By Oyewole Sarumi
In the first part of this series, the public announcement was examined as a diagnostic event, a moment in which a pastor stood before a congregation and declared that monogamy is “unbiblical” and polygyny is “divinely ordained.”
That first essay traced the postmodern soil in which such a declaration could grow, examined the hermeneutical distinction between the descriptive tolerance of the Old Testament and the prescriptive norm of the New, and appealed to the patristic and Puritan consensus that has always read the Scriptures as teaching the monogamous covenant.
But an announcement is only the surface. Beneath the announcement lies an argument, and beneath the argument lies a hermeneutic. Pastor Israel Ford has now come forward to explain his reasons, and those reasons demand a second, more searching examination.
The excuses offered are not merely personal justifications; they are a grammar of interpretation, a set of hermeneutical moves that, if accepted, would dismantle the New Testament’s teaching on marriage, leadership, and revelation itself. The task of the theological teacher and the pastoral leader is to dissect that grammar, to expose its inner logic, and to set it over against the unyielding standard of the apostolic witness.
THE TESTIMONY UNDER EXAMINATION: WHAT WAS ACTUALLY CLAIMED
The public record is now clear enough to be examined with precision. Ford, who co-founded LifeWorks Church in Wickliffe, Ohio, with his first wife, Lydia, in 2009, told his congregation that he had been living with two wives for approximately three years before the public announcement.
The second wife, Shakayla Ford, had previously served under Ford’s spiritual mentorship, and Lydia described the transition by saying that Shakayla had moved from being a “spiritual daughter” to becoming a wife.
The arrangement was presented not as a fall, not as a failure, and not as a concession to weakness, but as a discovery of the “will of God”. Shakayla told the congregation that “it is amazing to know that this is the will of God and to live it,” and Lydia introduced her as “my sister in marriage” to applause.
Ford’s own account of how the arrangement began is hermeneutically significant. He explained that his first wife “doesn’t mind if I look at other women,” and that this openness made it easy for him to tell her that he had fallen in love with Shakayla.
The progression he described was one of proximity and service: Shakayla was always around, helping when Lydia was sick, cooking, cleaning, and doing different things, “to the point I fell in love with her.”
He then insisted that he did not want to “go against his faith or live in sin,” and so he sought God’s direction through prayer and fasting. All three of them, he claimed, agreed to a forty-day fast, and in the middle of the fast, God spoke to him and to Shakayla through a dream on the exact same night.
The first wife, significantly, did not receive the dream. Ford added that he would not marry Shakayla without Lydia’s approval, and that he waited until Lydia was comfortable before proceeding. He explained his public announcement by appealing to transparency: “If you do something, you preach something, you should live it”.
When challenged on the biblical text, Ford’s defense took a different turn. He argued that the requirement that an overseer be “the husband of one wife” applied specifically to certain leadership positions, and he claimed, “One, I’m not a bishop nor am I a deacon. Two, if that’s actually what that meant, then that would only pertain to those who are on that level of leadership”.
He then extended the argument by comparing the monogamy requirement to the apostolic instruction that women should be silent in the church, which he dismissed as “a cultural thing.” If Christians can accept a cultural interpretation of the silence passage, he reasoned, why can they not accept a cultural interpretation of the monogamy requirement? “It’s cultural,” he concluded. He also defended the asymmetry of the arrangement, insisting that his wives could not take additional husbands, and arguing that the husband’s responsibility to die for his wife means that he has “the greater sacrifice”.
THE HERMENEUTIC OF EXPERIENCE: WHEN APPETITE BECOMES REVELATION
The first and most fundamental hermeneutical move in Ford’s defense is the relocation of authority from the text of Scripture to the interior experience of the interpreter. The account begins with desire: he “fell in love” with Shakayla. It then moves to prayer and fasting, and it culminates in a dream, a private revelation that is treated as the decisive word of God.
The first wife’s approval is then sought and obtained, and the arrangement is baptized as the will of God. This is not a hermeneutic of Scripture; it is a hermeneutic of experience, and it follows a recognizable pattern. Desire is felt. Proximity creates opportunity. A period of spiritual seeking provides the appearance of seriousness. A private experience, in this case a dream, supplies the needed authorization. The consent of the first party removes the final obstacle. And then the whole sequence is narrated as a story of divine leading.
