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

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

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The terms church and churches in the New Testament. Part of our problem in this connection is in recognizing that our terminology is not New Testament terminology. I do not here intend to give a theological analysis of the term church but rather to show the geographical reference behind the term church.

In the New Testament, we sometimes read of the church of God or the church in Christ Jesus in the singular, and sometimes the church in Laodicea or the church in Ephesus or the church in Jerusalem or the church in Antioch or the church in Rome, always in the singular. When you come to churches in the plural, the reference is without exception always to local congregations beyond the confines of a single city.

You never find the churches in Jerusalem or the churches in Antioch or the churches in Ephesus. You do find the churches in Judea, the churches in Samaria, the churches in Asia, but at the city level, it is always a reference in the singular, to the church. Now that generates some enormous problems for us.

It is what stands ultimately behind the model of government in Presbyterianism, for their argument is once you get a church established so strongly in an Antioch or a Jerusalem or an Ephesus where the numbers are great, clearly the congregations were not meeting in one place. There was no venue big enough, especially in a time of increased opposition. In Ephesus you did not rent the local amphitheater for an evangelistic rally.

Then, necessarily, the congregations were meeting in separate groups. Let’s call them, for the moment, assemblies or congregations. But still Paul speaks of one church, the church in Ephesus, with many different congregations. And, says Presbyterianism, this indicates, therefore, that when Paul sends for the elders from the church in Ephesus, you have, in effect, spiritual leaders coming from a multiplicity of congregations that nevertheless constitute one gathering of the Lord’s people.

To use modern Presbyterian terminology, you have, in fact, a de facto presbytery. You have an area of several different congregations, which then pool their elders into one presbytery, which together has some general oversight over all of the local congregations in that area. Now there’s a certain amount of plausibility to that reconstruction, but it is not the only reconstruction from the biblical evidence that is possible, and in my judgment, it has some built-in weaknesses.

Inevitably, in the modern cosmopolitan area now, with a strong Presbyterian system, you inevitably have different numbers of presbyteries, this presbytery and that presbytery. All you’ve done is chopped up the pie in a slightly different way. The truth of the matter is that in Baptist or other congregational-type circles, where you might have a church of 1,200 on one corner and half a mile away 500 and another few blocks off 200 or 1,200 or 1,600 in many centers of North America, again, what is the rationale for drawing the circle here as opposed to here as opposed to here as opposed to here? We have buildings today. Our local church of 2,000 may, in fact, be bigger than all of the local congregations in Ephesus combined.

There’s difficulty in understanding exactly what we should be doing. What is clear, however (this is something I will deal with in a later session), is that the relationship between elders, pastors, and bishops on the one hand and the local church on the other is a known and dynamic relationship. The New Testament presupposes that there is an ecclesiastical, a church responsibility toward the elders and vice versa. We’ll delineate that in a later session.

What that means, therefore, is that you cannot reasonably imagine a body of elders that stands so far removed from a whole array of congregations that the congregations don’t know them and they don’t know the congregations. Each church in the New Testament, even if it is made up of a number of house groups, is seen as a unified entity in days before the megachurch and the megalopolis, which generates super-churches.

Now then, I would go one stage further. I would like to argue that in the New Testament, on the whole, with only a few exceptions, there is no massive distinction between the church universal and the local church. That is to say, there is not a thought-through, carefully worked out distinction between what this church is here at Faith meeting in this building Sunday by Sunday and what the universal church is.

There is casual reference to all believers simply as the church of God, and there is likewise reference to the local church, but how the two are related is not worked out in any detail. The general presupposition is that each church is simply the church. That is to say, each church is the manifestation, the outcropping, of the church. The definition of what the church is varies according to the metaphor used.

