Church Polity Is like Stretching

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Matt Smethurst
Do not underestimate the value of meaningful church membership. Amen, on a previous episode, I gave that little home alone illustration, right? No compelling community without those windows, no meaningful membership without that door. Right?

Ligon Duncan
Both how we worship and how the church is governed, both those things teach theology. What we want is godly authority, not ungodly authority, manifested in the church. And church polity is meant to do that.

Matt Smethurst
Welcome to the everyday pastor. A podcast on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the gospel coalition. My name is Matt Smethurst.

Ligon Duncan
And I’m Lig Duncan.

Matt Smethurst
And let’s talk about that voice for a second. So like, I think we’ve kind of hit our stride. We’re hitting our stride in this podcast. So I think it’s it would be an appropriate time for you to bless these listeners with with a little throwback in your life to your days as a radio DJ, which you referenced in an earlier episode, but I understand that you had a kind of certain radio call back in those high school days. Do you remember it?

Ligon Duncan
I do, okay. I do. Greenville High we, we had a radio station, wghs, and I was the station manager. I was also the school DJ so if we were doing a dance. I was DJing the dance, and so the call The Morning Call for wghs went something like this, good morning, and welcome to wghs, station of the stars, top of the hill, bottom of the building, and inside the door marked Authorized Personnel Only. We’re not always accurate, but constantly consistent, occasionally consistently constant, and every now and then we’re even funny. Welcome to WGH s

Matt Smethurst
that’s perfect. Oh my goodness. Can you guys believe this podcast is free? I just feel like we should close in prayer. It’s only going to get worse from here. No, thank you. Thank you for indulging us absolutely. And the Lord has has seen fit to use that voice to powerful effect for the ministry of the word.

Ligon Duncan
It’s my mother’s fault. It comes from her Mom. Mom’s the voice of the family. I know she was a she had an amazing voice. She was a contralto soloist, and I loved to hear my mom sing, but she taught me a lot about supporting my voice, projecting my voice. We talked about this earlier, you know, in another episode, how important that is to do Mom, mom, and having to sing helped so much in that area, and that, honestly, when I have to teach, if I’m teaching them a modular course where I’m doing seven hours a day for five days, very often, at the end of that week, I’m thinking to myself, thank you, mom for making me support my voice so that I can talk all these hours to a class and make it through to a week. So yeah, I’m very, very thankful to mom for that.

Matt Smethurst
Yeah, of course, Spurgeon has an interesting discussion on that, and lectures to my students in a pre amplified age talk about the need to speak from your chest. In this episode, we’re going to talk about the scintillating topic of church polity, and we’ve provisionally titled it. I don’t know if this is what will be the marketing title, but we’ve given it the kind of internal title of why polity is like stretching. What we mean by that is that stretching seems really boring until something tears, and then you really wish you had paid more attention to it. And in the same way church polity can seem boring or impractical until something starts to go wrong in the life of the church, and then you see how actually immensely practical it is. I’ll confess, though, that I was a Christian for many years before I had heard the word polity. I know it’s not a word unique to Christianity. When I first came across this idea of church polity, I did not know what it meant. So can you kind of define our terms? Well,

Ligon Duncan
polity refers to the way the church is governed, and what polity really does is it ensures that Jesus is the King and head of the church and we are not the king and head of the church, and it ensures that the sheep are cared for by the king in a way, that they are neither lorded over, nor are they lording over their elders. So church, church polity is actually it’s there to make sure that King, Jesus is ruling the church. Our generation loves community, but here’s the thing, you cannot have real community without authority. And so church polity make sure that you have gospel community, but you have to have authority. You know the old Bob Dylan song, you may serve the devil or you may serve. Lord, but we all got to serve somebody. What we want is godly authority, not ungodly authority manifested in the church, and church polity is meant to do that. Another thing, another angle. I like the stretching analogy, but another way you go with it. Matt is both how we worship and how the church is governed. Both those things teach theology, so worship teaches theology and polity teaches theology. A lot of times, people think, well, there’s theology over here and then there’s polity over here. Baptist and Presbyterians have always though we may disagree on the specifics of certain aspects of church polity. We have both always agreed that the Bible teaches you the fundamentals of polity and that we ought to derive the fundamentals of polity from the Bible, and that means polity is theological, and that means that your polity is teaching your people theology. Let’s illustrate it using the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church views what we call ministers as priests, and that means that they mediate grace to you well, that teaches theology, and so no wonder there is this enormous loyalty of Roman Catholics to the mother church, because grace is being mediated through the priesthood. To them, we do not believe that we are priests. We are elder, teacher, shepherds. Well, we’re priests in so far as every now believe every part of Israel priesthood, but the Minister is not uniquely a priest in the Protestant tradition, we are servants of the word senior, senior pastor, very

