This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, but I’ve been reluctant to write about it for several reasons. First, because I’m not sure how many people will actually be interested. Second, because the discussion can get technical and “deep in the weeds.” You can quickly get into the nuances of Biblical interpretation, and the Greek language of the New Testament. And third, because, on a personal level, nothing I’m about to write will give you a warm fuzzy feeling or help you get your locker open. So those are the reasons you shouldn’t read this article. If any of that resonates with you, you should stop reading now.
On the other hand, I hope you do read this, for several reasons. First, because I hope it will reassure you about our church. Second, because while I’m going to try hard to not get “deep in the weeds,” I will suggest some resources for those of you who might want to investigate this topic some more. And third, because not everything in the Bible is intended to give you a tingle or a set of easy steps to solve life’s mundane problems. A lot of it is intended to help you think clearly and to know what you believe. As Linus from the comic strip Peanuts pointed out, sound theology has a way of giving us great comfort.
When I was first in the ministry—a long time ago…the summer of 1978! —I began hearing a name I would hear a lot in the years to come: John MacArthur. He was, and still is, the pastor-teacher of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California. I heard other pastors talk about what a fantastic preacher he was, and how his entire ministry was given to expositional teaching. It sounded a lot like Nehemiah 8:8 – “They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.”
One pastor I met pulled open a drawer of his desk to show me a pile of cassette tapes, all of them MacArthur’s sermons. He told me, “My people think I’m the smartest guy in the world, and all I do is listen to MacArthur’s tapes.” I remember even back then feeling a little uncomfortable, and hoping there was more to this pastor’s preparation than that. Plagiarism, anyone?
Eventually I heard John MacArthur on his radio broadcast, Grace to You. I also got some of his books and recorded messages. I have a great deal of respect for Dr. MacArthur. He once said one of the most singularly helpful things I’ve ever heard about preparing to preach from the Bible. He said, “Dig out the Bible background, and your sermon will preach itself.” He was right!
Back in the early 1980s there were three pastors who became my role models for expository preaching: John Mac Arthur; Chuck Smith of Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California; and Charles Swindoll, then pastor of the First Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton, California. (There must have something in the water out in California back then.) You could also throw in W. A. Criswell of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas as one of my heroes of expository preaching.
Anyway, as I began to read and listen to John MacArthur, that’s when I first encountered the teaching about elders in the local church. Specifically, the idea was that each church should have a plurality of elders in its leadership, not just a single pastor. And often it was either implied, or boldly stated, that if a church didn’t have a plurality of elders, then the church was unscriptural, and God could never bless it (i.e., make it grow).
Well, that got the attention of pastors everywhere, because every pastor wants their church to be blessed (i.e., to grow). So I, along with tens of thousands of other pastors, started buying books about church eldership. And we started trying to figure out how we could possibly reorganize our churches into apparently the only true and Biblical way for a church to be organized. I read MacArthur, Piper, Strauch, Stedman, Mims, Hybels, and Warren. I went to conferences and heard speakers; I listened to tapes, and then CDs. And I had lots of discussions about all these things with lots of other people.
There was only one problem. I wasn’t convinced.
I tried to be. I wanted to be one of the “cool kids” with elders in their church. But the more I heard, and the more I read, the more questions I had. I began to think. “Now, wait a minute…” I had some serious doubts about all this. When I read the Bible, it all just didn’t seem as clear to me as these other guys were saying it was.
They start with the assumption that there must be a group of elders in every church. As you read the book of Acts, it plainly refers to elders (plural)in the churches (cf. Acts 14:23; 15:4; 20:17). But nowhere is the number of elders specified for each church. The assumption is made that every church had a plurality of elders. But the language of Scripture can be just as easily understood as referring to men who presided over house-churches scattered around a city (cf. Romans 16:5; Philemon 2). Where there were large numbers of converts in a city like Jerusalem, Ephesus, or Rome, with no buildings of their own to meet in, Christians would have met in smaller groups in individual houses. Each house-church then would have had an elder to lead and teach in their meetings. This could just as easily have been why Paul told Titus to “appoint elders in every town” (Titus 1:5).
