Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Eldership in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
First we’ll begin with 1 Timothy 3:1–7:
“Here is a trustworthy saying: If anyone sets his heart on being an overseer, he desires a noble task. Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him with proper respect.
(If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?) He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the Devil. He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the Devil’s trap.”
Now onto Titus 1:5–9:
“The reason I left you in Crete was that you might straighten out what was left unfinished and appoint elders in every town, as I directed you. An elder must be blameless, the husband of but one wife, a man whose children believe and are not open to the charge of being wild and disobedient. Since an overseer is entrusted with God’s work, he must be blameless—not overbearing, not quick-tempered, not given to drunkenness, not violent, not pursuing dishonest gain.
Rather he must be hospitable, one who loves what is good, who is self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined. He must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that he can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it.”
Now before we start looking at these passages and a few others together, I want to make one or two preliminary remarks. In the New Testament, a pastor is an elder, is a bishop. The NIV uses, instead of the word bishop, the word overseer. Now it’s important to sort that out because in the history of the church, from about the fourth century on but with roots going back to the second century, there is, for huge swaths of time, very often in the Western world, a tripartite division.
That is to say, you have bishops who exercise a certain kind of rule over several parishes, over several local churches. They might be quite extensive. Then you have sort-of the minister in charge, who is variously called pastor or minister or sometimes an elder. Then you have deacons, so you have three different offices. But it has long been known, not least in circles that maintain a three-fold ministry of bishops, pastors, elders, deacons.… It has long been known, even in those circles, that in the New Testament it wasn’t so.
An Anglican scholar by the name of Lightfoot in the last century wrote a very distinguished essay demonstrating in the first century, there were really only two layers of leadership.
We still use the term bishop today, but it’s so fraught with this larger dimension that the NIV decided to abandon it and go for the word overseer, instead. And the three names, then, given to the one level have to do with different aspects of that kind of ministry.
The word pastor is simply from a Latin root that means shepherd. That’s all it means. When you say “Pastor Smith” or “Pastor Billy Joe Bob,” you’re really just saying, “Shepherd Smith” or “Shepherd Billy Joe Bob.” So whatever weight gets attached to shepherds in Scripture is bound up with that job. It’s got to do with leading the flock and feeding the flock and protecting the flock and sometimes chastening the flock and hauling the flock back when they go astray and so forth. That’s the range of metaphors out of which shepherd derives.
Then elder comes both from synagogue rule and also from village rule. An elder was someone who was a little more mature, a little more experienced, respected, and was appointed to have some kind of leadership. In the church, that range of experience is tied, not so much to years (we’ll come back to that) as to spiritual maturity. We’ll come back to that qualification in a moment.
Finally, overseer, or to use the older word, bishop, is bound up with the fact the job is tied, in certain respects, to a kind of rule, to a kind of administration. We’ll come to that in a few moments, as well. Then, within that framework, if that’s one layer of leadership in the church, interestingly enough, the other has virtually all the same characteristics, all the same qualifications as the former, except deacons are not mandated to teach. Now they may end up doing some teaching, but it is not an essential part of the definition of that task. Now we’ll come back to that, too, in a few moments.
One of the reasons why we know these three names for one office in the New Testament are, in fact, just that, three ways of contributing to a total picture of one office, is when you compare the lists of qualifications, the overlaps are so enormous you just cannot escape that conclusion. In a few of them, the names get flipped right within the paragraph so in the second passage I read, Titus 1:5–9, we start off, verse 6: “An elder must be blameless …” Verse 7: “Since an overseer is entrusted with God’s work …” You’ve gone back and forth within the same paragraph.
Now it’s by comparing all of these passages together you are forced to the conclusion Lightfoot, that blessed Anglican, taught us a century ago that in the New Testament a pastor is an elder is an overseer. Now within that framework, then, let’s work first of all through the list of qualifications listed in chapter 3 of 1 Timothy, the passage I read just a few moments ago.
The first thing to observe is the unexceptional character of most of these qualifications. In other words, this list does not begin by saying, “Very well, then. An elder or an overseer must have an IQ of at least 160 and must have a charismatic gift of extraordinary leadership and stand head and shoulders above the hoi polloi.”
It doesn’t say anything like that. Listen to what it says. “He mustn’t get drunk,” which on first reading is not an extraordinarily high standard. “He must be the husband of but one wife.” Well, whatever that means, it sounds decent, in any case. “He must manage his own family well.” Well, I should hope so.
But you have nothing of a flavor here of extraordinary qualifications. What’s going on? In some respects, the list of qualifications is remarkable for being unremarkable. The list may indicate, not only that in the early church there were many Christian leaders without a high background of extraordinary education and all the rest, but there is something else.
