On Spiritual Papas and Mamas // Veracity Fount

Mark Ssesanga:
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Tabaaza Podcast, where we bring you truth for a dark world. My name is Mark Ssesanga, on behalf of Veracity Fount, and I’m glad to be your host once again for another interesting topic.
We do hope you have been well, and we do hope that you enjoy our content—on whatever channel you get it, either on YouTube or whichever podcast platform you listen to us from. We do hope that you enjoy our content, and again, please do send in your questions, and we’ll be glad to answer them.
In studio with me today, I have a very good friend—pastor of The Fount Church.
Denis Mugume:
Yes, the resident pastor
Mark:
The resident pastor of The Fount Church. And how many months into marriage?
Denis:
About, like… six months now?
Mark:
Six months into marriage?
Denis Mugume:
Yeah.
Mark:
Welcome, Denis.
Denis:
Thank you, Mark.
Mark:
Please, yeah, introduce yourself.
Denis:
Hello everyone. My name is Denis Mugume. I am the resident pastor of The Found Church Bukoto, and I am married to Pudin Sari. I’m a Christian, I love the Lord Jesus Christ, and I’m glad to be back on the podcast.
Mark:
Good to have you, good to have you. The last time we had you here, we were discussing—we had quite an interesting, yeah, interesting topic on that. So, I’m looking forward to this one.
This is another one of those again—it’s spiritual “from papas and mamas.” So it’s one of those topics that many of us don’t quite understand, and sometimes, in a sense, we are afraid of our relationships with our pastors in a certain way.
And so, because of the fear of fathers and mothers, and what the Bible says about fathers and mothers, we have this concept of spiritual papas and spiritual mamas. I used to be very scared of my pastor back then because of this “Touch not God’s anointed.”
Denis:
Yeah.
Mark:
Exactly. So again, because of this spiritual papa and mama thing—”Honor your father and mother so that it may go well with you, and you may have a long life.” (Exodus 20:12) So what is this spiritual parenthood? And how, in a sense, does it relate, if at all, to any of those passages that speak about parenthood?
Denis:
Yeah, I think spiritual parenthood is the idea of mentoring, discipling, or coaching somebody in the gospel. So probably an older person is counseling or guiding a younger person to walk in the faith and the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
In that sense, that younger person would refer to their pastor—or whoever it is that is doing it—as their spiritual father, or their spiritual mother, or their papa, or their mama. It’s quite common, and I think it’s basically taken from Pauline language.
1 Timothy 1:2: “My true child in the faith.”
Titus 1:4: “To Titus, my true child in the common faith.”
1 Corinthians 4:15: “For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel.”
And so, when I think about that word, what comes to mind is the gospel, first of all—somebody mentoring and guiding the other in the ways of the gospel.
In verse 17 of 1 Corinthians 4, Paul says: “That’s why I sent you Timothy, my beloved and faithful child in the Lord, to remind you of my ways in Christ, as I teach them everywhere in every church.”
So it’s the gospel—it is someone who is modeling the gospel with someone. And then that other last part of 1 Corinthians 4 says that, “I either would come to you with a rod of discipline, or with gentleness,” or even the ability to put to discipline as a father or a mother would. So that’s sort of where I think it comes from.
Mark:
Okay. So how then how then does that role of spiritual papas and mamas and how has it evolved from that biblical understanding? Because I think one of the things I guess that Paul uses is the aspect that he brought the gospel to these people. He brought the gospel to the Corinthians. He mentored Timothy and Titus. Yeah. And so there’s the aspect that he brought the gospel to them. He led them to the, he told the gospel to them and became saved. But today I don’t know if that’s the way that it’s used.

Denis:
Yeah. I think there has been a move away from the gospel. I think when we move away from the gospel, everything else is lost—you can’t seem to redeem much after that.
Because even in 1 Thessalonians 2 and verse 9, “For, brothers, our labor and toil—we worked day and night—that we may not be a burden to any of you, while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God.” So yes, we are spiritual fathers in that sense, but we’re not a burden to any of you. We worked with our own hands.