Matt Smethurst
churches. Jesus Christ, exactly

Ligon Duncan
he’s the king and head of the church. We’re not priests or mediators. We simply facilitate the words ministry to the people of God. And that means that our role is very different from that of someone in a Sayer dodal polity system like Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholic. Define that word so Sayer dodal means that the ministry itself is administering grace, that the ministry itself is the conduit of grace, kind

Matt Smethurst
of like we talked about on a previous episode with liturgy. Liturgy is the pipes, the water. The word is the water, right? And if you don’t have pipes, the water is not gonna go where you want it to. But if everything becomes about the pipes, then it’s Yeah. So,

Ligon Duncan
you know, I think the thing I want to emphasize in this kind of a context where we’re evangelical Protestants, but oftentimes, you know, the gripe against evangelicalism in the late 19th century and throughout the 20th century has been that the evangelical church lacked an ecclesiology, and I think that that worked out in a lot of para ministries in evangelicalism in the 20th century. And it worked out in a lot of churches Frank

Matt Smethurst
and of course, pastors, our primary audience, but, but for those others who are listening in, yeah, define ecclesiology as we

Ligon Duncan
the doctrine of the Church that is evangelicalism. Had a doctrine of Christ AB the deity of our Lord and Savior, Jesus, Christ, and it had a doctrine of salvation, salvation by grace, alone, through faith, alone, in Christ alone, praise God for those emphases. But it often looked at the church and said, it’s nice to have the church around, not necessary. And so the church was often incidental in evangelical theology. And what? Again, what makes me happy as I look at the last 30 or so years of the churches, there has been a groundswell of evangelical Protestants. Some of them are Baptists, some of them are Presbyterian some of our Congregationalists, some of them are or even low church Anglicans, who’ve said, You know what, biblical polity matters more and the doctrine of the Church matters more than maybe evangelicals of an older generation appreciated. Yeah, so I’m, I’m really thankful we’re talking about this so many,

Matt Smethurst
so many evangelicals look to the Bible for their soteriology. They look to the Bible for their missiology. We could go down the line, but they don’t look to the Bible for their ecclesiology, right? Not because they’re bad people, but just because they’ve never been taught, they’ve never been shown, they’ve never been trained to assume that the Bible actually has things to say about the local church to the degree it does Correct,

Ligon Duncan
correct. So even even things as basic as church membership, there will be some evangelists that will really resist that idea that’s an imposition of the Bible never talks about church membership, and I’m sure you’ve had those conversations with evangelists before. And so even polity at that level is something that that I see. An appreciation for now, and some of it is people have been in settings where there has been an absence of polity, and a lot of times it’s one person in whom all authority is vested. So even if you don’t believe in a pope, you’ll have one in those in those settings. And so people realize, wow, if we, if we want to make sure that authority isn’t abused in the church, then we need to have a polity that ensures that that authority. And I wonder if the Bible has something to say about that. And lo and behold, it does. Yeah,

Matt Smethurst
that and that, I love, that you’ve framed it in light of our anti authority age, right? Our friend Jonathan Lehman, whose recent book on authority, I would highly good, a great book for pastors to read with your staff, with your elders, he makes the really counterintuitive observation, actually in a previous book. But he says he talks about individualism, and he says, when we think of individualism, we think that means being anti community. That’s not what it means. With the exception of the hermit, every individualist wants community. What it individualism is not so much being anti community as it is being anti authority. We just don’t want someone telling us what to do. And so there’s a sense in which ecclesiology is God’s loving response to my love of autonomy, right? He, he knows that left to myself. I’m going to say, you know, mine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever Amen, right? And so He gives us the church that’s good in order to combat that fallen tendency. So we agree that the Bible, the Bible speaks about how the church ought to be ordered governed. Is this something that pastors ought to just be thinking about among themselves, perhaps in their seminary training, or is church polity something that we ought to be regularly teaching our

