Questions about Pastors

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It is the person who is going to be in charge of the church and put together the long -term plan.

Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, the Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the

Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member. We are here to give you biblical interpretations and applications of the

Christian life. And we are now wrapping up our series on what is a pastor.

This last episode is just wrapping up all of the questions we have gotten in that we have not had a chance to answer yet.

And so we have a couple of emails with several questions each that we will be addressing on what is and, well, what is not a pastor.

So I'm glad for all of you who have listened to these 10 episodes. I hope they have been helpful.

I hope that you have shared them with others, especially that last episode on encouraging your pastor.

I hope you took that one to heart. I hope that maybe you shared that episode with your pastor, but at least that you went out of your way this week to show some encouragement to your pastor.

I hope that this series helped you to realize that a pastor does a lot. It is not an easy job. It is very often a thankless job, and many people don't think through all that is involved in shepherding a flock.

I had one person who once told me that pastoring or shepherding would be very easy if it wasn't for all the people.

Well, yes, that is very true. We sometimes can make it difficult for our pastors. And so I hope that you took to heart the last episode and encouraged your pastor.

If not, may I encourage you to do that today. Find a way to encourage your pastor.

Go back and listen to that episode if you need to. I hope you've listened through all 10 episodes in this series.

So let us start with the first email that we had gotten. This comes from Mike from Plant City, Florida.

He says this, Thanks Andrew for your ministry. I learn a lot from you.

Very much appreciated the discussion on deacons and elders. Being a deacon in a

Reformed Baptist church, I am trying to work out proper boundaries with elders and deacons duties.

Trying to put together a deacon training program for new deacons to cut down the confusion in the future.

Side question, what is a wise point to allow or disallow women teaching boys in Sunday school?

So let's deal with the first question first. So deacons and elders, there is a difference in the roles.

And so what are those roles? I mentioned it a bit, but I'm going to want to go into obviously more detail because maybe

I didn't give enough detail. So Mike's question is a good one because a lot of churches confuse these two.

In fact, I'll state this. One of the things that I find that is difficult is that many churches, especially many

Baptist churches, confuse these roles and have deacons acting as elders and elders acting as deacons, and it's not good.

I think that what you see in a lot of Baptist churches, especially as you have a paid pastor and maybe associate pastors that are paid, and then you have men that are deacons, but they're functioning, they call it leadership, and they blur the lines.

And in churches like that, I'm very clearly against women in the role of a deaconess.

Why? Because in those roles, the deacons act as elders. There's oversight, there's authority.

And so I would disagree with that. So the one advantage of referring to those two roles as shepherd and servant clarifies it a bit because what you have is the role of the pastor is the one of authority.

It is the person who is going to be in charge of the church, and you probably should have a plurality of them, and their role is to look at the church, examine it, and put together the long -term plan, make the decisions, have all of the authority for how things are done.

Now, you can say, well, Andrew, what about when you have congregational led? Gotcha. You're right.

There are some churches that function under congregational led versus elder led. And I could see either one, actually.

I'm not hard -pressed for one versus the other. I think it'd be more biblical to eventually get to a point where you're elder led.

But if you only have one or two or three pastors, I don't think it may not be wise to be elder led, especially if you have one guy with a bunch of yes men.

So you want to have clear definitions if you have a few elders so that there's clear delineation of what their roles are and where they have the authority, so they each have an area of maybe authority over each other in different areas of the church.

But ultimately, when it comes to the voting of the church, they would be equal in authority. That means that the guy who's doing the preaching doesn't have more vote than any other pastor in the church.

But I would not include deacons in that. Deacons don't have that function of making decisions and having a vote on what happens in the church.

Now, if it's congregational led, then, well, yes, deacons have a vote like every other member of the church.

And I think that it's fine to have congregational voting, congregational led, when you don't have enough pastors.

Now, I'll just give a side note here. The way that when I had an opportunity to plant a church, what we tried to do is have all the men discuss the items of business for the church so that we would train up men for leadership.

And we had three men that were acting as elders that had the vote for that church.

And so it involved the input of all the men. That way we got a view, and if you want to include all the input of the entire church, that could be a different way of doing it.

But the idea was that there was some training that went in for the men, and it was also that the church had input, but they weren't actually voting.

And we made that clear. So the separation between pastors and deacons would be that the pastors are those who are having oversight, making decisions for the church.