These qualifications are ordinary in the sense of being imposed on all believers, with only an exception and a half, here, but they’re not ordinary in the sense of being commonplace. When you work through this list, what you discover is every single one of them, bar one and a half, are somewhere else mandated in the New Testament of all believers.
So for example, when we’re told he is not to be “given to much wine,” that doesn’t mean the rest of us are allowed to go and get roaring drunk, because somewhere else in Scripture, there’s always a passage that warns against that kind of thing. When we’re told, for example, he is supposed to manage his own family well, well, aren’t we all? Or when we’re told he is not to be a lover of money, does that mean the rest of us can be greedy materialists? It doesn’t really matter?
In every case you can find this thing that is laid on the back of elders is laid on the back of everybody in the church. Thus, for example, “not quarrelsome.” The rest of us are not allowed to be contentious. “Hospitable,” in Hebrews chapter 13 is laid on all Christians. There isn’t anything here, except for one and half that we’ll come to, that make the elders stand out as someone who is qualitatively different. Rather, the idea is what is mandated of the whole community must be exemplified in the leaders.
In other words, if there is a certain kind of moral tone that is expected of all Christians, then surely the leaders have to exemplify that moral tone, in particular. Now that is one of the primary reasons why these standards are not the sort of thing that put Christian pastors, Christian elders, Christian overseers into a separate category of performance, a kind of priestly qualification that makes them a cut different from everybody else. Rather, what is distinctive about them is they best exemplify what is mandated, in fact, of all of us. The one and a half exceptions are:
First, he should be able to teach. We’ll come to that in due course. Obviously that’s not mandated of everybody. Well, there’s a general sense, I suppose, in which we’re all committed to sharing the truth with others, but in any sort of formal sense that’s not mandated of all people.
Secondly, he is not to be a novice, a brand-new comer, a recent convert. Well, obviously you can’t impose that on every convert. We all have to begin somewhere, don’t we? So there is a qualification of a certain amount of experience and maturity that is at stake. But apart from that, every single one of these you can find mandated of all believers, somewhere in the New Testament.
What that means, then, is the prime characteristic of the Christian elder, pastor, overseer is that his life constantly reflect Christian values, Christian morality, Christian conduct, Christian integrity. That’s a baseline. In the second place, note briefly what features in this list go into making this spiritual leader. Let’s run through it quickly. Starting in verse 2:
1. “Above reproach.”
Blameless, in that sense. It doesn’t mean such a person is sinlessly perfect. There is too much in Scripture against that sort of expectation. What is does mean is there is no obvious inconsistency or flaw everyone agrees is there and reproaches the man for.
2. “The husband of but one wife.”
In some ways, that’s the most difficult, or disputed, qualification in the entire list. It has been variously interpreted. Some think it means this man must be married. That is to say, he must be the husband of but one wife. Highly unlikely. It’s not at all clear Paul was married. The Lord Jesus certainly wasn’t.
In Romans 7:1–4, Paul certainly allows for a person to be unmarried and then can get remarried, if it comes to that. Moreover, in 1 Corinthians 7, Paul acknowledges there are certain advantages in being single in the ministry. I was single when I was senior pastor of a church in the West Coast of Canada, and there are all kinds of advantages.
There are some disadvantages, but there are some wonderful advantages in terms of the hours you put in, and evening visitation and calls when you get more people at home, and that sort of thing. There are some wonderful advantages to being single in the ministry; it shouldn’t be despised. It’s highly unlikely this text is stipulating, therefore, that this person be married.
Some think it means he is forbidden to remarry, if, for instance, his first wife dies. He must be the husband of but one wife, no matter how long he or she lives. Again, that is unlikely. In Romans 7, Paul insists there is nothing dishonorable about remarrying, marrying a Christian spouse, the second time around, after the first one has died. Elsewhere, he gives discussions of that sort of thing in all kinds of contexts without once suggesting it is a kind of inferior root.
There are some who think it means “not a polygamist.” That is, not somebody who’s married to two or three wives. Well, what people object to about this one is it is argued that no one in the Christian church was married to two or three wives, so why should it be stipulated at all? Moreover, it is argued, in the first century, polygamy wasn’t all that common. Why do you have to stipulate this particular thing? I’ll come back to this one because, in my view, that is the correct interpretation here.
The last one is, not a divorcÈe who has remarried. Well, the Bible certainly warns against divorce in all kinds of ways, but it is also important not to make divorce the kind of worst sin on the current horizon, the unforgivable sin, the sin against the Holy Spirit. Some have tried to impose a prohibition against anyone ever becoming a minister of the gospel who has ever been divorced at any time in his life.
