On The Road - Episode 10 - God Centered Church - How Exactly Is An Elder Qualified?

God Centered Theology

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Oh, this is

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Andy Cain. It's a joy to be back with you once again. It is October 16th in the year of our

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Lord 2024. And I hope you're having a great day. I want to talk to you today about God -centered church, and we're going to do it specifically talking about pastoral qualifications.

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We have a interesting situation in our world today where we love to put all these extra biblical qualifications on our pastors.

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In fact, we've got such an Americanized version of the church that we value things above what scripture does.

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Now, I don't doubt that people have honest intentions and they just, you know, just to give an example, you know, you can look and not everyone has this, but for the most part, just about pick a job description, quote unquote, of where someone's looking for a pastor.

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If they have any size to them at all, and you're going to see, you must have a master's degree and 10 years of experience.

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Well, and that's usually listed first. We, you know, qualifications or expectations of this candidate, master's degree, doctorate preferred, 10 years of experience.

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Sometimes they'll even say 10 years of experience at a large church, because I think what happens is these larger churches tend to think they're better than the other ones or think they deserve better than the other ones.

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I honestly don't know what people think is going to make someone better just simply because they have a master's or a doctorate and have a certain number of years of experience.

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Because if you provide to them, you know, I may not necessarily have a, an official master's degree, but I have a wealth of education from self -study, learning under proper mentors, you know, doing this, doing that.

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And you can have what was interesting, you know, life experience is so discounted.

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You can tell them, you know, I have all this experience in management and secular work history.

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And, you know, because one of the actual qualifications of a pastor is administrative leadership, not to just oversee paid staff, as many of these will put it, but to actually oversee the entire church.

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And you need to have good administrative leadership for that. And you can get that knowledge and those skills from working in secular environments.

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And this is discounted. It's, it's really hard to express it unless you've been in this world and understand it.

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But it's really troubling when you have, if you have a wealth of experience working and things like that, and you have a great amount of education, you're, you're able to teach, you have a great resource of study in your mind from teaching

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Bible and teaching this, and you know, you're every bit as qualified as any other qualified pastor.

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And you turn in an application and you get rejected and say, well, you don't meet our requirements. And you're like, well, what are you talking about?

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Well, we, we have to have a master's degree and 10 years experience and you only have this and that and this and that.

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And you're just like, okay. So I actually responded to one one time that, that did that.

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I said, you know, copied the text from first Timothy three, Titus one, first Peter five and different places.

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And I was like, you know, here's the actual qualifications for pastor. Which one of these are you saying?

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I don't meet because we, you know, and here's the thing before anybody does it. Cause you know how it is in this world.

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You say something and people assume you're stating an extreme view and argue against that because we love the straw man stuff.

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No, I'm not saying that education isn't important. No, I'm not saying that it isn't good for a pastor to educate himself and to be continually learning.

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What I am saying is that the apostles of Jesus day and those early church fathers and the elders that Titus appointed, the elders that Paul appointed didn't have master's degrees.

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They didn't have doctorates. You say, Oh, well times have changed. Well, Bible hasn't changed.

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They wanted the qualifications for pastor elders to oversee

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God's church, not be employees for the church to work under the congregation or work under the deacons or under a personnel committee or whatever it is we've created in this world today because we've really just adopted some horrible things.

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But the reason that the way you were to be qualified for an elder in Christ's church is roughly, you know, it's hard to put a number on it, but I would just simply say the majority of the focus is on the moral qualifications, everything they're required to do when it comes to being, you know, calm and measured and humble and you know, all these different things, you know, not giving the money or wine and all these different things.

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Those are requirements morally for all Christians. The difference is if you're going to be given that level of authority, it would behoove the people to make sure that the people they're considering are demonstrating a consistency in those qualifications over a period of time.

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And that's a sermon for another day, but it's a moral expectation, not a measure of one's level of education or, you know, when he went in there and when they appointed elders in all the towns and early church, they didn't say, well, you don't have 10 years experience because the church was new.

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There was no way for them to have 10 years experience or five years experience or whatever arbitrary number we put on it.

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They said, are you morally qualified? Are you the husband of one wife? Are you sexually pure?

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Are you morally pure? Are you demonstrating the correct level of moral qualifications?

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And then yes, also you're required to have the spiritual gift of teaching, which means you would have to be educated to a point in which you could faithfully consistently teach the text of scripture.