The deacons are the servants who are carrying those decisions out. So if you want to think of it, the pastors are having the long -term vision and setting the agenda for the church and what is going to happen for the church, and the deacons are the ones that take care of the day -to -day operations that the pastors end up choosing.

So one is doing long -range thinking, one is doing day -to -day operations. One is making the votes and the decisions for the church, the other is carrying them out.

So in Mike's case, if you're trying to put together a deacon training program, you'd really want to be focusing on the deacons on day -to -day operations and getting their authority from the pastors and knowing that they are not making the decisions for the church, but serving the church under the authority of the pastors.

I hope that helps with explaining that. His second question was, where do you allow or disallow women teaching boys in Sunday school?

And this is a very interesting question, wrestled with it quite a bit. Now in the Jewish culture, which is what many will appeal to, many will say the age is 13, and they do that based off Jewish culture, because in Jewish culture, people would have at the age of 13, when they have puberty, they've become adults or seen as adults.

In fact, the first time that many Jewish boys would be preaching, taking that position, would be at the age of 13.

I preached my first message in synagogue at the age of 12 in March, my birthday is in April, and so that was the closest we could get to where I would be able to do it.

At the age of 13. So that is one way of doing it, and many will view that.

Another way of looking at it would be 18. And the reason that some churches look at 18 is because, well, the same as what

I kind of said, in America, at least, or in other cultures, people see 18 as the age where someone becomes an adult.

And so some churches will say that women could teach while they're still seen as children, as not being adults.

And so if you have that view, if your church sees that, maybe you want to wait till 18.

But it is something where I can't be dogmatic either way to say one is over the other.

But those are the two general views that people have, either 13 or 18. Which do

I choose? I could go either way. I think it becomes the discussion of the church itself that I'm in before we make that.

So Mike, I hope that answers your questions. And before we get to the next email, let me give a word from our sponsor,

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Let's get to the next email that I got from Heidi of Round Rock, Texas. And this is a little bit of a longer one with many questions, but let's get to it.

She says, Hi, Andrew. There are only three podcasts I do not miss.

That was all in caps, by the way. There are only three podcasts I do not miss every week, and you are one of them.

I cannot tell you how much you have helped me mature in my walk with the

Lord. Thank you for all you do. I have some questions that I would like to ask you to address in your series about what is a pastor.

What is the difference between teaching and preaching, especially as it relates to what women are allowed to do in the church?

If I understand your position, you would allow a woman to teach a Sunday school class if it were made up only of children or women.

What if a man asked to attend a Sunday school class? Would he be allowed to participate?

How do we know if we have crossed the line from teaching to preaching?

This is all very confusing to me, as up to this point, I have not attended churches that felt this was a hill to die on, so I have not had to think through the position regarding women in the ministry.

However, I would like to get these questions clarified for my edification. Well, Heidi, we're glad you asked those questions because it is one that many people struggle with, and so, by the way, she says that there's three podcasts that she never misses.

I'm sure hoping that since the rap report is one of them, I hope one of the others is

Apologetics Live. Just saying, that's another podcast I do. So, as we look at this, this is a really good question.

What is preaching? What is teaching? Now, first off, when it comes to women's role in the church,

I'm going to say a woman cannot teach, and remember from 1 Timothy chapter 2, 12 -14, teaching was a general instruction.

I will state now that there's an episode that I'll be doing on my Apologetics Live episode coming up soon that we will address a new view that someone has on women's teaching in that passage in 1

Timothy 2. They take a very unique view. It was something that was going to take a little bit longer to unpack, so I'm going to do it on the two hours of Apologetics Live, so go check that one out.

But I don't think a woman can teach men in the church. Now, we just said, what age is a man?

Well, I'll leave that for your church to decide. However, teaching can be and often is more interactive, where preaching is more of a monologue.

Now, preaching is something where when you're preaching, it is more of an instructional based, where you're going to hopefully be taking

God's word, if that's what you're preaching on, but you're going to be exegeting a passage of Scripture and giving almost commands or instructions that are a little bit more forceful than it would be in a teaching time.

And I, just as a personal thing, when I'm asked to speak at a church, there's certain messages that I would do in a

Sunday school that I wouldn't do in a morning service. And for me, I see that because of the difference of preaching and teaching.

I'm going to preach a text of Scripture, and so I'm going to take Scripture and exegete I could even do a topic where I'm dealing with many

Scripture passages, but I'm not going to do something like, say, a message on social justice in a morning worship.