So he might have been a murder, and then paid his debt to society and got out and got converted and became a minister of the gospel. But if he’s been divorced he can’t do it, which somehow projects a certain image of divorce I’m not entirely comfortable with, as if divorce, somehow, is the unforgivable sin.
Where divorce does disqualify a person from ministry, it seems to me, is bound up with a category we’ve already had. He must be blameless. It’s a category of credibility. A little further on, he must be able to govern his own house well. You worry about someone whose life is cracked up in his marriage, and then three months later he feels now he’s qualified to be back in ministry. He’s repented, and after all, the gospel’s all about forgiveness and all of that, isn’t it?
Well, clearly the Bible has something a little more stringent to say than that. Although divorce is not the ultimate sin, or the unforgivable sin, yet, it may disqualify a person for ministry precisely because it destroys so much of credibility. It destroys so much of trust. It destroys so much of believability. Now I would like to say much more about that one, perhaps in discussion if it comes to that, but in any case, it simply is not what this qualification is about.
It does have to do with polygamy, and believe it or not, that does address us at certain deep level. It can be shown there was much more polygamy in the first century than some people think, especially in the strata of society where people felt above the common rules. Herod the Great, for example, had 10 wives. Now he didn’t have them all at once because he murdered two of them, but he had several at a time. And, in fact, out in the borderlands of the empire, places like Lystra and so on, polygamy was still not all that uncommon.
If you go to Africa today, in some tribes in central Africa, for example, polygamy, even outside Muslim circles, is still not all that uncommon. And the more power you have.… If you are the chief, the more likely it is you have a plurality of wives. The number of wives is connected with the public persona. It’s bound up with office, almost, so if you’re chief you’re likely to have four or five wives, for a start. You can afford them. It presents a certain kind of leadership qualification, almost.
But in the church, it’s the reverse that is the case. Supposing you move into one of these tribes today. Suppose large numbers of the tribe, including the chief, now become Christians. Does the chief of the tribe become chief of the local church? Not according to Paul. That’s ruled out. Just because you are chief in the secular world does not mean you’re allowed to be chief in the local church.
That is where the rubber hits the road for us, too. You sometimes find in a high-flying church with a lot of middle-level managers and senior executives and powerful people from the surrounding culture. It’s simply assumed because they’re leaders in the larger culture, in the sort of larger tribal groupings that, therefore, they will be leaders in the local church! Sometimes the people who think that most strongly are those leaders themselves. They can be right pains.
But the fact of the matter is that in this particular area, the area of polygamy, that’s ruled out. One of the reasons is, in the Scriptures, marriage is presented not only as a certain social institution, but a kind of type, a model, a pattern, a typology of the relationship between Christ and the church.
It’s not between Christ and the churches. It’s between Christ and his people, the church. So there is something even to be modeled about Christ and the church by husband and wife and by certain kinds of structures and fidelity and integrity. In any case, Paul rules out this person from being a pastor/overseer, and so forth.
3. “Temperate, self-controlled, and respectable.”
These all have to do with a certain kind of orderliness to life.
First, temperate means clear-headedness, self-possession, not an extremist. It has nothing to do with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The word rendered here temperate simply means clear-headed, self-possessed, not an extremist.
Secondly, self-controlled. After all, God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, of love, and of self-control we read elsewhere in the Pastorals.
Thirdly, respectable. That word sometimes has negative overtones today; it sounds somewhat pompous. “He’s respectable.” That’s not quite right. Well-behaved. I would almost say dignified, except that sounds even more pompous. What it does mean is attracting a certain kind of respect, perhaps. The next two are bound up in the expansion of Christian witness.
4. “Hospitable and able to teach.”
First, hospitable. That is, the Christian pastor, elder, overseer must not be a hermit or recluse, must not be someone who wants always to be isolated from people. A great book reader and a thinker, perhaps, but can’t stand people. “I love the church. It’s the people I can’t stand.” Not that sort of attitude. It won’t do because the ministry is bound up with touching people’s lives.
Secondly, able to teach. We’ll come back to that one in a moment. The least that must be said about it is it presupposes two things: knowledge of the truth and of God, and, secondly, an ability to communicate it. Occasionally you will find people who are wonderful communicators, but they don’t have much to say.
Alternatively, you can find some people who have massive knowledge, but they just can’t get it across to anybody. In both instances, they’re ruled out of this office. “Able to teach” presupposes at least knowledge of Scripture and of God and an ability to communicate it. Then, from verse 3:
5. “Not given too much wine.”
That is, not only free from drunkenness, but free from addiction. The slave of Jesus Christ must not be a slave of anything else. “Not violent, but gentle.” That is patient, kindly, forbearing.
