Working with Fellow Elders (Part 2)

Ligon Duncan

If elders only do what they do or vote how they vote, because you want them to vote that way, the change is not going to last. As soon as you’re gone, they’ll go back to doing it the way they want to do it, but if they really believe it’s the right thing to do, the change will last you. Matt,

Matt Smethurst

welcome friends to the everyday pastor. A podcast on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the gospel coalition. I’m Matt smitherst and I’m Luke Duncan. And in the last episode, we started thinking about working with fellow elders, and in particular, what we are and are not looking for in potential elders in the life of the church, and in this episode, we want to think a little more practically about what it looks like to serve as an elder, to to navigate various dynamics among an elder team, how to lead in meetings and so forth. So let’s have this conversation, LIG and hopefully be a help to pastors as we think about this perennial topic as lead pastors. Of course, we may functionally be first in terms of influence, because we’re standing behind the pulpit Sunday in and Sunday out, but I think it’s really important to go out of our way to lift up our fellow elders as pastors of this church, and to make clear that I, as the lead pastor, actually don’t have more authority biblically than these other brothers. If, if I never lose any votes in an elders meeting, then I don’t have an eldership. I have a dictatorship. Yeah. So what we’re looking for in a potential elders is not just yes men, correct, but I have a brother, a friend, who so emphasized that in a in a church revitalization, that he came into, hey, I don’t want yes men. I don’t, I don’t. I’m not above you guys. I want you to push back and disagree. And it’s come back to bite him a little bit, because he’s gotten the opposite. He’s gotten a bunch of no men who seem to just disagree for the sake of disagreeing, as if that’s helpful. And so it’s this balance between honesty and humility. We want men who are going to be able to speak honestly and convictionally, but will have a deferential spirit and a humble concern, knowing that wisdom is found in an abundance of counselors, yeah, and it’s in in a fallen world, you’re going to be wrong about something. Yeah,

Ligon Duncan

I’ve never been in a church with perfect elders, because I’ve been there, right? Uh, I’ve never, I’ve never been in a church that had no problems, uh, amongst the leadership, but I’ve been with healthy elders, and I do want to reiterate what you just said. I do tell my students if, if you’re not losing at least one important vote to your men every year, then you don’t even know how to submit to the brethren. You can’t be your way or the highway all the time you’ve there’s got to be some time. But I would also thank you for mentioning what you did. You also know, in a situation where the elders are just beating the pastor down every single time, that the elders need to take stock of that, if that’s happening and something’s out of whack too, all of us ought to have to submit to one another, and we liked to get as much unity and consensus as we could. And very often, if we were, you know, if we were 5545 on something, we would, we would say, we need to send this back and think about it and see if we can’t get more unanimity amongst our leadership on this, if, especially if it’s a really important thing,

Matt Smethurst

not that you’re saying unanimity is required for every decision. No, not at all. But the more consensus, the better.

Ligon Duncan

And especially if you’re going to make a big change, you you want the leadership generally on board, because you’ve got to, then they’ve got to go out and help pay you to find a congregation.

Matt Smethurst

If you lose the vote, the congregation can’t find out that’s that you are on the other side of it. Yeah, you’re a united front. Yeah, that issue of term limits. Do you think it’s wise for lay, non staff elders to have term

Ligon Duncan

limits? We have different practices in the PCA. All elders are permanent elders in the PCA, but not all elders are permanent voting elders on the lay elders in some churches. Now, at first pres, we had permanent elders that were permanently voting elders, and which means you have to be really careful who you put on the session, because they’re going to be there with you for the next 30 years. Now, interestingly, at first pres, we ended up having officer elections about every three years, because you’d have older men that were rolling off, becoming emeritus or being graduated to glory, and you’d need new guys coming on. And so it was about every three years we were doing officer election, almost like you were having terms. But I think the important thing is you. If you have terms, you’ve got to make sure that that does not result in an imbalance of power where the pastor is calling the shots, because there’s a term rotation and in our in our session, you know the tendency in large church, big steeple, Southern Presbyterian churches in the 60s and 70s and maybe even into the 80s, was to have elders on the set the elders on the session. They were the boss and the pastor was an employee. I mean, I remember a friend of mine in ministry who said he went to a church in Mississippi, and they said, We don’t rotate elders. We rotate pastors, you know. So they were sending him a message, we’re in charge, son, you know, and you don’t want that dynamic either. There needs to be a respect, and I again as the recipient of respect that I didn’t deserve. I was a 35 year old guy with no lead pastor or solo pastor or senior pastor experience, pastoring a large, by and large, well taught and historic evangelical congregation with elders with a lot more life experience than me. They were wonderful to me. Now, you know, did some of them look down on me and think I didn’t know what I was doing? Yeah. Were they right? Sometimes, probably, but they didn’t treat me like a field hand. They really they were good to me, and they tried to keep me out of trouble. A lot of times they would want to make hard decisions without me being involved, so that I couldn’t be blamed for it, and I appreciated that they It wasn’t that they didn’t care about my opinion. They just recognized, you know, ligand, you have to be the pastor to everybody, and if you’re the guy always pulling the trigger on hard decisions that bring about disagreements in the congregation, they’re going to blame you for it. Let them blame us. And so I appreciated the willingness of the elders diffuse congregational criticism. Yeah, the pastor didn’t decide this. We decided this. The pastors delivering what we decided, you know, it’s this is not him, you know, this is not the pastor getting his way. And I because it was healthy. I liked that, Matt. I really appreciated that.

