Elders, Pastors, Bishops and Such Matters (part 1 of 2)

Listen as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of church government in this address from The Gospel Coalition sermon library.

---

Male: It’s a special honor for me to be able to introduce our speaker to you this morning. Dr. Carson was a member of the faculty of Northwest Baptist Theological College and Seminary before he went to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and it was my very special privilege to make his acquaintance at that time and to have good times of fellowship with him and also with his wife Joy.

Don Carson did his doctoral work in New Testament at Cambridge University in England after he had served in a pastorate in our fellowship for some years. He has written at least a half a dozen books and a number of journal articles, and he has gained a hearing as an evangelical scholar who has to be taken into account in New Testament scholarship. It gives me great pleasure at this time to introduce to you Dr. Don Carson.

Don Carson: It seems as if almost everybody I spend any time talking with brings back very happy memories of earlier times. I was just thinking, Herb, of going out together with you and Del and Joy and myself for meals now and then, and the time we poured concrete in your backyard, and a few other things.

We live in a day of growing upheaval in local churches. I think this is especially true in the Western world, and especially in churches in what is called the believers church tradition of which we are a part. The reasons for this are many. Partly it’s a reflection of the rise of the middle class. We have an increasing number of yuppies, young urban professionals, upwardly mobile, and these types in our churches, who are used to giving orders all day, like to come to church and give orders all weekend.

At the same time, there are changes going on, demographic shifts in our population, so that the percentage of people who are well trained, literate, and educated is considerably higher, even though the level of elitist education is lower than 20 or 30 years ago. This sometimes means, too, that we have a situation where the pulpit is not as well trained as the pew. That too has to be admitted.

The situation in that respect is much worse in Africa, where, in fact, there is a saying in the urban cities that the problem with the church is that the pew is higher than the pulpit. That is, the pew has far more people in it who are university trained, who have done advanced work. As a result, the image of the ministry to the average Christian in Africa’s urban centers is that the ministry is ignorant, ill trained, standing on ceremony and personal authority instead of on knowledge and example. In some small measure, we in the West partake of that too.

Then there are other factors. We live in a day of great reversal of culture values, of moral values, and the church is going through upheaval as it copes with some of these things. A bare 10 years ago, it was relatively rare to find divorce within evangelicalism. Relatively rare. Now in large parts of California, you can, in fact, have a divorced and remarried minister without any embarrassment whatsoever. It is all a sign of God’s grace.

Many other things could be listed, but the more the local church goes through upheaval, the more imperative it is for us to go back to our biblical roots and test what we hold against the norms of Scripture, and in few areas is this need more imperative than in understanding in what leadership consists, in understanding the structure of ecclesiastical authority in the New Testament.

As I move around various parts of the continent, I’ve discovered that in denomination after denomination within the believers church tradition (that is, in confessing evangelical churches that attempt purity), there is, in fact, massive tension between the church as a whole and the leadership, or in various ranks of the leadership, and rather unclear ideas about how to resolve some of these problems.

Let me begin by surveying rather rapidly some of the historical developments that have given rise to these diverse opinions. In the New Testament, the term apostle has an extraordinarily wide semantic range. It doesn’t necessarily mean the Twelve plus Paul. It can cover those who are delegates of churches. In some instances it simply refers to those who are sent by church delegates. In some instances it refers to missionaries.

But there is a narrow sense of apostle, the sense that covers the Twelve, specially commissioned by Christ, plus Paul. For this narrow group, it’s rather interesting to observe that there are no successors as they die out. The sole exception, of course, is Judas Iscariot, where Matthias is chosen as a substitute, because Judas didn’t simply die out, as it were. He, in fact, apostatized.

Within that framework, Peter finds warrant in the paradigms of Old Testament Scripture, according to Acts 1, to find a replacement to bring the number up to the Twelve, reflecting again the totality of the people of God under the typological structure of the twelve tribes of Israel. But once the apostles begin to die out from opposition or old age, no provision is made for their replacement.

The appeal in the later books of the New Testament is not to new apostles, still less to prophets who will secure the truth for the church, but to the foundation that has already been laid. “Guard the deposit” is the cry of the Pastoral Epistles. “Return to the basics” is the cry of 1 John. “Keep that which has been committed to you” is the appeal of Jude. In this context, then, there is no appeal to a new ranking body of authority.