So, when I think about today, that word is thrown around very carelessly—or very thoughtlessly. That’s one. And so, the losing of the gospel has also caused a lot of abuse and misuse of that term,
Mark:
And manipulation.
Denis:
So you find that we have wives who listen to their pastors, or apostles, or prophets more than they listen to their husbands. They would kneel and kiss the prophet’s feet—something they can’t even do for their husbands.
I think about children who don’t think their parents are serious. They’re like, “Okay, they are there, but when it comes to the things of God, I can’t listen to them.” And there’s this extreme sort of allegiance to the pastor or the apostle, over even your own parents.
I think about fellowships at campus where spiritual papas and mamas dictate who you date. You can’t even date from outside the fellowship—you have to date someone from inside the fellowship, and someone that we have assigned you to date.
I think of those mamas and papas who make demands, financial demands. January is a month of first-fruit offering, so every bit of money that you make in January belongs to the man of God.
Mark:
And some of them also, in a sense, make you become their errand boy or girl when they need something done.
Denis:
Like, at campus, I was told someone would bring food—girls would bring food—to the head of the fellowship.
So this day you’re eating rice, tomorrow you’re eating Irish potatoes—different girls bringing food to the man of God in the name of honoring the man of God. And this is a fellow student at the university! They’re training themselves to “honor the anointing.”
I think the other extreme cases I’ve seen is the case of a prayer corner—where someone has a place in their house, a prayer corner, and they put up a mat and a picture of their spiritual father. And if you ask them about it, they will tell you, “Well, we are tapping into that grace—that every altar should have a name.” So the name of the altar is…
Mark:
There was someone who, not too long ago, came up with this idea that you need to name your altar—some lady on YouTube.
Denis:
So the role has evolved from someone who is mentoring you in the ways of God, teaching you in the ways of God, to becoming sort of like a mediator between you and God—where you even need to pray through, “I tap the grace upon my man of God.”
Of course, there’s a downside to that as well: there is lots of abuse—emotional manipulation, financial fraud, sexual predation. You know, because at some point the “anointing” upon the man of God becomes, of course, that verse you just quoted—Psalm 105:15: “Touch not my anointed ones, do my prophets no harm.”
To “touch the anointed” is to “touch the anointing,” you get it? So the anointed can forgive you, but the anointing upon him won’t. Someone abuses you sexually, but you can’t say anything because of “the anointing.”
Mark:
Unfortunately, I’ve heard of stories of people who have been abused, where the man of God tells them to get into a situation like that, and they’re scared of saying “no” because they think that by saying “no” they’re being disobedient to their papa or mother, to their “parent,” and so the blessing of God will not flow. They end up doing something sinful—like engaging in sexual activity—that is obviously and clearly forbidden by God, but they’re doing it because they don’t want to…
Denis:
So what has happened is that the man of God is the one who has the right to interpret Scripture, and even if you open the Bible and read a verse, you don’t have the revelation behind it like the man of God has. So the authority has now been moved from Scripture to the man of God, or to the spiritual papa or mama.
There’s a lot of control and manipulation that goes on in there. Again, we have exalted the spiritual father and mother to a place where there is zero accountability. If you say anything about it, they will ask you—and quote, I think, Romans 14:4: “To his own master he stands or falls”—so, “Who are you to judge?” It’s out of context.
But the point is, these people have become people that are almost mediators—or indeed are mediators—between us and God. So Christ has been set aside, and now it is, “I invoke the grace upon my man of God. I invoke the grace upon Prophet So-and-So.” And that’s very dangerous, I think.
Mark Ssesanga:
Yeah.
Denis:
Yeah.
Mark:
Yeah. So, how then can churches practice true biblical mentorship? We have cases in the Bible like Elijah and Elisha, which I think is a very good case. We also have, of course, Jesus and the apostles—but Jesus, of course, we know that He is God.
But we do see, in a sense, mentorship. We have Paul and Titus, Paul and Silas, Paul and Timothy—we see those. So how can churches carry out good biblical mentorship of people?
Denis:
One is to return to the Father’s heart. Christ Himself said in John 8—and I will read John 8:28—“So Jesus said to them, ‘When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and that I can do nothing on My own authority, but speak just as the Father taught Me.’”
