We’re back now with our third hour of five. We have almost finished point number three on the outline called “Biblical Principles of Local Church Governance.” This is for any of you who are new this morning. This is a Bethlehem Institute seminar entitled, “Biblical Eldership,” which is part of a larger class called “Issues in Spiritual Leadership.” Different seminars are given throughout the year, some on Wednesday night, some on weekends, and some on Sunday morning. You’re certainly welcome at any of those, though we certainly would not want to pull you away from your ministry or your involvement at your local church, but rather strengthen you for it.

So those right there on the overhead now are the last three of the 11 principles of local church governance. Keep in mind that these were all articulated back in the mid to late 1980s as guidelines for how Bethlehem would rethink our governance structure to move us little by little towards a more flexible, lean, ministry-oriented, biblical governance structure. These were not the result of that, but the guidelines for it.

Let’s take these last three and then we’ll move on to another point. Feel free along the way, like you did last night, to get my attention and ask your questions. If I feel like we’re slowing down too much, I’ll say so, but otherwise, I don’t want you to misunderstand or I don’t want to make a mistake that should be corrected.

9. Spiritual Qualifications Should Never Be Sacrificed to Technical Expertise

For example, deacons or trustees or what we call now, and I added this yesterday, financial and property administrators should be men or women — I do say that carefully because while we don’t install women as elders at Bethlehem, we will and do believe it would be biblical to have deacons or trustees or financial property administrators who include women — with hearts for God even more importantly than they have heads for finance and best of all both.

I stressed this because as I contemplated our change in government, I saw at Bethlehem in those early days something that I hadn’t seen in many churches, namely that both our trustees and our deacons in those days who were governing the church as remarkably godly, spiritual people who put a premium on Christlikeness, being biblical people in the way they think, saturating their meetings with prayer, and walking in the power of the Holy Spirit, not in human wisdom. I wanted to preserve that so bad, so this principle made its way in.

Whereas in many churches, I’ve even heard the phrase used that the elders or the deacons do the “spiritual work,” and then you have to have businessmen know how to do budgets and finance and others. That’s a horrible bifurcation, isn’t it, as though how you handle your money isn’t spiritual. Give you an illustration here. We have a missionary in Uzbekistan, Oscar Huerta, and I’ve been on the inside of some of his emails back and forth with his supervisor in London in the last few days. I’ll be careful here now that I don’t say too much, but suffice it to say this: He’s being called to give an account with the energy he devotes to thinking through, talking about, and organizing how money is handled and how business things are handled.

The supervisor wanted to see a little more energy and effort put into the more spiritual or church planting things. I sense the need to be careful here. To send out tent makers who spend all their time on tents and never get around to planting the church is not a good investment of human resources probably, but Oscar’s answer — and I know Oscar well, I’ve known him for 12 years — was an impassioned answer to the effect that money is probably where most people are destroyed spiritually. Jesus talked more about money than about the second coming and about marriage. Jesus was unbelievably concerned with how we handle our possessions because they kill, they really kill. It is hard for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven.

So to put money into the hands of your least spiritual people is deadly in a local church. So however you lead in this matter, your standards of spiritual depth, biblical awareness, and passionate commitment to radical Jesus-like living should be the kind of people who are handling your business affairs. That’s principle number nine. Don’t sacrifice spiritual qualifications for business expertise. It’s better to have spiritual bumblers than carnal experts. I don’t know if you agree with that. I agree with that. I just said it. Obviously, I agree with it. But you don’t have to. I think God covers for many bumbling people who love him with all their heart. Many experts who are not spiritual can get us into big trouble.

10. The Selection Process Should Provide for the Necessary Assessment of Possible Leaders

A group should be doing this who is able discern the qualifications mentioned in number eight, and that the process provides for the final approval of the congregation of all the officers. We have that in place now. We didn’t have it then and we didn’t know quite what it would look like. I just wanted to make sure that we avoided what was happening in those early days at Bethlehem even though God was blessing while I was watching it happen to keep us from going off the deep end.

The problem was if you have a nominating committee and the nominating committee is elected by the congregation, little interviewing for the nominating committee is going on. So a nominating committee is usually chosen mainly because you ask who knows the people. That’s what you ask: “Who knows the people.” You got 300 people, 200 people, 100 people, or 1,000 people. Who knows the people? You put those people on the nominating committee. Those nominating committees may not have studied for years the list of qualifications in 1 Timothy 3. They may not understand any of them. They may not know what the Greek word sōphrona means (“sober,” or sometimes translated as “dignified”). They might read “dignified” in a version and say, “We need to have a man who wears a three piece suit to be on the committee,” or something like that.

You can’t just have popular people or people who know people. You have to have a group who is spiritual, who knows the Bible, who can take the time and give the effort to interview candidates and get to the root. You need people who are gutsy, who will say, “Now, don’t take offense at this, but tell me about your little nine-year-old. He seems to be acting out in Sunday school in a way that seems really troublesome. We just need to try to get inside what’s going on here? Is there something wrong there?” That may not keep a man from serving as an elder because there may be things going on there that are physiological or whatever, but very few people have the guts to ask questions in the interview process. So now, our elders do this and I’m hoping and trusting that they do it carefully when they interview candidates.