Moreover, as the apostles begin to move out into greater and more diversified ministry, we find emerging under them, as it were, but in a sense adjacent to them, a new group: the elders. Historically, the earliest reference to them is found in the book of Acts, chapter 11, verse 30. Here it is almost a throwaway remark. That is, elders are not discussed in terms of the way they are appointed or chosen or the like. They are simply introduced as a group that is already there functioning in the church.

This has to do with the commitment under the prophecy of Agabus to send help to the Jerusalem church. Some of the brothers decide to do this, we are told in Acts 11:30. “Sending their gift to the elders by Barnabas and Saul.” So it seems as if already elders are operating in the Jerusalem church without further discussion, almost certainly a sign that the term has been taken over from elders as they were used, at least to some extent, in Judaism in “synagogual” and other circles.

Then a little farther on, we discover that elders crop up in increasingly powerful leadership roles in Jerusalem, especially as the apostles move out. In chapter 12, verse 17, we discover that James is becoming increasingly prominent. When Peter escapes from prison, he says, “Tell James and the brothers about this,” as if James is a special brother with a little extra personality or strength or leadership. A little farther on we discover, in fact, that he is an elder or the chief elder (we’ll worry about such terms in a few moments) in Jerusalem.

In the Jerusalem Council in Acts, chapter 15, it is quite clearly James who is chairing the meeting, summing up the conclusions and the like, precisely because the apostles by this time seem to have scattered into broader spheres of ministry, and in the local church in Jerusalem it is James who seems to have a preeminent authority. That is precisely why, for instance, Paul in Galatians, chapter 2, can refer to Peter and John and James as the pillars of the Jerusalem church.

Now when we consider the authority of the apostles, we discover unique features about it. I shan’t spend much time on this question because it is not immediately relevant to us today if we agree that there are no apostles, in the narrow sense, operating amongst us today. Perhaps the strongest place where that unique apostolic authority is enunciated is in 1 Corinthians 14.

Here Paul has been dealing with tongues and prophecy, and he concludes in verse 37, “If anybody thinks he is a prophet or spiritually gifted, let him acknowledge that what I am writing to you is the Lord’s command.” In other words, although he understands New Testament prophecy to be revelatory (chapter 14, verse 30), it is something that comes to the prophet …

Even though he views such prophecy as revelatory, it is revelation that stands under his own writing authority as an apostle. What he writes is nothing less than the Lord’s command, and if even a prophet claims something other than this, then, Paul concludes, that person himself will be ignored. He means here by God. He will be judged unworthy and ruled out of court by God himself.

Moving on then with the elders and leaving the apostles behind, we discover that in the first missionary journey, on the return leg, Paul and Barnabas appoint elders in the cities that they have previously evangelized. (Acts, chapter 14, verse 23.) Here there is appointment of elders, incidentally, from the top. This is not by church vote. This is appointment from the top.

On the other hand, one has to recognize that there are some special circumstances going on here. There are other factors to be borne in mind. If you measure the entire length of the first missionary journey, it cannot be more than two years, and it’s probably not more than about 15 or 16 months, culminating at the beginning of 49 or thereabouts.

So the entire trip out and back, taking up only 15 months, 18 months at the most, means that when Paul reaches the end of his route and begins returning through Iconium and the like all the way back again, the first churches he visits on the return leg cannot have been established for more than three months or so, because he visits them in return order. Nevertheless, he appoints elders in every place.

Here are churches where no Christian is more than three months old, and elders who are three months old in the Lord, at most, are being appointed by apostolic fiat. Now how are you going to fit that into “not a novice, lest he be puffed up with pride”? The chap didn’t even get a decent MDiv at Northwest.

What’s the point? The point is that this criterion of maturity is entirely relative. I was brought up, as some of you know, in the province of Quebec. During the lean years, you counted it a year of great blessing if you saw two converts in a local church and kept one. When I was growing up, there wasn’t one French Canadian church that was self-supporting.

I was beaten up from time to time as a maudits Protestant, a damned Protestant. Baptist ministers alone, between ‘50 and ‘52, spent eight years in jail for preaching the gospel. That was never the charge, of course. It was always “disturbing the peace” or “inciting to riot.” That was my heritage. In 1972, things began to change, and for about a decade (and still to a lesser degree today), growth was extraordinarily rapid.

