What Does It Mean to Be “Above Reproach”?

Exemplary Christians

For many Christians—and pastors included—when you take a first look or a fresh look at the elder qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 or Titus 1, there can be a little bit of surprise that the first one mentioned is not that he’s a Christian and regenerate. Paul assumes that. It’s not some other attribute which we might consider central to pastoral ministry. Rather, it’s this umbrella term, and it might be a strange term to many of us: “above reproach.”

What does it mean to be “above reproach”? Some ears, maybe tender consciences, hear “above reproach” and think that’s unattainable. Maybe they think of it as a kind of blamelessness or even an utter sinlessness. That’s not what “above reproach” means. “Above reproach” is a very outward-oriented, public-facing qualification. It gets set right at the beginning of the list of elder qualifications—the public nature of the office. Other ears might hear “above reproach” as a really low bar, meaning that I don’t need to have some taint on my public reputation. For many people, that’s not very difficult, and they think this is a really low bar and attainable.

But one thing that it does get at is in addition to the public nature of the office, the exemplary function of the Christian ministry of pastors and elders, they need not be world-class orators or the greatest minds in the world or have administrative savvy. They are typically normal, healthy, exemplary Christians.

The elders are meant to embody—in their leadership and in their teaching—the kind of healthy Christians that we want the whole flock to grow toward. And so it’s important, given the public nature of the office and its exemplary function, that the elders be above reasonable reproach.

In other words, we want to be able to say about every pastor and elder in the church, “Be like him,” and not immediately need to qualify that. There are some men who, by virtue of their own indiscretion, both in the world’s eyes as much as in the churches, are not above reasonable public reproach. And they should not be pastors and elders.

There are others wrongfully have been accused, and we should stand by them and evaluate that clearly. But God means for the leaders in the local church to be those who are above that public reproach.

David Mathis is the author of Workers for Your Joy: The Call of Christ on Christian Leaders.

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