Does Divorce and Remarriage Disqualify a Man From Being a Pastor?

In Bert’s defense:

I am the one who first mentioned Charles Stanley. Bert was responding to my statements.

However, the issue with Stanley is more than gossip. Stanley, his wife, and their son Andy made public statements and sworn statements in court documents. Using those as reference is not, by itself, gossip. If we follow your logic, then we can never say anything about any pastor since we do not go to that church. That would mean that we can never say anything about Driscoll, MacDonald, any homosexual pastor, any liberal pastor, any immoral pastor, etc.

The topic of this discussion is pastors and divorce. Charles Stanley is perhaps one of the most well-known current pastors who are divorced. His situation is “fair game” for a discussion such as this.

When we declare something to be “pure gossip”, even beyond the fact that I was actually going (thank you, Wally) on things like sworn court statements, let’s consider why we would, sans evidence, declare something to be gossip.

The obvious inference is that the speaker wishes to declare that certain claims can not be admitted into evidence, and when someone does that without knowing the actual nature of the evidence, it amounts to little more than a shout down.

It’s allowable, IMO, to point out that something is indeed hearsay when it’s that, or if it doesn’t even qualify as hearsay, but….that presumes that we’ve done the work to figure out whether an allegation is direct evidence, hearsay, or tertiary/etc.. information. We don’t get to just declare something to be “gossip” or “speculation” without providing evidence that it is indeed so. Or, if we try, we ought to be rightly seen as “people who will shout each other down”. We also might infer that we are “people who reflexively defend people in their own theological or personal orbit”, or, more succinctly, “nonthinkers”.

That implies, of course, that a gut check for both Wally and I is whether we will apply the same kind of scrutiny to people in our own theological orbits. For me, that means the GARBC, ABWE, FBBC in Ankeny, Cedarville, BJU, and the like.