6. “Not quarrelsome.”
Not contentious. There are some people who are not only ready to fight, but ready to enjoy it. Not least some of us who come from a fundamentalist background where our very orthodoxy is measured, not by contending for the faith, but by being contentious about the faith. In this connection, then, it is very important to read a passage like 2 Timothy 2:22 and following.
“Flee the evil desires of youth and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart. Don’t have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments because you know they produce quarrels. And the Lord’s servant must not quarrel; instead, he must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful.
Those who oppose him he must gently instruct in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the Devil, who has taken them captive to do his will.”
Do you see that kind of image? Someone who’s not a wimp. Someone who’s standing up to them. Someone who’s still correcting them. Someone who’s trying to teach them. But somehow, someone who doesn’t have his ego so much on the line that if he’s challenged at any point he loses his cool and blows up and damns them all to perdition and tries to get on with his task of ruling the church. There’s none of that. There is a kind of a self-denial and a kind of firm, immovable gentleness.
7. “Not a lover of money.”
Jesus Christ has promised all of his disciples enough for their needs and, therefore, the leaders of the church must exemplify a certain carelessness about such needs because they are trusting Christ. The worst conceivable situation in the local church is when the church adopts the attitude, “Lord, you keep him humble, and we’ll keep him poor.” The minister adopts the attitude, “I’m going to get every cent I can get out of this selfish congregation.”
The best attitude is where the congregation sees itself in the privilege of supporting someone in the ministry, generously, so that he’s free to get on with the work of the ministry. The minister himself, for his part, doesn’t give a rip in a certain kind of sense, just is above all of that, doesn’t really care.
For there is a profound sense in which, in the ministry, you don’t pay someone for the work they do. There are some things I’ve done in ministry, you could never have paid me enough to do in any case. Some funerals I’ve taken, some wretched situations I’ve had to handle.… You would never have paid me enough to do it.
In fact, what the church is doing is supporting someone so he is free for the ministry, and in that kind of framework, then, you don’t want him to be worried about where his next meal is coming from. But you don’t want him, either, to have the idea, “Hey, considering how important I am as the leader of this church, you ought to pay me at least so much and so much.” On the other hand, you don’t want a church taking the attitude, “Obviously, this dear brother needs lessons in humility so we’ll make him dirt poor.”
Somewhere along the line, then, you want the combination of 1 Timothy 5 and 1 Timothy 3 to come together. First Timothy 3: “He’s not to be a lover of money.” First Timothy 5: “He’s worthy of double honor.” And which word honor is often used for pay, to be quite frank. “Worthy of double pay,” not least to those who are committed to the ministry of the Word. Verses 4 and 5:
8. “He must manage his own family well.”
Graciously, gravely. Verse 5 articulates, really, the parable of the talents. The parable of the talents reported in Matthew 25:14 and following. That is, if you can’t do it in the smaller arena, how can you be expected to do it in the larger arena? What this principle gives is an impressive dignity to the Christian home. Not all men are eligible to be elders in the church, but most are eligible to be elders in the home. Within that sphere, the responsibilities are somewhat similar.
I want to see elders in the church leading family worship, teaching the children the way of God, thinking through patterns of modeling and discipline, and so on. Let me tell you the worst conceivable Christian home. It’s the one with high spiritual pretensions and low performance. The best Christian home with very few pretensions and wonderful performance. Now I say that out of gratitude and respect to my parents. My parents didn’t think of themselves as anybody.
They thought of themselves as, in many ways, losers and failures, partly because they lived through the tough years of Quebec when nothing was happening. But I can’t remember a day in all my life when my father didn’t pray for at least 45 minutes, and we knew he was praying for us and for the church and for his ministry.
He was never a threat to us from his own ego or anything like that. He just didn’t operate on that kind of plane. When I eventually left home, and I might have started off thinking they were a bit “old fogies” and lived a long time ago and all of that, eventually, when I saw other homes, just by comparison, I saw the integrity of their lives.
Now there is a passage in the second paragraph I read that can, I think, be misunderstood. I think it is mistranslated in the NIV. The NIV has in Titus 1:6: “An elder must be blameless, the husband of but one wife, and a man whose children believe and are not open to charge of being wild and disobedient.” Does this mean the children of every elder must be Christians? If you say yes, then you say from what age? From the age of 2, 5, 17-1/2?
In fact, the particular word that is used there “must believe” is an adjective that is in many places rendered “must be faithful” or something like that. Also, in social listings, where you have moral characteristics that are laid out, it always has that force. I think what it is saying here is not they must believe. After all, grace doesn’t run in the genes, but at the end of the day they must be faithful, not wild, not profoundly disobedient or something like that.