Ligon Duncan
people? Oh, absolutely. Why? What’s

Matt Smethurst
the practical

Ligon Duncan
Think? Think about it. In both the Presbyterian and the Baptist system of church government, the congregation must vote on who is going to be the pastor, teacher, Shepherd, elder of that congregation. And that means they must know something about the qualifications that scripture requires of that person, and they have to have sufficient knowledge of that person, that they’re willing to submit spiritually to that person’s godly oversight? Wow, that’s a lot. You’ve got to prepare a congregation to vote yes, to be to be knowledgeable in the things that they need to be looking for. I think the reason that Paul writes to Timothy about those qualifications. Is not that Timothy doesn’t know what those qualifications are because he’s already a pastor. Timothy knows what he’s writing those things to Timothy because he knows that Timothy needs to teach the congregation in Ephesus at what was it first Baptist Ephesus, okay, he knows recent archeological discovery. He knows they need to know those qualifications as they are looking for future elders and deacons in the church.

Matt Smethurst
Yeah, because the purpose statement of First Timothy is First Timothy 315 I’m writing these things to you so that one may know how to conduct himself in the household of God, which is the church, you know, the household of faith, which is the church of the living God. So it’s a blueprint for church plant. That’s

Ligon Duncan
right. So that’s absolutely Matt. We do need to know. Our congregations do need to know these things. So how do you teach your congregation these things?

Matt Smethurst
Well, you’re right to acknowledge that it’s downstream from just the inescapable fact that they are spiritually responsible. They bear a spiritual authority. Now you and I would, I think, disagree on exactly where some of that authority, where you know, where it begins and ends. So we would agree that the local church, the gathered congregation, has the authority to vote on its pastors. I as a historic Congregationalist. I would consider myself an elder led Congregationalist. I would understand that the gathered congregation under King Jesus has the final authority also for membership and discipline, right and doctrine and leadership, I kind of see it as two things with a flip side of the coin, so that, I think the New Testament is explicit that the congregation has final authority when it comes to discipline, and by implication, also membership, because you can’t put someone out of a. Body you haven’t brought them into, right? And also, the congregation has final authority over over doctrine and by implication, leadership in Baptist circles, or baptistic circles, where you might have different statements of faith. For example, ours is an adaptation of the 1833 New Hampshire confession. We look at passages like Galatians chapter one, where Paul is writing to a very young and actually immature congregation. It’s one of the earliest New Testament letters, and you see Paul’s logic there. In Galatians one, eight and nine. He says, you know, if anyone comes to you, bringing a gospel, preaching a gospel other than the one you have received, even if it’s an angel, even if it’s me, even if it’s impossible, let him be accursed. In other words, he’s expecting even a young congregation of believer believers to judge doctrine. He’s not writing to elders in Galatia. He’s writing to members, and he’s saying it’s your job to sit in judgment. Same thing in Second Timothy four, where the warning is that in the last days, people will gather for themselves teachers who say what their itching ears want to hear. Now what’s interesting? Where is he laying the blame? It’s not with the false teachers. Of course, there will be judged for that, but he’s laying the blame for tolerating false teaching with the congregation. So that’s where I say we would understand that doctrine would be something in the final purview of the congregation. But to your question, because I understand that the members of my church are finally responsible to express their will. We do that through voting. The Bible doesn’t prescribe voting, but the will of the majority needs to be discerned. It’s because that’s their spiritual responsibility. It’s my job and the elder’s job to train them to use that authority well. So we understand that what we’re doing is we’re leading the congregation to use their own authority in a way that’s going to accord with biblical wisdom, and practically, you probably did something very similar at first press Jackson, even if the congregation wasn’t voting on all incoming members or all discipline cases. You understood yourself as a shepherd and your fellow shepherds to be training the congregation to think wisely and well about their own spiritual responsibility. And

Ligon Duncan
you know, probably similar training processes. We have a membership process, and this is one of the things that we try to teach to new members that are presenting themselves to be united to the church. So we try to teach them about basic polity as they come in our conviction different from Congregationalism is that not every member of the Church has to share our polity, and in fact, they don’t even have to share all of our theology, but they do have to be ready to submit themselves to the government and discipline of the church. And so they have a right to know what that is before they unite themselves to the church. And so we try to do that in the new member process, and then all of the officers of the congregation do have to embrace the theology and government of of the church, because they’re going to be helping administer that. And so we have a process of training for new members. We have ongoing discipleship for members, and then we have officer training that tries to equip the officers to make sure that they understand and embrace the theology and polity of the church.

