Carl Trueman has many good insights on the character of ministers and elders, gleaned from 1 Timothy 3. You can read it here.
When commenting on why the overseer must be a man of moderation, he notes:
This is one more reason why Paul typically assumes overseers and elders will be older people. The knowledge of which hills one must die on, which battles need not be fought, and that sometimes it takes a long time to move a congregation to where they should be, if one is to do it without hurting people – this knowledge is something that comes with age.
Yes, determining what hills to die on is important and is often lost on younger folk (I didn’t always pick my hills wisely in my younger days). Or, as a professor of mine reminded us in seminary, you can only fall on your sword once, so it had better be worth it.
But then Dr. Trueman gets this little jab in:
Put some thirty-something punk in a pulpit and guess what? He’ll be playing ACDC during the worship service, using explicit language in his stand-up routine, dressing like a superannuated teenager, screaming down his critics as `haters’ and refusing to visit the sick in hospital until they are in body bags. But hey, those things would surely never happen……
I wonder who he’s talking about?