Now it does not mean children of ministers are sinlessly perfect. It does not mean they don’t do some pretty stupid things. Really, the question is, how is it being handled? How is it being administered? What kind of discipline is being imposed? What kind of encouragement is there, there?
It doesn’t mean, either, that when the children have left home and have become adults and are outside his purview, it doesn’t mean then, when he has no direct control on them anymore, they must all be fine, upstanding believers and have nothing wrong with their lives or else the man in disqualified.
But when they’re children and in his house, then there has to be some kind of display of that least common of gifts, Christian common sense and grace and tact and discipline and modeling and encouragement and sometimes a sharp yank on the rope and sometimes a small administration, perhaps, of the board of education to the seat of learning.
The right combination of modeling and discipline, because that’s going to go on in the church. If he can’t do it at home, he certainly can’t do it in the church. The time may come, when, if it becomes obvious that the man has lost control entirely, his kids are 13 and they’re the terrors of the neighborhood and completely out of control, the man is disqualified from public ministry in the church. That’s what the text says. Verse 6:
9. “Not a recent convert, lest he be puffed up with pride, making his fall seem all the greater.”
Too rapid promotion usually spells disaster. Then he falls under the same judgment as the Devil, as he was lifted up in pride against God himself. But what “not a novice” means is, nevertheless, a bit of a relative category. Thus, for example, in the book of Acts, on the first missionary journey, when Paul goes out what is now southern Turkey and plants churches in various places, then on the return swing, he appoints elders in every place.
Now there is no way those Christians had been Christians for more than a few months. That’s what the chronology demands. But he appoints elders in every place. Now it would be inappropriate to appoint such people as elders in Capitol Hill Baptist Church because this church has Christians who have been Christians here for a long time, with a lot of experience.
I was brought up in French Canada, as I have indicated, and during the tough years, until 1972, as late as 1972, in a population of six and a half million people, there were a grand total of 35 evangelic churches. Not one of them had more than 30 people on a Sunday morning. They were all supported by Canadian dollars.
Often there was a fair bit of attack of one sort or another, some of it overt. Then from 1972–1980, those 35 churches grew to 500 churches in eight years. Many of them had hundreds of people. I would go to speak in a church in French Canada, and there wasn’t a single person in the room who had been a Christian for more than 18 months.
Now in that kind of framework, the elders were people who had been Christians for 18 months, 16 months, 15 months, 12 months because they were a lot older than anybody else in the church. It’s a kind of missionary-expansive situation, so “not a novice” is, inevitably, a relative term and when the church is growing rapidly “not a novice” means something a lot shorter than what it might mean in a church like Capitol Hill. Still, it’s an important principle.
Let me just mention quickly a number of characteristics that are drawn from other passages not mentioned in this particular list. First Timothy 5:21: “At all costs, he must avoid favoritism, partiality.” That sometimes means there is a loneliness to leadership, because we all have favorite types of personalities and people we get along with better than with others and so on. But Christian leaders must not be partial.
Then, more generically, 1 Timothy 6:11 and 12: “The Christian elder, the Christian pastor must pursue all godly virtues.” Then more generally yet, very powerfully in 2 Timothy 2:2–4: “Leaders in the church must expect serious difficulties and be persistent in the face of them and utterly committed. If you think this is going to be an easy ride, go and become an astronaut or something. Do something easy in life. Don’t become a Christian pastor.
Now then, let me return to this one exceptional characteristic, “able to teach.” I want to say two things about that. First, there are some people who argue that there are two orders of elders in the New Testament: those whose task is primarily administration and those whose task is primarily teaching. That distinction is based entirely on one verse, namely 1 Timothy 5, where a distinction is made in verse 17, apparently.
“The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching.” So some have argued this sounds a bit as if there are two tiers: those who direct the affairs of the church (administration) and then another group, the “especially” group, who also add to this teaching and so forth. My hesitations in this regard are two-fold:
1. I am always a bit reluctant to impose on the conscience of the church something which, on the face of it, is said only once.
This is the only text in the New Testament which lends any support to that view. Not because something has to be said many times for it to be true, but because something has to be said more than once for me to make sure I understand it properly.
For instance in 1 Corinthians 15, there is a reference to those who are “baptized for the dead.” Now the Mormons think they know what that means, but I’m not sure I do. In fact, in the history of the church, it has been shown there are 42 different interpretations of what that means, “baptized for the dead.” The reason is that the phrase only shows up once; it’s a slightly obscure passage.