Matt Smethurst

Yeah, we do have term limits, not a biblical requirement. But I think there is, it can be wisdom in having semi regular on ramps and off ramps. The obvious reason is sometimes you do bring on a brother who turns out to be not the most helpful unifying presence. And so it’s good to have a kind of the way we have it is you can serve two consecutive, three year terms before you have to take a mandated sabbatical year. And that’s the other thing. Is so many of these brothers, you know, they have full time jobs outside of the church, busy lives, they’re really volunteering their time to serve as elders. And so it can be a gift to them if they’re forced to take a break, like we’ve already mentioned, how all elders are pastors, and pastors are elders, and they have equal authority. And yet, as the senior minister, you do have a particular obligation and opportunity to lead. So how much should the lead pastor be speaking up and kind of taking charge throughout meetings? And when should he just let conversations take their course? I

Ligon Duncan

don’t think there’s a one size fits all answer to that. I think that the maturity and experience of the senior pastor plays into that, the gifting of the senior pastor in areas of leadership plays into that the dynamics of his relationship with the elders, whether he’s got a really strong group of elders, or whether he’s got folks that really need to grow up into the role. I think there, there’s not a one size fits all answer basically,

Matt Smethurst

whether he already has the culture he wants, or whether he’s trying to establish anything exactly

Ligon Duncan

if, if elders only do what they do, or vote how they vote, because you want them to vote that way, the change is not going to last. As soon as you’re gone, they’ll go back to doing it the way they want to do it. But if they really believe it’s the right thing to do, right the change will last. Well, what did I want? Did I want flash in the pan change, or did I want lasting, healthy biblical change? I wanted lasting, healthy biblical change, so that that one word that that gives to men in ministry is, don’t look for quick, short term change. We’ve quoted it before, but I love the Jim Boyce statement where he said, evangelicals overestimate what can be accomplished in five years, and they underestimate what can be accomplished in 20 and I think especially younger guys. I’m an old guy now, but younger guys need to remember that I when I came to the church, there were two or three things that I thought structurally really needed to change, but the but let me say, the leadership of the church was really proud of doing those things in what I would have considered the wrong way. Day, and but I thought to myself, I cannot be the one that comes in and says, You’ve got to change this. They had to buy in to it themselves. And in God’s providence, God made that happen from the elders themselves. I didn’t have to manipulate that or maneuver that. It just it happened. And and then I was able to, you know, after the elders came to a decision, they’d turn to me, Well, what do you think pastor? And I’d say, I agree with you on this. And so it wasn’t like they were being forced to do something by the pastor, although what I thought they were doing was really important and needed to happen. They had come to a realization themselves. They did that

Matt Smethurst

there’s a there’s a form of discipling them exactly, just patiently.

Ligon Duncan

And I just thought, you know, not everybody, not every minister, can play it that way, like I, a friend of mine that went into a congregation where they the elders themselves. They were thirsty for change, and they realized that change needed to happen. It had to happen in the church. They wanted the pastor to move quickly there. That was not the attitude of my guys, when, when, when I came in. And so I think you need to know what’s the attitude of the leadership, and that’s going to determine how you’re going to play that I did not have to speak up or break ties early on in my ministry, and I’m thankful for that. Now, later on in the ministry, there were things where I had to break the tie on it, but as I told you before, usually we wanted to build some consensus amongst the leadership. We didn’t have to have a unanimous vote, but we needed to feel like, hey, a pretty good majority of the elders think this is the right thing to do. So we typically didn’t do, you know, 5149 kind of things, but there were a couple of things that we just had to make decisions on, that I had to break ties on, and that wasn’t fun, because I knew there were going to be people with with strong opinions on the losing side. The pastor didn’t agree with me, but we did have a really healthy culture of folks. When the session makes a decision and we walk out of this room, it’s our decision. It’s not the pastor’s decision, it’s not the majority’s decision, it’s our decision. And I always thought that the majority was respectful of the consciences of the minority, but it also was not going to get caught in an inertia because of resistance, especially from a smaller minority. And you just that’s a dynamic in church life that all Presbyterians or Congregationalists have to deal with. That dynamic, don’t we?

