Titus: Building on firm foundations

While Timothy is battling with false teachers, Titus is building on the foundations laid by Paul in Crete. He’s been left behind to ensure that the churches they’ve founded are organised in such a way that they don’t fall prey to the kind of false teachers plaguing the Ephesian church.

Because they were written at the same time, Titus shares some of the same concerns as 1 Timothy. But because the circumstances of the two churches differed, Paul focused less on false teachers and more on Christian lifestyle in his letter to Titus.

The church on Crete was still in its infancy. So Paul writes to encourage Titus to do two things. The first is to appoint to leaders. He doesn’t tell Titus how to appoint them but he does outline the sort of qualities leaders should have – just he did to Timothy. One of the key elements is that leaders should know the good news about Jesus and be able to teach others about it – whether by preaching or by running a home group.

The fact that Paul stresses to both Timothy and Titus the need for good leaders who can teach should not lead us to jump to the conclusion that the church is becoming institutionalised. Some commentators have argued that Paul couldn’t have written the pastorals because the picture of church given in these late letters differs so much from the freer, charismatic congregations pictured in 1 Corinthians and other early letters.

But this is not necessarily the case. Philippians, an early letter, is written to church members and leaders (Phil1:1). The church always had leaders (see Acts 6:1-7, 14:21-24). What we must guard against is reading later church organisation and structures back into the pastoral letters and assuming that they give us a picture of a church that is becoming rigidly hierarchical. The very fact that some leaders in Ephesus had gone off the rails and some hadn’t; the very fact that Paul had to install his person and try to bolster his authority by writing him a strongly worded letter, the contents of which he was to share with the whole church, suggests that church life and organisation was still pretty loose and free. It suggests that people claiming to be inspired by the Holy Spirit and having a ‘new’ revelation of how things should be done could still get a hearing - to the benefit or detriment of the church, depending on what this new things was.

The church still consisted of small gatherings of believers – probably no more than 30 in any one congregation – meeting in homes across cities, relating loosely to each other but having no centralised controlling leadership. The leader of one of these small groups was not a pastor in our sense of the word but someone more like a home group leader – an ordinary working person with a bit of Christian experience and knowledge who hosted the congregation and gave a shape to its meetings. But these people mattered – they still do. They had a considerable influence over the health of the church. If they got infected by false understandings of the good news, it is likely that those meeting in their home would pick it up – like flu going round a home group in a British winter.

And this is why Paul lays such stress on leaders being able to teach and pass on the basics of the Christian faith to their congregations. It is also why he insists that in their lifestyle they model Christian behaviour (Titus 1:5-16). Leaders don’t just teach through their words, they also teach through what people see in their lives.

The second item on Paul’s agenda to Titus is to remind him what he – and by implication all the leaders he appoints – should teach. The dominant theme of chapters 2 and 3 of this letter is that a Christian’s life should be focused on good works (1:8, 16; 2:7, 4; 3:1, 8, 14). Paul stresses that Christian believers should exercise self-control – a favourite theme of his (see 1 Corinthians 8-10). This is not spiritualised self-help. Rather in Paul’s view self control is a fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22). It is inspired by the Holy Spirit and based on sound Christian teaching. The reason he stresses it in Titus is that it will protect the people in his care from the manipulation that Christians in Ephesus are experiencing from leaders who seek to exercise undue influence over members of their congregations.

But self control is not an end in itself. Its purpose is to enable Christians to focus on how they should lived both in the church and in the wider world so that the good news about Jesus is seen and experienced by people (2:5, 7, 8, 10, 11; 3:1, 8). Paul’s passion throughout his ministry was that as many people as possible came to experience and understand the freedom and new life that God brings us in Jesus. That is what Titus should be teaching on Crete. That should be the focus of all our home group activity.