Nobody’s quite sure. I think I can narrow it down to three. I think I have a pretty good idea which one it is, but there’s no way I’m going to impose it on the conscience of the church. “You must take my interpretation of that phrase.” Because the phrase only shows up once, so you’re very nervous there for about imposing on the conscience of the church something that shows only once in Scripture.
It’s a generic reason. The particular word rendered “especially” doesn’t mean “especially” most of the time, in any case. In other words this sounds as if this makes a separate category for them, but instead of making a separate category, the word accentuates what they do. Those who direct the affairs of the church. Indeed, these folk who teach and preach the Word of God, or something like that. Because in the New Testament, the authority that rules the church is not primarily an authority of independent office.
It’s an authority that is administered through the Word. I just cannot stress that enough. The idea is not that you obey pastors, elders, overseers because they are pastors, elders, overseers. They’ve got the job. They’re up; you’re down. You do what they say. They’re the administrators so you obey them. Then there are also some people who teach. That’s not the idea. The idea is that the authority they administer is precisely the authority of ministering the Word of God.
Thus, if they teach the Word of God and come alongside and say, “Look, this is what the text says. Do you see that?” And if they start teaching, then, some false teaching, you have every right to challenge them! Because they are not to put themselves over the Word of God. They are under the Word of God. I’ll come to back to more of that during the morning’s message.
But if they are genuinely teaching the Word of God and they are bringing people alongside, under that Word, then, in due course, they accrue to themselves an enormous credibility and a kind of functional authority because they are so widely perceived to be faithful teachers of the Word of God.
Thus the administration of authority in the church is not so much bound up with office or merely manipulation of administrative leaders, although in any large organization, there are all kinds of administration and all the rest. But rather the font of authority comes from the Word, and out of that Word comes teachers who explain it and apply it well so that people say, “Yes! This is the mind of God.”
2. When you look at all the passages in the Pastoral Epistles and beyond, for that matter, in this teaching authority, it is bound up of an extraordinary mixture of authoritative proclamation on the one hand and superb modeling on the other.
It’s never one without the other. You find this, then, not only in the Pastorals, these passage we’ve looked at together, but you find it surfacing in other texts, as well. For example, 1 Peter 5:
“To the elders among you I appeal as a fellow elder, a witness of Christ’s sufferings and one who also will share in the glory to be revealed: be shepherds of God’s flock.” Notice again the links. “To the elders I say this: be pastors.” That’s what shepherds means. You have again the link of elders and pastors, as we saw earlier in Titus. We saw elders and bishops, now here elders and pastors.
“Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, serving as overseers …” Bishops. The words get linked again. “… 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.” So you have this emphasis on oversight but also on examples. I’ll go through two more passages before I offer a couple of synthesizing comments, and then we’ll open it up to questions and discussion.
1. There is a stress in the Pastoral Epistles, as well, on observable, spiritual growth in the leaders.
Let me just mention one passage. First Timothy 4:14–16: “Do not neglect your gift, which was given you through a prophetic message when the body of elders laid their hands on you. Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress. Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them.”
In other words, the idea, then, is the church will see progress of the gospel in your life and in your teaching. If Mark isn’t more knowledgeable and a better preacher, teacher of the Word of God five years from now, than he is now, and if he isn’t better now than he was when he came here three and a half years ago, quite frankly, there’s something wrong with him.
He ought to be growing in his reading, his thinking, his understanding, his ability to apply it, get it across, teach it, the years of experience and growth so you see in him a transparent growth in holiness and conformity to Christ on the one hand and in his doctrine and grasp on the other. We’re not static people, either.
2. It is intriguing that two other New Testament themes are sometimes interwoven with passages about spiritual leaders.
They are, first, doxology, praise of God, and, secondly, eschatology. That is, anticipation of the end that keeps everything in a certain kind of perspective. Let me read you a passage or two. First Timothy 6:11–16: “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 command without spot or blame until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which God will bring about in his own time—God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever.”
All of this exhortation of what the leader’s supposed to be, and to press on to the very end (that’s eschatology) for God is himself absolutely glorious (that’s doxology). Those sorts of links are fairly common. That is, something about leaders and what they should be like, and then, in the light of Christ’s return and the final judgment and especially in the light of God’s sheer glory and majesty and wonder.
You find another passage with the same combination of themes in 2 Corinthians 4, and you can see why. The ministry is not an end in itself. The ministry is committed to preparing the whole church of God for Christ’s return. Moreover, ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ, elders, pastors, overseers should not be in this business in order to garner praise for themselves and be thought wonderful but to bring glory to God.
Now there is one more reflection I should offer because it comes out of a whole lot of passages in the New Testament, but you can’t put your finger on a single one. It would take me 15 or 18 passages to lay this one out in detail, but let me finish with this summarizing point just the same. In the New Testament, how many elders should there be in any local church? Elders, pastors, overseers.