So I think returning to the heart of the gospel in Jesus—where our devotion to Jesus matters more than what we are doing for Him.
And I think Oswald Chambers says that the biggest threat to devotion to Jesus is being busy for Jesus—where we are more concerned about numbers, about the system, more than we are concerned about the heart work. The heart—like the character. You get what I mean?
How do we evaluate church success? I’m a pastor, and normally the parameters are numbers, giving, budgeting. They’re not about that internal work of compassion, kindness, love, and peace.
So when the institution becomes more important than the work of shepherding—the work of loving people and learning Christ—I think that is a dangerous thing we are doing. Any rumors of abuse are shut down because “you’re going to affect the work of God; you’re going to be blaspheming.”
So, number one: that it that, we have to return to the heart of the gospel. We must choose love and obedience to the Father as the driving force of our lives—over systems or doctrine, over these things we’ve built around ourselves.
That’s one.
Two is to be watchful of either over-shepherding or under-shepherding. In reaction to all this abuse, some have said, “I am my own shepherd; I’m going to just read the Bible”—which is not Hebrews 3:13, that talks about “exhorting one another… so that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”
There are two extremes here:
One is over-shepherding, and the other is under-shepherding.
Under-shepherding is where you become individualistic—it’s just you and Jesus—and that is dangerous. The word there, “exhorting,” means guiding, counseling one another. In other words, there is a place and a role of biblical membership—that we are members one to another.
Everybody has to have peers in grace that are able to hold them accountable and say, “Hey, Mark, I think I haven’t seen you around. Are you okay? What’s going on?” Every Christian must have people who are allowed into their lives and can ask questions about how they spend their money, their sex life, or their entertainment. If you don’t have someone that…
Mark Ssesanga:
Even how you spend your money?
Denis:
Yes, yes. There have to be fellow brothers and sisters who are allowed to ask you the questions you don’t want to have conversations about. That is one…
Mark:
Then, over on that point—where ideally is this supposed to happen?
Denis:
In the local church. I think our local churches sometimes are so open about membership—it’s like attending a church is equal to being a member—that there is no biblical membership to understand who is a member of a church and what it means for us to be members.
Because when there was trouble in the church at Galatia, Paul did not blame the elders or the pastors; he blamed the members: “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?” In other words, the members were the ones supposed to be looking out for doctrine and saying, “That is not true.” You get it? Paul did not blame the elders; he blamed the members.
So there has to be this group of people who are allowed into your life to ask you the hard questions—that’s to keep away from individualism or under-shepherding.
Then, over-shepherding—we must distinguish between authority and authoritarianism.
Do you get it? Everybody has authority, by the way. A two-month-old baby crying at 2:00 a.m. in the morning—authority! These two grown adults have to wake up, because that baby has authority.
So, authority in itself is not a bad thing. Because we are made after God’s image, we have some type of authority. But we have to be mindful, as shepherds, that we are only under-shepherds.
I like, at The Fount, that we don’t have a “senior pastor,” but a resident pastor who is full-time—because the only Senior Pastor is Jesus Christ. All of us are under-shepherds, so the more we know Him, the more He will teach us.
Mark:
And even, I’m guessing, you have other elders you serve with. It’s not like you’re above them, but you’re all accountable to each other and to the congregation.
Denis:
Yes. A plurality of elders is very important—elders who can hold each other to account. And even the pastor needs a pastor. We can’t always be appearing in spaces to preach and teach; we also need to be listening to.
Because judging ministries by numbers and externals puts you under an extra anxiety that has to be dealt with in some way—either you get into some nasty habits that, in the end, blow up, and the whole thing crumbles.
So I think churches need to be on the lookout for that. They have to respect pastors’ rest time. If the pastor is so overly engaged in the ministry that they have no time for their wife and children—that’s a problem.
Mark:
That’s a problem, because there are commands which the pastor ought to obey that relate to his wife and children.
Denis:
Pastors need to attend the service. These days, the “man of God” does not attend the service—just comes straight in with a whole host of ushers to the pulpit chairs, preaches and then he calls you to the front, lays hands on a few people, and they fall down. Before you know it, they sing a worship song and—boom!—he’s gone, he’s “raptured” back into his office.
