This is one of multiple verses which indicates a rather disorganized church in my opinion. Men derive power from organization; if people are disorganized, they are more likely to obey God. The Tower of Babel comes to mind. (But this is a very wild tangent from the article, so don’t anyone do anything more than contemplate it here.)

On the other hand, the idea of a spiritual lineage is doctrinally sound; we just aren’t supposed to actually do anything with the idea.

… But what an impoverished sense of pseudo-shalom this must be. It’s the peace of a beggar who is content to glean from the fields, while never risking the possibility of failing as a farmer. It is a peace that means never feeling the joys of a job well done, of gifts well used, of fields filled with growing crops, of a family supported, of workers employed and supporting their own families, and of hundreds of people fed from the fruit of your labor. That is too high a price to pay for such peace …

For those of us Christian men who are not fathers - in my case, because I am single - what does it mean, for *us*, to be “fathers in Christ”? Having heard so much in the last few years about this, I am still puzzled, and a little frustrated, that an essentially married church has not thought about this. Our Catholic friends, ironically enough, do recognise single men (their clergy) as fathers in the faith; why can’t the evangelical church at least think about this? :-)