A Process for Calling Elders

Some of you asked last night what our actual process is and do we have documents that guide them, and the answer to that is yes. We do have lists of questions and we have lists of the qualifications and how to get at those. Here’s the process we follow. We’re in it right now, and so I’ll just tell you what’s happening.

Somebody, anybody in the congregation or on the council can give us names. We assemble names of possible elders, and we have a long list right now. As a council, we pray over those names, we look at those names, and we study those names and then in conversation we just say, “Who seems to be rising to the surface here as somebody we should pursue?” and we start sharing names. At that moment, anybody around the council can say, “But did you know this?” or, “Are you concerned about this?” or, “What about this?” and that, if others share, might be enough to put that on hold while somebody deals with that or if you don’t get that, then you move ahead. Once you’ve got a smaller list, then we either go in person or we send a letter saying, “Would you be open to a conversation about this? Would you be willing to talk about this or come to a seminar like this?”

If so, then we send two elders to go and meet with this person if they’re willing to go to that next step, and that is, I think, the key moment in assessment. We get volunteers for that. We just say, “Who knows this person best? Anybody know this person well?” and somebody says, “I know them well,” and then one other person goes with them. So they’ll meet for however long it takes over lunch or before or after service or somewhere and try to get into their lives and see if they are ready to move ahead.

Then the next stage, if it’s thumbs up, is that they bring a report back and they share their thoughts. We could stop it right there (we have), or we could go to the next step, which would be to invite the person in. Jeff is at that step now. Jeff came in and we grilled Jeff as a whole council. We’ve got about 15 guys there and Jeff was answering questions about that. When that’s done, then the council comes to a mind and we really try to come to a mind. I resist running it. I don’t run it, but I resist. I try to say, “I’d rather not have a quick ‘call for the question’ type meetings, but rather let’s talk about this. David, you haven’t said anything. What do you say? Dan, you haven’t said anything. What do you think? Let’s get everybody not under the table. We want to hear what these men say,” and we’ve been able to come to some pretty large consensuses over big things, though we don’t have to. We don’t have any rule that says you have to have a consensus. Some elderships do.

We said, “Thumbs up,” to Jeff Jacobovitz and now Jeff will be put before the people if he’s willing. If he’s willing to go to that next step, then when the congregational meeting rolls around, he will be affirmed.

Here’s another piece. We put a little biography of Jeff and whoever the candidates are in our church mailing list and say, “This person is about to come. If you know anything that would make this person unfit, please get to the elders.” So that’s sort of the process. Any questions about that in particular?

If you’re sitting on a committee where a person is being assessed and somebody says, “I know something about this person that makes them unfit for this work, but I don’t think I should share the details,” should they share the details?

I don’t know. There are probably situations in which you shouldn’t, if there’s a legal issue involved, maybe, or a pledge or a promise that you would break at that moment. We would have to trust, at least I would with great hesitation. On the other hand, I would press the person and I would say, “Now, why? Why are you holding back on this? Is there a promise, a value you’d be breaking or is there a legal thing that you’d get the church into trouble with?” If they just said, “It’s just too hard to talk about,” I think what I’d probably suggest is, “Why don’t we appoint a little subcommittee here since we don’t want the dirty laundry maybe hung out wider than it should be? There’s no point in doing that. Would you share this with two or three others if you can do that and let them say, ‘Thumbs up, yes, this should not be shared and we should not move ahead.’” That’d be one possible compromise. Yeah, go ahead.

Have you ever had a case where the church has not affirmed the recommended people, and if so, how do you follow up?

We’ve never had a case like that. Leith Anderson over at Wooddale takes this principle not just on nominations but on virtually every church action. Leith says, “If you ever get a no vote from the church, the leaders haven’t done their job.” Meaning, you do so much careful work in teaching and educating at the Sunday school level, the house group level, the congregational meeting level, you’re getting feedback, you’re discussing, and you get all the negatives before the vote and then you adjust and tailor. You don’t put half-baked motions on the floor and you don’t put people who are unprepared to be a leader on the floor.

Now, whether that’s a principle that can be carried through consistently is another thing. I see the wisdom in it. Just do a lot of careful homework. Do your homework so that your people have this sense of trust and think, “These men really work hard and they bring to us such good people or such good motions or such good plans, it’s a thrill to say amen to this leadership.”

I didn’t say this last night, but I thought about it as I was going to sleep because I was reading some stuff. I know that if people don’t like the elders or don’t like me, say, as the preaching elder, they will call that rubber stamp. You can find negative terminology to describe positive things. People might say, “In this church, the congregation just rubber stamps the elders.” Well, that’s a negative way of describing what might be a very positive thing. There probably is such a thing as a rubber stamp — meaning a mindless, thoughtless concession to people who think it doesn’t matter whether the things the elders say are good or bad.” That would be a rubber stamp, but to trust your leaders and to have such competent, rigorous, spiritual, careful leaders that it’s a joy to affirm what they do, that’s not rubber stamping.