In 1 Corinthians, chapter 1, for example, “All those who call upon the name of God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” It is a confessional stance. The worshiping church. If the gathered people of Christ meet in this particular place and call upon God through Jesus Christ, that is the church. But in other places, in just a few instances, the word church has reference to a number of different congregations which nevertheless can be differentiated. They are concrete congregations, not the entire church, and there is a hint of unease at the language.

For example, Paul twice insists that he persecuted the church of God. Now he didn’t persecute the church in some abstract sense. He persecuted churches, the church in Jerusalem, churches in the surrounding area of Judea, and he took a jolly good stab at the church in Damascus. Yet they are lumped together and called the church of God, almost because together individually they simply are the church. We are not to think of ourselves in any particular congregation as one part of the church. We are the church.

Now there are some very important ramifications for that theologically and in terms of governments that we shall spell out in a later session, but I shall leave it there for the moment. We come, then, to plurality of elders and the question of kinds of elders. Very frequently it is noted that when elders are referred to with respect to a particular congregation in the New Testament, plurality is assumed. That is correct. It is assumed. It is not taught; it is assumed.

On the other hand, one also has to recognize that we are thrown back to the discussion we’ve just finished about the nature of the church. If you have a church, the church in Antioch, which necessarily met in a diversity of house groups, you may have had an elder … or, conceivably, more, but at least an elder … in connection with each house group, and the house groups themselves constituted the church in Antioch.

So of course you then have plurality of elders in the church in Antioch, but given the circumstances of the day, it was very difficult for the church in Antioch to meet as a whole church. But if a particular house group got big enough … let’s say 50 people, 75 people, with an elder … you may have had what we would call a local church with an elder.

Suddenly you see, then, that the question of the number of elders per congregation cannot be a legislated item. What is assumed is that there will be sufficient leadership at the elder/pastor/bishop rank to look after the needs of the congregation. That is what is assumed. And where churches are growing and multiplying, it is not surprising that there are elders in the churches in the New Testament.

Now when we ask, “Are there kinds of elders and ranks of elders and the like?” in fact, there is only one passage in the New Testament that addresses that question directly. It is found in 1 Timothy, chapter 5, verse 17. We are told, “The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor …” The word honor in Greek could mean pay, double salary. “… especially those whose work is preaching and teaching.”

This is often taken to be an indication of a twofold ranking system. That is to say, a ruling elder on the one hand and on the other hand a teaching elder. So you have some elders whose primary job is administration and some elders whose primary job is preaching, teaching. I want to say two things about that.

First, where you have lists of qualifications spelled out in the New Testament (as in 1 Timothy, chapter 3, verses 1–7, with respect to the episkopos), the one distinctive characteristic (as we shall see tonight) of this office function is the ability to teach. I do not see myself any exception to that in the New Testament, and the list recurs. It recurs in Titus, chapter 1, verse 7, and following, and elsewhere.

In other words, the assumption is that if you are an elder/pastor/bishop, one of your distinctive qualifications is that you are able to teach. What that means we’ll spell out in more detail tonight. So when I turn to this passage and find some kind of distinction between ruling and teaching, I am a little bit nervous about making an absolute break so as to suggest there are elders who do not teach.

Secondly, this is the only passage in the New Testament that makes any kind of distinction, and it could be interpreted in a couple of ways. I shall not bore you with the exegetical details, but as a methodological principle, I would want to argue that I am very loath to build a very big case, theological, practical, or any other, on one verse.

“Ah,” you say, “how many times does the Bible have to say something for it to be true?” Ah, I reply, it does not have to say it at all. It either is true or it isn’t. But it may have to say things several times for me to understand what is being meant, because I’m dumb. That’s why, unless you’re a Mormon, you probably do not build a tremendous theological structure on 1 Corinthians 15:28–29 regarding the baptism for the dead.

In fact, there were three journal articles published in 1950 and 1951 by Catholic Biblical Quarterly, which surveys more than 40 major interpretations of that passage in the history of the church. Now I think I know what the passage means, but I refuse to incorporate my judgment about what it means into an ecclesiastical confessional statement, because the expression only occurs once. There is room for disagreement amongst us. It is a difficult passage. I’m not sure what it means. Likewise, I’m not quite sure what this passage means in 1 Timothy, chapter 5.

