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Marriage and family life feature prominently in the requirements Paul lays down for overseers in the church. An elder must be the husband of but one wife (1 Timothy 3:2), and he must manage his own family well (v. 4). If a person cannot meet those standards it would appear that he is disqualified from leadership in the church.
Just what Paul means when he insists that an overseer must be “the husband of but one wife” has been disputed. Some say he is excluding polygamists from leadership. Others say he is excluding those who have never married, and others still that he is disqualifying those who have been divorced and remarried. Some argue that he is talking about those who have been widowed and remarried, and another group again say that he is referring to those guilty of marital unfaithfulness.
At least two of these suggestions can be dismissed as improbable. It is highly unlikely that Paul is referring to those who have never married, or to those have been widowed and then remarried. There is enough direct and implied scriptural evidence against these suggestions to let them fall.
On the other hand, we can say with some certainty that Paul is excluding polygamists from church leadership. Although, as John Stott informs us, Roman law forbade polygamy, it was still widely practiced in the Greco-Roman world and tolerated within Jewish society (p. 93). So it is possible that this injunction was aimed at ruling out polygamists.
But was this the only category of men that Paul had in mind, or even those that that he was primarily targeting? John Stott thinks that it isn’t. He considers it more likely that the apostle was thinking mainly of those who had been divorced and remarried, and of those who were guilty of some form of marital unfaithfulness.
Regarding the first to these – men who have been divorced and remarried – Stott comments as follows: “Do divorce and remarriage constitute an absolute ban on ordination, although they seem to have been allowed by Jesus to the innocent party when the other has been guilty of serious sexual sin, and by Paul in the case of a newly converted person whose spouse remained unwilling to continue the marriage?” He believes that they do. To the challenge that this creates something of a double standard within the church, he replies, “Yes it does, but is it not reasonable and right that a higher standard should be expected of pastors who are called to teach by example as well as by words?” (pp. 93-4).
Regarding the second – some form of marital unfaithfulness – he writes that Paul’s words may well mean that a prospective (or incumbent) church leader must be a man who has proved to be “faithful to his one wife … a man of unquestioned morality, one who is entirely true to his one and only wife” (p. 94). He then adds, “The accredited overseers of the church, who are called to teach doctrine and exercise discipline, must themselves have an unblemished reputation in the area of sex and marriage” (p. 94).
The issue at stake is not one of moral perfectionism, or of membership within the church of those who have a history of sexual and marriage failure. It is an issue of what Christ requires of those who lead and instruct his church. And of them he demands that they have “an unblemished reputation in the area of sex and marriage.”