Matt Smethurst

Yeah, and related dynamic is especially guys who are going into a church revitalization, figuring out how quickly to go about enacting change. And the reason it’s so tricky is because, in general, I think a lot of young zealous guys maybe are inclined to try to act more quickly than they should, and they end up burning bridges and losing capital and trust. However, there is another dynamic, and that’s that there’s a honeymoon phase, and you can get away with stuff early on when everyone’s excited about you being there, and that’s just a matter of prudence and wisdom and talking to fellow pastor friends you referenced, though you know times when elders do disagree, and obviously this is a massive thing. I mean, I know for pastors listening to this episode, many of them probably are in the throes of some kind of interpersonal conflict among their elders. So what wisdom would you commend to pastors when they when you think about those kind of political dynamics or just natural conflict that arise,

Ligon Duncan

I really cared about the unity of my men, and I did not want any disunity amongst the leadership to spill out into the congregation, and it so often does. You know congregation members have their elders that they’re closest to if conversations start happening there, you can have little groups build up. We want this, we think that, et cetera. So I really tried to make sure that I promoted unity amongst my officers. Let me say one hard thing I had to do in that area, when you have disunity, very often, the elders with the strongest opinions end up in your office to talk with you. It is vitally important that the last one who walks out of the office doesn’t think that you agree with him. If you don’t agree with him, because they will lose confidence in you if everybody who walks in your office walks out thinking you agree with them. When you don’t agree with them, they’ll question your integrity. So that means sometimes a pastor has to say, Brother, I hear what you’re saying. I’m sympathetic to what you’re you’re getting at here. I disagree with you,

Matt Smethurst

or I need to think about it correct. I need to pray about. And just not

Ligon Duncan

leave an impression, because you don’t want a guy standing up. Well, the pastor talk to me, and he agrees with me on this, and then the other guy says, Well, I happen to talk to the pastor the day before, and he agrees with me on this, and suddenly you look like somebody who’s just blowing in the wind, and you can’t make a decision. So that’s one of the hard things you have to do. I’m actually serving the unity of the men to let them know. No, actually, I don’t agree with you, or I’m not convinced yet, or I need to think about that. I’m serving the Unity by not being uncertain with my own position. Now I can also just say, Brother, I disagree with you. I am not going to force my opinion on this issue with the elders. I want you to come to an agreement on this. I’ve got my opinion. If asked, I will share it. I’m certainly willing to say why, to anybody that asks me. This is not about getting my way, but I disagree with you, and that what I found, as hard as that can be, is elders respect you and and and then if I protect their confidentiality and their positions in good faith in the public meetings and in other private conversations, they know I’m protecting their their character, their authority, their role in the congregation, that’s one way that I would protect the unity of the Session. The other thing that I would do is I would try to honestly represent them to one another in private conversation, in such a way that it would not add to any suspicions that they had of one another. I could say in certain cases, hey, you know Rob, I know that you think that Bill disagrees with you on this, and I know that y’all kind of blocked horns at the last meeting, but I want you to know I’ve talked with Bill about this. Bill has the highest regard for you, and so you may not see eye on eye to eye on this, but Bill really respects you. So don’t think you’ve got an enemy. You don’t have an enemy. And if I could say privately to them. You brothers aren’t hating one another. You actually love one another and respect one another. You just disagree on this that could help diffuse some of the you know, because men attach to our opinions certain relational dynamics, and we get into categories of us and them, you know, and who’s on my side and who’s on his side, and that gets attached to, do you really respect me or not? And if I could lower the temperature on that so that they could have an honest disagreement and realize this is not about respect. It’s not about, you know, regard for you. It’s about disagreeing on how we need to do this. Anything I could do to help keep disunity from spreading, I tried to do because I didn’t want that to get out in the congregation. And thankfully, I did not have to do that much. My guys were that, you know, that they could, they could be a man you know, and lose the debate and walk out and laugh in the parking lot, you know, before they drove home. And that’s a real gift. Not every pastor has elders that can do that, but thank God he gave me elders that could do that. And that’s a wonderful gift to a congregation that to have men that can really disagree with one another and walk out of the room and love one another, but they themselves wanted to cultivate that sort of attitude in this room. We are going to leave it all out on the on the field, but when we walk out of here, we’re going to walk out of here loving one another, together as the old one this church,

