Uneducated

Now when they saw . . .  that they were uneducated and ordinary men, they were amazed and recognized them as companions of Jesus. 

 - From Acts 4

I have spent most of my life, in the firm belief that a college degree isn't worth a dime, when it comes to one's standing in the Kingdom of Heaven. We have highly credentialed pastors, ministers, worship leaders. They have their graduate degrees from seminaries. They have their doctorates. They are referred to as "Dr So-and-so," and they rarely push back and insist that they be treated as anybody else. 

It is assumed that, if you have all these credentials, that it gives you some sort of godly authority. 

It doesn't.

Right here, we have in writing, that the Scribes and Pharisees, and government officials (i.e. the clergy as well as the secular authorities) could pick out the followers of Jesus very easily, because they were uneducated and ordinary men. 

I'll never understand why professing Christians with advanced degrees and credentials don't downplay it. If we were serious about our walk with Christ, we would put more mechanics and laborers on our boards of elders, and fewer accountants and attorneys. We would let the guy with barely a high school education (and the gift of preaching) speak from the pulpit at least as much as the seminary grad.

It gets tiresome, holding out with some faculty member of a Christian college, that will absolutely refuse to give any ground when challenged by one of us unlettered mortals. If they were really that rock-solid on interpreting Scripture from the original Greek, shouldn't they go out of their way to defer to the perspectives of others, especially the blue-collar members of our community?

Jesus did not run around with the scholars of His day. They didn't write the Gospels. And most of the Epistles were written by a former Pharisee that renounced his degrees and honors, for the sake of Christ. It is very easy to identify His followers. It should be no problem stepping down from one's perch, and attempting to blend in with the riff-raff comprising the True Church.