Leaders?

July 10th, 2021| Topic: RaMbLeS | 0

The other day there was a most unfortunate occurrence in Athens, Greece.

A Greek Orthodox priest had been formally defrocked and removed from the clergy for alleged misconduct by his superiors a group of bishops. The 37-year-old responded by throwing acid at those elders, injuring seven of them and three others in attendance (one a police officer)—all hospitalized with burns, two seriously.

Photographs of the scene of the attack in central Athens showed bloodstains and acid burns on the walls of the room where the hearing was held and on the desks where the bishops had been seated. Discarded black robes thrown off by the bishops and attending clergy also had bloodstains and burn holes.

The governing Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church:

The suspect had been removed from the priesthood for ecclesiastical and criminal offenses including fraud and illegal possession of drugs; he had also made threatening posts on social media ahead of his disciplinary hearing. But this attack was entirely abhorrent and unprecedented.”

The attack was also condemned by Greece’s government, President Katerina Sakellaropoulou, and the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I.

Said the ex-priest’s lawyer, Andreas Theodoropoulos:

The suspect is a psychiatric patient who is taking strong medication. He did not fully comprehend the consequences of his action, but was responding to a perceived injustice.”

In any case, this is not the kind of behavior the church wants from its leaders.

The statement is trustworthy: if one aspires to the office of overseer, it is a good work he desires.
The overseer, then, must be irreproachable, a one-woman man, temperate, self-controlled, honorable, hospitable, able to teach, not addicted to wine, not pugnacious, but gentle, not quarrelsome, free from the love of money, one managing his own household well, keeping children in submission with all dignity (but if one does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God?), not a new convert, so that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation of the devil.
And he must have a good testimony with those outside [the church], so that he will not fall into disgrace and the snare of the devil.
1 Timothy 3:1–7

Thus the list begins (after the introduction in 3:1) with a “must” and ends in 3:7 with another “must.” Both these “musts” deal with similar issues—not sinlessness, but irreproachability. It is notable that the elder list commences and concludes with the demand that an elder be “irreproachable”—the public image of the elder forms a bracket for all his qualifications. One might therefore see the elder list as one with eleven items, with the first, “above reproach,” being the heading. As Chrysostom (the fourth-century Church Father) noted, “every virtue is implied in this word.”

Such irreproachability is to characterize church leaders even in the eyes those outside the church (3:7). Indeed, several of the specific items in this list are identical to ideas and concepts floating around the milieu of first century thought, both Greco-Roman and Judaistic. For instance, here’s Polybius, the third-century Greek historian:

It was impossible for a man who was careless about the conduct of his own life to administer public affairs well.”

And it is also striking that almost every item in the list shows up elsewhere in the New Testament as required characteristics of all Christians. Thus the role of leaders is to model godliness for the flock:

Be an example to those who believe ….
1 Timothy 4:12

May there be many of that ilk!

SOURCE:
AP