[SeekAndFind]

I read it for strictly what it says.

We should not read it in a literal wooden sense. Many church fathers who were also Bishops were single. These were people who were there just a mere decades after Christ. If they did not read the passage literally as "MUST BE MARRIED OR ELSE DISQUALIFIED" and understood it as "MAY BE MARRIED BUT IF SO, MUST BE MONOGAMOUS", then I believe we have good precedence for understanding it to be so.

Even if St. Paul was an evangelist, he still did pastoral work and if he laid down the rules for church leadership, he would not have excluded himself.

[ColdSteelTalon]

We should not read it in a literal wooden sense.

If I follow this to its logical conclusion, then its OK for an adulterer to be a Pastor because its just not fair to judge people who would otherwise be a good pastor. Who are we to judge right ??

Rules mean things. And churches who ignore them do so at their own peril. The verses also do not mention that a woman cannot be a pastor either, but if I wanted to I could say that the verse does not specifically exclude women, so it must be OK for a woman to be a pastor.

Paul, setup Churches and got them started he was in the truest sense an Evangelist. And yes he did exclude himself from being a permanent Church pastor because the Holy Spirit guided him to write what he did. Paul did not make the rules God did.

God's word is divinely inspired.