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And yes, you need to be able to demonstrate the ability to lead. Now, if you've got all that,

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I don't care if you don't have a degree at all, you're qualified. I don't care if you have zero years of pastoral experience, you're qualified.

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Now, having said that, this is why a plurality of elders is so important because if you do have a new elder with no experience, it would be much better for their development as an elder to be around more seasoned elders to watch their example, to learn from them.

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Because while I don't think you should require a doctorate to be a pastor, I do firmly believe in continual education and continual learning and development.

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And this can come, it does not. The idea that education can only be formal education or somehow it's not a qualified form of education is foreign to scripture.

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And it should be foreign to the church. In an ideal situation, it would be great if all of our elders had master's and doctorate degree.

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Yeah, sure. I mean, that'd be great. But take my life, for example, you know,

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I didn't have money to go to school the first time around. I went for a year or two and then it was upon me to pay for it and I couldn't, you know,

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I didn't have anybody to help me out. You know, then I just had a long history at food line and different things, getting life experience.

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And so, and I did finally get around to doing a bachelor's, but nothing

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I do today, I mean, it's no knock against liberty. It's no knock against formal education. But if I'm just being honest, nothing

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I do today came from that bachelor's degree. None of it. The things

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I've learned, the skills I've learned from, you know, websites and video editing, preaching, teaching, all of it came from just simply living life, looking at good examples, practicing my teaching, studying the word of God to have a better range of understanding of things.

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None of it came from any formal education that we've got to, we don't need to get to the point where we say, well, you just don't, you know, you don't have to have formal education, you know, and you know, formal education is bad or something.

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No, we don't need to do that either. We need, but we need to be far more balanced because right now we're leading far too much to the extreme of ignoring qualified elders.

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And in some cases, elders that would perform far better than those that have formal education.

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There's some with formal education that aren't that good of an elder. And there's some that are very good.

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We've got to be more balanced. We've got to be looking for the right things. And this is why it's so vitally important that we get our churches back to be an overseen by a plurality of biblically qualified elders so that we are raising up elders within the body of the church and appointing them and not doing so much of this hiring from the outside and bringing in somebody three

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States over that you really don't know. And bless God, they had a doctorate. I'm like, you don't know them.

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The key to appointing elders is, is getting people that you know, that you've seen over a period of years that have shown themselves to be qualified and able to perform the duties of an elder bringing in somebody from the outside while yes, it can work sometimes doesn't.

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And so we need to be focused on doing things biblically. And the way you do it biblically is a plurality, multiple men that are qualified.

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And this is always, they say, well, you got to have checks and balances. And you always hear it from people that have power and don't want to lose it.

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The checks and balances are scripture. Everything is scripture. Scripture has the checks and balances in there. If you have an elder that's sitting, there's a process to deal with that.

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If you have an elder that disqualifies himself, you remove them. It doesn't change the fact that God has said he wants qualified elders overseeing his church.

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He doesn't want the congregation to oversee it. He doesn't want deacons to oversee it. He wants his elders to oversee it.

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The job on us or on, on those that are not elders is you've got to make sure they're qualified.

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And that qualification expectation continues. Even after one is appointed, it's up to an elder to continually ensure that they remain qualified.

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And if they disqualify themselves, they should remove themselves. You really, you shouldn't even have to have a church remove that elder.

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That elder should remove themselves. I mean, that'd be great if you could have that level of awareness, but we really need to get,

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I don't know that it will happen in my lifetime. I don't know if it will. I really don't. I've been on the sideline now for five years.

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Now I haven't been on the sideline when it comes to ministry. I still work and I do everything that I'm able to do, take opportunities as I can.

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So I'm still able to pastor as much as I can and help in areas that I can.

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However, I have been, you know, not in an official capacity pastoring for now over five years.

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And there's a lot of reasons for that. But the one that keeps popping up the most is, well,

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I don't have either enough experience or don't have the right degree or in a lot of cases, cause

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I'm one of those evil Calvinists, you know, reformed and, you know, we just can't have that running around here.

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You know, so I've ran into that. I've ran into, oh, you don't believe in all the calls.

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You must not believe in getting people saved. I'm like, yeah, that's not really why I don't support them, but okay, whatever.

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But these are the kinds of things you run into. And we've really, really, really, I don't know what it will take.

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Smarter men than me might can figure this out, but we have got to find a way to get our churches to repent, submit to scripture.