Matt Smethurst

what a counter cultural thing, especially today, in our age of outrage, where the emotional temperature on every conversation is turned up to 10 to have a group of brothers who don’t take themselves so seriously that they can’t imagine a world in which they’re wrong. They’re not most animated and most excited by those tertiary issues. As you mentioned earlier, it’s not like, yeah, I affirm the primary stuff and the secondary stuff. But man, what I what I really care about is this, there are guys who understand, again, that the Lord leads us through the collective wisdom of the whole that none of us has a has has a monopoly on God’s wisdom, that we actually need others to speak. I mean, I’ve just been so there have been so many times in our elder meetings where one of the other brothers who hasn’t even thought about the issue at hand as much as I have, because I I’m paid to sit around and think about this stuff, but one of the lay brothers will say something that makes me realize, oh my goodness, I have not even considered it from that angle, that’s such that’s such a helpful way to to think about it and to process that the only explanation for that culture in which brothers can disagree with one another without being thin skinned is that the eternal third person of the Trinity resides in them Amen. And we pray that the Lord would give us cultures among our elderships like that. As we’re wrapping up this episode, a couple other things that I want to just recommend, and that is, first of all, in your elder meetings, it’s so easy, I find to just immediately rush to all the business, all the agenda items you have to get through and not take time to actually discuss the sheep. Now maybe there will be a brief section in which you talk about the, you know, the crisis cases in the church, but the ordinary sheep really never get discussed or prayed for. So one thing we try to do is just work systematically through our membership directory, praying through a couple pages at a time, making sure that at least one of us knows something meaningful about each member’s life. And if we don’t, that’s cause to reach out and basically find that out. But we find that that that helps just keep us in that mode of we are shepherds, first and foremost, and then. The other thing is, elders really exist in a lot of ways to think on the level of vision and principle, whereas the staff’s job is to execute on a day to day basis. So it’s easy. I think, in meetings, if you’re not careful to kind of get in the weeds on things, things that really ought to be delegated to staff or to deacons or other volunteers in the congregation. And then as elders, you actually never really get the chance to sit back and consider larger matters, whether theological issues or or ethical trends or things in the life of the congregation, whether it’s about, you know, the need for a building or whatever. So what we’ve started to do is we’ve started to have several issues meetings per year where what we’re doing in those meetings is just focusing on a particular issue, and one of the elders will come and we’ll facilitate the conversation about that. So for instance, one of the ones we’ve done recently is on fostering a culture of discipling. How will home groups fit into that? How? How do one on one discipling relationships? How does Sunday School fit into that? Just forcing us to kind of think on that level of principle from which we can then go and start to make practical. It’s good applications and delegations.

Ligon Duncan

Let me say, as a guy that has, I’ve moderated a lot of elders meetings, that point’s a really good one to make sure that you are positively instructing your men in the issues of the day so that they are able to intelligently and biblically address those things. That’s that’s probably something I need to incorporate. Wish I had done that more with my elders. That’s a really good idea. Along those lines, I will say to younger pastors who may be listening to us, you may leave seminary thinking that the great issues that you are going to face in terms of building unity and leadership challenges are going to be the great theological issues, the deity of Christ, the substitutionary atonement, and you will be disappointed that very often the big things that are dividing People are issues of relatively insignificant value. So you know, you may have heard your professor say that the church is the kingdom of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. It is not under the Constitution of the United States and the President of the United States. And we need to get the American flag out of the church. And you go to work in Roseville, Alabama at a 75 member church, and they’ve had the American flag in the sanctuary for as long as anybody remembers, and you decide, as the young man, I’m going to take that American flag out of the sanctuary, and then suddenly there is a conflagration in the who took the American flag out of the pastor took the American flag out? Is he a communist? And you know, suddenly there’s this big conflagration. Okay, don’t do that, don’t you know, one don’t do things that are going to unilaterally provoke controversy about things that are not the big things that need to change in that church. Probably you need to make sure that people are converted. People are reading their Bibles. People are being faithful in their marriages. Elders actually are qualified to be elders. Deacons are qualified to be deacons. Make sure you don’t go in and become the occasion for a big fight on a thing that doesn’t need to be the big fight in that in that congregation. And so often the big things, you know, somebody came to the pastor and said, Can we take that rug out. It’s ugly. Yeah, take it out. Yeah. That rug was given by Miss Sally Sanders, and she has supported this church for years, and I can’t believe that you would have had that rug taken out of the ladies parlor. That’s offensive, and suddenly there’s this big thing going on a. Over this. This was not what you went into the ministry to write rugs and flags and all these other things. And so very often in churches, it can be things like that that provoke division rather than the big issues of the faith. Yeah, even the cultural stuff that we face today. So I just for younger ministers, as you think about this, you know, you only get one hill to die on, so choose it

