women when they were gadding about from house to house, leaning on so many different people. They got into trouble. So he encouraged them to remarry and it is unlikely that having said this, Paul would then later exclude them from the widow’s order because they had followed his advice. Do you see what I’m getting at?

So he tells young women who lose their husbands to remarry. He says, “This is good for you. I want you to remarry. Don’t stay single if you can.” And then here, they’re 65. They lose their husband. They don’t have any support. No federal government can take care of them. It’s going to be the church or nobody, so they have this system of widows enrolling and Paul says, “Sorry, you had a second husband. You’re excluded,” and she would say, “Well, you told me to have a second husband.” So, I don’t think one-man woman means either polyandry or remarrying after the death of the husband. Well, what’s it left to refer to then? My answer is divorce and remarriage, and if that’s what it means for the woman, I’m inclined to think that’s what it means for the man. It’s the same phrase. That’s my basic argument. Yeah?

Didn’t they have a term for divorce back then rather than just this ambiguous statement? And if he was going to talk about polygamy? What word would he have used? A different phrase?

Good question. I don’t know what the Greek phrase for polygamy is, but he certainly could have said not to have two wives at once or something. I hear the force of that argument because I used it just a minute ago. Here I’m just thinking out loud, the phrase probably is as broad as it is (“one-woman man”) to cover a broad range.

In other words, it’s general enough to say there are different ways you can become a two woman man. You can become a two woman man through polygamy. You can become a two woman man through inappropriate re-marriages, and I use inappropriate because there are some remarriages that are not, like after death. And you can become a two woman man by having secret affairs on the side and not have a divorce. So he’s saying there’s a fundamental issue here of the kind of man that should be there with regard to how he relates to a woman. The answer is that he better relate to a woman biblically and it should be one woman.

Now, here, there are different ways that very godly and very careful scholars come down. For example, we referred to Believers Chapel in Dallas. When S. Lewis Johnson’s wife died, he resigned because he was no longer the husband of one wife. That’s a very literal interpretation, right? That’s very narrow. I love S. Lewis Johnson. He’s a teacher and a great scholar and a great thinker. But I say, “Wow, Dr. Johnson, really? You want to give it that meaning?” That is really tight.

Are you saying that a woman who divorces her husband inappropriately, say at age 35, repents, and 15 years later she meets a godly man. She marries him. Then she turns 65, her husband dies, and she applies for this order. There’s some kind of group going on here because there’s qualifications you’re supposed to meet to belong to it, and Paul says, “She shouldn’t belong to it.” That doesn’t mean she can’t be fed, or she can’t be housed, or she can’t be clothed and cared for, but there seems to be some kind of order here like a nunnery or a convent.

We say, “Whoa, you mean then that something in her past way back when will keep her out of this order of women?” And Paul said, “Yes, I think so,” which is why I would on the flip side apply the same thing to a past issue in an elder’s life. Many people will say, “Oh, that’s a long time ago. Isn’t it what he’s like today that counts for the eldership?” I say, “Well, yes, mainly,” but when it comes to the issue of what his marriage track record is, there’s something about it that disqualifies him. I’m giving you my bottom line thinking on this and I admit to varying interpretations here, and we as a council have had varying interpretations on this. But the bottom line seems to be that if you ask, “Why, Paul, would you exclude a godly man who’s put behind him an illegitimate divorce and remarriage 40 years ago? He’s experienced a dramatic transformation and has proved himself for 30 years as a God-fearing, praying upright holy man. Why would you exclude him from the council for goodness’ sakes?”

I think the answer would be that it’s because the marriage issue is the one thing that is when it comes to the public overall representation to the world and the church abides. You want elders who embody in their marriage track record the ideal as much as possible, and if that’s not his reason, then I don’t have one.

Let’s say Pastor Joe is abandoned by his wife Sally in an affair. She leaves. She takes all the legal initiatives she can. She divorces. She remarries. Is Joe disqualified from the pastorate?

