Prescriptions for a Healthy Church: Cretans
July 17th, 2011 (PM). By: Rod Earnshaw
Rod Earnshaw brings a message from Titus 1.10-16 entiled “Cretans are always liars”. This is part of the 2011 series from Titus entitled “Prescriptions for a healthy church”.
Elders, Part II
2011 07 17
Titus 1.10-16
Our topic tonight, like last week is leadership in the church. So I wonder if you’ve ever been in the presence of pure leadership greatness? How would you know? I think you’d know…
My uncle is a natural born leader. He rose to the top in sports administration – he is the epitome of that leadership aphorism – how do you know if you’re a leader? Look behind you and see if anyone’s following.
What is it about him? I’m not sure I can put my finger on it – he’s a big personality, he dominates every room he’s in, he’s got charisma, charm, natural born grace, and a supreme confidence behind everything he says. I always find myself seeking his approval, wanting his praise, his agreement. He’s what I imagine Bill Clinton’s like, or Barak Obama or Nelson Mandela. There are some people who are just natural born leaders. People just want to follow them.
But what if the natural born leader doesn’t care about the people who follow him? What if he doesn’t care where he takes them or what happens to them; what if they’re just means to an end and he’s on a power trip? Well then all that natural leadership ability makes them dangerous doesn’t it?
And that’s exactly what was happening on Crete – leaders were springing up all over the place, but not good leaders, they were blagging their way into church leadership for profit, not for the good of the church.
Last week we heard part one of Paul’s plan for dealing with these dodgy leaders. He left Titus on Crete with a mission to appoint leaders to teach the truth and refute error – fill the power vacuum by appointing good men who are fit to lead.
That’s a necessary and important part of the strategy, but it wouldn’t be enough in itself, so this week we have part two.
And the big idea this week is that Titus needed to silence the bad leaders who were beginning to take over. They needed to be silenced because they were already ruining the church. Titus needed to do it so it didn’t turn into a popularity contest between the newly appointed leaders and the self appointed leaders.
Conveniently for my sermon outline there are three things in this passage that Paul tells Titus (and us) about his strategy to silence these bad leaders: first, how to spot them, second how to stop them, and third why it’s so important. So let’s turn those into sermon points and get into it – but I’m in a mood to mix things up a little, so let’s work backwards through that list…
So, my three points are:
Silence Bad Leaders because they will ruin the church;
Silence Bad Leaders by publicly calling them out; and
Spot Bad Leaders by their Convictions, Character and Competence.
So let’s start at the beginning (or the end?) with point one:
Silence Bad Leaders because they will ruin the church;
Look at verse 10:
10 For there are many rebellious people, mere talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision group. 11 They must be silenced, because they are ruining whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach–and that for the sake of dishonest gain.
If there’s no authorised leadership, then any one can push themselves to the front. That’s what was happening in Crete. But men who push themselves to the front are not the men you want to run the church. They were teaching error and ruining whole households, because they were in for the sake of what they could get out of it. They had to be dealt with, they had to be silenced.
We heard last week that good elders needed to be appointed to teach the truth and to rebuke error, to fill that leadership vacuum. But it’s not enough to put good leaders in place; the bad leaders need to be dealt with.
Before we move on to look at that in detail there is something I want to clear up from last week, centres around these words Paul uses for these leaders – specifically in Anglican circles the use of ‘Preist’ to mean the elder, the vicar. Ben was right to say that that’s how the Anglican Church uses the word, but Paul may not be using ‘elder’ in this passage in the exactly the same way that Anglicans use it. There’s confusion here and I want to try and clear it up a little before we go any further…
Two things need to be cleared up. Anglicans are doing something strange in calling their elders priests, because there is another word that we translate priest – ‘heiros’. That’s the word translated ‘priest’ in our bibles, referring to the priests in the temple, the people who offered the sacrifices etc.; So the Roman Catholic church calls their ministers ‘Priests’ meaning ‘like the OT priests’ – and thinks of communion as a new kind of sacrifice, not of a sheep or a goat, but of Jesus body, their ministers are standing in for Jesus as Priests ‘heiros’ priests.
