What is church government?

Question 09048.

Church government is the least glamorous subject in theology and one of the most consequential. It decides who chooses your minister, who holds the money, who can discipline a member, and what happens when a congregation and its leadership disagree. Nobody joins a church because of its constitution, and a great many people leave because of it.

Three main systems have divided Christendom for centuries, and each can point to New Testament material. I hold one of them with conviction, but I want to describe all three fairly before I say why, because the differences between believers here are real and none of the positions is silly.

What Church Government Is Trying to Settle

Every congregation, however informal, answers three questions whether or not it writes them down. Who has authority to teach and lead? How is that authority conferred and removed? And where does final decision-making rest when there is disagreement?

Systems of church government are simply the different answers Christians have given to those three questions. The episcopal answer locates authority in bishops standing in succession from the apostles. The presbyterian answer locates it in a graded series of elder courts. The congregational answer locates it in the gathered membership of each local assembly.

Before comparing them, notice something the New Testament does not do. It never gives us a constitution. There is no chapter setting out procedure, no template for a church meeting, no instruction about quorums. What we have instead is a set of offices, some qualifications, and a number of narrative examples. Any system of church government is therefore a synthesis, and honesty requires admitting that at the start.

The Episcopal System

Episcopal church government takes its name from episkopos, overseer. Authority rests with bishops who ordain clergy, oversee dioceses and, in the Roman and Orthodox forms, stand in an unbroken succession from the apostles. Anglicans, Methodists in their original form, Roman Catholics and the Orthodox all use versions of it.

The case for it is partly biblical and largely historical. James appears to hold a leading position in Jerusalem. Timothy and Titus are left in Ephesus and Crete with authority to appoint elders, which looks like a supervisory role over local congregations. And by the early second century Ignatius of Antioch writes as though a single bishop over each city church were already universal.

My difficulty is that Timothy and Titus were apostolic delegates on temporary assignment, not permanent office-holders, and that the New Testament uses overseer and elder interchangeably. Paul calls for the elders of the Ephesian church in Acts 20:17 and then tells those same men that the Spirit has made them overseers in verse 28. If bishop and elder were distinct offices, that sentence could not have been written.

The Presbyterian System

Presbyterian church government derives from presbyteros, elder. Each congregation is governed by a session of elders, teaching and ruling, and those sessions send representatives upward to presbytery, synod and general assembly. Authority is shared and appealable, and no single man rules.

It has real strengths. Every congregation is governed by a plurality rather than by one personality, which is a genuine safeguard, and there is a route of appeal when a local church goes wrong. Acts 15 is the standard proof text, with the church at Antioch referring a dispute to a wider gathering, and it is a reasonable use of the passage.

My reservation is about the higher courts. I can find elders in every congregation in the New Testament. I cannot find a standing body with jurisdiction over multiple congregations, and Acts 15 reads to me as a consultation involving living apostles rather than the founding of a permanent structure. On the Acts 15 question, the NET Bible notes are a useful check on both readings.

The Congregational System

Congregational church government places final authority in the gathered membership of each autonomous local church. Officers are chosen by the congregation, discipline is exercised by the congregation, and no outside body may overrule it. Baptists, Congregationalists, Brethren and most independent evangelical churches work this way.

The biblical material here is more direct than people expect. The Jerusalem church selects the seven (Acts 6:3-5). The Corinthian congregation is told to act when assembled to remove an offender (1 Corinthians 5:4). The whole church is the final court in Matthew 18:17, where an unrepentant brother is brought before the church itself, not before a bishop or a presbytery.

The weakness is obvious and I will not hide it. A congregation can be foolish, factional or swayed by a strong voice, and there is no external appeal when it goes wrong. Congregational church government requires a membership that reads, prays and thinks, and it fails badly where that is absent.