If we have female deacons, how do we distinguish in the list of qualifications where it says the elder shall be “the husband of one wife” (1 Timothy 3:2) and the deacon shall be “the husband of one wife” (1 Timothy 3:12). Clearly, a woman can’t be the husband of one wife.

I don’t want to go into detail here because I’m teaching on this on Wednesday night. So I know you probably can’t be here and most of you can’t, but I separated out these issues, manhood and womanhood issues on Wednesday night. We’re spending five whole weeks devoted to that question and one’s like it. I’ll try to give you a brief Utinni answer and it may not be satisfactory and we can talk afterwards.

I think there’s a section where it says, “and the women,” and it can be translated either “wives” or “women.” It says, “let them be” (1 Timothy 3:11), and then it gives some qualifications there under the deacons. That is missing under the list for elders. Now, if it’s wives, why isn’t it there for the elders’ wives, I ask. If you’re going to list some qualifications for the females and they’re the wives of the deacons in 1 Timothy 3:11, aren’t the wives of the elders even more significant to have spiritually fit than the wives of the deacons? So if you’re going to list qualifications for the women, which can mean “wives” or “women,” why not do that for the elders? I can’t prove this, I just say it looks to me like we are talking about women deacons here.

The men who are chosen should be the husband of one wife. The accent falls on one wife, not that they have to be husbands and therefore women can’t be that. But rather, women, if they’re going to be deacons, should have these qualifications and then they’re listed. That’s a contextual answer. My principial answer is the thing that distinguishes an elder from a deacon in the list of qualifications and in the duties is that elders are to be “apt to teach” (1 Timothy 3:2) and that elders govern (1 Timothy 5:17). Deacons do not have to be apt to teach. They’re not oriented mainly around the gift and authority of teaching, but rather serving in other ways. Deacons are not seen as governors, general overseers of the congregation, which is why I think in 1 Timothy 2:12, when Paul says to the church, “I do not allow a woman to teach or have authority over men,” those two things are present. These are the very two things that distinguish an elder from a deacon, which means that in principle then, a deacon who doesn’t function as a teacher and doesn’t function as an authority figure could be a woman. That’s my brief answer.

Now, when I say that, I’m going to be careful here because I know there are women in the room who are probably very gifted in teaching. I don’t think 1 Timothy 2:12 means women can’t teach at all and the brother back here pointed out last night that you’ve got the text, “Let the older women teach the younger women” (Titus 2:3–5), for example. I think the teaching of children, the teaching of youth, and the teaching of women is a wide open field for women and they should, therefore, then be qualified spiritually to do that. I wouldn’t say they’re deacons because of that. That’s just part of their giftedness. I don’t have any problem with the gifts being given to men and women as long as they exercise them within the biblical parameters.

What are your thoughts regarding single men as elders?

There, again, it would come down where it says “one woman man,” literal translation. The elder must be a “one woman man” with the accent on one. It’s not that you have to have one, but if you got one, it better be one. Now, that’s my interpretation. The accent is falling on being one woman man, not that you have to have one. Therefore, I would have a hard time saying Paul could not be the elder in a local church, Jesus could not be the elder in a local church, and Jon Stott cannot be the elder in a local church. That’s my position.

11. Terms of Active Service Should not be Dictated by the Desire to Include as Many Different People as Possible in Leadership

Rather, it should be dictated by the careful balance between the need, on the one hand, to have the most qualified leaders and, on the other hand, to guard against burnout and stagnation. Now, the tension there that I’m pointing out is that the most qualified leaders might need to keep serving because there might not be as many as you would like to have in a smaller church especially, and yet you have to guard against burnout and overwork. So you need to constantly be cultivating from the wider group of available candidates depth and giftedness by prayer and study and discipleship. So those are my 11 principles of local church government.

Elders and Deacons in Baptist Confessions

Let’s just take a survey and I’ll judge by what we’ve got here. How many are related to a Baptist church? Raise your hand. How many of those in those Baptist churches are part of churches where you do not have a group of people called elders? Just briefly then, I want to show you what’s available regarding what you could do. There’s a little green book called Baptist Confessions. It shows that from the earliest days there have been two offices in the church, elder and deacon. When you follow these confessions of faith through, that begins to drop out in the early 1900s. It’s very interesting. Ian Murray in his biography of Jonathan Edwards has some interesting explanations for why that is, which I’m not going to go into. But if you’re interested in tracking that down, it’s in pages 344 to 346 in the new biography of Edwards by Murray.

Let’s just look at two or three of these. It’s a short confession of faith in the 20 articles by John Smith, 1609. Article 16 says, “The ministers of the church are not only bishops (episkopos) . . .” This word “bishop” here is the New Testament translation of episkopos (“overseer”). So bishop is just a fancy word in English for “overseer.” He continues:

The ministers of the church are not only bishops (episkopos), to whom the power is given of dispensing both the word and the sacraments, but also deacons.

