WWUTT 731 Appointing Elders?

Appointing Elders in Every Town

The Apostle Paul instructed Titus to appoint elders in every town, elders, plural. It's a good biblical model for a church to follow that they would have a plurality eldership when we understand the text.

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Of God.

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Thank you, Becky. I hope you'll pardon my voice. I'm a little bit under the weather. Sickness has hit the Hughes household and I think it's affected us all over the course of the past week. So, we'll see how far I'm able to make it, how much strength my voice has.

Paul’s Letter to Titus and the Order of the Church

Still in our study in the book of Titus, we're in chapter 1. I'll begin in verse 5 and read through verse 9. This is Paul writing to Titus, This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you.

If anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination. For an overseer, as God's steward, must be above reproach.

He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered, or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, but hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined. He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine, and also to rebuke those who contradict it.

So Paul said, I left you in Crete, and once again, Crete was an island that was almost smack dab in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. It was a little bit to the southeast of Corinth and to the southwest of Ephesus.

And those were two major port cities that Paul frequented and spent a lot of time in preaching the gospel. So Crete was one of those places he went to, it was a pretty sizable island, and preached the gospel, planted some churches, probably was not there for an extended period of time, certainly not as much time as he had put in Corinth and in Ephesus.

And this may have been on a missionary journey that would have been between his first imprisonment in Rome and his second imprisonment in Rome. And then after leaving Crete, he left Titus there, and one of the things that he says in verse 5 is, so that you might put what remained into order.

Now, I'm going to be a little speculative. I don't know this for sure, but this is a speculation, that after preaching the gospel there, the church was severely ravaged. And though there may have been some evidence of a good number of people turning from idol worship to worship the one true God, Jesus Christ, it didn't stick.

Or they may have fallen into some sort of syncretism. So they just started worshiping Jesus along with the worship that they gave to their other Greek and Roman gods. So because it was not a hugely thriving endeavor to have preached the gospel on Crete, when Paul left the island and he left Titus there, he says, put what remains into order.

So even though the gospel did not take a stronghold of the people on the island, those churches that have remained, that have not been ravaged by false teaching, and certainly by the Jewish mystics that Paul makes a reference to a little bit later on in chapter 1, what's left, put it into order, appoint plurality eldership, which we see talked about here, and also make sure that those churches are operating according to a biblical model, what we would call a biblical model.

Paul would have said, that which pertains to godliness, which flows from the sound doctrine of Jesus Christ. And that includes the order of mentorship that we have in chapter 2 with older men mentoring the younger men and older women mentoring the younger women.

We have talks about church discipline in chapter 3. And of course, there's a constant call to teach sound doctrine here in Titus 1. At the start of chapter 2, it's at the beginning again of chapter 3.

So this constant appeal to preach sound doctrine. Paul says, I left you in Crete that you might put into order what remained of our missionary endeavor there on the island, and that you would appoint elders in every town as I directed.

You.

Plurality Eldership in the New Testament

Now, every time we see the word elder come up in the New Testament, it's always plural. There's always more than one. And it's one church, but there's multiple elders. So you think of the church in Ephesus, Paul did not have multiple churches in Ephesus.

There was only one. But there was a plurality eldership that was over that particular church in Ephesus. Same with the church in Rome. And with the churches on the island of Crete, there was one church per town.

And so Paul is saying that in those churches, appoint elders in every town as I directed.

You.

As this is apostolic instruction concerning the way that a church is supposed to be ordered. And it begins first with the overseer, the one who has been appointed to oversee the shepherding of this flock and administer the teaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now, to clarify, before we go on into the qualifications for an overseer, this doesn't mean that a church that doesn't have multiple elders is somehow existing unbiblically and they cannot be a biblically sound church until multiple elders have been appointed.

Now, I would certainly raise the question as to why there's not a plurality eldership. But it could be the case that there are not a lot of men who are mature enough and that pastor is continuing to raise up men in their maturity, in their understanding of the word.

And as they grow in sanctification, in godliness, and as it may be revealed in their lives that they have an ability to teach, then they might be tested and find themselves qualified to become elders.

And so they could be appointed elders in the church. I don't think that the statement, well, our church is just too small for plurality eldership. I don't think that statement is valid because you could have a church of 20 or 30 people and still have three elders.

There's no reason why you wouldn't have a pastor and then two other lay elders who can oversee preaching and teaching there in that church. And those other couple of men, they may be hosting Bible studies in their home.

They may be stepping to the pulpit when the pastor is away. But there's never a reason, I don't believe, or an excuse for a church to not have plurality eldership unless it's a matter of immaturity, in which case the goal should still be to raise up godly men who would be suited for those positions and be able to step into those roles.

