Episode 30: Elders, Deacons, Members (Biblical Distinctives of a Healthy Church Part 3)

To the Ruled Church podcast.

This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas? You see that one in Pechote, Mexico?

Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy. Christ is king.

You can't be Christian without a local church.

You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible-believing church, and spend your life serving Jesus in a local, visible congregation.

Welcome to the Ruled Church podcast.

We've done it, Eddie.

What have we done?

We have reached episode three zero.

Hey, is this as many as we did the first time that we did this podcast? How many did we do the first time?

Yeah, we're close, man. I think we might have done like 34.

Okay, so we're close to doubling ourselves up.

Yeah, and we're full steam ahead.

That's right, man, we're not gonna quit it. 34 podcasts this time.

Welcome to the Ruled Church podcast. I'm Allen Nelson, pastor of Perryville Second Baptist Church. With me is my brother in the faith, co-labor in the ministry, Eddie Ragsdale, First Baptist Marshal.

How's church going, Eddie?

Man, it's really going great. You know, I know that we're gonna talk about something else, but I thought about mentioning this to you. I think both of our churches are in this stage right now where the Lord is just blessing us with many infants.

And if we were Paido Baptists, man, our baptism numbers would be exploding. But I'll tell you what is awesome about it. It is noisy and it is raucous, but it is so amazing to have all of these blessings, these children in our service every week.

And I know that some people would say, well, isn't it a disturbance? And I would say, no, this is what a household's supposed to be like. Yeah, and that's what the household of God is like on the Lord's day meeting.

We'll talk about this. We'll talk about this and we'll talk, let's hold that thought. We'll talk about it. But I do wanna mention, I mentioned one thing. We had a hard thing with our kids. We've got new kids coming and young kids and in between Sunday school and our morning worship Sunday, man, they were just like running laps, you know?

And I had to tell them, you know, and a couple of the kids, a couple of the regular kids, they're like, oh, we can do this. And I got onto them. I'm like, y 'all know you can't be running here. And, you know, I made a couple of them cry cause they're little, you know, they're like three, you know, Gunner's son and then my son and, which he's five.

But anyway, they knew better, but these other kids are running and they're like, all of a sudden they're like, like, whoa, you know? So anyway, you know, I looked at your speaking lineup for the next couple of months and I'm not sure about everybody you got preaching at your church.

Oh yeah, yeah. Well, I've actually only got one guest, guest preacher coming to my church, but that's right. You are gonna be here at the end of March. So that is what, March the 26th.

We're looking forward to it.

Yeah, man, I'm excited. I'm excited to have you here with our folks and just spend a wonderful Lord's day together.

Biblical Leadership: Elders, Pastors, and Deacons

Well, we've been talking about biblical distinctives of a healthy church and our church has gone through what you might call a bit of a reformation. And so we've gone through five of these already in two episodes.

We've gone through biblical sufficiency, biblical holiness, biblical preaching, and then we skipped a few. And last week we did biblical missions and biblical evangelism. And people can look these up on, they're labeled pretty clearly on past episodes.

Today, we're gonna start out with biblical leadership and we will probably won't spend a lot of time here, but let me read this. And then you, just cause we've talked about this before, but it says, we believe local churches are led by qualified godly men who are able to teach.

In the scriptures, these men are referred to as elders, pastors, bishops, overseers. These different titles make up the one office ordinarily referred to as elders or pastors. In the New Testament, each local church had a plurality of elders who are responsible for shepherding God's flock.

As churches are able, they ought to have a plurality of elders as well. These pastors are equal in oversight over God's church, but each is gifted differently. So the main preaching duties will ordinarily fall upon one man, particularly in smaller churches.

We believe the only other office besides pastors in the local church is that of deacons. All church members ought to serve the church, but the office of deacon is particularly designed by God for qualified men to assist elders with the physical needs of the church so as to help free pastors for labor in the ministry of the word and prayer.

Thoughts, comments?

Revealed?