So the earliest Baptist confession I know about talks in terms of bishops being overseers and deacons being another office. Those are the two offices.

This 1611, a declaration of faith of English people remaining in Amsterdam. It says in Article 20:

That the officers of every church or congregation are either elders who by their office do especially feed the flock concerning their souls or deacons, men and women, who by their office relieve the necessities of the poor and impotent brethren concerning their bodies.

In fact, I studied in Germany for three years and I remember the Lutheran church. You have two big churches in Germany, Lutheran and Catholic, and both of them have huge ministries. They are all involved with the government because it’s these state churches. Parts of the government are called the Diaconal Ministries. These are men and women who run hospitals and do social things and so on. So those are the two offices. Again, here’s 1612 to 1614. These are propositions and conclusions concerning the true Christian religion. This is Proposition 76:

That Christ has set in his outward church two sorts of ministers, namely some who are called pastors, teachers or elders, treating those three as the same, who administer in the word and sacraments and others who are called deacons, men and women whose ministry is to serve tables and wash the saints’ feet.

The London Confession from 1644, in Article 36, says:

That being thus joined, every church has power given them from Christ for their better wellbeing to choose to themselves meet persons into the office of pastors, teachers, elders, deacons, being qualified according to the word as those which Christ is appointed . . .

I put these little asterisks here because “pastors” and “teachers” are omitted in later editions here to clarify that these three — pastors, teachers, and elders — were considered the same person.

Erasing an Office from the Church

The Second London Confession from 1688, in Article 26 says:

A particular church gathered and completely organized according to the mind of Christ consists of officers and members, and the officers appointed by Christ to be chosen and set apart by the church, so-called and gathered, for the peculiar administration of ordinances and execution of power or duty which he entrusts them with or calls them to to be continued to the end of the world are bishops or elders and deacons.

We see those two offices. That’s probably enough.

Here we’re into 1923. This is Articles of the Baptist Bible, Union of America, 1923, Article 13:

We believe that a church of Christ is a congregation of baptized believers, that its officers of ordination are pastors, elders, and deacons. There it’s not clear that these are the same, pastors, elders, and deacons.

Now, in 1963, the statement of faith of Southern Baptist Convention (1925), says:

The church is an autonomous body operating through democratic processes under the lordship of Jesus Christ. In such a congregation, members are equally responsible. His scriptural officers are pastors and deacons.

That is what most of us inherit when we go to a Baptist church like I did. If you bring up elders, they say, “That’s not Baptist.” By 1925, it’s gone. The word is gone, and so it’s not easy to accuse. It’s easy to understand the body of believers who grow up in a church. They think you have deacons and you have a pastor or maybe multiple staff, but you don’t have this animal called an elder. You hear that across the town, all the PCA churches and the PCUSA churches and the reformed churches, have elders, and so this is not Baptistic. That’s just historically naive as I hope you now see.

I had a comment on tradition just to say that doesn’t prove anything. Confessions of faith do not prove that it’s biblical. I just want you to know that wise and godly leaders have concluded in Baptist traditions that the two offices of the church are elder and deacon. Are there any questions about Baptist history or anything like that?

What if you have a vocational elder that does not necessarily have the gift of teaching?

He shouldn’t be a pastor, but let me clarify because I think when most people hear “apt to teach” or able to teach, they think of what I do on Sunday morning or what a very popular Sunday school class teacher does who attracts a lot of people. People might think, “Well, if only those people can be elders, they’re few and far between — those charismatic types who make a lot of noise and use their outside voice.”

Here’s the way we understand apt to teach. We bring Titus 1:9 alongside that text in 1 Timothy 3:2. It says this:

He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.

Elders have to be able to do that, but I don’t think they have to be able to do it in public. In other words, to be a charismatic upfront figure who is a dynamic leader and a winsome communicator is not necessarily what the apostles are looking for. What they’re looking for are people who can recognize the sure word as taught — that is, as the apostles have taught it. They can get in the apostolic mind, they read their Bible carefully, they understand what it means, and they can articulate it plainly, maybe in a one-on-one setting, counseling setting, or crisis setting. They can sniff out false teaching and spot it, and they can go to the Bible and find answers for the false teaching and present their answers.

There’s a difference between those things. “Apt to teach” means being competent in the word, able to correct false doctrine at different levels, but every elder should have that gift. Otherwise, he’s not going to be a contributing member to this council with the kind of biblical insight that he should have. There probably are pastors who don’t have that gift who shouldn’t be pastors, but don’t judge them on some style issue or upfront charismatic gifted issue.

Other Names for Elders in the New Testament

My aim here is to argue that the four terms in the New Testament — bishop, overseer, elder, and pastor — are the same person, not that the words are identical in meaning, but that they refer to the same person or office from different angles.