Matt Smethurst
Yeah, that that’s good, I think, to the degree that people understand that, that it’s not just the pastors who are setting the direction of the church. I mean, yes, it’s, it’s the role of the pastors to cast the vision, and, in a sense, to set the direction. But what I say to our folks at River City is the day I begin to stray from the gospel, and the day I begin to stand on something other than the Word of God is the day you need to love me enough to fight right, right? And it’s as it’s as if elders have their hands on the steering wheel, but the congregation has meaningful access to the emergency brake. Now, in a good car, how often do you touch the emergency brake? Right? Not often, yeah. But that gets back to the original illustration of the stretching. It’s when things start to go wrong that there has to be some kind of of redress. Let’s, let’s think just about dynamics among church leaders, so specifically among a team of elders. What wisdom would you come in to say lead pastors on how they can interact well with fellow elders in a way that helps those fellow elders? Because you mentioned earlier, it’s not just kind of a board of directors model. How can a lead pastor help his elders to see themselves as shepherds?

Ligon Duncan
I love the question. Let’s not pass over the assumption that underlines it everywhere you see church government in the New Testament, you see a plurality of elders. Amen. There’s never 20 there’s never a place where there’s just one guy in charge and everybody else is Amen, Charlie, it’s always a plurality of godly qualified elders everywhere you go, in every region, in everybody that speaks about whether it’s Paul or Peter or James, it’s everywhere in the New Testament. So that’s a big deal, and I would hope that there may be some folks from an independent evangelical environment where you haven’t had that kind of plurality of leader, Southern Baptist, godly thing to desire and to cultivate in a church. It will protect you. It will protect the congregation. It is a wonderful thing. So I love the question, but don’t pass over that point, because evangelicals have not always embraced that kind of vision. For a plurality of leaders. A lot of lot of evangelicals, basically view church as a chapel, and the ministers in charge, and there’s no membership. And you know what? When there’s no membership, there’s no authority or address in the congregation. Yeah. And in a Presbyterian environment, I am, I am responsible to my congregation. And certainly in a congregational environment, you there’s a there’s a mutual responsibility there. If there’s no membership there, they’ve got nothing to say about what’s going on. And a leader can surround himself with yes men and do whatever he wants to do. And, you know, as a Presbyterian minister, I know I can’t get by with that, and I’m glad I can’t get by by with that I love that. I have to submit myself to the brethren. I love

Matt Smethurst
it. And if you can’t submit, you can’t lead no or you ought not. And I,

Ligon Duncan
you know, I was thinking about this. We you and I talked about it not long ago. I was thinking about this last night, looking back over the 17 years that I was at first pres, I bet I had a serious disagreement with the decision of the elders, maybe 12 or 13 times and but looking back on that, I probably 10 or 11 of those times, looking back, I thought, yeah, they were, they were right about that. I still think I was right about this one, but most of the time when I and I really didn’t think they were making the right call on that, looking back on it, I think, yeah, that was the right call. And so now not everybody has the kind I loved the wisdom that I had around me. I had a lot of older men. I had a lot of wise men. Sometimes you’re having to nurture guys and bring them along, and they don’t have that kind of wisdom experience. But boy, did I love being in that I felt very protected. One thing that I always tell my students is you got to wake up in the morning, and one of your jobs is to protect your people from you, and one of the ways you can do that is through submitting to the brethren. So you’re not just doing what you want to do, and you are accountable to them. So I I love that talking about

Matt Smethurst
symbolic accountability, you’re talking about the real thing we must be talking about the real thing. A guy’s ministry will eventually just flame out, because none of left to ourselves and our own egos and our own everything like we need that built in act of love from God in the form of fellow shepherds to hold us accountable

Ligon Duncan
absolutely true. And if I could illustrate, because I think you’ll, you’ll, you’ll resonate with this concern. When, when I went to first prayers, one of the things I was concerned about was the process of receiving new members. It was woefully deficient. Basically, you presented yourself at the end of the worship service. You said you wanted to be a member. They quickly asked you the five questions of membership and you’re a member.

