The Leadership and Authority of the Congregation (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.

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In Henry Kissinger’s very important book, White House Years, the former national security adviser and secretary of state tells of his experiences when he first became secretary of state. That’s such a massive organization. There are tentacles reaching out everywhere. How is one man to take control of that? He says it’s quite simple how it works. The secretary of state asks for some position report and recommendation on the current crisis in, let’s say, Beirut.

The bureaucracy starts grinding and comes back with a report, which in essence says, “There are twits and kooks on the left, there are nuts and radicals on the right, and the sensible position is here in the middle.” No matter what question you put to them, therefore, the bureaucracy sets up a paradigm for you: an idiotic position over here, absolute folly over there, and then the center course that we hesitantly recommend. And woe betide the secretary of state if he fights the bureaucracy.

Now, of course, Kissinger himself had enough intellectual stamina that he could tell his advisers where to step off, because on many of these issues he knew a great deal more than they did, and he would send back report after report saying, “This is immature, amateurish, stereotyped. I don’t want to see this kind of shoddy work. Give me some genuine options.”

Sometimes when we discuss the structure of the local church, our vision is curtailed by stereotypical options. “We’re congregationalists. Surely that means we have to run things like a democracy.” But whatever congregationalism means, it can’t simply be democracy, since that notion really was not operative in the ancient world. Paul did not think of democracy as the primal foundation of all government.

When he tells people to obey the state, he’s not thinking of a parliamentary system. He’s thinking of the abysmal totalitarianism of ancient Rome. There is no place in the Scripture that sets democracy as a kind of ideal that is at least as authoritative as Scripture itself, which is nevertheless something of what we have absorbed from our surrounding culture and try sometimes to apply in our church.

On the other hand, sometimes you get an authoritative voice, both from within and without congregationalism, that has a whole catena of verses that can be strung out. “Obey those who have the rule over you, for they watch over your souls. Submit to those who are in authority. There is no authority but what is from God.” You can track them all out, which being interpreted means, “When I say, ‘Jump,’ brothers and sisters, you jump and ask how high on the way up.”

Now with options like these around us, with these stereotypes around us, we can sometimes be squeezed into patterns and alternatives and oversimplifications that may not be biblical. They may, in fact, be forcing us to think in distinctly unbiblical ways. Let me suggest to you some false alternatives that are sometimes paraded before us in style of leadership and then some false alternatives in structure before we turn to some biblical perspectives on these matters.

Regarding false alternatives in style of leadership, the first is the crushingly strong hero. Now this is sometimes nurtured amongst us as we study church history. We look at a Luther or a Calvin or a Wesley or a Whitefield, and one part of us (dare I say it, the more spiritual part) says, “Lord, do it again, and if you can use me, use me.” Another part says, “Boy, wouldn’t it be fun to preach to 50,000 like Whitefield.”

Let’s be quite frank, brothers and sisters in Christ. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, and not least in the matter of coveting ecclesiastical eminence. We have, nevertheless, over the years gradually cultivated this image of what a strong leader is. I could regale you for the next half an hour with my collection of Spurgeon stories. “Did you hear the one about …?” “Yes, yes, yes.” Do you see what I mean?

In all of these Spurgeon stories, Spurgeon comes out on top, so we begin to think in a kind of triumphalistic mode. The problem, I think, is exacerbated when it is compounded with youth. If I may speak now as one who has ministered among you and has left and has now come back from time to time.… Dare I say it? It is a particular problem of some evangelicalism in Canada and not least in this convention. May I stick my finger on a sore point?

When a young man was heading into the ministry 35 years ago he usually emerged from a church in which 60 percent of the congregation hadn’t finished high school. If he finished high school, he was among the top 15 percent in some churches. Often his vocational call was made at the age of 16 or 17, and, in fact, if he had grown up in part in the Great Depression, he had learned to bear burdens that made him mature in his youth.

So when he went to Western Baptist Bible College, he often went at the age of 17 and finished off at 20 or 21 and was in many ways a man, certainly far better educated than 95 percent of those to whom he meant to minister, and already had tasted struggle, enough that the congregation tended to look up to him, and he for his part tended to be mature. Talk to a man like Don Hill and he will tell you that when he was studying, every single person in his small class, except for one, entered the course already called of God to the ministry.

