Biblical Eldership - Lesson 1 — John Piper

The following message is by Pastor John Piper. More information from Desiring God is available at www .DesiringGod .org.

This is the TBI, the Bethlehem Institute seminar on biblical eldership as part of the larger fulfillment of a course here called Issues in Spiritual Leadership that has two tracks to it. A track one is for lay folks who simply want a certificate that they took it and we're really encouraging our men at Bethlehem especially to do this if they're dreaming or moving towards eldership some day or some decade.

Then there's a track two for the few guys here that are taking this for seminary credit. I want to begin by reading a verse from Acts chapter 20. You all know that in Acts 20 Paul assembles the elders from Miletus or from Ephesus at Miletus and gives them one of these moving final sermons of his and says in verse 28 something that I'd like to say and then pray with you for tonight.

The Elders’ Responsibility to Care for Christ’s Blood-Bought Church

It says, Take heed to yourselves and to all the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to care for the church of God which he obtained with the blood of his own son or other versions with his own blood.

So the church belongs to God. He obtained the church at the price of his own blood and therefore the role of the elders to take heed to all the flock is made to have extraordinary significance because of how precious the church is to God.

So let's pray. Father in heaven we swallow hard at the word that to obtain the church was so costly that it required the death of your son. The sins of your people were enormous and we have been purchased at great price and we are not our own.

Now we belong to Christ and we belong to you Father. And you have ordained as we will see that there be shepherds, overseers, pastors, elders to care for this great purchase. And Lord it is a weighty and awesome thing to be called by the living Christ to shepherd the church of God.

And so I pray that there would be an appropriate earnestness about our work tonight and tomorrow and that there would be a sense of glory about this calling and not burden. I pray that pastors here and elders here and those aspiring and those who are here to just learn what the kind of leadership is appointed in the New Testament that we all, oh God, would understand and then live out the kinds of relationships in the church that would magnify Jesus Christ in the world.

Lord these are glorious things we're about here and I pray that you would help us. Give us energy Lord. It's been a long day for many. And I pray that there would be in this room a kind of supernatural enabling that would give us ears to hear and a heart to feel, minds to understand.

And I ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. I think the first thing I'd like to do is just point you to some books. The text is this one by Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership. There are some of these in the bookstore and I would send you around the corner there to get them if you want to buy them.

And then some that are not text, but that I have consulted over the years and it helped me. Hezekiah Harvey, The Church. This is an old 19th century Baptist. Hezekiah Harvey. He also wrote one on the pastor.

Hezekiah Harvey, His Qualifications and Duties. You all know this one. The Reformed Pastor by Richard Baxter. Can't get much more discouraging than that book because it's so good and the stakes are so high and the pattern that he sets for us is just so awesome and the story of his own life is so inimitable.

He's one of those Spurgeon-like people that when you read them you just feel like quitting but that's alright. The Ruling Elder by Samuel Miller, Presbyterian background from the 19th century. Actually 18th and 19th.

And then the first book I read I think after I came to Bethlehem on the Christian ministry, Charles Bridges. And I thought it was great, still think it's great. And then this one which I've only dipped into, The Elder's Handbook by Berghoff de Koster from the CRC, Christian Reformed Church of America.

So there's just some more books besides Strauch that you might be interested in consulting as you study these things. And I'm assuming that a lot of you are in process about this. If you're coming from other churches it may be that you're in flux as to how your church will be governed.

And I think I will talk to you about a little history of this at Bethlehem. Before I jump into this though, just let me see if there's any questions about mechanics or logistics. Anything like that? Okay.

If there is, be sure to grab me. Just some introductory words about the history of Bethlehem here and my tenure here. I grew up as a Southern Baptist in Greenville, South Carolina and never heard of elders.

And had I heard about them, I'm sure I would have thought they were Presbyterian. And then went to seminary and I skipped all the polity courses because I thought I was going to be a teacher, which I was for about six years.

And I'm glad I did that, frankly, because these things can be learned on the job probably just as effectively as in seminary and there you need to do exegesis in theology and church history, which you won't do if you don't do it there probably.

You have to do this. Your church has to be run. And so you will get this done or you'll lose your job. You will figure out a way to lead the church, speaking of you, the pastor. Came here in 1980 and inherited a system of government which was deacon governed.

There was a council of deacons it was called and there were 24 of them and 11 standing committees. So every year there was a ballot and it was such that there had to be two choices for every office. So we needed about 200 people on this ballot.

Now the church in those days when I first came had about 300 people in the church. Now this is the sort of thing you get into if you lock yourself into a rigid, structured constitution with many boards, many committees and many offices.

