Overweight preachers don’t get to lecture anybody about sin.
That was the headline on an Instagram post, over a video of a guy doing shirtless squats. It’s part of a trend. Fill in the blank. If your pastor doesn’t do or say ______ to your liking, then leave that church.
Strip off the outrage and there’s a question underneath. Should fat pastors be allowed to preach?
The argument runs like this. If a pastor can’t discipline himself enough to stay in shape, he has no business telling anyone else how to live. As someone who has struggled with weight, let me start with an inconvenient admission.
It’s a good point.
I’ve been working hard over the last few months on my weight and my physical health. And I recognize more than you know; gluttony is a sin. Self-control is a fruit of the Spirit. Our bodies are gifts we’re supposed to steward. It all hits close to home. I would never downplay the severity of sin before a holy God. Patterns of repeated sin disrupt our relationship with God and undermine our witness. But here’s where I would take issue with the logic. There is a difference between sin and disqualifying sin. Disqualifying sins normally involve the mishandling of money, sex, and power. Undermining all trust in the person holding the leadership position.
However, ongoing gluttony rarely reaches the threshold of disqualification for several reasons. First, it lacks the scandal factor; while visible, it doesn’t shatter trust in the way sexual misconduct or embezzlement does. Second, gluttony, food fixation, and obesity represent distinct issues that may be deeply interrelated but aren’t necessarily connected, meaning obesity alone doesn’t prove willful sin. A pastor might struggle with metabolic conditions, medication effects, or genuine food addiction while still maintaining spiritual integrity in other areas. The biblical pattern suggests that ongoing gluttony should prompt serious self-examination and intervention, it’s a sin requiring repentance and discipline. Yet unless it reflects deeper character failure or becomes a public scandal, it remains a sin to be addressed rather than an automatic disqualifier.
What 1 Timothy 3 actually says
The people making this argument point to 1 Timothy 3, where Paul lists what to look for in the person who leads a church. Here’s the list:
An overseer must be above reproach. Faithful to his wife. Sober-minded. Self-controlled. Respectable. Hospitable. Able to teach. Not a drunkard. Not violent but gentle. Not quarrelsome. Not a lover of money. He has to manage his own household well, with his children respecting him. He can’t be a recent convert, or he’ll get puffed up with conceit and fall into the same trap the devil did. And he should be well thought of by the people outside the church.
Most of the qualities on this list, you can’t capture in a photograph. They’re x-ray qualities not iPhone qualities.
But self-control is on the list. And food consumption is certainly within the scope of self-control. I doubt it was on the top of Paul’s mind when he made the list because obesity wasn’t a widespread cultural problem in his day. But it is now.
Three things make it a little less rage-worthy than the Instagram guy wants it to be.
Self-control is fruit, not output. Paul calls it a fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, which means it’s grown inside and not manufactured outside. It isn’t a switch you flip. It’s what comes of an ongoing relationship with God, and there’s no promise about which fruit shows up first, or that any of it arrives all at once. So the text isn’t asking whether I’ve conquered every appetite. It’s asking whether the Spirit is at work in me, step by step, over the long haul of my sanctification. A man fighting a real fight with prayer, and forgiveness, and a doctor’s diagnosis, and discipline, and a bathroom scale is demonstrating the very thing the text asks for, even at a weight he doesn’t want yet.
Self-control covers the whole person. The word runs across temper, money, sex, speech, and appetite together. A person can be faithful to their spouse, clean with money, slow to anger, careful with their words, and still lose an argument with a bag of chips at ten o’clock at night. And a person can win every one of those food fights and still be a tyrant at the office or at home. The list asks whether the fruit is showing up in a life. It doesn’t hand out a pass to whoever has the best photo.
Above reproach doesn’t mean perfection. It’s the heading that governs everything under it, and it doesn’t mean nobody can find fault with you. It means an accusation wouldn’t stick, because it would contradict the observable pattern of your life. So the question isn’t whether you can find something wrong with me. You can. The question is whether what you found is what my life is actually made of.
What you can’t photograph
I want to come back to the thing that strikes me most about Paul’s list. Almost nothing on it can be photographed. I said, these are x-ray qualities and not iPhone qualities.
There’s no before-and-after pose for gentleness. You can’t shoot a reel of a man not being quarrelsome. Hospitality doesn’t trend. You can’t tell by looking at somebody whether he loves money, whether her children respect her, whether he’s teachable, or whether she’s the same person on Wednesday that she was on Sunday. Almost every qualification Paul lists is made of something that only shows up over years, in rooms where nobody is filming.
Which might explain why we’ve grown so fond of the disqualifications we can see.
Preaching beyond my level of obedience
Here’s where I part ways with the logic of the post.
Every Sunday I preach beyond my level of obedience. No matter the topic. I preach about prayer on mornings I didn’t pray enough. I preach generosity while wrestling with selfishness. I preach trusting God and then worry about things I can’t control.