However (and this is the second point), part of our problem again, I think, is that we understand administration in very narrow Western understanding. For us, administration means something like this: drawing the line diagrams as to flowcharts of responsibility, taking charge of the secretarial help, deciding who licks the stamps, paying the bills, sorting out whether or not you should buy a new Gestetner, organizing the committees, oversight over the building program, and on and on and on.

In other words, administration for us has to do with moving a lot of blocks and pieces around and, in a large organization, keeping all of the balls up in the air and functioning more or less as they ought to. But I suspect that in the New Testament, with the exception of care for the widows and the unfortunate, the down-and-outers, the poor, the indigent, administration was largely bound up more tightly with the work of the ministry.

It had to do with organizing the Bible studies, the evangelistic witness, the outreach, the kinds of groups that led to fellowship and growth. Fellowship groups, if you like; the kinds of groups you read of in Acts, chapter 2, where people met from house to house and continued in fellowship in the apostolic doctrine, training programs.

In other words, it was impossible to separate out the work of administration from the work of the general spiritual oversight of the congregation, including its preaching and teaching. We can make some distinctions with our large-scale organizations. In the New Testament, it is not clear to me at all that administration could have been separated out from the primary task of teaching and training the entire church of God.

So the emphasis in this verse, chapter 5, verse 17, is that those who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, and by such direction is included preaching and teaching. Thus, those whose primary work is preaching and teaching are themselves likewise directing the church. They are especially directing the church.

It is not as if you have some who do not do any teaching at all. Some in their administrative work may not have the primary responsibility for preaching and teaching, but those who do are not less ruling elders; they are especially ruling elders. Which brings us, then, to the contemporary question.… Should we have pastors and then elders in our churches?

I suppose, in some respects, the church that I view as my home church, in many ways, is the one where I spend only one-third of my time. It’s Eden Baptist Church in Cambridge, England. We live there one year in three, and in many respects that’s my spiritual rootage. They have a deacons’ board; and there is an elders’ board, of which the pastor is a part; and then the pastor himself is usually called pastor in some kind of exclusive sense.

Is that biblical? Well, in this particular case, I would want to argue that terminologically it is unbiblical. Functionally, in that particular church, it works out quite biblically. Terminologically, I cannot see why one person on an elders’ board should be called pastor and others not be called pastor. There is simply no biblical warrant for that sort of distinction.

What often happens, however, is that the one or two or three who are paid elders get the extra label. That’s the way it often works out in practice. That is a regrettable step. By all means pay as many of the elders as the church can reasonably afford, but why call them something else? Is it so very important that we attach labels to those who get paid?

The way that particular church operates, the pastor (we’ll call him that for convenience’ sake), who does most of the public preaching, by no means does it all. That church sends out teams into the surrounding villages, usually from the elders, and that church has any number of training and evangelistic and Bible study programs governed, controlled, and often taught by the elders.

When the Lord’s Supper is enjoyed in the church, the pastor may or may not lead it. Any of the elders may do so. The pastor is going to be on a mini-sabbatical when I return there this summer, and I will be doing most of the preaching in that church for six weeks or so. When it comes to the Lord’s Supper, however, since I’m not resident there, I’m not one of the elders, the elders will lead it. They often do whether the pastor is there or not.

In decisions about policy or what outside assignments the pastor may or may not take, there is great collegiality amongst those men, tremendous spirituality in those leaders. The terminology may trip them up later. At the moment it is not. It may trip them up functionally later.

Very quickly, then, the last two points: office and/or function. Some have argued, especially those from more Brethren persuasion, that in the New Testament there is no office of the pastor; there is only the function. I shall not go into the lengthy arguments except to say that there is some truth and some error to that argument.