During that time I would go back on occasion and preach in a Wednesday night prayer meeting. I remember one such back in ‘76, when I asked the pastor how long I had to speak and was told, “Oh, take an hour and a half or so.” There was singing with guitars and piano and anything else that was around for half an hour to 45 minutes. I preached for an hour and a half. Then there was question time for another half an hour, and then they got down on their knees to pray for two hours. Nobody began to leave until midnight.

That wasn’t just Sherbrooke. That was all over the province in those days. In center after center after center, you could not find a Christian who was more than two years old. My parents, who are coming up now in a couple of years to their golden anniversary.… With my father something like 55 years in the ministry, he is viewed as an incredibly senior saint. There just aren’t others like him in the province except one, William Frey. That’s it.

All of these young men come flocking to their door, saying, “How do you grow a Christian family? What does it mean to be a Christian grandmother? How do you raise your kids? What does it mean to be an elder in a church?” Christians, three months old, four months old, six months old. So part of the SEMBEQ movement was, in fact, to train leaders amongst Christians who were often not more than six months old, because that meant they were six months older than everybody else in the church.

This business of being a novice is entirely relative. Where you have a church with mature men and women who have been Christians for 20 to 30 years and exhibit a great deal of grace and maturity, you don’t put an elder over them who has been a Christian for three months, regardless of the rate of his growth.

Whence then, deacons. Many trace the office to the appointment of the Seven in Acts, although there, strictly speaking, the term is not used. In fact, the term deacon, as we shall see in a later session, is a general term, by and large, in the New Testament, so Paul can call himself a deacon. All Christians ought to be deacons in the sense that all ought to serve. That’s the basic idea behind the root. If we are serving, we are “deaconing,” if I may put it that way.

But again, there is a narrower sense of deacon (that we shall examine a little later) in which the deacon is some kind of an appointed person to a special office. Its qualifications and so on we shall look at in a later session. These, then, seem to be the beginnings of these roles, according to the book of Acts. Skipping now the rest of the evidence in the New Testament and coming to the period of the early church, it’s worth noting a couple of developments. We’ll come back to the biblical evidence in a moment.

In my judgment, by the end of the New Testament period, for reasons I will give you in a moment, there were only two distinctive functions or offices in the church, but very quickly, by the beginning of the second century, there were three. The three then dominated Christendom until the Reformation. The rise of the three was for perfectly understandable and, in one sense, justifiable reasons, even though the end result was sad and, in fact, the step was in certain measures unbiblical. It was an understandable development just the same.

The church was growing so rapidly that very often local assemblies had poor leadership, that is, poorly trained. A tremendous amount of the ministry was carried on by itinerant ministers, and many local church leaders were self-supporting and ill trained. So when someone arrived claiming to have the right and the instruction and the experience to teach and preach in the local church, often these local leaders did not have the grit to enable them to make an accurate judgment. There were a lot of phonies around as well as confident itinerants.

Thus, for example, in a document known as the Didache, dated about 125 or thereabouts, there are actually rules laid out by which to test itinerant preachers. Rule #1: If he comes and asks for money, he’s a phony. Rule #2: If he stays for more than three days, he’s a phony. Rule #3: If he expects more than food and lodging, he’s a phony. Rule #4: If he says anything against the doctrine of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, he’s a phony.

Now regardless of the wisdom or otherwise of the rules, the fact that there were rules shows that there was a problem, and the church was trying to cope with the number of itinerants who were making a claim on the church’s time, authority, doctrine, and purse. So increasingly, smaller churches would submit to the judgment of larger churches and their leaders regarding the advisability of listening to this or that itinerant.

So perhaps a larger church in a larger metropolitan area with better trained personnel and more discerning spiritual leadership.… These people would de facto gain increasing authority to themselves. It was not a question of usurping authority; it was a kind of self-protection instinct in the church. But increasingly, these more central and better-trained figures became overseers over these other churches.