I’m kind of a mess sometimes. Imperfectly following Jesus. If you read your bible, that’s called discipleship.
And sometimes you talk beyond your level of obedience too. You’re raising children while still healing from the way you were raised. You’re leading at work while privately battling insecurity. You’re telling a friend to trust God while lying awake worrying about your own future.
So imagine if the rule was that nobody gets to speak past their own obedience, then you’d be done talking too. Don’t tell your kids to be honest until you’ve never once shaded the truth. Don’t lead your team until the insecurity is gone. Don’t tell your neighbor that God is trustworthy until you’ve stopped lying awake at two in the morning. Wait until you’re qualified.
Nobody would ever say anything to anybody again.
Which is why it’s the wrong question. Should fat pastors be allowed to preach is a small, comfortable question, because it’s about somebody else and it costs you nothing to have an opinion about it.
Here’s the real question: should any of us keep pursuing God’s calling on our lives while we’re still doing it imperfectly?
The answer is yes.
The treasure and the jar
Paul was familiar with the accusation.
There were polished traveling lecturers in Corinth, and next to them he didn’t measure up. They had access to the best orators in the world at the time. So, Paul repeats what people were saying about him. His letters hit hard, but he’s unimpressive in person, not a very eloquent speaker. The people complaining are a first century version of the shirtless squat video.
He never argues they’re wrong.
He says instead that we carry this priceless treasure of the gospel in jars of clay, so the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. A jar of clay wasn’t the fancy pottery. It was the cheap stuff, common, easy to crack. Paul looks at the gap between the glory inside and the ordinary thing holding it, and he says that’s how God designed this thing to work. If he made the container too impressive, people would spend all their time noticing the container and never look for what’s inside.
We’ve all got our stuff. Some sins are just easier to see in a picture.
So don’t wait until you’re cleaned up to live out your calling. Mentor the young employee while you’re still figuring out your own career. Serve the poor while you’re still wrestling with materialism. Tell somebody what Jesus has done for you even when you’re nervous they’ll ask something you can’t answer.
Repent where you need to repent. And get help where you’re struggling, and make amends where you’ve caused harm. But at the same time, keep saying yes to your next assignment.
Don’t confuse being unfinished with being unusable.
I’m going to keep trying to improve my physical health. And while I do, I’m going to keep preaching Jesus.
I hope you’ll keep showing up too.
The Ordinary Altar
Every Thursday, one reflection and one small practice to try.
Common questions about this
Does 1 Timothy 3 disqualify an overweight pastor?
No. Weight is not listed as a qualification or a disqualification anywhere in 1 Timothy 3:1-7. The list Paul gives is about character, spiritual maturity, and relational competence: above reproach, faithful to his wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, gentle rather than violent, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money, managing his household well, and not a recent convert. Physical appearance appears nowhere in it.
But isn’t self-control on the list, and doesn’t that include eating?
Yes to both. Self-control is explicitly required in 1 Timothy 3:2, and eating falls within its scope. Three things keep it from functioning as an automatic disqualifier. Self-control is named a fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23, which describes something grown in a person over time rather than a finished achievement. The word covers all the appetites together, so a pastor may show real self-control in money, sex, speech, and temper while still struggling with food, and the reverse is equally possible. And the governing standard is whether an overall pattern shows Spirit-empowered discipline, not whether they have mastered every appetite.
What does “above reproach” mean in 1 Timothy 3:2?
It’s the umbrella term that frames every qualification under it, and it doesn’t require moral perfection. It describes a life of humility, faithfulness, and integrity in which an accusation against the man could not be substantiated, because it would contradict the observable pattern of his life. The standard measures direction and pattern rather than arrival.
Is gluttony a sin?
Yes. Scripture does treat it as one. Proverbs warns against joining those who gorge themselves on meat, and Paul describes people whose god is their stomach in Philippians 3:19. It’s worth noting that the Bible says considerably less about gluttony than it does about greed, anger, or pride, and that body weight and gluttony are not interchangeable. Medication, illness, genetics, injury, and poverty can all affect weight independently of out-of-control appetite.
What does “jars of clay” mean in 2 Corinthians 4:7?
Paul is writing to a church where critics had dismissed him as unimpressive in person and a poor speaker, a complaint he repeats in 2 Corinthians 10:10. A jar of clay was cheap, common household pottery rather than a display piece. His point is that God deliberately places the treasure of the gospel in ordinary, breakable containers so that the surpassing power is understood to belong to God rather than to the person carrying it. The unimpressiveness of the container is part of the design.
Should you leave a church over the pastor’s weight?
The biblical qualifications for church leadership concern whether a pastor’s conduct and character reflect Christ and protect the church’s witness. They do not address physical standards unrelated to his ability to lead and teach. A pattern of unrepentant sin, disqualifying moral failure, or false teaching are the concerns Scripture actually raises. A body that doesn’t look like the one in a fitness video is not among them.