The truth is that in the New Testament, for reasons we shall see in a later session, the office or function, whatever you want to call it, is not a qualitatively different class. Those who achieve this office or function are not qualitatively different people. There is no new priesthood in the New Testament. Let us be quite frank. Many of us who are pastors function like mini-priests, even though we affirm the priesthood of believers.

Nevertheless, having said that, it must also be said that there is an office in the New Testament, if by office you mean a post that is normally paid for, a position that can be pursued (that is to say, if anyone desires the work of a bishop, he desires a good thing; here then is the list of qualifications), and a task with specified conditions and qualifications that is open to the public claimant.

If that is what you mean by office, then of course there is an office in the New Testament, and it is precisely in that sense that I would argue there are two specified offices in the local church: that of the bishop/pastor/overseer and that of the deacon. But we must always struggle against so clericalizing these offices that somehow we institute a new priesthood. About that point I shall have a great deal more to say tonight.

Finally, what then of ordination and the laying on of hands? I wish I had about an hour on that topic alone, for it is an extremely complex one, and it has been made more interesting in recent times by a rather well done book by the late Marjorie Warkentin. Although I disagree with some of her conclusions, I only disagree with some. She has put her finger on some very important points.

Where, no matter what your view of ordination, do you find in the New Testament that once a person is ordained (whatever that means), that person then has the right to the “Rev” label (and all tax advantages pertaining thereto) for the rest of his life regardless of his continued vocation? Where do you see that such a person then is granted particular enduement from the Spirit to sacralize marriages and to sanctify burials? Where do you read that such a qualification is necessary to officiate at the Lord’s Table or to baptize?

The truth of the matter is that many of our traditions in this respect come out of Roman Catholic medieval theology where the Reformation has not gone far enough. In fact, when I officiate at weddings, as I do (with 1,300 students in our divinity school, we’re bound to have some pairings each year), I function as a minister of the state, and I tell them that.

For marriage, at the end of the day, is not a sacrament, nor a church institution, but a creation ordinance. You don’t have to be a Christian to get married. You don’t need my blessing. Perhaps the kind of model you find in France is not all bad, although the reasons for generating that model are disastrous.

There, to be married, you are married before a justice of the peace or the equivalent, and then if you are a Christian, there may be a further ceremony in the church, which recognizes that the church is praying for this couple and committing themselves to this couple, and so forth. There is warrant for that kind of thing.

But so long as people understand that I might serve now and then as a minister of the state, I am prepared to officiate at weddings. Immediately we perceive, then, that this business of ordination becomes complex indeed. It is bound up with long-standing traditions in the church and is often thought, in Western ecclesiastical tradition, to confer authority.

Now it is at that point where Marjorie Warkentin is largely right. Whatever ordination does or does not do, biblically speaking, it does not confer authority. The whole tradition, in fact, of the laying on of hands is likewise extremely interesting, although, again, I do not have time to pursue it here. But in the biblical pattern, it does not confer authority, and this for a theological reason we shall examine in the next two sessions. Does that mean, then, that there is no such thing as ordination? Maybe Spurgeon was right. He refused to be ordained.

Before I would go quite so far, however, I would want to argue that ordination in the New Testament, where it is the recognition of certain leaders with certain gifts, achieved by a number of different roots that, again, I shall deal with tonight, there is warrant for it. Certain people are certainly set aside to certain kinds of work. Whether it’s continuous or whether it’s temporary is another question entirely. They are certainly set aside and recognized by the church to be set aside, and in that sense there is certainly room for ordination in the New Testament.

Among the weaknesses, however, of the book by Mrs. Warkentin, if I may now offer one or two criticisms, is the following. She does not, it seems to me, give sufficient attention to the role of elders as the guardians of the flock and the protectors of the faith in the New Testament, the distinction that is presupposed in those passages where the church is exhorted to follow or obey leaders, even though, as we shall see in other passages, the church is responsible on occasion to discipline leaders.

