Elder Led Congregationalism: Church Government According to the Scriptures

Another scandal has hit the news, this time out of G3 Ministries and Pray’s Mill Baptist Church. I do not have all the answers, nor do I have all the details of what happened at Pray’s Mill or at G3, and I am not going to pretend I do. What I can tell you is that it is painful to watch. G3 is not a church. It began as a ministry of Pray’s Mill, and over the years I have written about it favorably, attended their events, supported their work, and been helped by their material. I am not writing this to pile on. Paul warned the church at Corinth with words every one of us needs to hear before we say a word about somebody else:

So I want to do something more useful than commentary. When a ministry stumbles, the questions that follow are almost always questions about church government. Who was accountable to whom? Who had the authority to act, and did they? Were the men in charge the kind of men the Scripture says should be in charge? Those are ecclesiology questions, and ecclesiology is not a side issue. As Baptists we have to get it right, because when a church gets it wrong, there are bound to be failures. Maybe not this year. But they come.

Here is how our church puts it in our constitution and by-laws:

One sentence, two halves, and a string of references behind each half. I want to walk through it, because every word in that sentence was put there on purpose.

Under the Leadership of the Holy Spirit

Before we say anything about elders or the congregation, the sentence says who is actually in charge. That is not a pious throat clearing. It governs everything that follows. Christ is the Head of the church. Not a pastor, not a board, not a denomination, and not the membership.

First place in everything. That includes how His church is governed. Elders do not own the church. The congregation does not own the church. The Lord Jesus purchased her with His own blood, and He rules her by His Word through His Spirit. Every structure we build has to answer to Him.

How does Jesus govern a church that meets in Southeast Georgia? Through the Word of God. The Bible is our final rule of faith and practice, and that phrase does real work in church government. If the New Testament shows a pattern for how the church is led, we are not free to improve on it because a business model looks more efficient or a tradition feels more comfortable. When a question comes up about elders, or membership, or discipline, the first question is what the Word says, not what works or what other churches are doing.

Every good work. Governing the church of God is one of them, and the Scripture is sufficient for it. So every reference in that sentence from our by-laws is the church showing her work, pointing to the place where her Head has spoken.

Elder Led

The New Testament gives the local church leaders, and it calls them elders, overseers, and pastors. Three words for one office. I have written elsewhere about the plurality of those men, and the pattern is plain: more often than not, the churches in Acts had more than one. What I want to press here is the word led. The Scripture does not picture elders as hired hands who wait for a vote before they do anything. It pictures them as shepherds.

Notice who made them overseers. The Holy Spirit did. And notice what they are told to do: shepherd. A shepherd goes out front. He feeds, he guards, and he leads the sheep somewhere. Paul tells the Ephesians the same thing from the other direction. Pastors are a gift Christ Himself hands to His church.

To the Thessalonians, Paul describes the men this way: they labor among you, they lead you in the Lord, and they admonish you. Then he tells the church how to treat them.

Hebrews 13 may be the strongest of all. Twice in one chapter the writer calls them leaders. Verse 7 says to remember them and imitate their faith. Verse 17 says something a lot of people would rather skip over.

Obey. Submit. Those are the words the Holy Spirit chose. A church where the pastors cannot lead, where every decision is fought out on the floor by prominent men or families in the church, and the men God gave to shepherd the flock are treated as employees, is following Robert's Rules, not the New Testament. Elders lead. That is the first half of the sentence, and the Scripture is not shy about it.

Congregationalism

But the sentence does not stop there, and neither does the Bible. The same Lord who gave elders to the church gave authority to the church herself. Look where Jesus put the keys.

Two chapters later, when He explains how those keys are used in discipline, He does not say take it to the elders and let them handle it. He says tell it to the church.

The final court of appeal on earth is the gathered congregation, not a board and not a presbytery in another city. Paul practiced exactly this at Corinth. There was a man living in open sin, and Paul had every apostolic right to simply pronounce judgment. He did not. He told the church to act when they were assembled.

When he writes them again, he refers to that discipline as the punishment inflicted by the majority (2 Corinthians 2:6). The majority. That is a congregational vote, described by an apostle, without apology.

You see the same thing with the choosing of the first men we would later call deacons. In Acts 6 the apostles did not appoint the seven. They told the congregation to select men who met the qualifications, and the whole congregation was pleased with the word and chose them. In Acts 15 the decision of the Jerusalem Council was made by the apostles and the elders with the whole church (Acts 15:22). Leaders led, and the congregation was not bypassed. That is the pattern. Elder led congregationalism is not a compromise between two systems. It is what the New Testament actually shows us, in one church after another.