Bishops and Overseers

Let’s start with number one: bishop and overseer. There are not two Greek words in the New Testament, one for bishop and one for overseer. Episkopos is the word behind both of those translations. The English term “bishop” means overseer and is sometimes used to translate the Greek word episkpos. There are at least four reasons to consider this term “bishop” or “overseer” as equivalent to elder in the New Testament. Reason number one is a comparison between Titus 1:5 and Titus 1:7. I’ll read it:

This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you — if anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination. For an overseer, as God’s steward, must be above reproach. He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain . . .

Now, my understanding of that is that that switch is not a switch in meaning, just a switch in the way you look at the same person because there’s no indication here that I can see that a new group is being addressed here, but rather, here the group is called “elders,” and here the group is called “the overseer.” The first part gets at his task and the second part gets at his maturity. So that’s argument number one. Anybody think I’m missing something here? Does that look like the same person to you? The Greek word for elder is presbyteros, from which we get “Presbyterian” or “presbyter.”

Reason number two comes from comparing Acts 20:17 and 20:28. Here’s the point. Acts 20:17 says:

Now from Miletus he sent to Ephesus and called the elders of the church to come to him.

And then he gives this long message to them, and in Acts 20:28 he says now to these elders:

Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for (shepherd) the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.

That’s argument number two why bishops or overseers and elders are the same persons.

Argument number three is about 1 Timothy 3:1 compared to 1 Timothy 5:17. In 1 Timothy 3:1, Paul says:

The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task.

And then he describes the leadership qualifications for those. When he gets to 1 Timothy 5:17, he says:

Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching.

Unlike the deacons, the overseer must be able to teach. In 1 Timothy 3:5, he’s said to be one whose management of his own household fits him to care for God’s church. These two functions are ascribed to elders in the fifth chapter of this book (1 Timothy 5:17) — teaching and governing. It speaks of those who rule well, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching. So it is very likely that in Paul’s mind, the bishops and overseers of 1 Timothy 3:1–7 are the same as the elders in 1 Timothy 5:17. That’s reason number three.

Reason number four is Philippians 1:1 compared to 1 Timothy 3:1 and Acts 14:23. In Philippians 1:1, Paul writes:

To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the overseers (episcopois) and deacons (diaconois):

There are overseers and there are deacons. Paul says, “I’m writing to the church and I mean to get the special attention of these two groups,” which is a remarkable confirmation that the two lists in 1 Timothy 3 of elders and deacons are, I think, paralleling these two. These then seem to be the two offices of the church just as in 1 Timothy 3:1–13, the qualifications only for these two are given, but Paul appointed elders in all the churches. So it is very likely that the elders of the church at Philippi were the bishops and overseers referred to in Philippians 1. In Acts 14:23 it says:

Paul appointed elders in all the churches.

Then when he writes to the church in Philippi, he writes to the bishops and deacons. In 1 Timothy 3:1–13, those two groups are called or treated as elders, as well as bishops and deacons. Those are my arguments for why I would take the term “bishop/overseer” as the same person as elder, speaking the office from two different angles — one, the functional angle of overseeing, and the other, the maturity angle of elder.

Pastors

The next term to be concerned with is the term pastor then. The term “pastor” as a noun occurs in the New Testament only once in reference to persons. The term “shepherd” occurs more than once. You’ve got shepherd referring to shepherds in other places like John’s gospel, but in reference to an office in the church, the term poimēn or a person in the church, it occurs only here in Ephesians 4:11, which says:

He gave some as pastors and teachers . . .

But there is a verb that corresponds to poimēn, shepherd, namely poinmanō (“to shepherd”, or “to feed”) which is closely related to the noun pastor, which helps us to discover how the role of pastor was related to the role of elder and bishop. So here are my observations on this, and the reason here, I’m talking about reason number one, is the reason that pastors and elders should be considered the same person. Ephesians 4:11 treats pastors and teachers as one group, and thus suggests that the chief role of the pastor is feeding the flock through teaching, a role clearly assigned to bishops and overseers. In 1 Timothy 3:2, “An elder must be apt to teach,” and to elders in Titus 1:9, “He will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to confute those who contradict it.” This suggests that the pastor is another name for an elder and overseer. That’s argument number one.

Second, in Acts 20:28, the elders of Ephesus are encouraged in their pastoral (shepherding), thus showing that Paul saw the elders as the shepherds or pastors. Here’s the verse:

Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for (to shepherd) the church of God . . .

He could have switched those around and said, “Made you shepherds to oversee,” but he said, “Made you overseers to shepherd the church of God, which he purchased.” So clearly, elders, overseers, bishops are to shepherd — that is, to be pastors. The English word “pastor” means shepherd and it comes from the Greek word poimēn.

Then, reason number three, in 1 Peter 5:1–2, is that the elders are told to tend the flock of God that is in their charge. In other words, Peter saw the elders essentially as pastors or shepherds. Here’s the actual text:

So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed: shepherd the flock of God that is among you . . .

So elders shepherd, elders shepherd — that is, they pastor. All right? Pastor means shepherd. Here’s my conclusion: The New Testament only refers to the office of pastor one time. It is a functional description of the role of elder stressing the care and feeding of the church as God’s flock just as overseer (bishop) is a functional description of the role of elders stressing the governing or oversight of the church. We may conclude, therefore, that pastor and elder and bishop, overseer refer in the New Testament to the same office or person. This office stands alongside deacons in Philippians 1:1 and 1 Timothy 3:1–13 in such a way as to show that the two abiding officers instituted by the New Testament are elder and deacon.