It's a dreadful mistake. One of the mistakes is that you've got to have losers. You've got to have half losers every time you have an election. And if the church doesn't have the size to warrant that many candidates, it is a prescription for carnal leadership.

And there are churches being governed by fleshly people with no spiritual life all over the country because of constitutions that mandate certain levels of leadership and there aren't the people to fill them and so it's a popularity contest.

The least unfit get called and that's not a way to call anybody into spiritual leadership at any level. The committees or your more ruling type organizations. So I didn't touch this at all for five years or so.

I simply when I got to a text in my preaching would talk about the elders. When the deacons were praying and we were talking about what our mission was I would simply point out, you know, I think this group of guys and they were men and they were mandated to be men interestingly enough and we'll talk a little bit about that later.

I said, you know, you are a hybrid. You are doing duties that belong to elders verses 1 -7 of 1 Timothy 3 and you're doing duties that belong to deacons verses 7 -13 of 1 Timothy 3 and so this is a hybrid board and they began to adapt to that, that we're a hybrid.

That's what we are. And then over the years we began to just feel a little bit uneasy with that, that probably there should be a clearer identity of who the governors of this church are. Where is the authority vested and how do they relate to others and what about all these committees?

Is that a good thing? I forget what the year was, but sometime in the mid or late 80's I preached a series of sermons on Acts 20 on the eldership basically and thus lay before the whole church that we maybe should do some study here and then the deacons undertook about four years of work on this and just to make a very long and arduous story short, we installed our first elders June 2, 1992.

So if you're in a church and you inherited a governance structure that you think may not be as biblical as you'd like it, it took me 12 years to see come to pass what I think is at this church now a very biblical structure.

Whether we carry it through as effectively as we should and whether we implement all that's there in place, I'm very pleased with the constitution that now exists. There are no standing committees in this church anymore.

There's only one council of elders. It has a flexible size. Right now there are 18 of us. All of the ordained pastors serve on the council of elders by definition. And there have to be twice as many lay elders as vocational elders we call them.

That's not in the Bible. We just thought that was prudence. And whenever you're doing church government it'll always be a balancing out of what's clear in the Bible, which is a very small amount, and what is seemingly the work of wisdom given the culture and the kind of church that you have and where you are in history.

And so I'm very delighted. In fact, I've always been delighted with the leadership group of this church as a body of men. It has been the sweetest thing. The Lord has treated me with such unbelievable tenderness in these years.

Eighteen and a half years or so now I've been here and I have never had a council of elders that I felt was in an adversarial relation to me or a council of deacons or, which is more amazing, trustees or what we call now financial and property administrators.

There has always been in my eighteen years here a kind of collegiality and camaraderie that is simply amazing given the horror stories that I know happen in other churches. And I think that's partly owing to the Lord's tenderness towards me in knowing what I can and cannot handle probably and owing to probably ten thousand prayers for this church and a hundred and twenty six year history of faithfulness to the word of God.

And then I think there are some other practical means that the Lord has used to preserve that kind of unity that we'll talk to over these next hours. So since 1992 then, we've had a council of elders here and we don't have a body of deacons.

As deacons are needed for various things, they can be chosen. We don't have any standing committees. The elders create whatever bodies seem to be helpful. So they've created a children's committee and they've created a missions committee and they've created a building committee and they've created a Desiring God board and they've created a TVI board and they've created financial and property administrators and they can abolish these tomorrow if they want to.

So the elders govern the church by creating all these things and they are totally flexible. It feels so good now to have the flexibility and the ability to respond to ministry. This is one of the principles we're going to get to in a minute.

I shouldn't jump ahead here but I'll say it here is that I think when you have 11 standing committees, the mindset that you create in the church is that ministry consists in serving on a board or a committee.

That is deadly in a church. That is not ministry. Those boards are yeoman who have to bear the gutsy stuff that nobody should want to do to free people to do the ministry. Ministry ought not to be thought of as board work.

Ministry is in people's homes. Ministry is at the hospitals. Ministry is on the streets. Ministry is where needs are. Not making decisions at a board level. That should be streamlined as fast as you can get it streamlined in order to maximize and mobilize people for mission and ministry all over the city and the neighborhoods and the nations.

And yet, all over the country, churches think ministry. Oh, I'd serve on that committee or I'll serve on that board or I'll serve on that. So everybody's sitting around going to board meetings all week long and what kind of ministry is that?

That doesn't get anybody saved and it doesn't heal marriages and it doesn't bring kids up in the Lord. So, enough on our history. You can ask questions as we go along. I think I'll save the hymn for later.

The Church’s Importance, Preciousness, and Purpose

Okay. The outline that you have there, you can turn to that on the second page, is what I'm going to try to follow now. I'm not sure how many of these we can get through tonight, but I was thinking maybe three of them.