Yeah, you know, a couple of things I would want to mention, you know, a difference between the way we would view it and even our Presbyterian brothers. I'm thankful for them, but you know, they would have a distinction between what they might call ruling elders and teaching elders.

And I would say, if you're not a teaching elder, you're not an elder.

Yeah.

Because all the elders are to be able to teach. Now, I do think, as you said there, that there can be, you could have a brother who is more gifted in the preaching and teaching of the word for the main gathering who does more of that.

I have seen churches that tried to like perfectly divide it out so that, you know, if they had three elders, you know, one every three weeks, you were hearing from one of them so that they each taught exactly the same.

I don't think that a church has to do that, of course. I think that you can have different brothers with different giftings focused in different areas, but they all should be men of equal oversight and authority in the body life of the church.

And the reason I would want to point that out is because I don't think there's any biblical warrant for things like lead pastor or senior pastor or associate pastor or youth pastor, or I think that you can have one of the elders who's working with the youth.

Man, that's great. You can have an elder who, man, he's leading your worship, your singing time, and he's really spending a lot of time planning that part. But I think all of those are just elders pastoring and shepherding the whole flock, not the counseling elder and the preaching elder.

They're just all elders.

Yeah, that's right.

I think that's good, brother. And I think we're in agreement there. I think that Alexander Strzok is pretty helpful. You know, his book on elders is pretty helpful. And I think that it's just, it's okay.

It is okay if you have a few elders, it's okay to say, look, this guy's a better preacher. He's just better.

That's right, yeah.

And that's okay. And maybe he's doing more of your preaching, but the authority aspect is, you know, functionally, it will turn out that you might have an elder that has more influence, as it were, but the oversight, they share oversight responsibility.

And I even would say a church, there's more to be done in the worship, in the Lord's Day meeting than just the preaching of the word. So I look at our service the way that we do it now. And if we had three elders, all three of us could be involved in the Lord's Day meeting the way that we do it now.

Like, it's unfortunate that I'm the only elder as it is, because there's more work to be done than what I could do. And I'm saying, even in our Lord's Day meeting. So I have another brother who opens the service, leads in a prayer, reads a call to worship and all those kinds of things.

An elder could be doing that. Now, I'm thankful. I don't think an elder has to be doing that, but another elder could. You know, we do the Lord's Supper every Sunday at the conclusion of our service. And I would actually prefer that the preaching elder and the one doing Lord's Supper were different.

But right now, just because of where we're at, you know, I'm doing both. But I think it would be healthier for the church if we were able to switch off on those things.

And obviously, we both agree that it's okay for a church to just have one elder. It's not, you know, wrong, but it's not the best. And depending on how, it might just be out of necessity. If you have a church of 10 people, there might only be one qualified man.

But as you get a little bit bigger and as you have qualified men, there should be plurality of elders.

You know?

And I'll just tell you, from where we are as a church, and I will readily confess, this could simply be the inadequacy of the current pastor, but I don't feel like I could shepherd any more people. I don't sometimes feel like I'm shepherding well enough the people that the Lord has brought to us.

I need help. And so I don't know why any, I can't imagine why a pastor wouldn't want other brothers to help with the work of shepherding God's people.

Biblical Leadership in Acts, Titus, and Philippians

Yeah, let me just read a couple of spots. Acts 14, 23, when they had appointed elders for them in every church, elders, plural, church, singular, 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 that's Acts 14, 23. In Titus 1, of course, Paul says, verse five, this is why I left you in Crete, so you might put what remained into order and appointed elders in every town as I directed you. Elders, plural, town, singular, the churches in, you know, a church in each town, of course.

Then in Acts 20, you remember that verse 17, now from Miletus, he sent to Ephesus and called the elders of the church to come to him. And then you have, of course, Philippians 1, and this was

I actually just preached on that on Sunday.

Yeah, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi with the overseers and deacons.

So

Yeah, and that idea of with there is the idea that the elders and deacons are included in this greater body of the saints there in Philippi.

