When we started this version of Ask Paul Tripp about a year ago, one of the first questions

that we received and that Paul answered was about being disqualified as an elder if your

children were not walking with the Lord. Today's question is along the same lines, although Paul,

I know your answer is going to be different. The question

and the background goes like this. After dealing with some difficulties in our marriage,

my wife announced to me that she no longer calls herself a Christian, presently identifying as an atheist.

While she is still supportive of my desire to serve in the church, she does not attend worship with me.

Am I qualified to preach and teach up to and including eldership or pastoral ministry,

despite now being in a spiritually mixed marriage?

So this question is heartbreaking to me and almost hard for me to answer.

It's situationally, culturally, and currently relevant.

Pastors and elders live and conduct their ministry in the real world. They and their

families have to deal with all the brokenness, fallenness, dysfunction of this sin-damaged

world that no longer operates in the beautiful

way God intended.

And as long as sin still remains, an elder or pastor, his wife and children,

will be susceptible to a variety of temptations.

The most serious of them is to succumb to the temptation

to walk away from the faith for some reason.

It's particularly tragic when an elder or pastor's family is

spiritually torn asunder by the deconstruction of one of the members of the

family even more tragic if that's the elder's wife.

...