The Anglican Church, along with all the protestant churches, says that’s not right, Jesus is the only Priest we need, he sacrificed himself once for all, he remains our priest in heaven and we have no priests here on earth. But the Anglican church then goes on to use the word ‘priest’ to refer to ‘elders or leaders’, from the Greek word here in this passage ‘presbuteros’ – elder; there’s not supposed to be any hint of offering sacrifices in temples and making people right with God by what they do etc. So when I say I’ve been ordained as a Priest that’s supposed to mean an elder, a leader, not a priest – I know talk about making things harder than they should be! So that’s the first thing, an Anglican ‘priest’ isn’t a ‘priest’, he’s an elder.
So what’s an elder? In Paul’s day elder meant senior leader – it could be simply older men, men who had influence and exercised leadership in their communities and households; or in Jewish circles it could be used more technically of the council of rulers in the synagogue or the sanhedran – religious and political leadership.
So is Paul using elders in the way Anglican’s use it? Probably not –they’re appointed from within the church, they’re locals, not experts brought in from outside. But more than that Paul also describes them using the word ‘episcopos’ – in verse 7, translated ‘overseer’ – that’s the word from which we get Episcopalian, or Bishop. Elder and Bishop are also used to describe the same people in Acts 20, where Paul speaks to the Ephesian Elders and in 1 Peter 5 where Peter speaks to the elders as a fellow elder, which both add the idea of being shepherds, from which we get the word pastors – pastors, priests and bishops all the same thing in Paul’s day). So are they like our bishops? Not like ours no, they’re leading churches, Titus is much more like the Bishop, he’s appointing and overseeing them.
We always need to be very careful not to read our current experience back into biblical texts where their context is very different to ours. So where does that leave us?
Well the elders Titus is to appoint are leaders in the church. They’re local to the church and appointed from within, they’re probably most like our home group leaders.
And before we leave this little linguistic excursus there is one more interesting angle that isn’t often made clear in translations – these men Titus is to appoint are, as well as elders and bishops, also stewards. See in verse 7 where it says they are ‘entrusted with God’s work?’ – that’s translating a word meaning ‘stewards of the house’, or ‘household managers’. Verse 7 is more literally ‘since an overseer is entrusted with God’s house he must be blameless’. So the elders are like the stewards, the leader of the household, under the Father. This image carries a lot of freight for Paul because the churches were likely house churches, so the elders were leading whole house holds.
This brings us back to verses 10 and 11. There are many rebellious people who must be silenced ‘because they are ruining whole households’ – do you see what’s going on there – that probably means they were ruining whole churches!
How were they ruining the churches – through teaching things they ought not to teach. What was that? Well we don’t get a full blown explanation of the teaching that was going around in Crete, but there are very clear hints.
Verse 10 says that the worst were the members of the Circumcision group – Jewish Christians who want to insist that Christians keep the OT law – as we saw last term in Acts 15.
Verse 14 and 15 point us in the same direction. Verse 14 refers to Jewish myths – an idea that will be picked up again in ch 3. Along with Jewish myths verse 14 also speaks of the commands of those who reject the truth – that is literally “the commands of men” who reject the truth. It’s a shame the NIV doesn’t translate that as ‘commands of men’, because if we know our NT we’ll recognise that as Mark 7 language – in Mark 7 Jesus said to the Pharisees that their religion was nothing but commands taught by men; (he was in turn referring back to Isaiah 29). Jesus goes on to say – Mark 7.15 – that nothing that goes into a man can make him unclean, it is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean’ so Mark tells us that ‘in saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean’ (mark 7.19). This cleanliness language seems to be picked up by Paul here in Titus in verse 15: ‘to the pure all things are pure’.
What’s emerging strongly suggests that the main problem teaching in Crete was Jewish legalism. Legalism threatened to capsize the church by taking them away from grace and leading them into dependence on what they did for God’s favour. In so doing it would lead them away from obedience to God and into rebellion against him. It would appear to make them more godly, but in fact instead of making them more pure it would spoil everything and leave them corrupted!