So I think pastors need to be in that space where they remember: we are also first sheep, and at best, under-shepherds of Christ.
I would also suggest, to churches who are doing biblical mentorship and counseling, to protect the time of pastors. In the UK, I attended churches where the pastors had a mandatory vacation, where they would block out their emails, get offline, and just go and spend time with their wife and children.
We don’t have much of that in Uganda. It feels like the more you abandon your family, the “deeper” you are.
I watched a prophet that time saying that the Holy Spirit is jealous—you know why pastors end up in divorce?
Mark:
Oh yes, I remember this
Denis:
Because the Holy Spirit is “lusting” for your love between you and your family.
Mark:
He said something like, you need to keep the Holy Spirit away so that you can love your wife.
Denis:
That is utterly nonsense. I guess he forgot that the Holy Spirit is the one who initiates… as in, God is the one who gave us family. He’s the one who brings people together; He’s really the one who holds us together.
Mark:
Yes. I guess he forgot that the Holy Spirit is the one who initiates… as in, God is the one who gave us family. He’s the one who brings people together; He’s really the one who holds us together. So how can He be….
Denis:
So, by the time someone can preach something like that on an international platform and is not even checked or called out—it tells you that these guys have an authority that is unbiblical. Do you get what I mean?
So I think that that is what we have to look out for — that we are raising or creating healthy communities where we hold each other accountable, pray for each other, where the pastor is safe to be human again, and not to become something close to God. Because you’re going to destroy both yourself and the pastor that you’re doing that to.
And also, the pastors themselves modeling the heart of humility. I mean, when we go to churches to preach, sometimes someone wants to carry your books, they want to give you a host of beautiful ushers to carry your books — and it’s good to waver those rights. Because if you don’t, those things do something to your head. They make you feel like you’re above sin; you feel you can never be wrong.
So, I think the pastors themselves must be in a space where they are happy to let go of their privileges — that if I come to a local church, the first picture I see should not be one of “the man of God.”
Mark:
You should see a servant who has come to serve.
Denis:
In fact, the pastor has trained the church so well that you can’t tell who the pastor is — almost everybody feels like they are pastoring each other. There’s this atmosphere of love and accountability.
Now, that’s not to say we can’t honor our pastors. Of course, we have to look out for the financials. The word “honoring” in the Bible actually was used in terms of taking care — the church paying the bills of the pastor.
Mark:
1st Timothy 5
Denis:
Yes, so that’s that.
We have to avoid — I think Martin Luther has this thing of “the drunken man on a horse.”
Mark:
You have to say which Martin Luther, because Martin Luther the Reformer — the one who lived in the 1500s — not Martin Luther King.
Denis:
So, Martin Luther the Reformer has this thing where, you know, the devil makes us go to extremes. It’s like a drunken man on a horse — he jumps from one extreme, and then he jumps to another extreme, off the horse either way. The point is to keep a healthy balance, and I believe accountability structures, or doing ministry that is more concerned about the state of our hearts than the kind of our work, is very key.
Mark:
So, you mentioned something about Paul mentoring Timothy, Titus, Silas. So, what if someone says, “This is what I’m doing — I’m imitating.” 1 Corinthians 11:1 says, ‘Imitate me as I imitate Christ.’ So someone might say, “I’m imitating you, I’m imitating my papa, as he imitates Christ.” And many of them — that’s the kind of argument we hear: “I’m following my papa; he’s leading me into Christ; he has never led me astray.”
I had a discussion once with a lady who came to do an internship at the place where I work. She left to go to the street to do street evangelism outside the workplace, and so she was pretty much spending all her time there. And so we asked her, “What are you doing?” And she’s like, “My papa said I should do this. And for me, I listen to my papa over my parents. So, whatever my papa tells me to do, I do, because I know my papa can never lead me astray.”
Of course, it’s that overconfidence in whatever the guy says and whatever he does — they command so much authority that this person was willing to disobey their parents, and not disobey the spiritual papa. And to them, they think they’re following that passage: “Imitate me as I imitate Christ.”