The theological problem with this pattern is not that prayer, fasting, and dreams are unbiblical. They are not. The problem is that they have been placed in the position of authority that belongs to the written Word of God. The prophet Jeremiah declared, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). The apostle John warned, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). The test that John provides is not the intensity of the experience or the sincerity of the seeker; it is the apostolic confession of Christ. A dream that contradicts the clear teaching of Scripture is not a revelation from God; it is a test of discernment.
The Bereans were commended not for accepting Paul’s preaching on the basis of his apostolic authority alone, but for examining “the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11). Ford’s account reverses the Berean pattern. The experience becomes the standard, and the Scripture is forced to fit it.
This is the postmodern condition in its most pastoral form. The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard famously defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives,” a suspicion of any overarching story that claims to explain reality. In the hands of a pastor, this incredulity does not usually announce itself as unbelief. It announces itself as a deeper sensitivity to the Spirit, a willingness to question inherited traditions, and a courage to follow God beyond the boundaries of what others have taught. But the functional authority has shifted.
The metanarrative of Scripture, which runs from creation to new creation and which defines marriage as the one-flesh union of one man and one woman, is no longer the master story that governs the pastor’s decisions. The master story is now the pastor’s own journey, and the Scripture is a collection of texts that can be arranged to illuminate that journey.
The 2025 Lifeway Research survey found that 28 percent of Protestant churchgoers now agree that “as culture changes, some biblical truths become obsolete,” an increase from 24 percent in 2019. Among younger churchgoers, the figure rises to half. Ford’s hermeneutic is not an outlier; it is the pastoral edge of a widening consensus that truth is malleable and that experience is the final arbiter.
THE “I AM NOT A BISHOP” DEFENSE: A FAILURE OF ECCLESSIAL HERMENUTICS
Ford’s second major defense is ecclesial rather than experiential. He argues that the requirement of monogamy in 1 Timothy 3:2 and Titus 1:6 applies only to bishops and deacons, and since he is neither, the requirement does not bind him. This argument deserves careful attention because it reveals a profound misunderstanding of how the pastoral epistles function and of what pastoral leadership is.
The phrase in 1 Timothy 3:2 is mias gynaikos andra, “a one-woman man,” and the same phrase appears in Titus 1:6 for the elder. The patristic and Reformation consensus understood this as a positive requirement of monogamy, excluding polygamy, concubinage, and promiscuous indulgence.
The question is not whether the phrase applies to a man who holds the specific title of “bishop.” The question is whether a man who exercises pastoral oversight, who leads a congregation, who stands before the flock as an example, can be exempted from the moral qualifications that the apostle Paul lays down for that very office.
Ford’s distinction between the titles “bishop” and “deacon” and his own role as “prophet” is a semantic evasion. The pastoral epistles do not establish a hierarchy in which the moral qualifications for leadership can be circumvented by a change of title. The qualifications are given precisely because the leader is a public representative of the gospel. The overseer must be “above reproach” (1 Timothy 3:2). He must “manage his own household well,” for “if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?” (1 Timothy 3:4–5). These qualifications are not arbitrary tests; they are the moral logic of pastoral representation.
A man who introduces a second wife into his household has, by definition, created a household that no longer models the exclusive covenant between Christ and his church. To argue that the rule does not apply because one’s title is “prophet” rather than “bishop” is to treat the pastoral office as a set of interchangeable labels rather than a sacred trust. It is, in effect, to say that the man who leads the congregation is exempt from the standards that govern the congregation’s leaders. The prophet who claims to speak for God has placed himself above the word of God.
The New Testament’s teaching on monogamy is not confined to the qualifications for office. It is rooted in creation and reiterated by Jesus and Paul as the norm for all disciples. Jesus, when asked about divorce, did not begin with Moses but with creation: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh” (Matthew 19:4–6).