Why? Because that is more of, it is instructional, but it's not from Scripture itself.

So I'm going to teach that. So when I'm teaching, I'm looking to be a little bit less, shall we say, formal, a little bit less of a monologue, and I'm going to allow for interaction.

It doesn't have to be interaction, but the goal of preaching and teaching is that the audience member will understand what you're saying.

That's, a good teacher is always going to be understood by his audience. And so many people would say that preaching is more of a forceful way, where teaching is more of an interactive way.

Can we be dogmatic on that? Not really, but that, I think, is a good way of understanding the two.

When it regards, regarding Sunday school, if a man wants to come in, well, you may have a pastor who wants to evaluate a woman teaching the children or teaching a women's

Bible study or something like that. I think it could be okay as a one -time thing for someone to come in and evaluate, to be able to give instruction to the lady teacher.

That would be fine. For a man just to sit in, to learn, I think would be an issue.

In fact, we had a woman who taught one of our conferences. She taught at a women's class, and the only man that she or I would allow in there was her husband who did video.

He was recording it for us, and so we decided that he would be the only man allowed in there because we needed someone to do the video.

And so she felt more comfortable with her husband being there since she was under his authority.

And so that would be the second one. The third question was, how do we know if we've crossed a line from teaching to preaching?

I don't know if there is a clear line, and I also don't know if it matters because, again,

I don't think a woman should be teaching or preaching to men, so I don't know that it matters very much if you have someone who is teaching or preaching with a man there.

Neither one should be done. So I hope that is helpful and that answers that question.

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Let's go to our third and last email that we have to wrap up all the questions that we didn't get to.

This one is from Catherine. I don't know where she's from, but Catherine says this.

Good morning, SFE team. I have been greatly enjoying Pastor Rappaport's series on what is a pastor.

I am a Reformed Baptist attending an SBC church and a converted girl power feminist millennial, thanks to R .C.

Sproul. I enjoy his Rappaport podcast as well as Apologex Live, and I wholeheartedly appreciate all the work that goes into this ministry tool.

I may be a few days late, but Pastor Rappaport extended an opportunity for questions regarding this topic.

I'm certainly exposing my ignorance with my questions. What would be the place for a woman in seminary earning a pastoral degree?

I know seminaries used to be exclusively for male students, but society being what it is would never stand for that nowadays.

It seems dishonest for a seminary, especially one that teaches submission to the biblical prohibition on women in a preaching role, to accept tuition money from a woman seeking a degree in preaching or pastoring.

I have often considered going to seminary for my own edification and to better teach my three children in sound theology at home.

I am resistant to accept instruction from an institution that conveys such degrees upon women.

A follow -up question, are there biblically sound seminaries that offer ad hoc courses for the layman?

So let's look at this. And first off, I thank you very much for the encouraging words from all of the people that sent in comments about this podcast.

We are so blessed that this has been helpful. I don't know that you as a listener can understand how much

I appreciate when you contact us and let us know how this podcast or anything of the

Striving for Eternity ministry blesses you. It's a lot of work for what we do, and we do not know unless you let us know how it affects you, and so we greatly appreciate it.

And I love emails like this. I save emails like this, because I'll tell you,

I'll just be kind of transparent with y 'all, especially if you listened to the last episode, there's days in ministry that get, well, hard and get discouraging, and that's when

I go to my file, both in my email and written file, and I just read through different letters of appreciation that people have sent to see the encouragement that this ministry has been to y 'all, and because of that,

I get encouraged. So please, just because the series is over, don't stop sending in emails and letters to us.

You can email us at info at strivingforeternity .com, or you can go to strivingforeternity .org and check out the website to know where to send a handwritten letter if you so choose.

So let's answer the questions. I really love the fact that Catherine was converted from girl power feminist millennial.

I do love that. So we all appreciate R .C. Sproul's ministry, and especially for what he's been able to minister in her life.

So what about seminary degrees for women? Well, I kind of dealt with this cursory earlier in a previous episode, but let's dig deeper into this.

Is it wrong for a seminary to offer a degree to women? Well, it depends what that degree is and how it's used.

My seminary used to have a degree that women could do, in fact, anyone, any lay person could do, that was just whether it was in the area of theology or counseling or ministry, that was a certificate degree.

They didn't give the Master's of Arts or Master's of Divinity. There's many who get a

Master of Arts degree that they go in and take courses just for further learning.