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And for crying out loud, I'm not saying rip up and tear up and get rid of the bylaws because we don't want to have any level of organization.

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When I say we need to rip up, tear up the bylaws and constitution, what I'm saying is not in the literal fashion, but we need to rip up and tear up constitution and bylaws as being the final authority in our churches.

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It needs to be clearly done because bylaws and constitutions serve a purpose. They're legally required.

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So we have them and they can be good, a good legal measure to keep people from coming in, wolves coming in and destroying a church.

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But when it comes to God's people, our ultimate allegiance is to scripture, not bylaws and constitution.

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So if a bylaws and constitution agrees with scripture, then it's not really necessary because it's scripture you're going with.

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And if they disagree with scripture, you always go with scripture over to bylaws and constitution. So they should never be looked at as, okay, this is how we do things.

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And we do it because this is what our bylaws say. No, we say, this is how we do things. And we do it because this is what scripture says.

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And until churches repent, bow the knee to Christ, bow the knee to this and be obedient to scriptures and actually be willing to make actual effective changes to their bylaws and constitution or to the way they do things to bring themselves into greater conformity to scripture.

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Stop having these churches where you may have a pastor that's a figurehead, you know, on paper, but really it's the deacons that run the church or the personnel committee that runs the church or the person with the most money that runs the church until we effectively change cultures to where we have a plurality of elders to oversee.

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Deacons are primarily responsible with the physical needs of the church and visiting and things like that, where, and if needed, they can call on the elders to come and pray if needed.

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And then having the congregation there to make disciples, be discipled, use their spiritual gifts, edify one another, everybody working in their proper roles.

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And one of the largest reasons we can't do this is because churches are so bloated with programs and ministry silos.

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And that's the way we've always done it. It may just take a lot of church planning and letting some of these other churches die out.

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And it's just sad to say, but this is where this is a symptom of it. The fact that we look at pastors as, okay, we need somebody that's got a high level of formal education and this, that, and the other, and that's what's important.

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No, you want somebody that if needed can weep over the scriptures, that would be willing to bleed for the scriptures, that even though it's not their sheep, it's

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Christ's sheep, they would defend the sheep that they are under shepherding for God. Somebody that knows the scriptures is willing to admit they're wrong, that knows how to administer and run his household well, and knows how to administer and run the household of God correctly, knows that if he has a person in a position of leadership that they delegated that to, knowing to back off and let them lead.

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It doesn't mean you've abandoned your oversight in that area, but it means this person's got a good set of qualifications for this area, let them leave that area, back off, unless something major is going on.

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There's so much involved in all this, but the bottom line is we have gotten so far away from the biblical method of operating a church that now we've just assumed that the way things are is what the

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Bible says, and it's just not. And a lot of people get mad at people like me when we say this, but it's just true.

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And people out of fear will say, well, what if you have a dictator pastor, and this, that, and the other? And I always say that's the reason that I have a plurality of elders, because congregation has to be the overseers, because you've got all those mean, evil pastors.

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Like, well, why are you even going to church? If your default position is all pastors are evil, then don't go.

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And if you have an evil dictatorial pastor, guess what? They're not a They're not qualified.

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So boot them out, get them out of the pulpit, and take the time that's necessary to find genuine, qualified pastors that obey

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Christ, obey His word, and love God's people the right way. Oversee them the right way.

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Not in a lordship way, but in a, let me show you what we need to be doing because Christ said so kind of way.

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And so, sorry for the longer on the road episode. These are usually five to 10 minutes. This one's knocking on the door of 20.

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But this, this subject has really bothered me lately because I'm, there's so many people like me that are eager and ready and ready to go.

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And we can't, because we've decided that we can only have, and it's a whole nother subject for another day, but this idea that you can only have pastors on staff if they're paid positions.

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And like, if you have elders in your church, you need to be using them in that capacity. That's what they're there for.

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And so it's just, it's a sad state of affairs. I'm thankful that we have so many people in our churches that care, that want to make sure we get the right people leading the church.

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But somewhere along the line, we've just lost our focus and we need to refocus ourselves. So anyway, normally

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I do this from carpool to work in the morning, but I had some time here at lunch. So I did this episode and I hope it was beneficial for you.

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I hope that you hear my heart and this, I hope you understand what I'm saying. And you know, people love to misrepresent stuff, but I think if you really listen to everything

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I've said here, you'll get the main point I'm making. So God bless you all. Hope you have a wonderful day and I'll see you next time on the road.