The singular “a man” and “his wife” are the grammar of creation. John Wesley’s comment on this passage is precise: by making them one man and one woman, Christ “condemned polygamy,” and by making them one flesh, he “condemned divorce”. John Calvin is equally direct: the expression “the two shall become one flesh” condemns polygamy no less than it condemns the unrestrained liberty of divorce. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, states the norm with equal clarity: “Because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband” (1 Corinthians 7:2).
The possessive pronoun “his own” and “her own” excludes the sharing of a spouse with another. As one commentator notes, “polygamy and polyandry are rigorously excluded from the sanction of the Christian faith”.
THE “IT’S CULTURAL” DEFENSE: THE HERMENUTICS OF SELECTIVE ACCOMMODATION
Ford’s third defense is the most revealing because it is the most explicitly hermeneutical. He argues that the monogamy requirement is a cultural instruction, comparable to the apostolic teaching that women should be silent in the church, and that just as Christians have learned to interpret the silence passage culturally, they should learn to interpret the monogamy passage culturally as well.
This argument has a surface plausibility, and it is precisely for that reason that it must be examined with care. The question is not whether some biblical instructions are culturally bound. The question is what makes an instruction culturally bound, and who has the authority to make that determination.
The apostolic teaching on women’s silence in 1 Timothy 2:11–12 is a contested passage, and faithful interpreters have differed over its scope and application. But the existence of a debate about one passage does not grant a license to reclassify any passage that proves inconvenient.
The monogamy requirement is not an isolated instruction that appears only in a single verse. It is woven into the fabric of the biblical narrative from Genesis to Revelation. It is grounded in the creation ordinance, affirmed by Jesus as the original intention of the Creator, reinforced by Paul’s teaching on the one-flesh union, and embodied in the qualifications for leadership.
To classify this entire network of teaching as “cultural” is not to engage in careful contextual interpretation; it is to perform a hermeneutical surgery that severs the branches from the root. The Puritan divine John Owen warned that heretics “begin first to wrest Scripture expressions to a sense never received nor contained in them.” The reclassification of a creation ordinance as a cultural preference is precisely such a wresting.
Moreover, the “cultural” argument proves too much. If the monogamy requirement is cultural, then so is the prohibition of incest, the prohibition of adultery, and the call to sexual purity.
The logic of selective accommodation is inherently unstable because it provides no principled criterion for distinguishing between the instructions that are binding and the instructions that are dispensable. The criterion that Ford implicitly employs is the criterion of contemporary plausibility: if a teaching fits the sensibilities of the interpreter and his community, it is binding; if it does not, it is cultural. But that is not a hermeneutical principle; it is a recipe for ecclesial chaos. The church’s historic method has been to distinguish between the moral law, which abides, and the ceremonial and civil laws, which have been fulfilled in Christ.
The monogamy requirement belongs to the moral order of creation, not to the ceremonial or civil order of Israel. To place it in the category of the culturally dispensable is to confuse the creature’s design with the creature’s custom.
THE APPEAL TO EXODUS 21:10: THE ABUSE OF A TEXT OF REGULATION
Ford’s public defense also appealed to Exodus 21:10, the Mosaic statute that requires a man who takes another wife not to diminish the food, clothing, or marital rights of the first wife. This appeal is a textbook example of what the first essay identified as the confusion of descriptive history with prescriptive command.
The statute does not command polygyny; it regulates a practice that already existed in the ancient world and protects the vulnerable first wife from neglect. The Mosaic law, in its accommodation to the hardness of human hearts, tolerated polygyny for a season, but it never endorsed it as the Creator’s intention. Jesus himself made this distinction explicit when he said that Moses permitted divorce “because of your hardness of heart,” but “from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). The same hermeneutical principle applies to polygyny. The law regulated it because it existed, but the regulation was a concession to human weakness, not a revelation of divine ideal.
The narrative witness of the Old Testament confirms this reading. The polygynous households of the patriarchs are not presented as models of marital flourishing. They are presented as theaters of rivalry, jealousy, and grief. Sarah and Hagar, Leah and Rachel, Hannah and Peninnah: the names themselves evoke the sorrow of the divided household. Solomon’s many wives turned his heart away from the Lord (1 Kings 11:3–4). The Old Testament’s candor about the consequences of polygyny is itself a form of critique. The narrative does not need to pronounce a formal prohibition because it shows, with unflinching realism, the bitter fruit of departing from the creation design. To appeal to Exodus 21:10 as a warrant for polygyny is to read the Bible as a collection of isolated statutes rather than as a unified story, and it is to mistake the patience of God for the permission of God.
