For the last year or so I have been completely immersed in reading and studying around the whole subject of church leadership. I am now beginning to bring together all my findings and conclusions and will post them here on a weekly basis, beginning with this introduction.
Having been preaching and teaching for just over fifty years, having pastored three churches, including one which I planted, having had the privilege of preaching in dozens of churches in 20 countries on 3 continents, and having worked with a wide range of church leaders, I have come to the firm conviction that almost every problem in local church life is leadership related. By that I mean that almost all problems arise because of the wrong exercise of leadership, the wrong people in leadership, or the wrong attitude towards leadership by the church members.
But that problem is actually, at least in part, a symptom of a more fundamental one which is the general ignorance, on the part of both church leaders and members as to Scripture’s teaching about leadership roles in the local church.
I have taught through such passages as 1 Timothy 3 in congregations which have had a history of good, solid biblical preaching, only to be met with the comment, “We’ve never heard this before”. I’ve come across men who have spent three or four years at theological seminaries and who have never studied in depth the clear biblical teaching about leadership structures and roles that is found in passages like 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. That absence of instruction and preparation is inexcusable.
Even in my own case, despite spending three years at what was at the time one of the very best Bible Colleges in the UK, the Bible Training Institute (BTI) in Glasgow, the attention to this subject was, at best cursory. I still have almost all my lecture notes from those glorious days of teaching and I recently consulted them to see what material I had on church leadership and there is the equivalent of about one side of A4. No wonder our churches are getting leadership wrong.
Some years ago, I remember being struck by something that John Piper said. He commented on the fact that he had never led a ‘how to’ seminar on church life because there is so little material in the Scriptures on ‘how to do’ church. And he’s right. But that means we should pay all the more attention to what we are taught in Scripture on the subject. And Scripture is certainly not quiet on how churches should be led. As Alexander Strauch has pointed out, “the New Testament offers more instruction regarding elders than other important church subjects such as the Lord’s Supper, the Lord’s Day, baptism, or spiritual gifts.” [1]
Given the straightforwardness and simplicity of the biblical material on this immensely important topic I am amazed and surprised by the variety and complexity of models that have existed throughout the history of the church and continue to this day, the vast majority of which, in my personal opinion, bear little relation to what we are taught in Scripture.
In many situations, church tradition carries more weight than Scripture. When I taught on this subject in a Baptist church more than twenty years ago, among the responses I got were, and I quote, “We know this is biblical, but we’re Baptists” and “We know this is biblical, but we are Nonconformists”!
As I write this we have just marked Reformation Day; a day when we rightly remember the beginning of the much needed reformation and renewal of the church in which the truth of the gospel had been buried by centuries of false teaching and traditions. It seems to me that the principle of semper reformanda – always reforming – is needed still, especially in the area of leading God’s people by the Book.
Let me put my cards on the table right from the start, having spent much time studying this in considerable detail I am totally persuaded that the biblical pattern for the local church is that is should be independent and led by a male eldership characterised by plurality and parity. I am not saying that other structures and systems are necessarily wrong, simply that you cannot argue from Scripture that they fit the biblical teaching.
Mind you, there is one model that I do think is entirely wrong, although very common and popular – congregational church government; or as I recently heard it described – member led. I can’t think of anything worse!
The purpose of these papers is to demonstrate from Scripture why I hold that position so strongly in the hope that it may persuade even a few to apply the principle of semper reformanda to their situation.
In the next episode, we will begin to consider the biblical material by examining the Old Testament foundations for the role of elders.
[1] Alexander Strauch Biblical Eldership Biblical Eldership Resources: Colorado, 2023 p13