Volume 3 · Honest HereticsLesson 28About 22 minutes

Titles and Clergy

What do you call the person who leads your church, and why?

Honest Heretics edition for skepticsSwitch to Centered (for believers)

The center · Matthew 23:8

⁸But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi’, for one is your teacher, the Christ, and all of you are brothers.

Pastor. Reverend. Father. Bishop. Apostle. Doctor. Most churches have a word for the person at the front, and many have a ladder of them. The titles come with the best seat, a reserved parking space and a voice that is hard to question. In some churches, questioning the leader at all is treated as questioning God.

You're not imagining it. If you have watched a leader's title shield him from questions, or seen people who raised concerns pushed out while the leader stayed, you saw something real. Jesus spoke to this directly, and his words are some of the plainest in the Gospels. Churches that print his words in red still hand out the titles he told his followers to refuse.