THE CONSENT OF THE FIRST WIFE: WHOSE CONSCIENCE GOVERNS?
Ford’s fourth defense is the claim that his first wife approved the arrangement, that all three parties prayed and fasted, and that he waited until Lydia was comfortable before proceeding. This appeal to consent is presented as evidence of integrity and transparency. But it raises a deeper question: whose conscience governs the interpretation of Scripture? The consent of a spouse is morally significant in many contexts, but it cannot transform an act that Scripture prohibits into an act that Scripture permits. The apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians about a matter of sexual immorality that the congregation had tolerated, asked, “Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?” (1 Corinthians 5:6). The consent of the community does not sanctify the leaven. The church at Corinth may have been proud of its tolerance, but Paul called it to mourning and discipline.
The appeal to consent also obscures the dynamics of spiritual authority. Shakayla was not a neutral party in the negotiation; she was a woman who had served under Ford’s spiritual mentorship. Lydia, by her own account, initially rejected the idea when Ford first raised it, and she only accepted after a period of prayer and study that Ford had encouraged. The consent of the first wife was obtained within a relationship of spiritual and emotional asymmetry. This does not mean that Lydia was insincere, but it does mean that her consent cannot bear the theological weight that Ford places upon it. The question is not whether the parties were sincere. The question is whether sincerity can override the word of God. The prophet who says “God spoke to me” has placed his private revelation above the public revelation of Scripture, and the consent of his family has become the ecclesial seal on a hermeneutical decision that the church itself must judge.
THE NEW TESTAMENT’S UNYIELDING STANDARD: CREATION, CHRIST, AND THE CHURCH
The New Testament’s teaching on marriage is not a series of disconnected rules; it is a coherent theology of covenant. It begins with creation: God made one man and one woman, and the two became one flesh (Genesis 2:24). It is confirmed by Christ: when the Pharisees appealed to Moses, Jesus appealed to creation, and he declared that what God has joined together, man must not separate (Matthew 19:4–6). It is applied by the apostles: Paul told the Corinthians that each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband (1 Corinthians 7:2), and he told Timothy and Titus that the overseer must be a one-woman man (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6). And it is fulfilled in the gospel: the one-flesh union of husband and wife is a profound mystery that refers to Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:31–32). The exclusivity of marriage is a sign of the exclusivity of Christ’s covenant love for his one bride.
This theology is not a cultural preference; it is the shape of redemption. When a pastor introduces a second wife into his covenant, he does not merely violate a rule; he distorts a sign. The church is the bride of Christ, and Christ has one bride. The pastor who multiplies his wives preaches a gospel in which the bridegroom is not satisfied with one bride, and in which the covenant is not exclusive. The apostolic qualification for leadership is not an arbitrary hurdle; it is a call to embody the gospel in one’s own household. The man who cannot embody the exclusive covenant of Christ and the church in his marriage is not qualified to lead the church that is called to bear witness to that covenant.
The early church understood this. Clement of Alexandria, writing in the second century, declared that the Lord “no longer concedes polygamy,” and that “He brings in single marriage for the sake of procreation of children”. Tertullian, in his treatise On Monogamy, argued that second marriage is “akin to adultery,” for “what is adultery but unlawful marriage?”. The writer of the Epistle of Barnabas insisted that the way of light is to “love thy neighbour more than thine own soul,” and the Didache commanded, “Thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not commit fornication.” The Shepherd of Hermas declared that a man who has a wife and takes another is an adulterer. These are not the musings of a later, culturally conditioned church; they are the voice of the church closest to the apostles, and they are unanimous in their reading of the New Testament’s monogamous standard.