Oh, you mean the elders should be members of the church?

That's right, that's right. Well, and I think this is important because I've known pastors before who almost speak about their church like it's a separate group of people from them, those people at, you know, First Baptist Marshall.

Well, no, no, no, First Baptist Marshall is us. I'm a part of First Baptist Marshall, not like they're just those people over there separated from who I am. No, that's a part of who we are. We're one family of faith.

And so I do think it's important that the elders not see themselves as some outside class, but as a part of that community of faith, that local church.

Yeah, good.

The Role of Deacons as Assistants to the Pastors

All right, what about deacons?

Well, we all know that deacons could be a ruling body over every Baptist church.

They're like the Senate. They're the Senate.

That's right, they're the Senate. Oh, no, I was just telling our church this Sunday because I was dealing with that passage in Philippians chapter one that so often that's what has happened in Baptist churches is that we've created, we've called them deacons, but they basically function like a board of ruling elders like the Presbyterians would have.

And then they hire a preacher to come and, man, you come and you preach to us on Sunday and don't really mess with anything because the deacon board will run everything. And that's not the case here at our church, but I know that that is the case in many Baptist churches, but it is not the case in the Bible.

Grow the church, preacher, as long as it's people that look and act and think like us.

That's right, that's right.

And it doesn't make us uncomfortable. Yeah, it's just, and I'm gonna say this. One of the reasons that has happened is because of bad pastors. Pastors have come into the church. They have stayed a year or two years, three years, and then they've left.

And that's happened and happened and happened. And so you look for these men of stability because you always look at, you know, there's a vacuum of, no power is probably not a great word, but there's a vacuum there, like there's stability.

There has to be stability. So you look to these men, these older men.

Who's gonna be responsible. It's really about responsibility.

Who's gonna take care of us. And so you look to these men as the leaders in the church. And so one problem is with pastors, go and stay, you know. And then another issue is, of course, deacon's misunderstanding.

They really, our friend Jim Ellif wrote a great article is it ccwtoday .org, but he wrote a great article on deacons how essentially they are like the office. You ever watch the office?

Yeah, a little bit.

He's not assistant manager. He's assistant to the manager, okay. That's what deacons, right? I mean, they are assistants to, they're not assistant pastors, but they're really in a large part assistants to the pastors to help with some of these, I don't wanna call them mundane, but physical tasks that would kind of detract the past.

You know, like for example, you're going on a mission trip. Deacons ought to be able to step up and say, hey, look, let me take care of the plane ticket. Let me help take care of the plane tickets and their arrangements and those kinds of things.

Or you're doing an event. Let me help make sure that I get the table set up. You focus on your studies and your prayer or they ought to be people in the church are helping put out fires, you know, not causing them and all sorts of things.

But I do believe, actually, we didn't talk about this before. I believe that deacon is office for men. I know there's some difference in there because of 1 Timothy 3, but I have two that talks about wives, their wives.

I have two responses to that. So some say, well, it can be men or women, two responses. One, I think grammatically, I actually think that we should consider that deacons and elders' wives. I think Paul just kind of interjects that in there.

And then here's another thing, because of what I think deacons do, I think it does not make sense for it to be a woman because they have to work so closely with the pastors that you really don't want that to be a situation where it'd be a man and a woman alone having to work on some task together.

So I think biblically and functionally, it makes sense. Anything else you wanna say about the leadership of the church matters?

Yeah, well, one other thing I would point out just because I just preached from that Philippians passage, it's even some of it is understanding the language that we use. In Philippians 1, verse 1 there, Paul refers to himself and Timothy as doulos, which the ESV translates as servants.

The NAS translates as bond servants. The idea is slaves, right? The idea is slaves. And then it translates the word dikonos as deacon, but really the idea of that word is a servant or a minister,.

But not the kind of minister.

Like we normally think of the minister as the pastor, but it's the person to minister to, like you said, physical needs, administrative needs, these kinds of direct needs of the body so that the pastors can be about the spiritual health and oversight of the church.