I shared this before, but we have a deacon in our church. He's a deacon. He's not the pastor. He does preach sometimes, and he has a

Master of Arts from the same seminary that I attended and got my degree from. So there's nothing wrong with paying for a tuition to a seminary to get an education.

So one of the things with the wording of her question is kind of the idea of paying a seminary that is going to offer degrees to women.

Well, they may offer a degree to women for the women to get a better education.

Now, some schools choose, as mine did, to offer it as a certificate and not a

Master's of Divinity. You could, as a woman, you could get a Master of Arts in counseling, but you could not get a

Master's of Divinity. That's just how they chose it, and therefore they would not ordain for seminaries who do the ordaining.

There's some seminaries that do. They would not ordain women. Now, there's still some seminaries that only allow men to attend, and there's some who allow women.

I think that if you can afford to and you have time in your schedule, a seminary education is good for everybody.

Now, if the seminary is giving a Master's of Divinity toward women for the purpose of being pastors, or even more so if they're ordaining women, then

I think that's a problem. So, I think that you'd have to do some digging into the seminary and find out more about what they teach, what they're about, so that that seminary that you're paying money to and supporting with your funds is doing something that would be unbiblical.

But that's the case with any seminary, male or female. Does it mean that you can't get a seminary, a degree from a seminary that's off?

Well, I'll put it this way. There's people I know who have gotten a degree from Princeton University, a very liberal seminary.

They got their PhD from Princeton, but they were also looking to be more the scholarly level, and so the one individual

I knew, he was looking to be doing a lot of writing against the liberal view from Princeton and others.

And so having the degree from Princeton gave him a much different ability than, say,

I would have if I got a doctorate of ministry from a seminary that would be very conservative

Christian. And so there could be reasons that someone might want to do that, but you'd need to do that knowingly.

So, I would say if you look to get a seminary degree, absolutely dig into that seminary, learn as much as you can about it.

And there are many seminaries that have degrees that you could take online and take classes from home, and so you need to look at that to see.

I argue that a seminary degree is good for everyone. Now, I love what she says here because she wants to learn more of the scriptures to teach her three children sound theology at home.

That is a mother who takes her role of a mother serious. She is looking to learn as much as she can so she could train up her children.

She knows where her ministry is and wants to be best suited for that.

And so I would encourage to see where you can get more training. I mean, you could get free training from us at our

Striving for Eternity Academy. Just go to strivingforeternity .org, go to the academy, and you could take the four courses that we have there free online.

That can help you. I know a lot of people that use those courses for homeschooling as well, but there's places you could go to get free training.

CARM .org has courses that you could pay for their schools, not very much, and you can get access to those.

And so there's a lot of places you can go and get even free education because a lot of the seminaries have free classes online to introduce the seminary.

So there's a whole lot of places that you could go to online where you could do courses from home.

I encourage people to do that if you have the time and the finances. Do not put yourself in financial debt to get a seminary education unless you're someone who is looking to do this.

This is going to be you're getting a seminary degree to be in full -time ministry. You're looking to pay that off.

So I just would caution people who are just putting money out that they're not able to repay.

So make sure you have an ability to repay that if you're going to do that. It is not cheap, but no education these days is.

And so I don't think it's dishonest to, you know, for a seminary to train women up as far as getting an education, but I would agree with her that if they're doing it for the preaching to men, then

I think we would have a different view. And so I hope this has been encouraging. We just want to wrap up the last three emails that we had because we wanted to make sure we got to all the questions.

I thank you for all the feedback that we have gotten throughout the series. This series has gotten a lot of really good feedback.

What I'm going to look to do is either myself or Josiah Nichols, we're going to put together a blog article and link all of these so that if you found this really helpful, we're going to look to put something that kind of gives a summary of all of it together, so you have it in one place.

And if you want to find that, we'll put that out, and we're going to put it as strivingforeternity .org

slash pastors, strivingforeternity .org slash pastors.

That will be the URL for it when we get it done. It will not be done until this episode is out so that whether Josiah or I write that blog article, we make sure we have all of the articles out together.

So look forward to you sharing this, letting others know about this. If you have found this helpful, the best thing you could do other than, of course, emailing or writing us so that we know, because that is a great encouragement, or come to the conferences that we go to, let us know that you listen.

That is the most encouraging thing. I got to tell you, I was driving out to a James White debate, and I got in and just had been driving a long day.