Matt Smethurst

carefully. Play the long game. As one of our mutual friends likes to say, younger ministers tend to have great acuity but poor depth perception. Yeah, they can see things very clearly when they’re up close, but fail to take that long view. And I’ve sometimes just thought, man, seminary, so grateful for seminary, amen. But seminary teaches you the rules. Ministry teaches you the exceptions. Yeah, ministry is where you realize that in a fallen world, sometimes you aren’t going to be able to be a purist in every church decision. Welcome, welcome to trusting God, living with fellow sinners and trying to help each other toward our eternal home. Yeah, as we, as we kind of wrap up the the episode LIG, anything you would encourage pastors to consider about how to invest in their fellow elders, how to disciple them and encourage them Well, again,

Ligon Duncan

pastors ought to be thinking about what is the next generation of elders going to look like? You know, just like pastors, pastors are looking over their whole congregation and they’re they should be asking, Okay, who are the godly women in the congregation that we need to be investing in so that they can invest in the rest of the who are the godly deacons, or future deacons that are going to be serving, who are the godly elders that are going to be serving and doing what we can to invest in every part of the youth. So all of us need to be what’s the next generation going to look like? What? What do I need to be doing to raise up the next generation of leadership. So one is identifying that, and then, you know, being a part of pouring into that. Another is making sure that you’re pouring into your current leadership. Yeah, and with the with the women in the congregation, Donna Dobbs was my director of Christian education, and she would ask me to come work with the women that were going to be doing the teaching in the women’s Bible studies. I loved being able to do that. I wanted to do the same thing for the elders, so I started Bible studies. I started teaching opportunities so that I could invest in them and then encourage them to exercise their gifts and give them some feedback, and give them some encouragement, give them some suggestions. Every usually lay elders have certain areas where they’re better equipped than others to do a teaching series or something like that. Set them up to succeed, you know, put them in that area where they’re really good. You know, they just read Don Whitney’s book on the spiritual disciplines. Hey, why don’t you teach a discipleship group on that or why don’t you teach a Sunday school class on that next semester? Just always be looking for ways that they can deploy their gifts and cheer them on. And then we, we always had elders praying in public worship services. So I would, I would get the I would get them up to do announcements, to talk about various things in the life of the congregation, but also to pray, because I wanted the congregation to hear them pray and and it let the it let the congregation know, okay, these guys are not just people that make good spiritual decisions. These are people that love God. Pray to God, and I can have some respect for spiritually and theologically, as a mature Christian, I’m glad that I’ve got elders like that. So I wanted to put them in places where the congregation could see this is not just a spiritual board of directors. They’re shepherds. And then, you know, get them to help on visitation and such. You know, I’ve, I’ve had so many times that elders have gone with me on visitation, and they’ve been able to do things that I never could do,

Matt Smethurst

yeah, and even sometimes they beat you there and

Ligon Duncan

beat me there, yeah, yeah. Well, what an

Matt Smethurst

encouragement that the senior senior pastor of every church is the Lord Jesus Christ. Hebrews calls him the Great Shepherd. First. Peter calls him the chief Shepherd. We’re just privileged to be under shepherds. And what a gift that we’re not alone, that we have other brothers. If you’re wanting to start thinking about some of this stuff with your elders, or if you don’t have elders yet, maybe with some godly men in the church that you’re discipling. In addition to that book, I mentioned the path to being a pastor, another great one that would provoke discussion is by Jeremy Rennie, simply called church elders. It’s short, it’s accessible, and it would be a good catalyst for conversation. We hope this episode of the everyday pastor has been an encouragement to you. Please take a moment to leave us a review that would help. Get some traction so that we can help other pastors find fresh joy in the work of ministry.