THE PASTORAL AND SPIRITUAL STAKES: WHAT IS AT RISK FOR THE FLOCK
The stakes of this hermeneutical debate are not merely academic. They are pastoral and spiritual. A 2025 study of polygamy and Christianity in Southwest Nigeria found that 81.2 percent of respondents consider polygamy sinful, and 87.1 percent strongly oppose allowing polygamous individuals in leadership roles. The same study found that polygamous families face emotional distress, gender inequality, and legal uncertainties, and that children from polygamous homes reported the highest level of dissatisfaction, citing neglect and inheritance conflicts. These are the human faces of a practice that some pastors are now attempting to baptize as the will of God. The pastor who leads his congregation into polygyny is not merely making a theological mistake; he is exposing women and children to a pattern of family life that the data consistently show to be marked by sorrow and instability.
There is also the question of the pastor’s own soul. The pastoral vocation is a vocation of self-denial, of taking up the cross, of laying down one’s life for the sheep. Polygyny, whatever its defenders may claim, is a logic of acquisition rather than sacrifice. It expands the pastor’s domestic realm rather than limiting it. It multiplies his claims upon the devotion of women rather than emptying himself in covenant faithfulness to one. The pastor who stands before his congregation and declares that monogamy is unbiblical is not exercising prophetic courage; he is exercising hermeneutical self-indulgence, and he is doing so at the expense of the very people he is called to shepherd. The prophet who says “God spoke to me” has placed his private revelation above the public revelation of Scripture, and the consent of his family has become the ecclesial seal on a hermeneutical decision that the church itself must judge.
THE FUTURE OF THE FAITH: FROM HERMENUTICAL EVASION TO HERMENUTICAL ACCOUNTABILITY
The question that Ford’s testimony presses upon the church is not whether postmodernism is a threat. That question has already been answered by the direction of travel. The question is what the church will do about the particular hermeneutical habits that make a defense like Ford’s possible. And here the analysis must move beyond diagnosis to prescription, because the future of the faith will be shaped less by the refutation of bad arguments than by the formation of readers who are incapable of making them in good conscience. The first article in this series identified the crisis of authority. This second article must identify the cure, and the cure is not a restatement of the crisis. It is the cultivation of what may be called hermeneutical accountability: the disciplined practice of reading Scripture in a way that is answerable to the text, to the church, and to the future judgment seat of Christ.
The HERMENUTICAL VACUUM THAT EXCUSES FILL
A defense like Ford’s does not flourish in a vacuum. It flourishes where the church has failed to teach its people how to read the Bible as a unified story with a coherent moral shape. It failed when a leader does not have a discipler who can call him to order. When a leader get to the place and position of power and authority, he will misbehave without a toeholder. The Lifeway Research 2025 State of Theology survey found that 48 percent of Americans say the Bible contains helpful accounts of ancient myths but is not literally true, and that more than a third believe modern science disproves the Bible. These statistics describe a church that has largely surrendered the doctrinal ground on which any meaningful discussion of biblical marriage must stand. When a congregation does not know what the Bible is, it cannot evaluate a pastor’s claim about what the Bible says. The hermeneutical evasion is made possible by a hermeneutical vacuum, and the vacuum was created by decades of catechetical neglect. It’s obvious that Ford has neither a discipler nor a toeholder!
This is where the recovery must begin, and it must begin with the leadership audience to whom this article is addressed. Seminaries and pastoral training programs have too often taught exegesis as a technical skill for the commentary and hermeneutics as a theoretical discipline for the lecture hall, while leaving the ordinary believer without the tools to ask the most basic questions of a text. The result is a church in which the pastor’s private interpretation is functionally unassailable because no one in the pew has been equipped to test it. The remedy is not to make every believer a scholar. The remedy is to restore the ancient practice of reading Scripture in community, with the creeds and confessions as guides, with the whole canon as context, and with the mutual accountability of the body as the safeguard against private revelation run amok.
ANSWERABLE TO THE TEXT: THE DISCIPLINE OF CANONICAL READING
The first dimension of hermeneutical accountability is answerability to the text itself. Ford’s defense exploited a method of reading that treats the Bible as a collection of isolated verses rather than a unified narrative. He appealed to Exodus 21:10 without asking what the rest of Scripture says about polygyny. He appealed to the qualifications for bishops without asking whether a pastor who leads a congregation is exempt from the moral standards of the pastoral office. He appealed to a private dream without asking whether that dream conformed to the apostolic faith once for all delivered to the saints. Each of these moves is possible only where the canonical shape of Scripture has been lost.