Do you notice this is the direct opposite of Paul’s criterion for elders in 1.9 ‘they must hold fast to the trustworthy message as it has been taught’. These men do the very opposite, they reject this message, undermine it and teach a different message instead.
These men are theological Pied Pipers. They lead a merry dance and attract a great crowd of followers – and they lead them off to death. The have to be silenced because their tune leads to death
Silence Bad leaders because they will ruin the church.
Before we move on to the next point I want you to notice that if that is how they relate to the gospel, then no amount of ordaining or due process can make up for this most significant failing. Whether they’re the Pope or the Arch Bishop of Canterbury, the dene of the Cathedral or the arch deacon of the diocese – if they don’t hold fast to the trustworthy message as is has been taught, then they’re mere talkers and deceivers, rebellious men who leaders have a duty silence.
Who – the Pope and the Arch Bishop of Canterbury not just random titles – institutionally the Roman Catholic church has rejected the trust worthy message as it has been handed down and re-introduced the very same types of things that the circumcision group wanted to impose on the NT church – ritual pomp and ceremony, priests offering sacrifices that bring us to God and people dependent on their works to make them acceptable to God.
The Arch Bishop of Canterbury hasn’t been much better recently – he continues to accept bad leaders who openly rebel against the word of God.
But bad leaders can’t be left to do their own thing, they will ruin the faith of the church. They have to be dealt with. So how do we deal with bad leadership? That’s point two, Paul tells Timothy to silence them by publicly calling them out.
Silence Bad Leaders by publicly calling them out
Last week we saw how the leadership vacuum was to be filled by appointing good men. But it’s not enough just to put good men into positions, Titus is also given the job of publicly calling out the bad leaders.
Look at verse 10 again:
10 For there are many rebellious people, mere talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision group. 11 They must be silenced …
13b Therefore, rebuke them sharply, so that they will be sound in the faith 14 and will pay no attention to Jewish myths or to the commands of those who reject the truth.
I know we don’t like conflict in the church, we’ve talked about this quite a lot recently as we worked our way through Acts, particularly Acts 15 – and I won’t go over all that again, if you missed it you can find those talks on the website (the unstoppable message series). I just want you to notice again that this is a public process – these false teachers have gained traction through seemingly plausible teaching and personal charisma, and people are being led astray, whole churches ruined; heaven and hell hang in the balance. Titus can’t just stand by and let the false teachers keep the gains they’ve made, he needs to step up and publicly call them out. He needs to meet false teaching and rebellion with a clear declaration of the truth and a clear rebuttal of the error.
And this is not fuzzy or in some sort of code so that only those in the know get the message, this is as clear as possible and as public as possible so that everyone knows exactly what is from God and what is error.
And do you notice how this letter functions to do exactly the same thing. Paul writes an open letter to Titus, expecting, wanting the whole church to hear it. In it he repeats a whole lot of stuff that Titus already knows – why – just so Titus has a handy memory aid in case he forgot why he was there – no, he wants to give Titus the public backing he needs to get the job done, he wants everyone to hear these instructions. This does two things – it declares Titus authority and credentials to do the job, and it publicly puts the dodgy leaders on notice – they can accept Paul’s apostolic authority and submit to Titus’ leadership and the men he appoints, of they can demonstrate the truth of Paul’s criticism by continuing in their path of reckless disobedience.
So Paul models what he wants Titus to do. He learned it from Jesus, who didn’t just declare the truth, but corrected error. And he expects Titus to model it before the elders. And he expects the elders to practice it too. Publicly calling out those who are in error is a key part of the task of Christian leadership.
Let me try and illustrate this for you. Imagine I started subtly changing the gospel here. Imagine, for instance, that I started to teach a prosperity gospel, something like Creflo Dollar or Kenneth Copland – I said if you give a seed gift to the church God will return it 30, 60 or 100 times, so show me the money. And I started spending that money on private jets and Rolls Royce’s – and I said that showed how faithful I’d been and so God was blessing me.