A second assumption is that there are two kinds of elders, vocational elders, and lay elders. The vocational elders are in what we call the full-time ministry. Lay elders aren’t paid; they work at other jobs and have to be good for nothing. (“It’s a joke, Shmuel!”) They base this on I Timothy 5:17, which says “Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching.” The assumption is that this passage is talking about two kinds of elders: those who rule(or govern the affairs of the church), and those who teach and preach.
The problem with that understanding is that it is not necessarily what 1 Timothy 5:17 means. Even some who have lay elders in their church admit that the Greek text of this passage is not so clear, and could be understood to mean that all elders teach and preach, but some labor extra hard at preaching and teaching, and those elders should be doubly honored. And, as Dr. Iain Murray points out, “If the words of 1 Timothy 5:17 distinguish between two groups of presbyters, then it is the only text to do so…” (A Scottish Christian Heritage: The Problem of Elders, page 343).
One of the things that began to bother me as I searched the New Testament about all this was that, if you make all the passages that talk about elders in the church to apply to lay elders, then you are left with hardly any passages that speak directly to preachers. 1 Timothy 3:2 says that an “overseer” (or “bishop” in the King James Version) has to be “able to teach.” I have heard this phrase “dumbed down” to mean simply “able to explain the Gospel.” Excuse me, but aren’t all Christians supposed to be able to explain the Gospel? Isn’t that the point of Jesus’ Great Commission to the church (Matthew 28:18-20; Mark 16:15; Luke 24:46-48; John 20:21)? And isn’t that what we see the early Christians doing in the book of Acts (Acts 1:8; 8:1, 4)? It seems to me to be setting the bar for church leadership pretty low for “able to teach” to just mean “can explain the Gospel.”
Dr. Stanley Toussaint was a professor who taught at Dallas Theological Seminary for over fifty years. I got to hear him speak one year at Moody Bible Institute’s Pastors Conference. He shocked us all by saying that he thought his institution had “gone to seed” on the subject of elders, and that he had seen men made elders who, in his words, “couldn’t teach their way out of a wet paper bag.” He went on to say that he thought most churches, even in the New Testament, weren’t large enough to have a number of elders, and that in most places they probably had only two, and older and a younger one. This fit a pattern we see all through Scripture, of God pairing an older and a younger man together. Think of Moses and Joshua, Elijah and Elisha, Peter and John, Barnabas and Mark, Paul and Timothy, or Paul and Titus. Early church history continues the pattern. Mark later became Peter’s assistant. (Many believe the Gospel of Mark is Mark’s recording of Peter’s preaching about Jesus.) And after the death of Paul, Timothy ended up at Ephesus, shepherding the church there with the aged apostle John. So even if an individual church did have more than one elder, it might have been just two, an older man and a younger one.
You need to understand that the words elder, overseer, and pastor all refer to the same office. In Acts 20, Paul called “the elders of the church” at Ephesus to come meet with him as he travelled through their region. And he told them: “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.” (Acts 20:28) The elders were told to “pay careful attention to themselves and to all the flock…”. The Greek word used for “pay careful attention” is the verb form of the word that means “shepherd”. In Ephesians 4:11 it is translated as “pastor” or “pastor-teacher.” The word pastor means “someone who cares for sheep.” Paul tells them to “watch over…all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers…”. The Greek word for “overseer” is episkopos, which means literally “to look over” or “one who watches over.” So, here in one sentence, the words for elder, shepherd and overseer are all used to describe the same office.
These words describe different aspects of the same work. Elder meant one with wisdom and spiritual maturity, not always, but often, connected with advanced age. Overseer meant, not a foreman or a taskmaster, but literally “one who watches over.” The word pastor brings to mind the ancient image of a shepherd watching over his sheep, and is connected from ancient times to the idea of being a teacher. Put all this together and you get a composite picture: a man who watches and presides over a church, with wisdom and spiritual maturity, teaching them and guiding them through the truths of God’s Word.