Because right there in that passage, what does Paul call the pastors? Overseers. And they're to be overseeing those spiritual needs so that the deacons, they afford that to the pastors by assisting them by taking care of the physical needs, the administrative needs.

I just, it's a wonderful and beautiful way that God has put together the care of his flock.

Yeah.

Well, what about a pastor? Don't pastors need pastors? That's what you have DOMs for though, right?

That's right, yeah.

No, seriously, in Southern Baptist life, this had been talked about, well, pastors need pastors. And so these associational missionaries have been referred to as pastor of pastors, but in the Bible, pastors do have pastors and they're called pastors.

Yeah, the other elders. Well, think about even that pattern. Once again, I know I keep coming back to Philippians 1 .1, but you know any Southern Baptist churches that are adamant that they ought to have a singular deacon?

I don't know of any. I mean, they all have plurality of deacons.

Yep.

But in the same passage where he calls for plurality of deacons, Paul calls for plurality, I can't speak, of overseers, of elders.

Yep.

And I think I got that argument from you, but it's just true. It's just true.

Well, we had to discuss that here, and that was why are we so adamant on plurality of deacons? And one guy told me, he was like, well, because there were seven deacons chosen in. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

I was like, that argument, no. So it's interesting how we hold onto the plurality of deacons but not elders. But in one sense, deacons are easier because for a deacon, you just need godly men, but they don't have to be able to teach.

So in one sense, it might make sense that, okay, there's four more guys qualified to be a deacon. However, I would say this. A lot of times, deacon requirements in the church are terrible. They just gotta be maybe an older guy who's a business owner or something, you know?

Right, or hasn't been divorced. Yeah. A lot of churches, if they find a guy in their church that hadn't been divorced, then he's the closest thing to qualified, so they ordain him.

Yeah, I mean, and this is what we're talking about in our conference too. Let's see, when does this come out? This comes out, oh, this comes out the week of the conference. So what we're talking about in our conference, which when you're listening to this, this will come up Friday.

Tomorrow night will be a round table at Grace Bible Church, and then we'll have the conference Friday and Saturday. But that's one thing we're talking about is the character of the elder, you know? We seem to focus on, you know, we mess up with deacons, but we mess up with elders too.

We seem to focus on the charisma or the communication. I'm trying to think of alliteration here, but not the character. That's right. Well, let's move on to worship. How about that?

That sounds good.

Covenant Membership in the Local Church

Next distinctive, biblical. Oh, actually the next one was membership. Well, let's talk about membership then. Biblical membership. This is what I wrote. We are a Baptist church, which we equate with biblical.

We believe that membership in a local church is a biblical and precious privilege. Membership in the local church is limited to regenerate persons, that is believers who have been baptized as believers by immersion upon a credible profession of faith.

Membership in the local church includes a covenantal commitment to weekly assembly with the body, as well as covenanting to watch over one another in holy love, to discipline one another when necessary, and to contribute financially to the needs and mission of the church.

We believe all church members, both men and women, each having various gifting, must serve the body of Christ for his glory and the advancement of his kingdom. No church will be successful in the eyes of the Lord without both holy men and holy women committed to the cause of Christ.

Thoughts?

I think that your use of the word covenanting is so important, because I think a lot of the idea of meaningful membership has been lost in our churches, because people don't even know what the covenant of their church is.

And if we do not get back to the place where our churches, the members of our churches, know what they are covenanting to, and know what the expectations of responsibility and accountability are in the local church that they're joining.

And when it comes to this, I'm all for individual local churches going to the Bible and constructing a covenant that they believe is biblical. Like, I don't think every church has to have an identical covenant.

But once you've constructed it, once everyone has agreed, this is our covenant as a local church, obey it, obey it. Make it as simple as you want to make it, but obey it. If you're not willing to obey it, you might as well not have the church covenant, because it is the document that you use to really look at what does meaningful life look like in this local church.

Now, we know we want to base it on, everything has to come from scripture, but this covenant gives you a place where you can look and say, you know what? I agreed to love my brothers and sisters this way.