The Offices the New Testament Actually Names

Underneath the three systems there is a good deal of agreement about offices. The New Testament names two: elders, also called overseers and shepherds, and deacons. Philippians is addressed to the saints at Philippi with the overseers and deacons, which is the whole officer list of a New Testament congregation in a single verse.

Elders carry spiritual oversight, teaching and shepherding. The qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 are overwhelmingly about character rather than competence, which is worth noticing in an age that recruits for skills. Deacons, from diakonos, servant, handle practical and material matters so that the elders can devote themselves to prayer and the word.

Plurality is the New Testament pattern. Elders is almost always plural in reference to a single congregation. That is a check on any one man accumulating authority, and it is one of the few structural principles I would defend as clearly biblical rather than inferred.

Where I Stand and Why

My own position is elder-led congregational government, which differs a little from the pure congregationalism common in British Baptist churches. Spiritual oversight, teaching and direction belong to the eldership. Practical and administrative matters belong to the deacons. Final authority in the church rests with the gathered membership.

That means the leadership brings matters to a church meeting with recommendations and emphases attached, and the congregation is not obliged to agree. When the decision goes the other way, we abide by it. I have been on the losing side of votes in my own church and have had to live with the outcome, which is exactly as it should be. That is genuine accountability rather than a procedural courtesy.

I do not believe in pastoral authority that places itself above the congregation. The pastor carries weight by virtue of his office and his labour in the word, not by virtue of personal authority accumulated over the years, and the moment those two get confused a church is in trouble.

Where the Systems Fail in Practice

Each system fails in a characteristic way, and knowing your own system’s failure mode is more useful than knowing the other systems’ weaknesses. Episcopal church government fails by protecting the institution when a leader goes wrong, because the machinery that would investigate is the machinery that appointed him.

Presbyterian government fails by burying decisions in committee until nobody can be held responsible for anything, and by allowing a congregation to be governed by men who do not know it. Congregational government fails through factionalism, through the loudest voice carrying the room, and through a business meeting mentality that treats the church as a members’ club with a budget.

None of this proves any system wrong. It does suggest that structure alone never saved a church. The best constitution in the world will not survive leaders without character or a membership without Scripture, and the worst one can be survived by a congregation that has both.

Holding It as a Secondary Matter

I hold my position with conviction and I teach it clearly. I also hold it as a secondary doctrine, which means I gladly fellowship with Presbyterian and Anglican brethren who read the evidence differently and I do not doubt their salvation or their churches.

The reason is straightforward. The New Testament gives us offices and qualifications with real precision and gives us procedure with almost none. Where God has been that reticent, dogmatism is out of place. If church government had been as important as justification, we would have been given a chapter on it.

What Scripture is emphatic about is the character of leaders, the plurality of elders, the accountability of everybody, and the necessity of order. Get those four right and most systems can be made to work. Get them wrong and none of them can.

Ordination and Recognition

One question cuts across all three systems and is rarely handled well. How does a man come to hold office? Episcopal church government answers through ordination by a bishop standing in succession. Presbyterian government answers through examination and ordination by the presbytery. Congregational government answers through the call and recognition of the local body, usually with visiting ministers invited to share in the service.

What the New Testament shows is a combination that resists all three tidy answers. Elders are appointed by Paul and Barnabas in Acts 14:23, appointed by Titus in Crete, and yet chosen by the congregation in the case of the seven in Acts 6. The Spirit is said to make men overseers, the church is said to recognise them, and apostolic delegates are said to appoint them. Any system of church government that can only account for one of those strands has flattened the evidence.

My own practice is to hold ordination as recognition rather than as conferral. The congregation is acknowledging what God has already done in calling and gifting a man, and the laying on of hands in 1 Timothy 4:14 is a public identification with him rather than the transmission of a power. That view has consequences: a minister carries no indelible character that survives his removal from office, and a church that has to remove a man is not undoing a sacrament. My article on what ordination is works through the question in more detail.