I hope it wouldn’t take long for someone to put a stop to it. But imagine that David Holloway and Jonathan Pryke and the other leaders of the Jesmond Trust, who planted this church, called me in sat me in the office and said – we hear you’ve abandoned the gospel, you can’t be the minister here anymore. But we don’t want to make a fuss, so we’ll just let you go quietly, you can resign and say it was for family reasons.
Well imagine I went on the offensive and started saying that David and Jonathan made me resign because they wanted to get control of my ministry, they were just jealous, they had personal problems… and I went across the road and started a new mega church in direct competition with the one I’d been kicked out of. You can see the damage that could do. Unless the error is publicly called out a dodgy leader is free to just keep teaching it.
So if you’re a leader, a home group leader, or a household leader – a husband, a father or a mother – then you need to be doing this, to be aware of what is in the air – what’s taught in Sunday school, what’s said in school, what’s taught by the TV shows and films and music – and within your sphere of influence you need to be showing the errors as well as declaring the good.
And when we hear of public barney’s between Christian leaders, we can grieve over the effect of sin in the church, but be careful about judging leaders who call out error, that’s their job. Pray that they’d do it well, that they wouldn’t be harsh and overbearing etc., that they wouldn’t rush to judgement etc., but don’t tell them not to correct error, they must correct error. And don’t tell them to do it all behind closed doors, that allows the error to stay in the public domain without correction. And in the face of grave error, pray that God would raise up true leaders who know what is required and are prepared to do it. Thank God for men like David Holloway who’s been prepared to stand alone and not just declare the truth, but refute the error also.
So we’ve established that this is important – they need to be silenced or they will ruin the church, and we’ve established that it needs to be public, but how do we know who needs to be silenced, how do we identify the ones we need to publicly call out, this is point three.
Spot Bad Leaders by their Convictions, Character and Competence
Paul’s descriptions of these bad leaders are scattered through out the passage:
Scan back over it again – they
rebellious people, mere talkers and deceivers, They ruin whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach–and that for the sake of dishonest gain.
They are are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.” 13
both their minds and consciences are corrupted. 16 They claim to know God, but by their actions they deny him. They are detestable, disobedient and unfit for doing anything good.
This is a scathing demolition of their convictions, their character and their competence to lead. And they’re almost the opposite to the qualities required to be an elder.
Last week we heard that elders must hold firmly to the trustworthy message – to have gospel convictions; they have to be blameless – not known for bad behaviours, but known for good character; and they have to be able to teach and to refute error – they were to be competent to lead. Contrast these bad leaders –they reject the truth, they’re so degraded they’re notorious for their disreputable character and they’re completely incompetent – teaching what they ought not to teach and ruining whole households! This is worth a closer look, so let’s take those three categories in turn:
Convictions
As Ben said last week what we believe gives rise to what we do (if we say we believe something and it doesn’t change what we do then it may be that we don’t really believe it as we should!). Convictions is a way of talking about the things we believe most deeply; it’s these deeply held beliefs that most shape our behaviour day to day. We’ve already seen these men don’t hold fast to the gospel, they teach things they ought not to teach, most likely a form of Jewish legalism.
Character
Again the direct opposite of what is required – not blameless as per verse 6 and 7; instead well known for their bad habits, bad character, so much so they have a literary reputation, they’re a byword for lazy, greedy, brutish, deceptive behaviour (vs 12).
I think evil brutes just about covers all the things elders were not supposed to be from verse 6 – remember: not over bearing, not quick tempered, not drunken and violent; and sadly over and above those things they are known for their dishonesty.
O and there was one more thing – they weren’t supposed to be pursing dishonest gain. But that is again precisely what they are doing – they teach what they ought not to teach – for the sake of dishonest gain! They’re not men of integrity, they’re mere talkers and worse, they’re deceivers (verse 10).
They’re so far from being qualified for leadership that Paul can sum them up in verse 16 as disobedient, detestable and unfit for doing anything good (vs 16); but they have the gall to claim to know God, to put themselves forward as leaderships in his church!
If you don’t appoint leaders, someone will appoint themselves the leader, and people who are push themselves to the front are not humble, gracious and other people centred – they are proud, self seeking and self serving.
Competence
The most important qualifications are convictions and character – and as we’ve seen poor (or no) convictions will lead to bad character and this in itself will render you incompetent to lead.
