How would you counsel someone who asked you how much they should give to the church?
What is your perspective on congregationalism?
Do you think it’s valuable for a church to have a prayer meeting? What do you believe about officers coming to prayer meeting? Would you come to prayer meeting as pastor?
Why are you a Baptist? What does it mean to be a Baptist?
What about Sunday afternoon service? How important is it to the church’s life and health?
Do you affirm our confession’s doctrine of the Sabbath?
Do you affirm the doctrine of “inerrancy?” [Familiar with the Chicago Statement?]
What does it mean to have “the ability to teach?”
Do you agree with our church’s confession of faith? Do you take any exceptions to anything in them?
What has God taught you over the past few years?
What is the mission of the church?
What do you believe are the most dangerous errors facing the church today?
What are the three uses of the moral law of God?
How would you describe the difference and similarity between the law and the gospel? Are we required to keep the law today?
Who should be permitted to take the Lord’s Supper?
What are your views on Christian liberty? Drinking, smoking?
What are some key things people need to understand about justification and sanctification?
What is the “order of salvation?”
What is the biblical definition of forgiveness?
Under what conditions, if any, should someone be allowed to get a divorce?
If someone was baptized as an infant, should we require that person to be immersed?
What if someone suggested that we use a dramatic presentation of a biblical story in public worship? How would you respond?
What is your testimony of conversion?
How does a pastor lead God’s people?
How would you describe your calling to be a pastor? Discuss the relationship between the internal call and the external call. How do you know for certain God has called you and that it isn’t self-deceptive presumption? How would you respond if the church chose not to call you to be a pastor?
Do you believe you will be able to pastor the other pastors and deacons of this church? What does that look like?
If no other called man were available, do you believe you could pastor a church by yourself?
Do you hold any position in theology that we might find unusual or controversial?
Would you say that you affirm the five points of Calvinism?
What would you do / How would you react if your church did not call you to be a pastor?
How would you counsel someone who repeatedly gives in to the same sin? Say you are trying to pastor a man who has regular outbursts of sinful anger. He knows it is a sin. He is grieved and sorrowful when he does it and wants to overcome it, but he fails over and over. How do you deal with him? What do you tell him?
As an elder, what will you do if you fundamentally disagree with the Senior Pastor on a practical issue not closely related to the gospel? [When should you submit to the leadership of the senior pastor and when should you not submit?]
What if it comes to your attention that a Senior Adult teacher is teaching against the doctrine of predestination? How will you handle it?
How would you handle an issue in which a deacon’s wife is gossiping and spreading rumors? What would you do?
What is the proper relationship between “shepherding” and “ruling?” Between “teaching” and “getting involved in people’s lives?”
How should a pastor/elder love the sheep?
What text of Scripture would you point someone to if you wanted to teach them the doctrine of sanctification?
Could you list 3 or 4 doctrines that our church should not divide over? Could you list 3 or 4 doctrines that our church should divide over?
Could you give us a brief outline of your pastoral theology? (Theology of the pastorate?)
How do you handle criticism? How would your wife handle criticism of you?
Could you describe/discuss how (and how often) family worship takes place in your home?
How do you define “success” in the role of the pastor?
What effects would you want to see as fruits of your pastoral ministry?
Does the New Testament Say That Elders’ Children Must Be Believers?
While 1 Timothy 3:4 says that an elder must “manage his own household well…keeping his children submissive,” Titus 1:6 seems to go even further when it says that an elder’s children must be “pista and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination.” While some translations (like the King James Version) translate pista as “faithful,” most major English translations translate it as “believing.” Because of this, some people argue that the New Testament teaches that an elder’s children must be Christians.
There are several problems with this view.
Considering how closely the two passages parallel one another it is reasonable to suppose that the phrase “having faithful/believing [pista] children” in Titus 1:6 means the same thing as “keeping his children submissive” in 1 Timothy 3:4. This would mean that the final part of Titus 1:6 (“not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination”) is an explanation of what pista means: faithful in their behavior, submitting to their parents, and not being unruly (1 Tim. 3:4). In other words, “pista” in Titus 1:6 probably means “faithful in behavior,” not “believing.”