Denis:
Well, again, all authority must be undergirded by love. 1 Corinthians 13 — if I speak in tongues of angels and don’t have love, I’m nothing; if I can reveal mysteries and have no love…
So, all authority that is not undergirded by love is no authority — it’s not safe authority. So that is the first one. By the time your man of God gets you to abandon your work for the sake of preaching the gospel, I think that is a dangerous thing because, again, if you’re not working, where will the money come from to support the work of the ministry?
I had a friend of mine — we were having a meeting about ministry and business — and he’s running a school. I think one of the mentors said, “Yes, it’s a ministry, but also it’s a business. Without the business, you won’t have the ministry.”
You know, so if people are not actually working, engaging, working with their own hands — because Paul in 1 Thessalonians taught us about how we worked hard with our own hands, not to be a burden to anyone — so in the Bible, working with your own hands is not supposed to be outside your devotion to God.
Your devotion to God will make you even work harder, yes, at your workplace.
Mark:
That’s why it says, “Work as though you’re working unto the Lord.”
Denis:
It’s not unto man, it’s unto God.
That’s one. Two: who are the other shepherds that are putting to account the man of God? All authority has to be…
Mark:
Well, in this case, all the authority is vested in one person. Whatever he says goes, you know, and I guess we forget that men are fallible. Men are subject to sin, to pride, to all those things.
Denis:
My favorite rapper says, “The best of men are still men at best.” You get it? So we are still men; we need that extra hand.
The worst punch is one that you don’t see. If you’re boxing and sparring with someone, the worst punch is the one you don’t expect. So, our biggest weaknesses as leaders are the ones that we normally tend not to see, and we need to have safe environments where they can be seen and also navigated biblically — versus denying them or saying things like, “It can never be, you’re destroying the work of God, you’re attacking the anointed; therefore, you’re attacking the anointing.” And that’s how it’s supposed to be done?
So it’s a very sad story over there. I pray that the Lord will open up our eyes to see, you know. And again, getting back the Bible to the whole beat: let us do expositional preaching — preaching verse by verse — let our people learn.
Mark:
What is expositional preaching, for those who may not know that term?

Denis:
Basically, it means that when you’re preaching through a passage, you make sure that the point of your message is the point that is made by the passage, without you imposing ideas or opinions on the passage. Let the meaning of the passage come out to you versus you trying to use it for your own ideas.
What we do is: we find a topic, then look for verses which speak into that topic — meaning there are Bible verses we will never read because they never fall into our preferred topics.
Mark:
As John MacArthur — one of, you know, the very good preachers — says, “Let the passage be the sermon.” Today, what you have is people who have sermons, and then they go and look for passages to attach to the sermon. They already come up with the sermon, “This is what I want to say; now I need to find something that will fit what I want to say.” That’s dangerous — yes, that’s dangerous.
So, Dennis, what are some of the dangers of this prevailing understanding of spiritual purpose? Of course, we spoke about some of them: the abuse, the manipulation.
Denis:
The real danger is that instead of leading people towards the heart of God, we take them towards ourselves, and that makes us God’s competitors — we are competing with God for His own glory, and yet He is very passionate about His glory.
So, I think that’s— I think, for me, the chiefest danger of it all: we are becoming devilish, demonic. At the core of what it means to be demonic is that we are our own gods. Like, this is about God’s kingdom, but we have made up empires in that kingdom that are ours, and we are building our own names versus working for the kingdom of God.
So that is the danger of it— that we lead people away from the Father’s heart to our own agendas.
Mark:
Yeah, it reminds me of Paul’s warning to the elders in Ephesus in Acts chapter 20, where he tells them to pay careful attention— from verse 28:
Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.
I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock.
And from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after themselves.
So, in a sense, these people are making disciples for themselves, not for Christ.
Okay, then… Well, some might say one of the reasons why people, I guess, tend to follow these things is: “spiritual papas and mamas are gateways to blessings.” If I disobey the guy, if I step away— I’ve actually met people who are afraid of leaving a church, afraid of leaving the papa and mama because they feel they’re disobeying, and that means disobeying God— and so my blessings… See, as you said, I guess they look at them as mediators. So, if I detach myself from this person, then there will be no blessing.