I was preaching all day and then drove out for this debate at night because it was near where I happened to be preaching.

And just as I got in the building, I was trying to rush to use the restroom and then get into the debate, and some gentleman saw me, stopped me, and said, hey,

Andrew Rapport, I listen to your rap report every week. And I just stopped and was so encouraged to just hear how the ministry blessed him.

So if you do that, hey, that is a great way of doing it. Another great thing you could do is share these episodes.

I mean, just take this episode and text it to five friends, put it out on social media to let others know about it, and let them know how this encouraged you.

That would be a great thing to do. And as I mentioned about events, let me share with you where I will be in case you're in that area.

I will be April 12th to 14th at River of Life Church up in the Watertown, New York area.

That's way up north. April 22nd to May 9th, we'll be out in the Philippines. This is in 2024, obviously, in case people are binging.

We'll be in the Philippines for two weeks, and they got us busy. Soon as I land the next morning, eight in the morning,

I will have an interview at a radio station. We then have a pre -conference on the 26th.

We have a conference in Manila on the 27th. Then both

Justin Peters, Jim Osmond, and I are being split up in three different churches for that Sunday. Then we fly to Palawan, where we'll be speaking there.

Then we will be flying back to Manila for a church camp that will go through the weekend.

Then we fly to Baha 'u'llah to do the same conference we did in Manila. The pre -conference is going to be on the woke agenda and answering the woke agenda.

The conferences that we're doing in Manila and Baha 'u'llah are going to be on the idea of a strange fire, dealing with some of the nonsense that goes on within the charismatic movement.

I think Manila is sold out. I think they got a max seating of that at 1 ,000 people, but you might be able to make it to Baha 'u'llah if you're available, so I encourage that.

We just booked the Utah Research Center. That is June 19th to the 23rd.

I will be there if you're out that way. The Utah Research Center is done by Mormon Research Ministries, so I encourage you to check that out.

They're in Dapper, Utah, and I will be speaking on a number of topics there. I will be

Thursday the 20th, June 20th, be speaking on Can You Trust the Bible? Judaism and the

Uniqueness of Christianity. On the 21st, I'm going to deal with the Roman Catholic Church, how to defend the faith, the deity of Christ.

Then on Saturday, June 22nd, the dangers of social justice and ambassador evangelism.

And then on Sunday, I will be out at Grace Bible Church, and that is in Hebron City, Utah.

So I'll be preaching there, and not exactly sure what I'll be preaching, but we agreed it'll be something out of the

Old Testament. And then very important, if you have a chance, I'm encouraging people to travel to this one, is

Vail Valley Baptist Church. This is in Vail, Arizona, and this is looking to be a great conference.

It is Christian Responsibility in an Un -Christian World. Great lineup of speakers, and many you may never have heard of, but when you hear them, will want to hear them again.

But it is Pastor Jay Miller, who's the pastor of Vail Valley Baptist Church. He's going to deal with being a watchman on the wall out of Ezekiel 3.

Dan Craft, if you don't know him, he's a seven -foot apologist. He's going to do a topic on apologetics is not what you think.

He's going to do another talk on abortion. John Sampson is going to do a talk on the gospel hope of the nations.

He's going to deal with those false converts out there. Aaron Brewster, who's one of our speakers at Striving for Eternity, is going to deal with the topic of true worship.

He's also going to do My Responsibility in Your Worship, dealing with the high places mentioned in 1 and 2

Kings. I will be doing a talk on warning on social justice, and another one on getting ready for persecution out of 1

Peter. Kevin Hay will be doing from Romans 6, You Are a

Slave. And Dominic Grimaldi, if you know from one of our

Podcast Street Talk Theology, Pastor Dominic is going to be dealing with spiritual adultery out of Hosea.

This is a conference you will want to make it. So if you want, go to strivingforeturning .org.

We have a banner for that conference where you can sign up on Eventbrite. This is the Christian responsibility in an unchristian world.

You do not want to miss that conference. Strongly encourage you to check that out. Hope to see you at one of these events.

And until next episode—and by the way, we're going to do a bunch of episodes coming up that are going to be episodes where I've been on other people's podcasts while I will be traveling to these many places, especially the

Philippines. I'll be out of commission for about three weeks. So we're going to be playing some older episodes where I've been on other people's podcasts that you may not have heard.

So I hope you enjoy that. And until next time, that's a wrap. Oh, oh, oh,

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