This meant that gradually, instead of having elders or pastors in each congregation, you had elders and pastors in each congregation but in some congregations they were also overseers or bishops. Thus, every bishop was an elder or a pastor, but not every elder or pastor was a bishop. You were a bishop only if you had oversight over a greater number of congregations. That was the rise of what came to be called the monarchical bishopric; that is, bishops who had some kind of ruling authority over other churches and leaders.

The reasons, in other words, were good, but the steps became encrusted in institutional form and ultimately led to some notorious abuses, coming perhaps to most dramatic highlight at the time of Pope Innocent III, whose name, incidentally, has to be the greatest abuse of English. Now it has to be acknowledged, if we turn to contemporary options in the evangelical world to go no further, that almost every system has its strengths and its weaknesses intrinsically.

We shall come back to biblical models in a moment, but it is important to understand and at least be sympathetic with what is going on. This past autumn, I had the remarkable privilege of giving the Moore College Lectures in Sydney, Australia. That is the most amazing Anglican archdiocese you can imagine. It is evangelical, thoroughly so, and the archbishop, Donald Robinson, does not function with a great deal more authority than a president or a general superintendent in the Baptist denomination.

So here there is nominally the structure of a tripartite system, which, in fact, is operating more like a believers church tradition. One has to be very careful when one assesses other groups to find out not just what labels are being used but how, in fact, the various posts are functioning. It is possible, of course, as you know, in various Baptist denominations and congregational systems for there to be little congregational government at all. It’s possible to have a whole array of popes instead. You don’t have to call it Anglicanism to gain that.

Then, again, within the evangelical orb there is Presbyterianism. At the risk of considerable oversimplification, in this system the presbytery consists of elders who cover or are drawn from more than one local church. The historical reasons for that we’ll see in a moment. This level of leadership, then, is trans-local church but yet in some kind of dynamic tension, depending on the particular Presbyterian group, with the authority of the local church measured through other officials.

At the other end of the spectrum is Brethrenism. I recall when I was an undergraduate dating two or three times a young woman who came from strong Brethren stock. I was at that time the vice president of McGill Christian Fellowship and was going out some Sunday evenings speaking in churches in the metropolitan area of Montreal.

On this particular evening, the father and mother of this young lady graciously drove me to where I was going. I spoke, and on the way back we were making small chitchat about this and that, and I mentioned I had seen a statistic somewhere that it was now taking in North America an average of 500 Christians and one minister one year to win one person to Christ. In those days, I knew more about statistics than I do now.

There was a stony silence from the front, and then the mother said, with a certain cold edge in her voice, “You mean 501 Christians.” I said, “No, I was referring to a certain statistic, and the statistic as I read it was 500 Christians and one minister.” She said, “You mean 501 Christians.” I said, “Well, regardless of the theological interpretation, in terms of the way things, in fact, are structured in Christianity today in the Western world, the statistic, in fact, was 500 Christians and one minister.” She said, “You mean 501 Christians.”

Then her husband broke in and said, “Dear, it was just a statistic that he read.” Even though I was even younger and more brash than I am now, I mercifully restrained myself from quoting Philippians, chapter 1, verse 1, where Paul greets all of the saints in the Philippian church with the bishops and deacons.

Now then, the truth of the matter is that even within that confession (and there are many strengths within that confession), once elders are appointed within Brethrenism, often they function with as much or more authority in the local assembly than in anything you’ll find in Baptist circles. Again, partly it’s a difference of nomenclature.

When you get down to the local church level, you discover the immense truth in the French proverb plus Áa change, plus c’est la mÍme chose. “The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.” The same kinds of problems and tensions occur with a different array of labels and appointment systems.

In the Evangelical Free Church of America, which astonishingly grew out of evangelical Swedish Baptists and evangelical Norwegian Lutherans who decided that Scandinavian blood is thicker than baptismal water and buried the hatchet on that issue, there is a slightly different system.

Here you have a pastor or pastors, then usually just one elder who looks after the number of people who are members and keeps the statistics and sometimes serves as chairman of the church, then deacons who function more or less as elders, and then trustees, and who knows where they came from except that in some states you’re supposed to have them.

In many of our traditional Baptist churches, you have pastors and deacons and no elders. The deacons do a lot of work that elders do, and the pastor serves as somewhere between elder and mini-pope. Then in other Baptist churches, you have a pastor (just one), and then several elders (and how they differ from pastors is not clear except that the pastor gets paid and the elders don’t), and then deacons, who are sometimes doing elders’ work and sometimes not.

