Children's Minister vs. Pastor — The Self-Contradiction

At 13:52, he claims that a pastor is an elder and an elder is a pastor, and says this is why they do not call a children's minister a "children's pastor" — because a pastor is an elder.

Words really matter, do they?

What is their children's minister doing? Teaching. Correcting. Feeding. Guiding. Nurturing. Protecting. Every single function that ποιμήν (shepherd/pastor) describes. The children's minister is shepherding children — that is literally the job. What does refusing to call them "pastor" achieve except denying recognition of God's calling on their life? That is not a theological distinction; it is a political one. And if the person serving as children's minister happens to be a woman — which it often is in complementarian churches — then the refusal to use "pastor" becomes transparently about gatekeeping a title, not describing a function.

The glaring self-contradiction:

1. At 12:19, he insists elder, pastor, and overseer are interchangeable — same office, same function, words don't carry distinct meaning. He flattens the terms.
2. At 13:52, he insists minister and pastor are not interchangeable — a minister is not a pastor because a pastor must be an elder. He now distinguishes terms that he just said were synonymous.

So which is it? When it suits his argument, three distinct Greek words collapse into one office. When it suits his argument again, two English words for the same shepherding work must be rigidly separated. He is manufacturing distinctions and collapsing them on demand.

"Today we have broadened the definition of pastor to include any and every type of oversight...but that's not necessarily biblical."

This is breathtaking. He has just spent two minutes arguing that the biblical terms are all synonymous — and now criticizes others for treating them broadly? The "broadening" he objects to is people doing exactly what he just did: treating the shepherding function as equivalent to the elder office. He flattened them when building his gender argument; now he un-flattens them to police who gets the title.

The NT reality: There is no passage that restricts the title "pastor" to a credentialed office holder while permitting identical work under a different label. The word ποιμήν means shepherd. If you are shepherding, you are pastoring. The attempt to create a minister/pastor hierarchy is an ecclesiastical invention with zero scriptural basis — and it contradicts his own thesis from 90 seconds earlier.

This is not exegesis. This is making it up as he goes along.

The irony of authoritative delivery: The very thing these so-called pastors seem to want to corner the market on is the ability to speak confidently and authoritatively on a subject. And all that gets them is a congregation of lemmings following them because of their manner of speaking and delivery instead of judging the content against the Word. This is precisely the opposite of what the Bereans did (Ac 17:11) — they examined the Scriptures daily to see whether what Paul said was true. Paul! And yet modern churchgoers are expected to accept claims from the pulpit without question simply because the speaker sounds certain. Confident delivery is not exegesis. Authority of tone is not authority of Scripture.