I think I would say not necessarily if he doesn’t remarry. I put it carefully like that because you have got these other issues of irreproachability and some of these others, like managing your household well. So, whatever church is going to call him or keep him must be profoundly satisfied through rigorous efforts that he didn’t fall short of those and help bring about the demise of the marriage, that it wasn’t because of a failure to manage his household well.

It is a scary and sad thing, is it not that a woman who forsakes the faith can hold a man hostage and ruin his ministry like that and hold that over it? I mean, Noël could do that to me. I tremble at that thought. She could go crazy in her head, forsake the faith and say to me, “Give me all the kids, and I’m bringing you down. I’m bringing you down. I’m going to ruin your ministry.” She could do that.

Would it be accurate to say that something in a marriage not owing necessarily to your own defect makes it inappropriate for you to remain as pastor or elder that may not be thought of mainly in terms of ruining a ministry, but opening another ministry? While it might be incredibly painful to leave the other calling, you could leave it for reasons that simply honor the text.

When you read the Old Testament, for example, and they say certain kinds of defects in the body kept you from being a priest, we say, “Whoa, that seems unfair, that the man who’s had an infection or something is wrong with his body and he can’t serve as a priest?” Our American idea of fairness says, “Oh no, no. It’s his heart that counts,” and yet there might be these wider issues at stake that are not a comment on his own heart, but rather are a way of preserving something at the corporate public level that is healthy for the church to preserve.

Twenty years ago, I was in prison for drugs. Am I disqualified?

That’s exactly the kind of question we have to answer. I don’t think so because we’d all be excluded, I think, if that were the case. Anybody who grew up in an unbelieving atmosphere and did any kind of sin would be excluded. But your present marriage situation is, according to Jesus, defined in its appropriateness by what’s happened in the past as well. So, you take Luke 16:18, Mark 10, and Matthew 5, and Matthew 19. Whether or not your marriage now is adultery or not, he says, has to do with how this thing came to an end or whether you left a woman or not. There’s the difference, I think. The present marriage is a reflection of something either good or bad presently right now that is owing to a marital situation in the past.

What about Hosea? Didn’t his wife abandon him?

Well, yeah, they were told to walk naked for three years too. There’s some strange things going on here in these prophetic books. He says, “Go get yourself a prostitute for a wife.” I think the Lord makes exceptions to make some really wild statements at times. I wouldn’t want to build on those prophetic, symbolic activities, any normative church activity. Now, we have 10 minutes to go here and we really could spend the rest of it on this issue of divorce, remarriage. We have a statement on divorce and remarriage, and I have a paper about divorce remarriage.

Our council does not have one mind about what divorces and remarriage are appropriate and inappropriate. We never have been able to come to a consensus on that. We haven’t worked on it for years, but back when we spent four years working on it, we didn’t. So we drew up a paper that was the closest thing we could get that we agreed on and we produced that and we made the guidelines for discipline in the church. It’s not my more narrow view, but what we could come to a consensus on is now what functions is how we govern. Then we decided that at the level of leadership, we would draw a fairly narrow circle so that an elder should not be divorced and remarried here.

Others of you, let’s just face it. That phrase, “husband of one wife” is not crystal clear. I’m not going to go on a warpath against any of your churches that interpret that in a way that is less narrow than we do. You make an effort. You do the best you can contextually. You try to bring in Jesus’s teachings about what you thought he meant about the kinds of divorces and remarriage that were appropriate or inappropriate. You talk about I think the cultural milieu. It affects me and the risks I’m willing to take these days and who I will marry and not marry. I think somebody in our wild-eyed, litigious divorce culture needs to stand up and take a strong view about the preciousness and the sanctity of marriage, even if not many people agree. Those kinds of things figure in.

Maybe we’ve said enough that you can see the difficulty of it. It really will not matter in the end if every pastor in this room comes to a strong conviction and you can’t get anybody following you. You’re going to have to go back to the drawing boards anyway because if you’re going to lead a people, you’re going to have somebody following you. It won’t do any good to have a view and nobody in your church will submit to the view. You’re either going to have to leave the church or you’re going to have to live with some compromises. You have to decide what are the issues in which we’re going to compromise and the issues which we’re not going to compromise, and this is one I am going to compromise on just because at the level of leadership, a phrase like a “one-woman man” is not lucid enough for me to be sure that the narrow circle we drew around it is the only legitimate one to draw.