The recovery of canonical reading requires the church to teach its people the great story of redemption: creation, fall, Israel, Christ, church, and new creation. Within that story, marriage is not an incidental topic. It is a sign of the covenant. The one-flesh union of Genesis 2:24 is taken up by Jesus in Matthew 19 and by Paul in Ephesians 5, and it is made to signify the exclusive love of Christ for his church. A reader who has been formed by this story cannot read Exodus 21:10 as a warrant for polygyny any more than a reader formed by the Sermon on the Mount can read the imprecatory psalms as a license for personal vengeance. The canonical reader knows that the parts must be read in light of the whole, and that the whole finds its center in Christ.
This is not a novel insight. It is the ancient principle that the church has always affirmed: Scripture interprets Scripture. The Puritan divine John Owen insisted that the Word of God is self-interpreting, and that the church’s task is not to impose meaning on the text but to draw out the meaning that is already there. The Reformers’ insistence on sola scriptura was never a license for private interpretation; it was a call to return to the text in its fullness, read within the community of faith and under the guidance of the Spirit. The church today needs to recover this principle not as a slogan but as a practice, and it needs to recover it especially in the training of leaders who will stand before congregations and answer for what they have taught.
ANSWERABLE TO THE CHURCH: THE RECOVERY OF CONCILIAR ACCOUNTABILITY
The second dimension of hermeneutical accountability is answerability to the church. Ford’s defense was framed as a personal journey, a private revelation, and a family decision. The congregation was informed, even celebrated, but it was not consulted as a body capable of judging the matter. This is a profound ecclesial failure. The New Testament knows nothing of a Christianity in which the individual believer, or even the individual pastor, is the final arbiter of doctrine and practice. Jesus gave the keys of the kingdom to the church, and he instructed his disciples to bring matters of dispute to the congregation (Matthew 18:15–20). Paul rebuked the Corinthians not because an individual had sinned, but because the community had failed to judge the sin (1 Corinthians 5:1–5). The church is the pillar and buttress of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15), and the exercise of that role requires the community to be equipped for judgment.
The recovery of conciliar accountability means, at the most basic level, that the church must recover the practice of church discipline. Ford’s public announcement was not a private matter; it was a public claim to divine authorization. Such a claim cannot be left unexamined by the body of Christ. In a healthy church, the announcement would have been met with the question: “What does the word of God say?” It would have been followed by a process of examination, and if the claim proved to contradict the apostolic faith, it would have been followed by correction and, if necessary, discipline. This is not cruelty; it is love. The pastor who is allowed to persist in error without correction is a pastor who is being abandoned to his error, and the congregation that permits it is a congregation that has abdicated its role as the guardian of the gospel.
The recovery of conciliar accountability also means that the church’s historic consensus must be taken seriously. The patristic and Reformation consensus on monogamy was not a cultural accident; it was the fruit of centuries of reading Scripture together. When a pastor claims a new revelation that contradicts this consensus, he is not merely disagreeing with his denomination; he is placing himself outside the communion of the saints. The church must have the courage to say so, and it must have the structures to make that judgment effective. This is what it means to be a community of interpretation: not a community in which every interpretation is tolerated, but a community in which interpretation is accountable to the Word and to the faithful.
ANSWERABLE TO THE FUTURE: ESCHATOLOGICAL FORMATION FOR LEADERSHIP
The third dimension of hermeneutical accountability is answerability to the future. Ford’s defense was framed almost entirely in terms of the present: his feelings, his wife’s approval, his congregation’s acceptance, his transparency. But the pastoral office is an eschatological office. The pastor is called to prepare a people for the return of Christ, and he will give an account for the souls entrusted to his care. The writer of Hebrews puts it starkly: “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account” (Hebrews 13:17). The pastor who leads his flock into error will not only bear the consequences himself; he will bear the responsibility for those who followed him.