The question to be explored is whether if, as she claims, individual ministers should not possess the kind or extent of authority usually conferred on them; this authority should instead be conferred on a body of elders in each church or the like.

That returns us, then, to the question of the plurality of elders, with which I have already dealt. In this restricted sense, I would want to argue most strongly that the New Testament warrants ordination so long as ordination is not confused with the conferring of authority but with the recognition of office function and all that pertains to it.

First, as I have indicated, it is almost immaterial how you label the particular offices or functions in the church. (You may call your deacons gobbledygooks.) Nevertheless, for clarity of thought in making the transfer from the biblical descriptions to our contemporary setting, it would help enormously to our clarity of thought if we used biblical titles for the functions that we are actually executing.

I suggest to you that in many traditional Baptist churches, where you have a pastor and some deacons, in fact, the deacons often function as elders and deacons. That does not help clarity of thought. In the New Testament, if I understand it aright, a woman may certainly be a deacon in the technical sense.

I do not think she may be an elder in the technical sense. But supposing you have a deacons’ board that is functioning like an eldership board. You have a problem because of your terminology. I would strongly urge, therefore, that we structure our churches using biblical labels, a deacons’ board and an elders’ board, with the deacons’ board in some ways responsible to the elders’ board.

I will spell some of that out tonight and tomorrow morning, Lord willing. What we often call the pastor (that is, the paid member or members of the elders’ board) should only be called pastor if the other elders are equally called pastor. We should not care particularly whether there is one elder, pastor, or bishop or two or three. We should govern such decisions according to the needs and size of the local congregation. That’s my second point.

Thirdly, I would strongly urge that church constitutions become a little more flexible. Let me give you an example. In many of our church constitutions, we have some kind of quota clause for deacons. If you have a church of up to 50 members, you shall have two deacons. If you have 75 … three. If you have 100 … four. If you have 125 … five, and so on. Now this is usually nicely expressed in semiofficial legalese, but that’s basically what’s being said. It’s a quota system. There may be a similar provision for elders.

What I would want to argue with all respect is that as soon as you quantify such matters in official language, you may, in fact, be dealing with a church that is going through such troubled spiritual times that in a congregation of 75 people you can’t find three spiritual, biblically qualified deacons. So why should you have three? What’s more important? Your constitution or the biblical qualifications?

Supposing you have a church with 75 members with four or five or … may God be praised … six who are qualified to be deacons and to discharge those responsibilities. Why shouldn’t they all be? In other words, we need to rethink our constitutions so that our constitutions cannot unwittingly remove the authority of Scripture from the organizing of our assemblies. Now before we open it up to questions and answers, let me lead in a word of prayer, if I may.

Merciful God, have pity upon us as we struggle afresh to understand the dynamic and structure and authority patterns in the early church, for we too can so easily be blinded by our own traditions that instead of reforming our traditions constantly by your Word, we may, in fact, enslave your Word.

Grant, Lord God, that our desire may not be to be innovative or iconoclastic, still less sarcastic, but to follow wholeheartedly whatever your Word has to say in doctrine, in structure, in life, to the end that we may think your thoughts after you and be progressively conformed to the image of your dear Son, that our churches may be the outposts of heaven they were designed to be, and that internally our relationships may reflect that kind of spiritual maturity that seeks one another’s good and, above all, the glory of the Savior who has bought us with his blood.

Grant, Lord God, that we may be spared from that foolishness that thinks we can solve all of our ecclesiastical problems by merely tampering with the machinery, as if by restructuring and using biblical names we will resolve spiritual conflicts. God forbid this conference be used by some to justify all kinds of heavy-handed ecclesiastical manipulation. Grant rather that it may drive all of us to our knees to think through how to bring all of our lives, individually and corporately, into conformity with the apostolic deposit. We ask in Jesus’ name, amen.