So, again, a church without plurality eldership is not inherently a dysfunctional church. You could even have a church without a pastor. And that happens. That's fairly common. It's still fairly common where you've got a church that might be between pastors.

And so the former pastor has left. He's gone to another place. They're looking for a pastor. And so they may have somebody from outside the church who will come in and speak every.

Sunday.

Or there could be somebody from that congregation who is capable of filling in the pulpit and doing that. But they're doing it as a lay minister or as an interim while the church is still going through the process of finding a pastor.

But it's still very important, even though that church is not dysfunctional in that sense, it's still important that they continue the process of trying to find a man who would be the overseer in shepherding the flock of God.

For the overseer helps to protect the congregation as a shepherd does when he tends with the.

Sheep.

He protects the congregation from the wolves, guides them in sound preaching and teaching as the people of God need. And so this is another reason why Paul says to Titus that you would go into what remains and put it into order and appoint elders in every town.

So some of these churches still exist. Some of these churches have survived the onslaught of false teaching and mad philosophers that have come in and tried to disrupt what it was Paul and his missionary brethren were.

Doing.

And in some cases they have been successful, or at least they've revealed those who are genuine converts and those who were not. And so Paul is saying, what remains? There's there's groups of people in these towns in Crete that are meeting his churches.

Some of them probably don't even have elders of any kind, and they are left open and susceptible to being attacked by wolves, whether they come open openly and ravenously, or they are wolves in sheep's clothing.

Because consider what it is Paul closes the qualifications with in verse nine. He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also rebuke those who contradict it.

So he's coming in and he's getting the false teachers out of there and ordering everything and directing the church in a direction that is according to the sound teaching of our Lord Christ. And so it's going to be Titus's job, not just to find the men in that church who are capable of filling those positions, but also equipping them for that, taking them through the scriptures, giving them a knowledge of Old Testament doctrine and how Christ has fulfilled all of the law and the prophets, preaching the gospel to them and helping them to understand what it is that Paul has preached.

By this time, a number of the letters that we have in the New Testament have already been written. And so it's likely that some of those letters and even letters we don't have anymore, things like Paul's letter to the Laodiceans, perhaps these letters have been compiled and would be given to those pastors and they would have those as texts to be able to teach the people from as well.

The four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Luke, of course, being the gospel that Paul preached and that text would have been completed by this time. So they may have had Luke's letter to Theophilus to be able to read from.

And then they had also some of the other letters, Paul's letters to the Corinthians, his letter to the Romans. Can you imagine that first century church and having Romans being taught in that church in the first century, even if Romans had not been written to that particular church?

But they had it for the Apostle Peter makes an allusion to it in Second Peter, Chapter three, that there are letters that the churches had from Paul that he had written to various congregations, instructing them in in preaching and teaching.

And so Titus was going to take that apostolic teaching and apply it to these men who would be qualified for these positions as elders. And I don't know what teaching was like during that time, as opposed to the way that we teach and come to an understanding of these things today.

But I would imagine it was a lot more brutal, especially considering how dire the times were that the gospels hanging on by a thread. We're already seeing that here on the island of Crete. Paul comes preaching the gospel.

False teaching is already taking a hold of people and pulling them away from the faith. And so the gospel could be gone from a place like Crete at any moment. And so there was an urgent need for sound teachers of the word of God to multiply quickly and be able to fill those roles as pastor to preach and teach to the people shepherding the flock of God.

So it probably was was some pretty harsh teaching with the urgency that was needed. But it also wasn't like a blitz and it wasn't a crash course. I mean, these guys were inundated with sound doctrine before they went out preaching the gospel.

So here, Titus is appointing eldership in those towns as he is directed by the apostle.

Paul.

Qualifications for an Overseer

And then what we have after that are the qualifications for an overseer. Now, I mentioned to you that that every time we have the eldership mentioned, it's always plural with two exceptions. And that would be in First Timothy chapter three.

And here in Titus chapter one, where it says that an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife. So these things are obviously singular, not plural. Well, that's because you're looking at the individual man and you're testing him to see whether or not he is qualified to fulfill this role and this calling in God's church.

But otherwise, every other occasion in which eldership is mentioned, it's it's plurality. It's a it's multiple elders that are overseeing the preaching of the teaching of the church. And I can say that as a pastor who teaches in a church with plurality eldership, I am extremely blessed.

And it is wonderful to have these men that I teach with. And our congregation is not big, you know, 100 people, I think on a we're getting a good attendance. We're a little over 100. And our membership is somewhere around 70.