That is not what is going on with MBBC today, and it’s not the fault of MBBC. Don’t misunderstand me. The truth of the matter is the demographics have shifted. We now live in a situation where for a whole variety of reasons people make vocational decisions, spiritual and otherwise, at a much later time. There are very few people who feel deeply, passionately committed to the ministry at 16, and some of those who do are so wet behind the ears and have borne so little of the burden of the heat of the day that they’re not ready at 22.

Then when they get into a church at the age of 22, they will discover, with exceptions (there are remarkable exceptions), the people to whom they minister … well, 30, 40, 50, even 60 percent of them already have college degrees or more. They’re professionals. Some of those people can read and interpret Scripture better even than our graduates. Feeling somewhat frightened and not as mature intrinsically as the older generation that bore the burden in their youth, they insist on their authority by stretching their office, and they wipe out.

So you have an increasing number of people who might have done excellent service in the ministry, but they were pushed forward too fast, too soon, too young. Whether we like it or not, the demographics have shifted, and the problem of self-promoted leaders is now compounded by that demographic shift.

Now I hasten to say there are always exceptions. I can think of two or three this evening who began pastoral ministry within the last decade at the age of 22 and have done excellent work. Of course, all of us remember that Spurgeon chap again, preaching in London at the age of 18 to 5,000 people. But you do not prove rules by exceptions. Hard cases make bad law. Hard cases make bad theology.

We are at the place now where, whether we like it or not, with the entire population of the continent getting older and better educated (not that the education itself is better, on average, but the number of people having some post-secondary high school education has increased), as a result, the very structure of what is perceived to be mature leadership in our churches has undergone a shift.

The average incoming age at Trinity is 28. The average age of our students is 32. It makes a big difference in the kind of people you produce, for about 90 percent of them are profoundly called to the ministry before they enter our door. That makes a lot of difference in what you do with them. The convention must face that demographic shift.

The opposite model is the meek noodle, the spineless wonder. Sometimes it is thought that meekness is weakness. Humility is so easily confused with servility, so somehow you get some people with a smarmy notion of godliness that thinks that provided you let people tromp all over you, you’re godly.

Those people too have a certain kind of show of humility, which does not stick it in the ministry. All they have to face is two or three real corkers in the local congregation, and they wipe out. They are idealists, but they have not grasped the rudiments of genuine biblical godliness. Christ was meek; he was not weak. Christ was humble; he was not servile.

The same apostle Paul who could be the servant of all men could threaten to cast some people to Satan for the destruction of the flesh. So suddenly we realize that although we may not fall into the trap of the model of the crushingly strong hero, the alternative that is offered us, the meek, spineless wonder, is scarcely a biblical model either. How then shall we lead the church of God?

There are also false alternatives in structure. One, of course, is the ecclesiastical IBM. In this kind of structure there is decision-making at the top, preferably by one person, especially me, and then it might descend, trickle down, through various committees with a great deal of power in very few hands that then basically tell people where to go, what to do, and how to do it.

It’s true that because we are still a congregation system the local church has an absolute sanction. It can, at the end of the day, fire a pastor. But in churches that have been trained up under this system of strength, it’s rare that that happens. Let me tell you quite frankly that the places where this system seems to work most is usually in constituencies with a high percentage of blue-collar workers. Have you ever noticed that’s the case? It is true.

It’s one of the reasons Jack Hyles, for example, goes down so well in his particular patch of Indiana. He’s ministering to a certain group of people who, on the whole, idealize a certain kind of leadership. It’s a kind of spiritual John Wayne leadership. That kind of leadership is looked up to. It’s strong by definition. The man has to sleep with his secretary before you get rid of him. Even then, maybe not.

But if you take that kind of man and plant him in a church full of yuppies instead, he’ll be out on his ear in six months, guaranteed. Because those yuppies all think they’re John Wayne … spiritual John Waynes, even. On the other hand, there’s the ecclesiastical democracy. This takes two forms. In some forms of ecclesiastical democracy, it is thought that the ballot box in the church ought to be handled in exactly the same way as it’s handled in our political system.

You agitate. You manipulate. You collect votes. You isolate an issue, and you start a phone campaign. You can swing almost anything if you get those votes. At the end of the day, everything has to be submitted to the church as a whole, for woe betide that leader who thinks he could even increase the budget to buy a broom without a church sanction. Then, of course, there’s a chance to beat him. It’s sort of fun to win at the polls, isn’t it? Any decent organizer can do it.

