Fight! Fight! Fight! by John B. Carpenter

By John B. Carpenter, American Thinker, August 25, 2024

John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022) and the Covenant Caswell substack. He won the 2000 Acton Essay Contest.

Moments after a bullet shot through his ear, Mr. Trump raised his fist, his face streaked with blood, and charged the stunned crowd, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Before anyone had triaged how serious his wounds were or concluded the attack was over, Trump wanted to leave his followers with that.

There’s a crisis of leadership in churches because of the expectation forced on pastors that they not fight, that they be doormats; some expect them to be effeminate. After all, two requirements for an elder—including pastors—in 1 Timothy 3:3 are that they not be “strikers” or “contentious.” The first word literally means a “brawler,” prone to fist-fights, the hot-head with a hair-trigger to violence. The second term—contentious—refers to someone who can’t let an opinion he disagrees with go unrebuked, often in the most abusive ways, who continues an argument far past the chance of profitability. Certainly, those are disqualifying faults for a pastor. But think of the kind of person Paul was training for eldership if they had to be warned not to fight over everything, not to hit people they opposed. …

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