Implications for the Language of Biblical Offices

This is major. The implications of this in my mind are very significant. Here are a couple of them at Bethlehem and then I’ll take your question. This means that John Piper, for example, is an elder and a part of the council or college or camaraderie of elders and that the pastor, which is still in the vocabulary of many of our people, is not the best way to put it. If someone says, “Who’s the pastor?” I would say, “Well, you don’t get it yet.” We’re all pastors and we’re all elders and we’re all overseers on this council. John has an assignment from this church to do certain things as an elder. He’s not the pastor, which is probably why my title senior pastor is just a little bit off. The word “senior,” what does that mean? I think I am in fact, after Irv, the oldest elder. Irv is our oldest elder. I’m next. So Irv is the senior pastor. That’s cool. I never thought of that. That’s one implication. I am one of them and I have one vote on this council. That’s another implication. I don’t legally or officially make choices that these other men have to follow. We make choices together. This group governs the church. Any questions?

Does your disaffection with that 1925 and 1963 Southern Baptist article on offices confuse people in the church? It seems that the terminology isn’t faulty in the document.

I don’t have a problem with that if I fill up the word “pastor” in those documents with all this teaching I just gave you in the last 10 minutes. That’s true. However, the average person doesn’t fill it up with that teaching. When they think pastor, they think preacher on Sunday morning, and then there’s a board, and they are deacons and they run the church by and large in the average Baptist church. They are the governing board.

In fact, in some of them, the pastor isn’t a part of that board. He may sit ex-officio on all boards, which may or may not mean he votes. There’s all kinds of different variations of it. I could tell you some stories here, but I think I’ll get too far off-field. So you’re right. I shouldn’t fault the terminology there. I should simply try to fill it up with a New Testament meaning that when it says there are two offices, pastor and deacon, what it means is there are pastors, elders, overseers, they are always a plurality in the New Testament and they are together. Not one of them is the overseer, governor, or guide of this church. Then there are these helpers and assistants who carry out the nitty-gritty financial and practical things called “deacons.”

Is the term “teacher” as in Acts 13:1 another synonym for elder?

I hadn’t thought about that. Probably the question is, does the noun teacher in text like Acts 13:1 mean that’s just another synonym of the same office? It probably is in view of Ephesians 4:11, which says, “He appointed some pastors and teachers . . .”

What’s the biblical support or warrant for saying that there should be such a thing as vocational pastors or elders if they all have the same task?

Here’s Ross Anderson, who’s a medical doctor, and here’s Irv who’s a retired teacher and here’s Dan Elder who is a flight attendant for Northwest. I could just go right around here and say, “Now, why do you hire somebody like me and pay me full-time when we’re all really doing the same thing?” The easiest biblical answer to that is 1 Timothy 5:17, where it says the elder is worthy of double honor who rules well, especially those who labor in logō kai didaskalia (“preaching and preaching”). That’s especially true. Some among the elders rise to the surface of being called by God and affirmed by the church as devoting their whole life to this. Whereas others are tentmaker-type elders, you might say. At least that’s my understanding of why some come to do it full-time. It becomes a more full-time job the larger the church gets.

I’ll tell you how I think. I think that at any time any one of these “lay elders” as we call them could stop working and become full-time here if the church called them to do that. They wouldn’t have to go back to seminary either. They would just prove over the years that there’s a competency, a gift, a special thing that they’re good at. Irv already does that full-time because he’s retired now, at least a lot of time, and some put in more and more and God can do that.

I think we probably should structure the elders so that elders do grow up into that. That’s one of the reasons we have TBI (The Bethlehem Institute). We just want to teach and disciple and lead in such a way at Bethlehem, and then for anybody who wants to come besides, there’s this constant rising of the general tide of biblical understanding so that God can just touch different ones around the church and bring them up into effective ministry in different ways. Who knows when that may become full-time? At any given time, God just may burn into a man’s heart, “I’m tired of punching computers. I just burn into do evangelism full-time,” or, “I burn into do counseling or to do visitation or something, and I just can’t stand spending my time at work anymore.” That’s a good sign of a call.

Are you saying that when a person is a teacher, that means that he’s an overseer or an elder?

The answer is no. We must distinguish here between office and gift. There are a lot of gifted Sunday school teachers, for example, guys who teach little kids and youth and adults, and there are women who are gifted teachers who teach women and children and others. The fact that they fulfill that function does not automatically make them an elder because there are a lot of other things that have to be in place as well.

When you hire pastoral staff, are you intentional about bringing them on as elders?

The answer is sometimes. Here’s an example. We automatically treat ordained pastors as elders because I think you’d have a builtin contradiction. That’s what it means to be ordained. It means to be a pastor/elder/overseer. If you hire somebody then say, “You can’t serve on our council,” you’re breaking your own terminology here. So that’s a given.