The alternative form of ecclesiastical democracy is through a delegated board structure or the like. This happens especially in larger churches. By this time it’s becoming obvious that you can’t leave all the power in the hands of the pastor. You can’t leave all the power in the hands of the whole church, because you can’t have a church of 1,200 people voting about a new broom.

So what you do is you invent something called the managerial board, and then, because it’s a democracy, you have it as representative as possible. You have representatives from the deacons and from the elders. You have representatives from the young people and from the retired senior saints. You have representatives from the women’s mission society, and you have representatives from the youth clubs. You have representatives from the janitorial staff and from the parking attendants. You get representatives from everywhere.

Then when you make a decision, you can all reach into your little pockets, “Yes, that one looks good to me. We approve that one.” Thus somehow the managerial board takes over the decision-making steps of the church. Where the spiritual leadership is in this, who knows? It’s in the board. So the board functions like a kind of parliament, a delegated responsibility, a delegated democracy.

It’s not turning now on spiritual leadership who are recognized for their wisdom, for their knowledge of Scripture, for the quality of their example, for their conformity to Jesus Christ, by their prayerfulness, their evangelism, their wisdom. No, no. It belongs to the board. That means that in this parliament called the board, provided you have one maverick in there who decides to organize things and make speeches and pull a few votes, he or she can pass or stifle almost anything.

It’s congregational government, isn’t it? Am I too harsh? I do not think so. As I travel around North America, I see congregational government after congregational government in one of these false models in the name of congregational government splitting churches, firing leadership, crushing people emotionally. You begin to cry from the heart, “How long, O Lord? How long?”

Let me suggest to you some biblical perspectives on these matters, first some for leaders and then some also for the church. My chief hesitation in presenting this array is that, in all fairness, each of these points could easily be turned into a full-length sermon, and there’s not time for that. I’m going to skip the section in your notes on constitutions. There may be time tomorrow for questions and answers.

I’m going to vary the degree of attention I give to each of the points on your notes in front of you, not necessarily according to their importance, but I will pick and choose some to enlarge upon, and others I will simply mention briefly in passing by.

1. Negative biblical perspectives for leaders

A) We must beware of the sin of the overlord.

Two passages come instantly to mind. The first is found in Matthew, chapter 20, beginning at verse 20. “The mother of Zebedee’s sons came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him. ‘What is it you want?’ he asked. She said, ‘Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.’ ‘You don’t know what you are asking,’ Jesus said to them.

‘Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?’ ‘We can,’ they answered. Jesus said to them, ‘You will indeed drink from my cup, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.’ When the ten heard about this, they were indignant with the two brothers.

Jesus called them together and said, ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave, just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.’ ”

The second passage is found in 1 Peter. It is one I mentioned this morning. I draw your attention to it again, 1 Peter, chapter 5. “Be shepherds 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.”

Before we are finished, we are going to struggle with this tension in Scripture between the exhortation to obey leaders, submit to leaders, and then this kind of exhortation: not lording it over the flock, not exercising this kind of authority. How can these two things coexist? How we formulate these things becomes very important, but perhaps the thing we should note at this point is the example of the Lord Jesus himself, for that is what he draws attention to in Matthew, chapter 20.

He says we are not to be like the Gentiles who exercise authority over people but rather like the Son of Man who did not come to be served, but to serve. Now let us be quite frank. Although Jesus came to serve, it didn’t exactly diminish his authority. Nevertheless, the manner of exercising his authority was not from the panoply of regal splendor. It was not as the superior who came in, as it were, to simply tell people what to do. Rather he identified with us, took on our flesh.

If he told people to pray, it was not something he did not do himself. If he told people to serve others, it was not something he did not do himself. If he told people to be humble, it was not something he did not do himself. So there was extraordinary authority even in his example. Here, then, is a kind of exercise of authority that is in the matrix of service.

We’ll try to define that more closely in a moment, but of this you may be sure: that pastor runs into least problems where most people are convinced that he wants to serve. If your congregation ever gets the idea that you are interested in ecclesiastical eminence, God help you. But if they are profoundly convinced that you have come to serve them for their good, it is astonishing what authority will accrue to you.

