Week 48 Titus 1
368 days ago I was reading Paul’s Qualification List for church leaders. I remember wondering: how-in-the-world did anyone qualify?
Since I’m pretty sure that some people did qualify I’m thinking that either a) believers in the 1st century were far far superior to modern-day Alberta church leaders or b) I’m misunderstanding the list.
By ‘misunderstand’ I don’t mean that I can’t understand (there’s about 20 items in the list and most of them are understandable to an elementary school-aged kid). By ‘misunderstand’ I mean that I wonder if I’m understanding the list in a way Paul didn’t intend.
Here’s the thing: I tend to think of the list as (what I’d call) absolute. Take the first qualification as an example: a leader must live a blameless life. To me that means: a leader must live an absolutely blameless life. And if I’m right about that then you only qualify if you’re 100% blameless. So mine is like a light-switch test: you’re either on or off. No in-between.
But here’s the other thing: if it’s a light-switch test then there’ll be very very few candidates (maybe not even one). So because of that I’m tending to come down more on the side of a Qualification List that’s relative. Meaning that leadership candidates had to be showing some evidence of progress in each of the qualifications.
Paul was maybe asking for the stars…knowing he might only get the moon.
Note: quote from Titus 1:7 (NLT)