This eschatological frame transforms the way we think about leadership formation. The goal of theological education is not merely to produce pastors who can preach well or administrate efficiently. It is to produce pastors who will stand before the judgment seat of Christ and give an account of their handling of the Word of God. Paul’s charge to Timothy is the charge to every generation of pastors: “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Timothy 4:1–2). The pastor who abandons the word for the sake of a private revelation has failed in the one task that defines his calling.
The church needs to recover this eschatological seriousness in its selection and training of leaders. The questions that guide pastoral appointments must include not only “Can this man preach?” and “Can this man lead?” but also “Will this man stand before Christ with a clear conscience concerning what he has taught?” The qualifications of 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 are not merely administrative criteria; they are eschatological criteria. They describe the kind of person who will be found faithful when the Chief Shepherd appears. A man who cannot manage his own household in the monogamous covenant of Christian marriage has not demonstrated the faithfulness that the office requires. A man who reclassifies the clear teaching of Scripture as cultural has not demonstrated the submission to the Word that the office demands. The church must have the courage to apply these criteria, not out of a desire to exclude, but out of a desire to protect the flock and to honor the Word.
FORMATION AS THE ANTIDOTE TO EVASION
The common thread in all three dimensions of hermeneutical accountability is formation. The pastor who reclassifies monogamy as cultural, who appeals to a private dream, who insulates himself from conciliar judgment, is not merely making an intellectual mistake. He is revealing a pattern of formation, or a lack of it. He has not been formed by the whole counsel of God, by the church’s historic teaching, or by the eschatological seriousness of his calling. The remedy is not a single lecture or a single article. It is a lifelong discipline of reading, praying, and living under the authority of Scripture.
This formation must begin in the home and in the local church. It must continue in the seminary and in the pastor’s study. It must be sustained by the fellowship of other pastors who are accountable to one another and who are willing to ask hard questions. The church needs to cultivate a culture in which the pastor is not a solitary interpreter but a member of a community of interpreters, accountable to the Word and to one another. The church needs to recover the practice of reading Scripture together, of studying the confessions together, of examining one another’s teaching together. This is not a matter of bureaucracy; it is a matter of spiritual survival.
The apostolic church understood this. The Jerusalem council in Acts 15 did not leave the question of Gentile inclusion to individual apostles and prophets; it gathered the community, examined the evidence, and issued a decision that was binding on the churches. The pastoral epistles insist that elders be appointed who are able to teach and who are above reproach. The letters to the churches in Revelation are addressed not to individuals but to communities, and they hold the communities accountable for their doctrine and practice. The church has always been a community of interpretation, and it must recover that identity if it is to withstand the hermeneutical pressures of the postmodern age.
THE UNFINISHED TASK OF THE CHURCH
As I wrap up this long piece, the testimony of Pastor Israel Ford is a warning, but it is also a summons. It is a warning that the hermeneutics of appetite is not a distant threat but a present reality, and that it can wear the face of sincerity, transparency, and spiritual seeking. It is a summons to the church to recover the discipline of hermeneutical accountability: to be answerable to the text, to the church, and to the future judgment seat of Christ.
The future of the faith will not be secured by the mere repetition of orthodox formulas, nor by the refutation of individual errorists. It will be secured by the formation of a generation of leaders who know how to read the Bible as a whole, who are accountable to the church as a community, and who live in the fear of the Lord and the hope of his appearing. The church must be a community in which the Word of God is not merely preached but obeyed, not merely studied but embodied, not merely defended but loved.
The pastor in Ohio has chosen a path of hermeneutical evasion. The church must choose a different path. It must choose the path of hermeneutical accountability, a path that is narrower and harder but that leads to life. It must choose leaders who will stand before Christ with a clear conscience because they have handled the Word of God faithfully, who have not sought to reshape the text to fit their desires, and who have not insulated themselves from the correction of the body. The church must choose the path of the Bereans, who examined the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so (Acts 17:11), and it must choose the path of the faithful pastor who can say with Paul, “I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27). This is the path that leads to the future, and it is the path that the church must walk if it is to remain the church of Jesus Christ in a world that has lost its way.
Prof. Sarumi, a disciple of Jesus Christ and teacher of the Word of God, writes from Lagos. Tel. 234 803 304 1421, Email: oyewolethecoach@gmail.com