Well, let me make a one quick biblical case if you want to look at Galatians 6 for a covenant. In Galatians 6 starts out, brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.

Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. Now, let me stop there for a second. Not going to make the covenant argument yet, but I'm fixing to.

Let me stop there for a second and say, you can't really obey this without formal church membership. That's right. You can't understand who's really in and who's not, unless you think bear one another's burdens means you have to bear everyone, every Christian's burden around the world today.

There is application there, of course, in a sense, there's some application there, but that is, it's actually much more tangible application than that. He's talking about specifically within the local church, we are to bear one another's burdens and we can't do that if we don't know who each other are, okay?

That's right.

But then when you talk about, okay, but really, covenantal? Okay, well, if you go down to verse 10, Paul says, Galatians 6, 10, so then as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone and especially to those who are of the household of faith.

Now, in the scriptures, this word for household is, it's just a common word for household and it's used a few times. It's used a couple of times just to talk about a physical household. You know, like if, what is that in Timothy, we're talking if a man doesn't take care of his own household, you know, he's worse than an infidel or whatever.

But then it's also used like 1 Timothy 3, 15, the household of God. And I think in Ephesians 2, perhaps, anyway, it's used a few different times. But if you think about the word household in the scriptures, similar to what a household is today, except I would say a little bit more inclusive in the sense that you also talked about like slaves and we're part of the household and all that, you know.

But each one of these ways to get into a household is covenantal. So for example, marriage, that's covenantal. Adoption, that's covenantal. Now, the only thing you might say is like, well, what about having physical offspring?

That's not necessarily covenantal, though I would say two things, I would say that. One, there is an implicit covenantal aspect to that and that this is your child, you're promising to watch over them, to love them, to bring them up the nurture and admission of the Lord.

But then if I can go to a modern analogy, you don't get out of the hospital without signing a bunch of papers, you know, this is your child. And so all the point in that is all these ideas about a household are formal and covenantal.

And it's not by accident that Paul uses this language to talk about the church. And so church membership ought to be formal and it ought to be covenantal.

The Household of Faith and the Necessity of Church Membership

Yeah, and you know, even going back to our discussion of elders and pastors in the church, how are pastors supposed to know, shepherd the flock of God that is among them if they don't know who the sheep are?

If there's no identifiable way to recognize who they have responsibility for before the Lord, how are they supposed to do that? And coming back to this household idea, if you think about it, every home is like a little church where the father is to shepherd his family.

And every church is a collection of Christian households where the elders, the pastors, the overseers are there to shepherd well the household of God. And that's why even in the Lord's instruction about the qualifications for elders, elders are to be men who have their households in order because if they can't shepherd their own families, how are they going to care for the household of God?

How are they going to care for the bride of Christ? You know, I think it was Votie Bauckham who said something to the effect that, you know, that today churches look at resumes and they don't consider the home.

In the New Testament, the home was the resume.

Yeah.

You know, and so we want to have this idea that if we really see the church as, you know, often, you know, we live in a day when people like to use the word family. You know, it's our church family. Well, that's great because it is.

This is God's household. And in such a way, we ought to have elders over the family because we are all on a part of one family. And that is going to mean covenant ties. It's going to mean closer ties than just I decided to show up this week.

Yeah.

Let me say this too. I've been in conversations before with folks just having a hard time finding a solid church. And I get that. But let me say this, as you read the scriptures, look at a church like Corinth.

I would not consider that church that I necessarily would be my first choice to go to, right?

Lots of But if you lived in Corinth, you'd go there because that's all there was.

That's right, that's right. But what some people end up doing though is they go to all these churches, they can't find anything that's what they want. And then they're just like, well, I don't got to go to church.

And I would say, man, you don't understand church membership. I wrote this the other day. Let me read it to you. The expectation of the Christian life in the New Testament, okay? A few points. Submitted to qualified elders, okay?