Two Ways to Miss the Mark

I want to be plain here, because this is where the failures come from.

Elder rule

Some churches take the first half of our sentence and drop the second. The elders lead, and the elders also decide. The membership hears about it afterward, if they hear at all. Discipline happens behind closed doors. Budgets, buildings, ordinations, all of it handled by a small group of men who answer to one another and to nobody else. It sounds efficient, and in the short run it usually is.

The problem is that the Lord Jesus gave the keys to the church, and no board of elders has the right to take them from her. When the congregation is stripped of its voice, the men at the top lose the one earthly check the Scripture built in for them. Peter warned the elders about lording it over those allotted to them (1 Peter 5:3). Paul told Timothy that an accusation against an elder was to be received on the testimony of two or three witnesses, and that an elder who continued in sin was to be reproved in the presence of all (1 Timothy 5:19–20). In the presence of all. That only works if the congregation is still in the room. Elder rule quietly removes them from it, and then everyone acts surprised when a man who answered to no one behaves like a man who answers to no one. This can happen whether a church has one elder or a plurality of them.

Unqualified men

The other way to miss it is to have the structure right and fill it with the wrong men. A church can have plural elders and a congregational vote and still ordain a man because he is gifted, or well connected, or because the church was desperate to have someone in that position. The Scripture is not vague about who may hold this office.

Read that list slowly and you will notice something. Almost none of it is about gifting. It is about character: a man above reproach, sensible, free from the love of money, leading his own household well, with a good reputation among outsiders. The Lord is far more concerned with what kind of man he is than with how well he can fill a room. Titus 1 says the same. And Paul adds a warning that ought to be read at every ordination:

Share responsibility for the sins of others. When a church ordains a man who should not have been ordained, the church owns part of what he does next. I have said before that I have seen more damage done by men who should never have been set apart than by churches that simply had one faithful pastor. I still believe that. It would be better to have no additional elders than to lay hands on the wrong man because the chart called for another box to be filled.

Why a Confession Matters Here

Being confessional is a wise choice, and I would say every church needs a good confession. A confession does two things for church government. It tells the congregation ahead of time what the church believes about the offices, the ordinances, and the authority of the church, so nobody has to make it up in the middle of a crisis. And it binds the elders to something outside themselves. A pastor who has publicly subscribed to a confession can be held to it. That is a mercy to him and a protection for the flock.

A confession is not a substitute for elder led congregationalism, though. You can have a fine confession on the wall and elder rule in the back room. The document does not enforce itself. The congregation does.

Large or Small, the Answer Is the Same

Someone will say that all this is fine for a small church like ours but does not scale. A church of two thousand cannot run every decision past the membership. I understand the concern, and I would answer it three ways. First, the New Testament churches were not all small. Jerusalem had thousands of members, and Acts 6 and Acts 15 show the whole congregation involved in the weightiest decisions that church ever made. Second, size does not change what the Lord commanded. It changes how much work it takes to obey. A big church has to labor harder to keep her members informed and involved. That is a reason to labor, not a reason to hand the keys to a committee. Third, not everything has to be voted on. When the church runs low on toilet paper, nobody calls a business meeting. If a security issue comes up on a Sunday morning, the men handle it. Congregational authority is not congregational micromanagement. The congregation holds the keys on the weighty matters the Lord placed in her hands: membership, discipline, doctrine, the calling of her officers. The elders lead in the daily work of shepherding, and the church is glad to let them.

Whether the church meets in a living room or a building with a parking ministry, the shape is the same. Qualified elders lead, the congregation holds the keys, and the Holy Spirit governs both of them through the Word. When that is in place, failures still happen, because elders and members are sinners. But there is a way to deal with them, and it is written down, and everybody knows what it is.

A Word to the Church

Pray for the churches in the news, and pray for the people who trusted them. Then look at your own house. Do you know who your elders are, and do you regard them very highly in love because of their work? Are you willing to submit to them the way Hebrews 13 says, and are they the kind of men who make that easy? Does your church know it holds the keys, or has it quietly handed them off because voting is tedious and somebody else seemed to have it handled?

Take heed that you do not fall. That word was for Corinth, and it is for us.