Does an Unbelieving Child Disqualify a Pastor?

If a pastor's child rejects the gospel, must that pastor step down from ministry?

It's a question more pastors and churches will face than we might expect. I recently heard a pastor with young children say that if any one of them did not come to faith in Christ, he would resign. I can think of a number of well-known pastors whose adult children have walked away from the faith. Some of us will face this question ourselves, or we'll walk alongside a pastor in our church who does. It's a question worth thinking through carefully, before the moment of crisis arrives.

The question centers on Titus 1:6:

This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you— if anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination.

The key phrase is "his children are believers." The Greek word is πιστά, which can carry either the sense of "faithful" or "believing." This raises an important interpretive question: does this verse require that an elder's children hold personal faith, or simply that they live obediently under his household? The answer, as it turns out, is not as straightforward as we might hope.

The “Believers” Position

The main argument for the “believing” position seems to be lexical: Paul usually uses to word to designate Christians as believers (2 Corinthians 6:15; Ephesians 1:1; Colossians 1:2; 1 Timothy 4:10, 12; 5:16; 6:2). After surveying how the New Testament uses the word, John MacArthur concludes:

The faithful are believers and the believers are faithful. They’re interchangeable. To take the word “faithful”, pull it out of the believing context, isolate it as if it only meant submissive to the father’s leadership without believing what the father taught would be to distort the word.

Those who hold this position also advance other arguments: for instance, that if Paul meant “faithful,” it would be redundant for him to then specify that they’re “not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination.” Also, if his own children have not come to faith under his ministry, that raises legitimate questions about his capacity to shepherd a congregation toward Christ. The ESV, NIV, CSB, and NASB all advance this view.

The “Faithful” Position

Others, like Justin Taylor and Timothy Miller, πιστά should be translated "faithful" rather than "believing/believers” for a number of reasons:

• Lexically, πιστός carries a passive sense in the Septuagint, in Josephus, and in the majority of Paul's own usage, meaning "reliable, trustworthy, faithful within a given role." That core meaning did not inherently connote religious belief until the post-apostolic period. The Gospels reinforce this: in Matthew 24:45, 25:21, and Luke 12:42, the word describes household servants who simply perform their duties well, with no implication of inner spiritual conviction.
• Every other qualification in Titus 1:6–9 measures the man himself: his character, his conduct, his competence. Faithful children fit naturally into that pattern, reflecting whether he can lead his own household with integrity. Believing children, however, would stand alone on the list as the only qualification contingent on someone else's response to the gospel. It’s outside his direct influence and, arguably, outside the criteria Paul appears to be establishing.
• Since 1 Timothy and Titus run as parallel passages, imposing a significantly stricter standard in Titus would be unexpected, and particularly burdensome given the Cretan context, where virtually all potential elders would have been relatively recent converts.

On this reading, the elder's children must be considered faithful, and the phrase "not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination" serves not as a separate requirement but as the concrete definition of what that faithfulness looks like in practice.

Coming to a Conclusion

Which view is correct? William Mounce is probably right that "a decision is not easy." Even so, the arguments for the "faithful" reading are more compelling. The lexical evidence is strong, and the logic that elder qualifications measure the man himself, not how his children respond to the gospel, carries real weight. As Miller observes, the faithful interpretation raises few applicational challenges, while the believing interpretation tends to create more problems than it resolves.

D.A. Carson puts it plainly: "I think what it is saying here is not that they must believe. After all, grace doesn't run in the genes. At the end of the day they must be faithful, not wild, not profoundly disobedient."

At minimum, we should hold our conclusions with humility and resist imposing them too heavily on others. Above all, this discussion should move us to pray: for the unbelieving children of faithful parents, and for the sustaining grace of God toward those who love them and wait.