Matt Smethurst
It’s a slower process than in many Baptist churches. Well,

Ligon Duncan
you know? And I knew, Okay, we’ve got, we’ve got to get at that. But I also knew they really liked that process. They had been doing it for many, many years. That way, again, well intentioned. And so I said to myself, I’m not, I’m not going to raise that issue for seven years, and but in God’s kindness within within a couple of years, the issue got raised not by me, but by one of the elders. One of the elders, you’ll speaking of accents. I had a ruling elder named Gene McRoberts. He was a long time lawyer for one of the largest law firms in the state. He had a beautiful southern accent, and he was a very dignified man. And one night, he stands up at the same. Election meeting, and he says, Brothers, I am deeply disturbed by what I see happening in the way that we are receiving members in the First Presbyterian Church. Why it is it is harder to get a Sam’s card than it is to become a member of First Presbyterian Church, you know, that’s and, and then he starts saying, and I had seen it happen. We had had people that would join the church one Sunday. And look, a lot of people were joining the church because they wanted to get their kids priority entrance into the day school. Oh, okay, okay. So, so, you know, is so I people would join the church one Sunday, and then I’d be, you know, brushing my teeth on Sunday morning, getting ready to go to church, watching a watching a worship service on public access television. And I, I’d look back in the choir behind the preacher, and there, there are two people that joined first prayers last Sunday, and they’re singing in the choir at Calvary Baptist Church, you know, the next Sunday. So I was feeling this well, when Gene said it, every elder said, Yeah, we got to do something about that. And that’s when the in I didn’t have to say a word about it, Matt and and I was delighted about it, and then I got to speak into what we were going to do instead of that. But gene was the one that drove that. And I love that environment where other elders are seeing the same things you’re seeing, and they’re concerned for the spiritual health and welfare of the congregation, and they speak up, and all I have to do is say, Yep, I agree, and off we go,

Matt Smethurst
yeah. And so one of the other things we would agree on is that membership need is biblical and therefore needs to be meaningful. And you mentioned the Sam’s card and that that made me think of the fact that, you know, gyms have memberships. Costco has memberships. One of the things we have to teach people is that church membership is, is less like membership at Costco and more like citizenship in a kingdom. You know, some people will say, well, there’s no verse in the Bible that says thou shalt be a member. And, you know, I heard someone quip, yeah. And if you look at the PGA golf rule book, there’s no, there’s no sentence that says, You thou shalt be a human. It assumes it right. The New Testament assumes because these are largely documents written to local churches. Don Carson has said it would have been inconceivable in the first century for a Christian not to belong to a local church. But we don’t just have to get at membership negatively by saying, Oh, look at these passages about church discipline. If there was such a thing as church discipline, there must have been such a thing as membership first. Corinthians, chapter 12 uses the language of one body many members in ligand. I’m ashamed to say, it wasn’t until recent years that I realized that passage is not about the universal church. I always thought first, Corinthians, 12, one body, many members. Oh, of course, that’s talking about the Universal Church, which we could define as kind of one of two things, either all Christians everywhere, the way we would talk about Christians in Asia, right? Or just Christians in the plural, yeah, dog, dogs, cat, cats, Christian Church, yeah. But if you look at it, he says, you know, for just as the body is one and has many members and all the this is first, Corinthians, 1212, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body. So it is with Christ, for in one Spirit, we were all baptized into one body, Jews or Greek slave or free, and all were made to drink of one Spirit. And then look at verse 27 now you are the body of Christ, and individually, members of it. Who is the you just go back to chapter one. Verse one, it’s the church in Corinth. He’s saying you local church. Someone can check me on the on this stat, but I think that there are around 110 occurrences in the New Testament of the Greek word ecclesia, which we translate as church. And I think 89 of them. So over 90% are referring not to all Christians everywhere, or just Christians in the plural, but to an actual local congregation. So we’ve talked about ecclesiology, and a subset of that, which is polity. Would you say it like that? Polity is a subset of ecclesiology. We’ve talked a little bit about governance, structure, elder leadership, and, you know, in my tradition, Congregationalism. But I just want to end on this note of regardless of where you’re coming from, in terms of of your tradition or your current church governing structure, do not underestimate the value of meaningful church membership. On a previous episode, I gave a little home alone illustration, right? No compelling community without those windows, no meaningful. Membership without that door, right? And that door is actually an act of love, because it enables us to step into the warmth and the love of a Christian family. Amen. Hope this episode of the everyday pastor has been a help and an encouragement to you. If you’ve been helped by it, we would appreciate if you leave a review or share it with a friend, so that we can continue to help pastors find fresh joy in the work of ministry.