Now as we turn to the biblical evidence, let me hasten to add that, in one sense, the labels are immaterial. If you mean by gobbledygook what I mean by deacon, I don’t care if you call all of your deacons gobbledygooks. If you call your elders deacons, in one sense I don’t really care. You can call them anything you like, so long as you mean by your term what the biblical writers mean by their term.

But that’s the problem. We are so often transferring biblical categories to our local churches without realizing that although formally the categories are the same, essentially they are different, and we breed our own problems. Let me then come to some crucial issues and outline them for you at least as I see them.

First, elders, pastors, and bishops; one, two, or three offices. Begin with the term episkopos, bishop, overseer. It is used in only four passages in the New Testament. The first one is in certain respects the most important: Acts, chapter 20, verse 28. This is an address by Paul to the Ephesian elders at Miletus, and it is extremely important, therefore, to begin with verse 17: “From Miletus, Paul sent to Ephesus for the elders of the church.”

Then verse 28, with Paul actually speaking: “Guard yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers [bishops]. Be shepherds of the church of God.” Here you have a collocation of all three crucial terms. These people, according to verse 17, are the elders. Paul calls them bishops, overseers, and he tells them to be shepherds, pastors. Pastor is simply the word from the Latin root that means shepherd.

Here then is a collocation of all three terms, and in this passage, bishop and elder are quite clearly well-defined, functional titles, whereas shepherd here is a functional description of a certain kind of activity. He does not recognize these people as shepherds. He tells them to be shepherds. Then when you come to other passages dealing with bishop, it is still important to remember this first one.

It is this passage, it seems to me, that is most crucial in ruling out that form of ecclesiastical structure that argues that elders may or may not be overseers; that is, that every overseer or bishop is an elder but that it doesn’t necessarily work the other way around. It is one of the reasons why I’m not an Anglican, even in the archdiocese of Sydney. In other words, the presupposition is that as far as the referent to each term is concerned, the reference to bishops and the reference to elders is exactly the same, at least in this passage.

Then we come to Philippians, chapter 1, verse 1, which I cited a moment ago, referring to the bishops and deacons. Presumably, in this context, Paul is addressing the church leadership. He is thus able to make a distinction between bishops and deacons, but unless you assume that bishops are also elders are also pastors, then he left out certain brands of leaders in the church, which is not all that likely.

The next passage is 1 Timothy 3:1–2, and then again Titus 1:7 that we shall be looking at a little more closely tonight, and finally, in the last passage, the fifth passage (not referring now to the local church and its leaders but to the archetype of all leadership, the Lord Jesus himself), we read (1 Peter 2:25), “For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.” So Jesus is the Supreme Pastor, the Supreme Bishop. The pastoral language itself, linked with elders, is again picked up in the same epistle, chapter 5.

Peter writes, “To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder …” Here an apostle is also an elder. “… a witness of Christ’s sufferings and one who also will share in the glory to be revealed: be shepherds [pastors] of God’s flock that is under your care, serving as overseers, not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not greedy for money, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock. And when the Chief Shepherd [the Chief Pastor] appears, you will receive the crown of glory that will never fade away.”

In other words, arguably, the collocation of terms in these and other passages means that in the New Testament, the elder, the pastor, and the bishop are three terms that all refer to one office function. In fact, I would be prepared to argue that this office or function is labeled in three ways in order to preserve different facets of what it is to be.

From one point of view, this pastor is an overseer. That is to say, he is responsible for certain oversight in the church, for certain general direction, and, as we shall see in a later session, people are told in certain respects to submit to him and to obey him. On the other hand, such a person is also called a pastor; that is, a shepherd. He is responsible for feeding the flock, for tending it, for looking after it, for giving his life for it. At the same time, such a person is an elder; that is, having overtones of maturity, of example, of qualification for leadership acknowledged by the community.

Moreover, when we look at the specific characteristics required of this particular role, we shall discover that no provision is made anywhere in the New Testament at all, so far as I can see, for different qualifications and responsibilities for the three different labels. They merge. I take it, then, that in the New Testament, elders, pastors, and bishops have the same reference, the one office function.