Hebrews 13, 17, for example. Informal covenantal membership with the local church, what we just read. Gathering weekly with the local church on the Lord's day, Hebrews 10, 25, example. Watching over and being watched over by fellow church members, Hebrews 3, 12, and 13.

Faithfully giving to the mission of the local church, 1 Corinthians 16, one and two. Having fellow church members in your home, 1 Peter 4, nine through 11. And I wrote, there are other things to mention and as important as individual prayer and Bible reading are, should be daily in the life of the Christian.

And as crucial as family devotions are, should be a regular part of our lives. You cannot have New Testament Christianity apart from the above. There is no New Testament Christianity outside the local church.

And so biblical church membership is ought to be our priority. And so if you're listening to this, you're not really plugged up in church or whatever, you've got to fix that. And if you can't find a church around you

You might have to move.

You may have to move. Now, I think that there are some bad things that happen in some churches, but it doesn't necessarily make them not a church. Right now, there's some things that happen and I'm like, okay, that's not a church.

But if there are things that's going on like, okay, that's not my preference. I even think this is bad. I don't think it's good, but it's still a church. It's still a pastor. We're observing the ordinances where the word is preached.

You may have to just take a deep breath and just go, but you can't just stay home.

And another possibility, if you find yourself in a place where there legitimately are no churches, no legitimate churches, well, there are probably other believers there. I mean, unless you are so rural that there are no other people there, maybe you're in the outskirts of rural Montana and you are the only people that live within 50 miles.

But if you are in an area with any kind of population and there are no legitimate churches, well, then maybe you should plant a church even.

Yeah.

Maybe there are other believers who are also looking for a legitimate church and you may need to find those people and you may need to plant a church that's gonna honor the Lord Jesus Christ in that place.

And it may be small, but that doesn't mean that it won't honor the Lord, especially if we're the rural church podcast, that'd be where you may need to plant a rural church for that very purpose.

Amen.

I would just encourage, go through the good channels on that. Don't just say, well, my house is a church now.

Right, no, I'm not saying that.

Yeah, yeah.

City council and all that.

Yeah, seek a church to partner with you to plant your church, elders that can give oversight over that.

I don't know what happened. I thought we were gonna get through more of these, but it's about time to close. Are we gonna try to push through worship or do you wanna save it? What do you think?

Hey, you're the producer, whatever you wanna do, man.

Yeah.

I guess let's save it. I guess if y 'all wanna listen to worship, you're gonna have to do it next time because kinda on Wednesdays, I do a Zoom meeting with these brothers in Mexico and it's good. So I kinda on a time crunch.

So I don't wanna just rush through it, but I was gonna get back to this point and we'll kinda give a preview. One of the things that we believe about worship, I said a whole disthought at the beginning of the episode, is that children ought to be in worship.

That's right.

They learn so much. And listen, I can tell you from experience, these last few weeks, we've had a lot of kids and a lot of crying. Sometimes you've got different levels of maturity with parents too. You got some parents, their kids are very well behaved.

If they get in trouble, they take them outside and talk to them or whatever. But then you have others that their kids are a little bit rowdy. And so you just have to deal with all that, but it's like, it's a beautiful sound.

It's a good thing. But we'll talk about that more next week as we talk about worship. But that's good. I hope it's helpful. We have to get the leadership and the membership right of the church. And here's the thing we've been saying at our church, Christ is worthy.

Wherever you are, Christ is worthy of a healthy church in your community.

That's right.

And it's worth the labor to get these things right.

Be patient.

And it can be hard. Be patient. It's worth it.

Go ahead.

That's what I was gonna say. It's not gonna be easy.

Yeah.

If you have this idea that, well, if it's all the product of the Holy Spirit and the work of God, then it ought to just happen easily. No, it's not gonna be easy. It's gonna be, there's gonna be work.

There's gonna be intentionality. There's gonna be effort. There's going to be really a bearing with one another's burdens. Even as we read there in Galatians chapter six, all, and that's not easy. It is not easy to bear with one another.