How Should a Church Respond Pastorally to a KJV-Only Member?

Question 01165.

KJV-Only members turn up in most Bible-believing churches sooner or later, and how a pastor responds to them says a great deal about the health of the congregation. I want to be honest from the outset: I do not hold the KJV-Only position myself, and I think it rests on claims that do not survive careful scrutiny. But I have sat across the table from enough sincere KJV-Only believers to know that the conversation is rarely about scholarship alone. It is about trust, memory, and a real fear of losing something precious.

My aim in this article is practical. How do I actually talk with them in my own congregation, keep the relationship warm, keep the pulpit clear, and avoid either capitulating to a claim I believe is mistaken or treating a sincere brother or sister as an enemy of the truth?

Understanding Where They Are Coming From

Most KJV-Only members I have known are not careless about Scripture, they are the opposite. They are often the most Bible-carrying, verse-memorising, church-attending people in the congregation, and their position grows out of a genuine love for the authority of God’s Word. Somewhere along the way they were taught, often by a trusted pastor or teacher, that modern translations represent a deliberate corruption of the text, and that the King James alone preserves the pure Word of God in English. Given that starting premise, their loyalty to the KJV is not stubbornness, it is faithfulness as they understand it.

Recognising this changes the tone of the conversation before a single fact gets mentioned. I am not correcting someone who does not care about Scripture. I am talking with someone who cares about it perhaps more visibly than most, and whose conclusion, in my judgement, does not follow from the premise as clearly as they have been told.

Explaining the Historical Reality Gently

When the moment is right, and it is rarely right in the first conversation, I try to lay out the history plainly rather than argumentatively. The Textus Receptus behind the King James was compiled by Erasmus in the early sixteenth century from a small handful of relatively late Greek manuscripts, hurried into print to beat a rival scholar to publication. It is a fine text and a monument of scholarship for its time, but it was never claimed by Erasmus himself, or by the King James translators, to be a perfectly preserved, uniquely authoritative document standing above all others.

I also find it helpful to ask a simple historical question that they have often never considered: what were English-speaking Christians reading before 1611? Wycliffe, Tyndale, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops’ Bible, all of these existed and were used by faithful believers for generations before the King James was ever printed. If the King James alone is the preserved Word of God in English, those earlier believers were left without one. That question, asked kindly rather than as a gotcha, often opens more ground than a stack of manuscript statistics ever does. I have set out the fuller textual case in Should We Only Be Using the King James Version? and in What Is Textual Criticism?, and I would rather send a genuinely curious KJV-Only member to read those slowly than win a quick argument across the coffee table.

What Not to Do With KJV-Only Members

I have learned some things the hard way here. Mocking the position, even gently, closes the door immediately, because it tells the person that their sincere conviction is a joke rather than a mistake worth examining. Turning the pulpit into a running battleground against them does the same, and it drags the whole congregation into a fight that most of them never asked to join. Neither is it wise to demand instant agreement as a condition of continued fellowship. Conviction on this question, held sincerely and without division-mongering, is not a first-order gospel issue, and treating it as one manufactures a conflict Scripture never asked us to have.

I would also caution against the opposite error, which is simply avoiding the subject altogether out of conflict-aversion. Silence lets bad history and worse rhetoric go unanswered, and it leaves younger believers exposed to whichever KJV-Only member speaks most confidently in the foyer.

What to Say Instead

I try to lead with what we agree on before I get anywhere near what we disagree on. We agree that Scripture is God-breathed, theopneustos, inspired in every word (2 Timothy 3:16). We agree that the sixty-six books are inerrant and authoritative. We agree that the King James is a genuinely excellent, historically significant translation, and I am happy to say so without qualification. From that shared ground, I explain that my confidence rests not in one translation being uniquely preserved, but in the sheer weight of manuscript evidence God has providentially preserved across thousands of Greek, Latin, Syriac and Coptic witnesses, which allows careful scholars to reconstruct the original text with remarkable confidence regardless of which faithful translation someone prefers to read.

With those who are open to it, I will walk through a specific textual variant together, slowly, so they can see how scholars actually weigh evidence rather than simply asserting a conclusion. This rarely produces an instant change of mind, and I do not expect it to. It usually produces respect, on both sides, which is worth more than a won argument.

When It Becomes a Fellowship Issue

There is a line, and pastors need to know where it is. A member who quietly prefers the King James and reads it happily alongside others reading the ESV is no problem at all. A member who begins teaching that everyone using a modern translation is reading a corrupted, Satan-inspired text, or who undermines a small group leader’s authority over translation choice, has moved from personal conviction to public division, and that requires a direct, loving conversation rather than continued patience. Titus 3:10 speaks of a person who stirs up division needing to be warned, and warned again, before more serious steps are taken. I would rather that conversation happen privately and pastorally than let it fester into a congregational split over an issue Scripture itself never makes a test of fellowship.

Why I Still Love the King James Myself

It helps, I think, when KJV-Only members hear a pastor say plainly that he loves the King James too. I grew up hearing its cadences, I have preached from it, and I still think there are verses it renders with a beauty modern translations rarely match. None of my disagreement with KJV-Onlyism is a disagreement about the value of the translation itself. My disagreement is narrower and more specific: it is with the claim that this one translation, and the relatively narrow set of late manuscripts behind it, uniquely and exclusively preserves the Word of God, such that every other faithful translation reading the wider manuscript evidence is corrupt by comparison.

Saying this out loud, from the pulpit or across a kitchen table, does real pastoral work. It tells them that the conversation is not King James versus Bible, which is how the issue often gets framed in their minds, but rather one faithful translation among several versus an exclusive claim about that translation which the historical evidence does not support. That reframing alone has softened more conversations in my experience than any manuscript chart.

A Word for the Wider Congregation

It is worth saying something to the rest of the church as well, not only to the KJV-Only members themselves. A congregation that watches its pastor treat a sincere but mistaken conviction with patience learns something about how to handle every other disagreement that will eventually arise among them, whether that is over music, ministry style, or secondary doctrine. Ephesians 4:2-3 asks believers to walk “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” That instruction was not written with translation debates specifically in mind, but it applies to them as directly as to anything else. How a church handles this question, whether with contempt or with grace, becomes a small but visible test of whether that unity is real or simply spoken about on Sundays.

So, now what?

If you are a pastor with KJV-Only members in your congregation, start by thanking God for people who love their Bibles enough to defend them fiercely, even when you think their defence has taken a wrong turn. Speak the historical truth plainly when the moment allows it, but let patience and genuine affection do more of the work than argument ever will. And if you are a KJV-Only reader working through this yourself, know that nobody here is questioning your love for God’s Word, only inviting you to look again at the history behind the claim you have been taught, in the same spirit of careful, humble enquiry that first made you love Scripture so much.

“I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.” (1 Corinthians 1:10, ESV)