First Timothy 3:5 explicitly grounds an elder’s qualification on the man’s managerial ability as displayed in how he runs his household (1 Tim. 3:4). Yet saving faith cannot be produced by any amount of godly parenting. Obedience and submission, generally speaking, can. The man’s qualification as an elder rests on his ability to govern his home, of which his children’s behavior is a reliable measure, not his children’s salvation, which he cannot bring about.
All of the requirements for eldership listed in these passages (being a one-woman man, being temperate, sensible, respectable, and so on) are matters of personal responsibility. To require that an elder’s children have genuine, saving faith is to hold one person responsible for the salvation of another, which is nowhere taught in Scripture. This would assign to humans a role in salvation that belongs only to God.
Justin Taylor is the executive vice president of book publishing and book publisher at Crossway.
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? —1 Timothy 3:4–5
. . . appoint elders in every town as I directed you— . . . above reproach, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination. —Titus 1:6
May a man have children who are unbelievers and yet be appointed or continue as an elder? First Timothy 3:4–5 and Titus 1:6 provoke the question.
There are two primary interpretations. Douglas Wilson summarizes the first view quite succinctly: “if a man’s children fall away from the faith (either doctrinally or morally), he is at that point disqualified from formal ministry in the church.”1 Alexander Strauch suggests the second interpretive option: “The contrast is made not between believing and unbelieving children, but between obedient, respectful children and lawless, uncontrolled children.” What is at stake, Strauch suggests, is “the children’s behavior, not their eternal state.”2
1 .Douglas Wilson, “The Pastor’s Kid” in Credenda/Agenda, vol. 2, no. 3.2 .Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: An Urgent Call to Restore Biblical Church Leadership, revised & expanded (Littleton, Col.: Lewis & Roth Publishers, 1995), 229.
Faithful Leadership in the Church and Home
Paul’s basic logic, especially in 1 Timothy 3, is fairly clear. The rhetorical question in the second half of verse 5 (“for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?”) logically grounds his insistence on an ordered home in verse 4 (“He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive”). Because “the house of a believer ought to be like a little church,”3 the result is that “he who cannot obtain from his children any reverence or subjection . . . will hardly be able to restrain the people by the bridle of discipline.”4 This means that how an elder, or potential elder, manages and orders his household are of utmost importance in determining his qualification for office. John Stott carefully summarizes the matter: “The married pastor is called to leadership in two families, his and God’s, and the former is to be the training ground of the latter.”5 (Cf. Matthew 25:14–30—he who is faithful over a little will be faithful over much. 6) The above analysis is rather uncontroversial among exegetes. Disagreements arise, however, when we probe more deeply into the nature of this well-ordered home.
3 .John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistles to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, translated from Latin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948), 83 n. 1.4 .Ibid., 293.5 .John Stott, Guard the Truth: The Message of 1 Timothy and Titus, The Bible Speaks Today (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 98.6 .William D. Mounce, Pastoral Epistles, WCB (Dallas: Word, 2000), 180.
Must an Elder’s Children Be Believers?
The most controversial question surrounding these verses is whether Paul is saying that an elder’s children have to be believers, or only that they must be faithful, submissive, and obedient.
The term pistas can mean either “believing” or “faithful” in the Pastoral Epistles (for the former with a noun, cf. 1 Tim. 6:2; for the latter with a noun, cf. 2 Tim. 2:2). Therefore, word studies alone cannot resolve the question.
However, I want to suggest that resolution to this question can be found in comparing the parallel between Titus 1:6 and 1 Timothy 3:4. We can be reasonably certain that tekna echonta en hupotagç (“having children in control/submission/obedience”; 1 Tim. 3:4) is virtually synonymous with tekna echôn pista (“having faithful / believing children”; Titus 1:6).7 In other words, to have pista children means to have children en hupotagç. This would mean that the final part of Titus 1:6 (“not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination”) is a description of what pista means.
