Mark

Kay you have misunderstood me.

You said “It is not a dishonoring Christ to get married unless one has made a pledge not to be married.”

I agree that it is not dishonouring Christ to get married. Bu tif you re-read what i said and why i cited the two verse from 1 Cor you will see my point. Namely, that it was the ‘desires’ of the younger widows that was the problem, not the marriage. It was the desires pulling them away from Christ therefore Paul urges them to re-marry so as to protect themselves. Then i quoted the 2 other examples because Paul says the exact same thing to the Corinthians.

” But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.”

“2 But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.”

So the point is not that marriage is wrong which you seem to think i said, but that marriage protects us from ‘passion’ and ‘sexual immorality’, which was precisely Pauls instruction to the younger widows who were abondoning Christ to follow after their ‘desires’.

Please re-read my comment and you will see what i meant.

Also please show me exegetically why the emphasis of this passage is on widow elders ministry? I know you believe verse 1 and 2 are addressing elders as opposed to older men/women, and i know you have the presupposition that the enrollment is about a listing of widow elders, but please show me exegetically how the passage at all conveys this as the intended meaning here.