But in today’s world we focus on competence first, almost beyond all else – if someone is good at what they do, that’s almost enough to make up for any defects of character (take sports men for instance – it doesn’t matter how greedy, lazy, or argumentative; it doesn’t matter how unfaithful to their wives, if they’ve got the skills required, they get the job; to pick one of many recent examples let’s take John Terry for instance, we’re continually told he’s a born leader, and he’s back as captain of the England team – even when he wasn’t he kept acting like he was. His off the field behaviour’s almost completely irrelevant, unless it involves his team mates. But with leaders like that it’s no surprise that so many footballers are in thrall to money, sex and all that jazz.
But what do we see here are the competency of these leaders? Well in one respect they seem to be very competent. Look at verse 11:
They must be silenced, because they are ruining whole households (remember these are probably house churches, so this could be more than just families, it could be whole churches!) by teaching things they ought not to teach.
They must have gifts or charisma for leadership, because they’re gathering a following. In the John Terry sense they’re born leaders, they must be, people are following them.
But look where they’re leading – they’re leading whole households (or churches) to ruin! Remember verse 9 from last week – the task of the leader is to encourage by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it, the reason Titus was supposed to appoint them was to straighten out what was unfinished, to correct what remained so that the churches would be complete, mature. Christian leadership isn’t just a matter of gathering a following, it’s a matter of taking people towards a destination, towards Christian maturity, as we’ll see through the rest of this letter, to greater and greater godliness.
That being so, these self appointed leaders are completely incompetent. They don’t lead people to God, how can they, verse 16, they only claim to know him. Instead of leading people to God they lead them into a nightmare of pseudo Christianity, away from real purity and into a mere parody of it. That’s why Paul calls them detestable – their disobedience to the message renders them unfit for doing anything good – and their apparent charisma and leadership gifts only make them all the more dangerous, because people are all the more inclined to follow them and make a ship wreck of their faith.
As we move towards the finish line I want you to reflect for a moment that these qualifications for leadership are simply exemplary Christian behaviour. We can’t be leaders without them, because leaders are modelling what we should all be working towards. Convictions lead to Behaviour, Repeated Behaviour leads to Habits, Habits form our Character – Character is the deep you, the person revealed in those personality tests, the set of patterns of behaviour and thought that is so deep it is almost automatic, what we do on autopilot. Often revealed in times of stress or tiredness – Was it the real Gordon Brown that we saw during the last election campaign when he was all smiles to the camera and then got in the car and called the woman he was talking to a bigot?
So if you’re a Christian, do you hold your Christian beliefs lightly – not enough to really change your day to day behaviour – or are they deeply held beliefs that shape you, constrain your decision making, move you to do good and to reject evil? And are you working on good habits of disciplining yourself, not just in the moment by moment decisions, but getting into patterns of good behaviour so that good behaviour becomes habitual, begins to develop into good character? If not, you need to get started on that. What can you do to shape your character – well for a start Proverbs says bad company corrupts good character – so who do you spend your time with – and to broaden that out a little, what do you fill your mind with? Good character, or disreputable characters – like the ones on our TV screens, movies, magazines and radios.
Do you get to bible study – homegroup of women’s fellowship? Do you spend time with God in prayer and bible reading? These aren’t just clichés these are the daily disciplines that shape who we are.
Conclusion
We need to finish. The need for good leadership is urgent. Without it self appointed leaders will take control and they will lead the church into disaster.
Last week one of you asked on the yellow slip: ‘how can anyone qualify to be a leader in the church?’ And that’s the right question. Certainly none of us can do it in our own strength. And none of us will get it totally right. So I want to ask you to ask God to equip and shape and change and help and protect me. And I’m not the leader of the church, there are many leaders, please support us all in prayer. Call out to God for us, because we have the potential to do great harm, as well as great good for this church. And strive towards the things that make a good elder, because they are the things that make a mature Christian. And pray that God would raise up more and more leaders, not just for us here, but for the church across the world so that we can declare the gospel with a clear voice, making the truth known, and correcting error.
Let’s pray…