And yet we've got four men, myself and another pastor who's part time and then two lay elders. So so four elders that have been appointed to oversee this church. Now, I was hired as pastor. And when I came on, there was not these other men.

It was just me. But by the second Sunday after my appointment as pastor, I was already bringing up. We need to consider plurality eldership because I believe that's a truly biblically functioning.

Church.

We are in biblical obedience when we have plurality eldership. Not everybody may have that opportunity. Again, if you've got a very immature congregation, but we were certainly in a place where there was no reason for us not to have plurality elders.

And so some people kind of dragged their heels on it. They weren't crazy about the idea, probably because their understanding of plurality eldership was it came from like the Presbyterian church, which just wasn't a common Baptist thing to have plurality eldership.

But we studied and labored over it for like a period of two years, I think it was. And the very first meeting that we had, the congregation was split in half, like half were for it and half were against.

But when we had our final meeting where we approved that final draft of the Constitution that allowed for plurality eldership in the church, it was unanimous. It was a unanimous vote in favor of that move.

And so it was really neat to see the Lord work and mature us in that way. And in that particular understanding, we went through a study of 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus. And we also distributed books by guys like Mark Dever and articles by Jared C. Wilson.

I remember it was one of them because he went through this in his church up in Vermont. And this was kind of the process that we went through to come to an understanding of what a biblically functioning church is supposed to look like.

And according to what it is that we have laid out for us in scripture, the instruction is to be a plurality eldership. So that was why we moved in that particular direction. And it has been wonderful to have these men that we meet with regularly once a week if we're able to.

And we study the scriptures. We pray for each other. We confess to one another. We talk about what these men are teaching in their respective classes because they all have classes to teach. We talk about what I'm going to be preaching about that coming Sunday.

And there's also the benefit of accountability, keeping one another in check, making sure that we're fulfilling these obligations of being good husbands, of being good fathers to our kids. One of us elders is an empty nester, so he doesn't have to worry about that.

But he certainly passes wisdom on to us, us younger whippersnappers. But also accountability for me in particular is that I don't get too high minded. I'm not too big on myself because this is not my show.

It's not like everything revolves around me. I'm the only guy that could be doing this. I can call all the shots. I can do anything that I want. It keeps me from getting too big headed, and I'm weak in my flesh.

That would be an easy thing for me to fall into. But these guys keep me humble and make sure that I'm being a servant of God and not trying to advance myself. But preach the gospel to his glory. I don't even just do this podcast without oversight.

There are elders at my church that listen to me teach this, so they know exactly what I'm teaching on the podcast in addition to what it is that I'm teaching at the church. So this is just an accountability I think is good for any minister.

Even pastors are instructed to submit to eldership, just as anyone else in the church would submit to their elders. A pastor must as well, and the only way he can really do that is if there is a plurality eldership.

So then once we come to that understanding, as Paul says here, what remains into order appoint elders in every town as I directed you, and then he gives the qualifications for what an overseer, what an elder should look like.

And that's what we're going to get to next, and we'll spend the rest of the week on that verses six through ten. He must be above reproach, and this is the same first qualification that Paul gave to Timothy in first Timothy chapter three must be above reproach.

You could not accuse him of any wrongdoing, or he doesn't have a bad reputation for bad behavior. The first and foremost qualification that an overseer or a pastor must have is he must be above blame.

He is a man of respectable admiral admiral admirable character. Sure, I guess he's an admiral in a certain sense directing the ship of the church in a particular direction, but he is a man who is a mature Christian to put it very specifically.

And then all the rest of the qualifications that we have flow from that first one, and we'll get to the rest of that tomorrow. Let's conclude with prayer. Our wonderful God, our heavenly father and our savior, we thank you for for drawing us to your word that we would desire to want to learn these things and get to know your mind and heart through what has been given to us by your prophets and apostles.

And here the apostle Paul is giving qualifications for what an overseer of the church should look like, but not just a man who is capable of preaching and teaching or who is qualified for that position, but even a man who is mature in his faith and in his walk with Christ.

So we might look at such a person and we might want to emulate that kind of behavior that is set forth before the church to follow after. Paul mentions multiple times in the New Testament to imitate the faith of those who would preach to you the gospel of Christ.

And so may we have good, strong men in our churches preaching the gospel that are good examples for the rest of the flock to follow. I pray that you would convict the hearts of ministers who stand in those pulpits that they would desire to teach the truth of God's word and nothing but, not wandering off into wild fantasy and crazy speculation, but teaching only that which flows from the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Keep us accountable to these things and may we grow in godliness according to it. In Jesus name.

Amen.

Closing Exhortation and Ministry Sign-Off

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