You just have to draw one and agree on it as a church and get the biggest consensus you can get and if that feels too big for your conscience, you’ll have to leave.

Temperate

He needs to be temperate, it says. What’s that mean? The word is used two other times in the New Testament. It’s in 1 Timothy 3:11 of the women deacons and in Titus 2:2 about older men. It’s odd that it is used here, even though in 1 Timothy 3:3, the elders must not be addicted to wine. Perhaps here the point is more general, namely that his temperance extends over other things besides wine, or perhaps the repetition comes because in 1 Timothy 3:3 there begins a list of things which the elder is not supposed to be, and Paul felt obliged to include the problem of wine in the negative list as well as the positive list.

At any rate, I think being temperate is broader here than just wine. This needs to be a person who is not given to excesses in things that would be harmful to him — coffee, sugar, overeating, etc. The standard is one of self-control, mastery of his appetites. Wine would surely not be the only drink or food that a person can misuse.

Sensible

Next qualification is called sensible, prudent, or reasonable. The word is used in those places. It is related to sophroneō, which means to be of sound mind like the demoniac after he was healed in Mark 5:15. The basic idea seems to be having good judgment, which implies seeing things as they really are, knowing yourself well, and understanding people and how they respond. We might say being in touch with your feelings as they used to say, or being in touch with reality so that there are no great gaps between what you see in yourself and what others do.

This is the idea of self-knowledge and the knowledge of others with a sober, wise, prudent, reasonable assessment of circumstances and persons. This is something you can’t begin to quantify. That’s why you have to have remarkably mature people in the interview process to try to discern this. Or as you watch men in the church over the years, do they rise to the surface as men who, when they stand up at a business meeting, when they say something, you say, “That was insightful. That was helpful. That was balanced. That reflected insight into human nature and the dynamics of this moment. He didn’t stick his foot in his mouth over and over again. He pulled people’s feet out of their mouths and they didn’t even mind it. What a gift. He should be a leader here.” We have people that are really good at that.

Dignified

This means “respectable” or “honorable.” The idea seems to be one of not offending against propriety, a person who comports himself in situations so as not to step on toes unnecessarily. In other words, there’s probably no absolute about dress in the world, for example, or absolute about demeanor in certain situations, but every culture has certain expectations and you can fall off the end on either side of these expectations. A respectable or honorable person will take thought for what is beautiful and what is appropriate. He’ll try to discern a situation and he won’t go blundering into the situation and bring reproach again upon the gospel or himself by dressing in some absolutely ludicrous way or speaking in some language that offends everybody or just ignoring norms and morays. He is respectable

Hospitable

This one who loves strangers. That’s the literal translation. It’s one who is given to being kind to newcomers and makes them feel at home. It’s a person whose home is open for ministry and who does not shrink back from having guests. It’s not a secretive person. In other words, an elder should be a more capacious type. We’re not all the same here on the elder council. Everybody’s not the same personality, but there should be some sense that on Sunday morning, they’re not mainly running away from people. They’re running toward people, and it helps to have a wife of a certain kind here, but that too is another one of those ambiguous, difficult things. What if the man is hospitable and the poor woman is so self-conscious and so nervous that she thinks she’s going to be judged by every speck of dust that’s there. We need to breed real freedom to serve soup on paper plates for Sunday dinner to guests.

My wife made a great hit in the first year we were here when President Lundquist came from Bethel College Seminary, and spoke for us and we invited him over and she served him on paper plates with soup and salad because she’s not about to cook on Sunday. It ain’t for any religious reason either. We just said, “You’re just one of us today,” and it gives you a great freedom to have lots of people over because soup is easy, right? The bowl can be huge, and the paper or styrofoam bowls are cheap. So, invite over every other person you see until your table is full.