The only two church officers listed in Scripture are “overseers and deacons” (Philippians 1:1). In 1 Timothy 3 Paul tells young Timothy what kind of men to look for to fill these offices. The qualifications of an overseer are listed in 1 Timothy 3:1-7, with a parallel list in Titus 1:5-9. The qualifications for deacons are listed in 1 Timothy 3:8-13. These lists are very similar, except that an overseer is also to be “able to teach”. These men were meant to be very similar in character. And I think the lines between them were supposed to be blurred from time to time. A deacon would feel more and more the compulsion to teach and preach, and begin doing just that. You see this when Philip the deacon (Acts 6:5) later started doing the work of an evangelist (Acts 8:26-40). Years ago in our own church, Wes Hensley served as a faithful deacon, then felt the call to preach and became a pastor, first at a church in Worthington, then in Spencer. And when sometimes a pastor’s path leads in surprising ways, or voice or strength begins to fail, men such as this still have the character and wisdom to serve and advise and counsel a church.
I know of one church that has elders, but no deacons. This church is led by a man I look up to, and whose ministry I greatly respect. I heard him say once that they don’t have a room in their church where the deacons go to do what deacons do, because the word deacon means “servant”, and since all Christians are supposed to be servants, therefore all Christians are deacons. I very much look up to this man, but I very much disagree with him here! The word deacon does mean “servant” and is sometimes used of those who serve the church in an unofficial way, i.e., without holding an office. But the only chapter in the Bible that describes the qualifications for the only two officers in the local church is 1 Timothy 3. If God saw fit to give us a list of qualifications for those two offices, doesn’t it sound like He intended for there to be specific men we could point to and say, “There’s an overseer”, and “There’s a deacon”? It seems to me to be a blatant ignoring of the Scripture for a church to not have specific officers called deacons. As soon as a church has those who meet the qualifications set forth, then a church ought to have deacons serving alongside pastors.
And I think it is significant that 1 Timothy 3 talks about the qualifications of an overseer in the singular, and then discusses the qualifications of deacons in the plural. And when letters in the New Testament were written to those who were shepherding God’s flock in a given place, they were always sent to an individual, never to a group (e.g., Timothy and Titus).
There are other arguments for a church to have a single pastor and several deacons. But I don’t want to argue with anyone about this. Life’s too short, and I’d rather play with my grandsons. If you’d like to look into this subject some more, I can recommend these books: A Scottish Christian Heritage: The Problem of Elders by Iain Murray; The Theory of Ruling Eldership by Peter Colin Campbell; Systematic Theology by Augustus H. Strong; Christian Theology by Millard Erickson. And also these articles: The Case for the Singularity of Pastors by Manfred E. Kober; and Elders in a Baptist Church: Plural, Yea; Lay, Nay, Parts 1-4 by David de Bruyn. The last two articles are available free online, and you can access Strong’s Theology for free online, too. All of these writers provide a different, and I think needed perspective on this issue.
But can I tell you something? I can see the arguments from Scripture that Presbyterians and others use to say that each church should have a presbytery, or a board of elders. And I can see the arguments that Methodists and others use to support the idea of a bishop ruling over a group of churches. I understand what they point to in the Bible in support of their positions. I understand, but I’m not persuaded.
The bottom line is, if you believe the Bible is the Word of God, and you believe that Jesus is the Son of God (God manifest in the flesh), then I don’t care if you want to be Presbyterian. I don’t even care if you want to be Baptiterian. If that’s how you’re persuaded when you search the Scriptures and think about the organization of a church, then I can respect that. But this is a lesser matter, relatively speaking. On things like this, Paul said, “Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind.” (Romans 14:5)
But here’s what rubs my rhubarb: Don’t you tell me that having one pastor and several deacons is unscriptural and wrong, when I can point to just as many Scriptures, and I have just as many valid arguments as you do to make my case. If you’re persuaded otherwise, fine. But at least acknowledge that others who love God, love the Bible, and love the local church have different views than yours.
In the comic strip Peanuts, Snoopy was writing a book of theology on his typewriter. Charlie Brown told him, “I hope you have a good title.” And Snoopy thought, “I have the perfect title… ‘Has It Ever Occurred to You That You Might Be Wrong?’”
Let’s give the last word to two very distinguished authors. Dr. Iain Murray said, “There is truth in the saying, ‘The wider the reading, the greater will be the modesty.’” And Richard Baxter wrote, “While we wrangle here in the dark, we are dying and passing to the world that will decide all our controversies; and the safest passage thither is peaceable holiness.”
So here’s an idea: instead of arguing about all this, you go get your elders, and I’ll go get my deacons, and let’s worship God and then go tell somebody about Jesus.
Soli Deo Gloria!
Pastor David