However, we hired Sally Michael along with her husband to be a minister for parenting and children’s discipleship. We were very consciously thinking through the terminology here. We chose minister, not pastor, not elder, not overseer because she’s a woman. She’s excited about this. So she has this incredibly important job of nurturing and guiding, helping our children. She has a gift to teach big time and that doesn’t make her an elder automatically. So we don’t call her with a view to the eldership.

Chuck Stedham, our associate for worship and music is not ordained, though he may move towards ordination and move towards the council. He may or may not serve on the council. He would be like anybody else in the church then who they would call onto the council or not. So sometimes it’s yes, and sometimes it’s no.

Do you assume the ordination process has evaluated people adequately?

Yes and no. We are more rigorous in calling staff than anybody. They get grilled longer than even our own elders because we’ve known them a while. A marriage after a few weekends is a dangerous thing.

Elders in the New Testament Church

All the New Testament churches had elders. Let’s verify this as much as we can with some texts. There were elders in the church at Jerusalem. Acts 15:2 says:

And after Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question.

So already, the apostles had seen to it that not only according to Acts 6 had deacons been appointed by the congregation, but somehow or other, elders had come into existence. It didn’t tell us how. It just said they did.So you’ve got elders, you’ve got some people functioning like deacons at least even if they weren’t called deacons, who manage this feeding of the widows, and you’ve got elders who are going to help solve this theological dispute. The church in Jerusalem has elders.

Secondly, there were elders in all the churches that Paul founded. Acts 14:23 says:

And when they had appointed elders for them in every church, with prayer and fasting they committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed.

So Paul on his return from the first missionary journey, I believe that’s when this is happening, appointed elders in all the churches. That’s what we hit on last night in the missionary situation. How in the world do you do this when you’re planting a church among a tribe who is totally pagan, never had any Christian background whatsoever? You go in there, you preach the gospel, learn the language some years, and then you begin to announce the gospel. God moves and 10 people profess faith, they begin to gather to study and the missionary defacto functions for a little while as the teaching elder. Then what? Well, something has to happen to bring them about at the beginning and then those processes we talked about earlier can carry on after that perhaps.

There were elders in Ephesus. Acts 20:17 says:

Now from Miletus he sent to Ephesus and called the elders of the church to come to him.

What’s so remarkable about some of these verses is that there’s no great to-do about observing that there are elders here. This is just assumed. You read a verse like this and you say, “Paul is just assuming there are elders in all the churches.” It’s a given. Elders are in all the churches of Crete, this island of Crete. Titus 1:5 says:

This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you—

There’s this broad sense that it doesn’t matter what culture you come from. You’ve got a Crete culture, you’ve got an Ephesian culture, you got a Roman culture, you’ve got an Antioch culture, and you’ve got a Jerusalem culture. Culture is a non-issue here. There have to be elders or something corresponding to that role.

Elders Assumed in the Early Church

There are also elders in all the churches of the dispersion of the Roman Empire. James 1:1 says:

James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the twelve tribes in the Dispersion: Greetings.

Now, I just put James 1:1 one up there and then we’re going to jump to chapter five to show to whom this letter is written. It’s written like a shotgun approach to all the either Christians scattered like Jews or Jewish Christians. There’s a disagreement about how to interpret that verse, but it’s very broad, all over the dispersion. Now, James 5:14 says:

Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church . . .

It doesn’t say, “And if there happened to be elders in your church, make sure you use them.” It’s an assumption. He writes this broad letter all over the world and he says, “Now when you get sick, call the elders,” and he didn’t expect anybody to be reading this letter and say, “What are they?” which is what would happen in many Baptist churches today. People would say, “We don’t have elders, so how are we going to obey this verse?” and they don’t obey this verse. Many don’t.

We do a lot of this. We keep oil in our prayer room. We keep oil in the offices. We meet with people. Just to show you practically in a big church like this where there are a lot of sick people, we do try to piggyback on services when elders are here already so they don’t have to come here or go elsewhere if they don’t have to. So after a service, somebody will call and say, “My child is going in for surgery, so-and-so. It’s really serious. Would you please anoint my child with oil and pray over her?” We’ll say, “How about 12:15 p.m. on Sunday?” and we’ll just send out the word to the elders, “Come if you can,” and two, three, four, five, six, or seven elders show up in the prayer room down there. The oil is there.

How do you anoint? What does anoint mean? Why do the anoint? The answers are very varied. I’m not sure why, but we do it, and when I do it, I basically pour a little bit on my hand and rub it on the forehead here, or I put it on the head. I haven’t gotten the nerve to just pour the whole bottle on anybody’s head yet, although I had one person who wanted that. He wouldn’t mind me telling you this. I went to visit Patty. She died at 38 years old of cancer. We anointed Patty with oil several times and prayed over her a hundred times, and it was God’s time for some reason. We didn’t understand. She left her four kids behind. But we went out there one time. She was in her living room in her bed near death. He said, “Just pour the whole bottle on her.” We did. It was small. She hardly had any hair anyway. She had no pretenses to keep up anymore. He said, “Maybe it just means pour it all out.”