Denis:
Yeah, there is a bit of control and manipulation in there, which is evident from the fear. I think if the Christians are following the shepherd through how they learn about Jesus— in terms of they’re actually reading God’s Word, they are trying to understand the meaning of the text— I think, as we read God’s Word, there’s something about Jesus’s character and nature which is evident in the Bible.
Now, if this person is supposed to shepherd me and mentor me and coach me and guide me in the ways of Jesus, but the more I spend time with him, the lesser and less I see of Jesus, it tells me I’m in the wrong place.
And I think to leave unbiblical, unhealthy churches is not only an act of obedience— it’s an act of urgency. It’s a matter of urgency. You don’t say, “Let me see where this thing is going. Let me just stick around and maybe God will…” No. If something is rotten to the core, you don’t sort of hope it will turn around. I think you have to leave.
There are biblical reasons to leave a church, and I think that’s what Christians need to discuss— probably in the next episode, or whatever, some other episode of Tabaza. But there has to be a place where it is safe to leave. And even— there’s a good of leaving a church, by the way. Yeah, there is. You meet the elders, share your reasons, and leave.
So we shouldn’t be kept in systems that are not godly or Christlike because we are trying to protect the image. Again, when the image becomes more important than the work that God is doing in our hearts, it’s a very dangerous place to be in.
You know, when our pastors are not also shepherded, or being in that space of Hebrews 13…
Let me just read that out for us—Hebrews 13, verse 17:
Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account.
So, if someone is living their life like they won’t give an account one day, I’m not sure that’s a church you belong to.
Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.
So, the members are accountable to the leaders, and the leaders are accountable to them.
Mark:
It’s a two-way— it’s not that the congregation is accountable to the guy, and the guy is “above” and only God will judge him.
Denis:
Yes, that’s why we have covenants. We make membership covenants in churches so that the member understands what it means to be a member, and the elder understands what it means to be an elder.
Mark:
By the way, that statement, “Only God will judge me”— I don’t know if people realize that it’s a dangerous thing. Because I’d rather you judge me so I can change my ways, rather than God. It’s a fearful thing to fall into His hands.
Denis:
So then, just to go back on that question— it’s not true that if you leave an unhealthy church, you “cut” your blessing.
Mark:
I think one of the things people need to understand is that God’s blessings are not tied to a person.
Denis:
There is only one place for that—Ephesians 1:3:
You’ve been blessed in Christ, in the heavenly places, with all kinds of spiritual blessings.
So, the blessing is not the man of God per se. The blessing is your positioning in Christ. The more you know Christ, the more the Shepherd begins to lead you to shepherds who are faithful.
Mark:
Okay. The Bible says, Obey your mothers and fathers so that it may go well with you. If you don’t obey them… Some people use this passage to say, “I need to obey my spiritual papa or mama.”
I remember, about two years ago, I was with a friend, and we were discussing. He was sharing with me some things that were happening in his church, and I said to him, “My brother, this is not right.”
And he said, “I know, I have issues with it, but this is my papa. God has placed him—He has placed me in that church.”
And I’m trying to explain to him that if he’s not leading you in the right way, he can’t be your papa. Yes, but he was so adamant on that, and he was sticking to this—“The Bible says obey your mother and father so that it may go well with you.”
Denis:
That means something, doesn’t it? He said, I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. I have come to separate father against son, and mother against daughter. (Matthew 10:34-36)
I think the idea there is, when our parents—our spiritual parents or physical parents—begin to assume the place of God, or we can, in very many ways, prove from the Scriptures that what they’re asking us to do is not something God would have us do biblically… Because we are walking in the Spirit when we are walking in His Word. The Spirit can never lead us away from His Word—God speaks through what He has spoken, and that is His Word.
So, learning and getting to know God’s Word, in community still, and realizing that my spiritual father is asking me to come over to his place after service, maybe wash his clothes and clean the house and probably spend the night and go on Monday morning— that’s not something…
And normally, whenever you are in a space where you’re not allowed to ask other Christians about what’s happening in your church…
Mark:
Then that’s a problem. That’s should be a red flag.