In fact, the question is very complex, in part because some of the New Testament language is not exactly like ours. For example, in the New Testament, the word church in the singular is bound up, regularly, with the city. So it’s the church in Jerusalem, the church in Ephesus, the church in Rome, but churches is bound up with the larger unit: the churches in Judea, the churches in Samaria, the churches in Asia Minor.
Now we, today, don’t use that kind of distinction because we will speak of the churches in Washington, for example. But in the first church, the cities were smaller. The church in Jerusalem was made up of one unified people of God. There weren’t denominations, then, but it wasn’t long before they broke it up in all kinds of house groups. The same at Ephesus, for example. There was only one church; it was all the church of all the people that met in Ephesus.
Ephesus wasn’t that big a town by our standards; it was big by the standards of the ancient world but not by our standards. You could all walk to anywhere in Ephesus in 15 minutes in ancient Ephesus. But eventually, they were so numerous they certainly couldn’t rent the stadium. That’s where they fed them to the lions instead. You don’t rent a place like that, so they met in various houses. They couldn’t get all of them into one house.
So what we refer to as “house churches” in the ancient world functioned in some ways a bit like our individual churches, except our churches are bigger because we get buildings this size, too. So the transfer isn’t exactly the same. Out of this have come several theories. On the one hand, the Presbyterian view of things which tries to have all of the elders, the Presbyters of a particular area constituting one body which has some kind of control over the local churches.
Then out of this has also come the view I am personally more comfortable with. It seems to me there is in the New Testament a place for a final authority in the congregation. I’ll be coming back to that one this morning as well. In 1 Corinthians 5, for example, there is an instance of church discipline which goes to the whole congregation, however much it may be instituted by the elders. Or in Matthew chapter 18, there is a final insistence by the Lord Jesus, that when things come down to the crunch, you tell it to the church.
There is wisdom in the whole church; there is a place for a kind of final sanction in the whole church. In fact, in the New Testament there is a kind of running tension between the final sanctions that are in the church and, nevertheless, the authority of these elders, pastors, overseers. There is a running tension because, quite frankly, either side can go bad. Thus, in 2 Corinthians 10–13 there are all kinds of leaders in the church whom Paul says should be kicked out by the church. And if they don’t do it, when he gets there, he will kick them out as an apostle.
On the other hand, there are passages like Hebrews 13 where the insistence is “obey the leaders.” The church can go bad. The leaders are supposed to be taking primary responsibility and authority. But in fact, sometimes they have to be disciplined, too. So there is a running tension in this pattern in the New Testament. Now within that framework, what we mean by churches today varies in size between the little house church, which may, in some cases, only have had one elder, one elder as part of a larger group of elders in the whole city-wide church.
It varies in size between that little house church and the sort of big Jerusalem-size church which had thousands of people in it. As far as I can see, in terms of application for us today, there is no absolute rule about having a certain number of elders or a percentage of elders. There is safety in numbers.
There is a bias toward a plurality of elders in the New Testament for a local church, but at the end of the day, churches are free to administer all kinds of matters in this business of elders, pastors, overseers in terms of numbers and discipline and modes of appointment and all the rest. What you must see is that elders, pastors, overseers are charged with the general oversight, direction, and teaching of the Word of God in the local assembly. Now I’ve gone on a bit too long, but if you want to come back at me with questions and so forth, now is the time to do it.
Female: If a prerequisite for being a pastor is to be able to teach, then what motivates so many seminaries to give out degrees to people who can’t? Is it money?
Don Carson: To people who can’t?
Female: To people who cannot. I mean, we’ve all sat in churches and you think, “Man, where did this guy come from? Who gave him that diploma? Is it that they were afraid? Is it money? The school doesn’t want to lose money? Or is it a dean afraid to lose his job?
Don: I’m sure all of those things apply on occasion. But on the other hand, I think it needs also to be said that at least in the kind of Free church, Baptist church sort of tradition, you don’t proceed from seminary graduation to ordination. That is, a seminary education is a step along the line, but then there is inevitably a period of trial and training, apprenticeship, curacy, it’s called various things, before ordination, and the ordination is done by the church.
So some of those people you are referring to, were finally ordained by the church. In other words, there is some shared responsibility for having got them in this task in the first place. Moreover, seminaries do train other people than pastors, too. Some of them will be trained for other roles of Christian ministry, so it’s complex. But I do agree with you that there needs to be more emphasis in many seminaries on how to teach well the Word of God.
Male: Where is the idea as we currently see it today, the sort of senior pastor or lead pastor, seen in the New Testament?