Elders Must Shepherd the Flock

Lastly, there are elders in all the churches in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia. I get that from 1 Peter 1:1, which says:

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia . . .

It’s all those people in what’s now Turkey, the near east there. Then he gets to chapter five and he says:

So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed: shepherd the flock of God . . .

There’s no question if there are elders among them. The assumption is by James, by Peter, by Paul from Jerusalem to Rome and everywhere in between that every church has elders. It’s a given. There’s not a church in the New Testament without multiple elders. One of the brothers here was pointing out to me that Believers Chapel down in Dallas, doesn’t think church structure is very ambiguous in the New Testament, but that it’s pretty clear and they’re pretty firm in what they teach about it, and you can see why on something like this.

Are there any questions about anything like that? If you’re leading a church right now or if you’re a layperson, you should patiently teach these things until your people are ready to put in place appropriate structures. Any questions?

It’s surprising you don’t mention just the carryover from Judaism, growing out of the whole context of elders.

The observation is that there were elders in the Old Testament. I just read about Numbers. There were 70 elders, for example. There were groups of elders who helped Moses. The concept of elders is not the creation of the early church. It was there already. What’s interesting though is that quite apart from cultural differences — as you might expect it then to be in Jerusalem where you got a Jewish church — all these churches in Cappadocia and Asia and Bithynia and all the churches in Rome and then probably in Spain, it seems like this is something we’re taking with us right across the cultures here. I don’t think you have to call them that, though why not since the New Testament does.

When I talk about elders around Baptist circles, frequently people respond with, “That means the old men in the congregation.” What do you say to distinguish or to clarify office versus old men?

The word can mean both. In fact, there’s one place in Timothy where it says, “Tell the younger men how to treat the older men as fathers” (1 Timothy 5:1), something like that, and it’s the same word. How do you then distinguish? Well, I suspect that in Paul’s mind, there is a maturity factor that you shouldn’t overlook. They should be older, but then the question becomes, what does that mean, and what if your church is all young?

Here’s a possible answer to the first one. I just read that the priesthood serves from age 30 to 50 and then he must retire and become one who then teaches and equips the others. See, the cutoff is age 50 and it starts at 30. So it may be that if you wanted a round number, 30 might be when a person enters into the elder half of his life. Keep in mind also, life expectancy in the first century. What would it be? Maybe upper 40s? I don’t know. It depends on the culture probably. It might be 50.

Keep in mind this too. In America, we have institutionalized adolescents so that it lasts until you’re about 22. Well, in that culture, at 12 or 13, you enter into manhood through some fairly significant processes of passage, you begin to work as an apprentice with your father or something, and you get married when you’re 16, 17, or 18 years old and you’re having children by the time you’re 22, 23, or 24, and you are a seasoned man in your mid 20s probably. To wait until 30 would mean stretching it. These men are saying, “I’m not going to live much beyond 30. I’m already feeling worn and old,” and yet here in America, we drag out growing up horribly. I don’t know what to do about it. It’s just a mess the way we bring children up into adulthood in this country, it seems to me. That’s another factor to take into consideration.

However, it looks to me like in 1 Timothy, elders and deacons, the word is taking on an official not just age meaning. So I’d want to be careful saying it has to be an old person. That’s the best I can do. I don’t have any lines to draw for you. We don’t have any here at Bethlehem. We don’t have anything written in our constitution that they can’t be under 30 or 25. Who would be our youngest elder? Anybody got an idea? Are you the youngest, Dan? How old are you? He is 37 and is probably our youngest elder. I would not be opposed to calling somebody younger than Dan.

People are coming and saying that anybody who’s older in the church is what the term is referring to when it says “elder.” What would you say to that?

That won’t work in 1 Timothy 3. It says, “Let the elders be above reproach,” and be this, this, and this. It’s because they’re going to fulfill an office and they need to be tested to enter into this office. I don’t think that would be too hard to answer.

Let’s say there is a culture that is polygamous or there’s no literacy and they can’t read and teach. Do you educate up to a point? Could you address that?

This is not your question but part of the answer is do you then put in place missionary structures temporarily that are maybe not ideal to bring them along, and do you compromise the principle on polygamy?

I don’t think I want to say the last word on that. I would not stand in judgment on missionaries at this point who went either way on that issue, frankly, who said, “If you’re willing not to take any more, keep the two that you have, be a faithful and loving husband to them, recognize it’s not God’s ideal, teach your children not to do it this way, and help us lead this church because there aren’t any other kind but this, then after a generation or two, polygamy falls away.” If a missionary said that’s the way we’re going to do it, I wouldn’t say, “Oh, you’re disobeying,” because there’s several reasons for that. One is that it seemed like God did that in the Old Testament.

Does Paul refer in saying “one woman man” to polygamy or to divorce and remarriage? I don’t think he can refer to both.

I’m wondering if he can’t. We’re going to get there. We’re going to talk about qualifications.