Denis:
That’s because that’s how cults work, you know. They has a whole episode on that. Cults work like that. Cults work by separation— you seclude the members from any other voice that could question what they’re doing.
I think true faith does not avoid questions— it is happy with the questions.
Mark:
Yes exactly.
Denis:
You may not like the answers, but you’re okay to ask the questions. So, I think any system that is anti-questioning— or anti-questions—
Mark:
And they limit you to a certain set of doctrine which is only from the “man of God” and remove everything else…
Denis:
This is Christianity; it has been around for the last 2,000 years. Surely, that in 2025, the “man of God” has a special revelation that no one has had in all these years? Honestly…
So, I think that’s the first thing to say about that: we need to learn to ask the questions about things, understand, and also watch out if you’re in a space where your questions make someone uncomfortable, or they begin to malign you and accuse you.
I’ve been in spaces where they say, “You have a critical spirit, a judgmental spirit”— but it’s actually the one accusing who is doing the judging. So, I think the more we tell the truth to ourselves, the better we will be at holding each other accountable.
Love does not rejoice with evil, but stands with the truth— I think that’s again in 1 Corinthians 13. So, I think if authority is not undergirded by love, whether it’s a physical parent or a spiritual parent, that’s not safe anymore. The only authority that is safe is authority that is under love.
That’s… I mean, that’s why you find— I don’t know, think about it— someone has a gun, and they’re not using that gun to shoot at you. Why? Because they were given a uniform and trained on when to apply the gun. And so, just seeing a plain-clothed person having a gun— that should scare you, because you can’t tell whether they are under any authority or whether they’ve been trained to use that authority in a safe way.
Because authority is okay, really. We all need it to have our churches functioning,
Mark:
And structures— not even just our churches, but civil society.
Denis:
Yes. But are they working towards the heart of Christ? In humility? In loving the poor? Do we use authority to lift up those who are oppressed, or do we use it to actually trample on them? Are our churches best for the poor?
If the poor walked into our churches, would they get the front seat, or would they be treated… you know, like the usher has come and dealt with them— you know what I mean? So, getting back to the heart of Jesus— there’s a verse which says, Though He is high and lifted up, He cares for the meek and lowly. Yes, God is transcendent, and yet He’s humble enough, in the image of Christ, to humble Himself to the poorest of the poor.
So, we are judged not by how well we exalt our “men of God,” but by how well we love the poor and those who are unlike us.
Mark:
Also, perhaps one more thing to say is— I think this verse about obeying your fathers and mothers is actually speaking about your biological parents, not your pastors. So you cannot apply it in that sense.
Denis:
It’s not fair. The one about pastors is in Hebrews 13— Obey and submit to those who have to give an account.
Mark:
So, I guess they also have to give an account.
Denis:
Samuel Rutherford has, I think, a writing on Lex Rex, where he says “The law is king.” So, it’s not “God here, and this is Caesar.” No— it is God up here, and this is Caesar. Caesar… yeah.
So, we obey Caesar because Caesar is carrying out the mandate of God— in Romans 13, the one who holds the sword, and he does not hold it in vain. However, if in the event that Caesar is asking us to disobey God in order to obey him, at that moment he loses his right to be obeyed, and we are to obey God.
That’s why, when the apostles were forbidden from preaching in Acts, they asked that question— they said, “How do we obey man and not God?
Mark:
Which one is right— to obey man or to obey God?”
Denis:
So, in every other sense, therefore— whether it’s husband and wife, or parent and child, or pastor and sheep— there has to be that idea that all authority is delegated authority. God gave you this power to wield it, to lead people to walk after His ways, and to build the life of Christ in them.
I think Paul says that I am preparing you to be a bride… I’m forgetting the verse, but the idea is I labour so I can present you to Christ as a bride without wrinkle, without spot. That is my aim as a pastor— I don’t want to see anything that is not like Christ in you. But also, me as a pastor— I have to have people who are helping me follow Christ, so I can confidently say, “Follow me as I follow Christ.”
But if I’m not following Christ, then I lose the authority to be obeyed.
Mark:
It’s always lovely to have you on the podcast, Denis. Thank you for being with us, thank you for sharing with us, and we always look forward to having you and learning from you.
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