When I was in Australia a few months ago, I stayed for a weekend with a friend from years past, Allan Blanch. He’s rector of a local Anglican parish church. When he took over this particular parish, it was not particularly evangelical, although he himself is a very devout and godly man, and he was facing something of an uphill battle. He’d been there three years. They had been lonely, difficult, confrontational years, but he was making progress. When I got home, I summed up the thing for my wife, who had known Allan and Pamela for years as well.

Allan Blanch is not God’s greatest gift to homiletics. Any decent homiletics student could make a very negative report on one of his sermons. He’s not a scintillating personality. He’s straight as a die but not flashy. Almost dull, predictable. But Allan Blanch has a servant’s heart. Do you know why he wins in the churches where he serves? And he has. This is his third charge, and in each case he has won the congregation so they just about worship the ground he walks on. Do you know why?

The reason is that almost every family goes through some kind of crisis every four or five years … marriage, bereavement, birth of a child … some kind of emotional upheaval. But he serves. Oh how he serves. The family that starts off against him he wins by serving them. If you want to be a friend of Allan Blanch, let me tell you how you start. You start by insulting him. You start by giving him a hard time, and he’ll turn around and serve you.

B) Beware of the sin of the “omnicompetent.”

The best New Testament example of that, I suspect, is Diotrephes in 3 John, verse 9. This Diotrephes, John says, loves to be first. He doesn’t have to say first in what, because Diotrephes doesn’t care as long as he’s first. You name it … he wants to be first. He knows it all. He controls it all. He runs it all. Beware the Gaius and the Demetrius who tries to stand up to him. Diotrephes loves to be first. If we present that kind of image to our church, our church will either kick us out or simply tell us to get on with it. Both are recipes for disaster.

C) Beware the sin of the self-made priest.

In the new covenant, we are all priests. You have no inside track with God. None. If you are free to pray more and to study Scripture at greater length it is because the gifts and calling of God upon your life have made you free to devote yourself more fully to these precious things, but this comes by virtue of your responsibility to serve the congregation in a certain way, not by virtue of your ministerial status.

I will say more about this one in connection with the church in a moment, because the two are interrelated. It has to do with some profound perceptions of the nature of the new covenant. We’ll come back to that one. Aim for this strange merging of strength and meekness found everywhere in Scripture. Let me read you a selection of texts from the Pastoral Epistles, and listen carefully for this concatenation of strength on the one hand and humility or meekness on the other.

Let us begin with 1 Timothy, chapter 4, verses 11 and following. Paul writes, “Command and teach these things.” That’s the strong side. “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith, and in purity.” That’s the exemplary side. How often would a young man do better in the ministry if he modeled more profoundly what he taught? “Until I come,” he says, “devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching. Do not neglect your gift.” I shall return to that in the next address.

Then again in chapter 6, verses 6 and following. “Godliness with contentment,” Paul says, “is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap with many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses. In the sight of God, who gives life to everything, and of Christ Jesus, who while testifying before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you to keep this commandment without spot or blame until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Verse 17: “Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God.” Verse 18: “Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age.”

Again, Titus, chapter 3, verses 9 and following. “But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless. Warn a divisive person once, and then warn him again. After that, have nothing to do with him.” Very strong language, yet when you examine the exhortation about how to talk to other people, then we are to exhort women as our sisters, older men as senior saints, younger men as our brothers.

What is going on here? How do you hold this together? In this way, the Christian leader who thinks to gain authority by claiming it as a right of office loses it. The Christian leader who commits himself to service and cares little for perks or advantage or rights of office and cares passionately for the integrity of the model he presents gains authority. That is so important.

I was reared in a Christian home. My father and mother are still alive to this day in their late 70s. I pray to God he will not take them soon, because they pray for their children. But the greatest impact on my life that they had was not in their exhortations to me to pray or to read my Bible or the like. It was in their prayer and reading of the Bible.

I can remember after a Sunday morning service when my father preached evangelistically. I can remember him going to his study and getting down on his knees and praying in broken tears for an hour for the people. I’m concerned that my children know that of me. I can stand on my authority as a father all I like, and I may only reap rebellion, but if I model what I preach, I will gain, on the long haul, such an outrageous authority with my children that you wouldn’t believe it.