7 .As Andreas Kostenberger writes, “In the larger context of the teaching of the Pastoral Epistles, it would be unusual if the author had two separate standards, a more lenient one in 1 Tim. 3:4 (obedient) and a more stringent one in Titus 1:6 (believing). This creates a presumption of reading pistos in Titus 1:6 as conveying the sense “faithful” or “obedient” in keeping with the requirement stated in 1 Tim. 3:4.” See http://www.biblicalfoundations.org/?p=36, along with his treatments in 1–2 Timothy, Titus, in the Expositor’s Bible Commentary, vol. 12 (rev. ed.; Zondervan, 2007), pp. 606-7, and ch. 12 inGod, Marriage, and Family (Crossway, 2004).
With that in mind, here are five further reasons that incline me to believe that Paul is referring to the submission and obedience of an elder’s children, and not to their salvation.
First, the grounding question of 1 Timothy 3:5 explicitly connects the elder’s qualifications with his managerial skills in verse 4. Generally obedient behavior does not require miraculous intervention; even a good lab technician can make a rat follow a certain path if enough planning and forethought is invested. Salvific faith, however, cannot be produced as a result of good housekeeping. While a godly home is often conducive to belief, it does not produce it. If we insist that a child’s salvation is fundamentally connected to the managerial skills of the father, we have inadvertently assigned an unbiblical role to human action. This is clearly the case with an application drawn by Stott: “An extension of the same principle may be that presbyter-bishops can hardly be expected to win strangers to Christ if they have failed to win those who are most exposed to their influence, their own children.”8 What would this mean? If you are a good manager at your home, then unbelievers can be “expected” to come to the Lord through your ministry?
8 .Stott, Guard the Truth, 176.
Second, even the best pastoral managers have unbelievers within their church or under their sphere of influence (cf. Gal. 1:6!). The logical consequent of this would mean that one can manage the larger household (his church) well, even though not everyone in it is a believer. If this is so, then it seems that one can manage the smaller household (his family) well, even though not all within it believe.
Third, insisting that having believing children is a prerequisite to eldership leads to some uncomfortable questions. What do we make of an elder who has a number of believing children—but one who is not? If most of his children are believers, is he not a good manager of his household? Or, does the one unbelieving child call into question his overall managerial ability? If it does, then why did any of his children turn out to be believers? Wilson writes: “. . . a man might decide (and, I think, should decide) to step down if one of his six children denies the faith. But if another pastor in his presbytery in the same situation does not decide to do so, and his other five children are saintly, only a crank would express his disagreement through a big church fight.”9 Yet this seems inconsistent; for if Paul truly teaches that unbelieving children automatically disqualify a man for eldership, then the purity of the elder board is worth fighting over.
9 .Douglas Wilson, “The Pastor’s Kid, Again” in Credenda/Agenda, vol. 2, no. 5.
Fourth, all of the requirements for eldership that are listed in this passage (being married once, being temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, a good teacher, not a drunkard, not a lover of money, and not a recent convert) are actions of personal responsibility. We would expect the requirement regarding his children to be in the same category. Requiring that his children have genuine saving faith is to require personal responsibility for the salvation of another, something I don’t see taught in Scripture.
Conclusion
I believe, therefore, that 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 are referring to the general submission and behavior of the elder’s children. God has so designed the universe that the parental role of disciplinarian, model, authority, and servant-leader generally has a profound effect upon the behavior of the children. Paul does not spell out what this looks like in every case, nor does he spell out all of the specifics of what will disqualify an elder. The general case, however, is clear:
What must not characterize the children of an elder is immorality and undisciplined rebelliousness, if the children are still at home and under his authority.10 Paul is not asking any more of the elder and his children than is expected of every Christian father and his children. However, only if a man exercises such proper control over his children may he be an elder.11
10 .See Knight, Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, 161, for his argument that Paul is referring to tekna (“children”) who are under authority and not yet of age.11 .Ibid., 290.
May God give the pastors and elders of our churches grace and wisdom in faithfully leading both their churches and their homes.12
Article by Denny Burk, Professor of Biblical Studies at Boyce College, the undergraduate school of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY.