Church Government and Money

Nothing exposes a system of church government faster than money, and the New Testament seems to know it. When Paul organised the collection for Jerusalem he went out of his way to involve multiple men chosen by the churches, saying that he took this course so that no one should blame him about this generous gift, and that he aimed at what is honourable not only in the Lord’s sight but in the sight of man.

That is a striking amount of care from a man who could have simply taken the money himself. It sets a standard: financial arrangements in a church should be transparent enough that the honest and the suspicious alike can see them. Where church government leaves one man with sole control of the accounts, whether that man is a bishop, a treasurer or a pastor, the structure has failed regardless of which system it belongs to.

In practice this means published accounts, more than one signature, an independent examiner, and a minister who does not know what individual members give. That last one is worth defending. A pastor who knows the giving figures will find it very difficult to preach without partiality, and the temptation is not hypothetical. James 2 describes exactly what happens when a congregation starts weighing people by their means.

What Members Owe the Structure

Most writing on church government addresses leaders, and the congregation is treated as the object of the arrangement rather than a party to it. That is a mistake. Hebrews 13:17 puts a duty on the members, and 1 Thessalonians 5:12 asks believers to respect those who labour among them and are over them in the Lord.

In a congregational setting that duty is concrete. Attend the church meeting rather than complaining afterwards about what was decided. Read the papers. Ask your question in the room where it can be answered. Vote according to conscience before God rather than according to who spoke last. And when the decision goes against you, submit to it cheerfully, which is the hardest of these and the one that actually keeps a church together.

There is a version of church government that exists only on paper because the members will not carry their half of it, and the result is always the same: a small group of willing people end up deciding everything, and then get blamed for it. If you belong to a congregation that governs itself, your absence is not neutrality. It is a decision to let somebody else decide.

Church Government and the Size of a Congregation

One factor shapes church government in practice more than any theological argument, and it is rarely discussed. Size. A congregation of thirty and a congregation of three hundred face different problems, and a structure that suits one will strain badly in the other.

In a small church the difficulty is finding enough qualified men, and the honest outcome is often that two or three people carry everything. In a large church the difficulty is the opposite: decisions multiply, distance grows between leaders and members, and the members’ meeting becomes unwieldy enough that real influence quietly migrates to whoever prepares the papers. Neither problem is solved by a better constitution, and both are made worse by pretending they do not exist. My article on what Scripture says about church size takes the question further.

What I would say is that church government should be honest about the church it actually serves. A small congregation should say plainly that its deacons are functioning in both capacities rather than pretending to a structure it cannot staff. A large one should build genuine ways for ordinary members to be heard rather than assuming the annual meeting does it. Structures exist to serve a real body of people, and a structure that describes a congregation nobody has ever seen is doing no work at all. The same applies to growth. A church government arrangement that worked comfortably at forty will need revisiting at a hundred and forty, and the time to think about that is before the strain shows rather than after a difficult members’ meeting has exposed it. Reviewing the constitution is not a failure of nerve. It is ordinary stewardship of something meant to serve the congregation rather than to be defended for its own sake.

So, now what?

Find out how your own church is actually governed, and I mean actually, not what the trust deed says. Who decides? Who appoints? What happens if the members and the leadership disagree? A surprising number of believers have no idea, and then are shocked when a crisis reveals it.

Then pray for the men who carry it. Church government looks like paperwork from the pew and feels like weight from the inside, and the elders of your congregation will give an account for your soul. When did you last thank one of them, or ask how you could take something off their plate?

Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account.

Hebrews 13:17 (ESV)

For Further Study

Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology gives a compact statement of the congregational position within a dispensational framework, and Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology treats the offices at greater length. Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology contains the fairest side-by-side comparison of the three systems I know of, setting out each case in the terms its own advocates would use. For the presbyterian argument, Louis Berkhof’s Systematic Theology remains the standard statement, and for the Anglican case Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is the classic source. J. Dwight Pentecost’s pastoral writings are useful on the practical relationship between elders and congregation.