Don: If by senior pastor, you mean a separate category, there is a problem there. But where you have a group of elders, a group of pastors, a group of overseers, then inevitably, in the very nature of the case some are going to be more senior than others, either because they have been in the task longer, they are more experienced, they know more, or they’re better teachers of the Word of God, so, inevitably, you get a functional discrimination that’s being made.
Thus, for example, when we are told explicitly Timothy, for example, and others, are to find young men who are able to take these things on and pass them on to others, you have a kind of mentoring role developing then, in local churches. You have, in fact, a senior elder and a trainee elder. So there’s nothing wrong, intrinsically, with the whole system. Those who try to insist on a kind of democratic structure to every elder’s board, as if everyone has exactly the same authority simply forget that at the end of the day, the authority is not in the individual, but in the Word.
So always there ought to be an appeal back to the Word. The person, thus, who knows the Scriptures best, and who teaches them best. It doesn’t mean he knows everything, he knows every part best or is always the best teacher in every case, but, by and large in terms of his experience, his example, his knowledge of Scripture, that one will, in fact, become de facto senior pastor, even if he doesn’t have that title. Does that help at all?
Female: With the clear teaching from 1 Timothy 3 about who should be elders how did things get to so topsy-turvy where pastor and his wife or just wife assume the headship of the church?
Don: Well, the changes have come about for many, many reasons. In the ancient church, the first change that came about, came about fairly early in the second century as far as I can see. It came about because the church was expanding so fast that churches embraced a lot of roving teachers who were able to communicate to people basic Christian truth, but some of these roving teachers were heretical or near heretical or grasping or greedy.
Eventually rules were imposed on the churches about what should be done in this regard. There is a very famous document dated from the beginning of the second century, after the New Testament was written, called the Didache which gives a whole lot of rules about what to do if a traveling teacher comes by, and he wants to stay for more than three days, don’t trust him.
If he asks for money, don’t trust him. You give him your bed and breakfast and all that, but be very careful about this because you don’t want to just be lining somebody’s pockets. Above all, if he doesn’t adhere to the glorious gospel of our blessed Jesus, then don’t trust him. You have all these rules going on. So eventually what would happen …
I didn’t really understand this until I got to parts of the world where the church had expanded very quickly, and I’ve seen these things face up. What you sometimes get, then, is in an area of 10 churches, 15 churches, 20 churches, 30 churches, there might be two or three churches who are led by pastors who really are better informed, better trained, more discerning, read more widely, and they can suss out these dangerous people a little faster than others.
So eventually some of the other smaller, weaker churches will say, “You know, I don’t know if I should take you on or not. Go see Pastor Jim over there. Have a chat with him. If he says you’re okay, you’re okay.” So they go and see Pastor Jim. Well, de facto, Pastor Jim is exercising a kind of veto ministry over everybody else. Now you’ve got the beginning of a bishop who’s over a lot of other churches, so that already by the time of Ignatius, about 115 or 120 he actually goes so far as to say, “Where the bishop is, there is the church.”
You don’t get that notion anywhere in the New Testament, but what he’s trying to do is preserve a kind of decent of apostolic truth that really defines the church. That’s what he’s trying to do, but now you’ve got the beginnings of a fledgling power structure that’s going to start changing things. So the reasons for these changes often were motivated by genuine concerns but handled so badly and beginning to move so far from the Word that, eventually, you get new traditions that are encrusted, and it takes a long time to break them down. Let’s close in prayer now.
Lord God, we take great comfort in the promise of the Lord Jesus, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” In truth, Lord God, that is our ultimate hope. We see in Scripture the Lord Jesus himself uses means, even such poor means as we are, but our confidence, finally, is not in the means but in Christ himself whose death does prove efficacious in calling forth the men and the women whom he loved before the foundation of the world. We thank you that in the last analysis, his calling forth and sanctification of the church cannot fail.
We are ashamed, therefore, Lord God, of the many times in which we depart from your Word, or we tumble into power plays, or we seek leaders that have current qualifications dictated by the surrounding culture but who are not steeped in your Word. We want to eschew such worldly patterns of thinking. We pray, Lord God, in this church, in the churches that confess the gospel in this land, there may be a return, a mighty return to constant reformation by the Word of God.
Forgive us, Lord God, when we adopt lower standards. We pray that in the discussions in this church, in weeks and months ahead, as it tries to bring about some reform in the light of the Word of God, there might be large, wide-scale consensus around what Scripture says, nothing else … not personalities, not power plays … around what Scripture says, and a desire to conform to that Word, both for the glory of the Master and for the good of the people for whom he shed his life’s blood. These mercies we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