And I'm going to reverse the order of the first two. I sent this off by email today and then realized, oops, I got it wrong. So I'm going to start with the importance, preciousness and purpose of the church because I just want to begin by making sure we feel the weightiness of what we're about here and who we're serving.

You can't talk about biblical eldership without laying the foundation of the church. What is the church? Why is the church? What's the goal of the church? How precious is the church? So I just want to highlight some of the names of the church and some of the ways the New Testament sees it so that you can feel the wonder of it.

The bride of Christ, of course. Husbands, love your wives as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the Word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she would be holy and blameless.

So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it just as Christ also loves and cherishes the church which is His body because she married Him and He married her.

So one picture that elders should have in their minds as they go about their work is I am serving the Bride of Christ. I am laboring to remove spots and wrinkles. I am laboring to enhance this glory, this splendor here.

And every time it seems to be small and low and nitty gritty, pause and close your eyes and pray and say, Lord, remind me that this body of people I am serving is more important than the U .S. Navy or the Pentagon or the Senate or the entire house.

This is the Bride of Christ. The body of Christ universal and the body of Christ local. Colossians 1, He is the head of the body, the church. Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake and in my flesh I do share on behalf of His body which is the church, filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions.

So the body of Christ is the church universal. It's His own body and it's the church local as well. 1 Corinthians 12 The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you, nor again can the head say to the feet, I have no need of you.

On the contrary, all the parts of the body, which seem to be weaker, are indispensable. Then verse 27, Now you are the body of Christ. Now, what's remarkable here in 1 Corinthians is that the head is not Christ here.

The image is different. The head cannot say to the feet, I have no need of you. This is a member of the church. This is part of the analogy. So here, he's thinking of the body differently than it was thought of when he wrote Colossians.

And here, he's thinking of the local church as the local expression of that universal body and he's thinking of every member as a part of that body relating properly so that none says, I don't need you.

The church is the body of Christ, which is probably why Paul was spoken to by the risen Lord on the Damascus Road with the words, Why do you persecute me? Why do you persecute me when you put my people in jail?

You persecute me. The household and dwelling of God. Ephesians 2. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens but you are fellow citizens with the saints and are God's household, God's house, having been built on the foundation of the apostle and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole building being fitted together is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God.

Now that is amazing. Is that not amazing? This household and this temple are being built, the people of God are being built into a temple or a dwelling of God. There is a way in which God inhabits the church that is different from the way He inhabits a soul and the way He inhabits nature.

His omnipresence is focused and active in a different way in the church than anywhere else. That is why the expectations for the gathered church in worship and business can be so different like when you are assembled, my spirit is with you, hand him over to Satan.

Something different seems to be going on there than just somebody off on their own claiming to be filled with the Spirit and acting on behalf of God. A dwelling of God is what the elders serve. And then the pillar and bulwark of the truth or the pillar in support of the truth.

1 Timothy 3 .15 I write so that you will know how one ought to conduct himself in the household of God. That could be written as a banner over this meeting tonight and tomorrow. I teach hopefully biblically so that you will know how one ought to conduct himself in the household of God which is the church of the living God, the pillar and support of the truth.

That is an amazing calling. That is an amazing calling. There is no other institution in society with this mission. It isn't the university. It's not Christian colleges and seminaries. It's the church.

The church is the pillar and support of the truth. That means if we do our job well, the truth stands. And if we do our job poorly, it can crumble. Generations will suffer if we don't fulfill that mission.

Is that church there the corporate church or the local church? The universal or local? The question is, is the church here the corporate universal or local? I think the answer would be it's the universal church coming to expression in local expressions.

In other words, if you say universal church and leave it out there unspecified in the air, it has no concrete place where anything happens. You get saints in heaven, you get saints yet unborn, you get saints scattered all over the world in various peoples, so where and how is truth being upheld?

It's when it becomes concrete in local expressions I think that this becomes a functional reality. But I wouldn't want to make a hard and fast distinction here. So that's a high calling and it's especially relevant for elders.

Why? Because we're going to see that elders are charged and they're the only people that are charged in the New Testament church with teaching or Titus 1 .9 with being those who correct according to right doctrine.

They're the guardians of right doctrine. The elders are. Nobody else is called to do that in the church except the elders according to Titus 1 .9 and elsewhere. Now why? Why the church? What's the goal of the church?

Because if you say, what's the goal of the eldership? The goal of the eldership would surely be to do something so that the church becomes what it ought to be. And what is that? Here's a few of the things that the New Testament says about the goal of the church.

1 Peter 2 .9 You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.

So there's the goal. So that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. Elders should do their work so as to enable that to happen. Go ahead.

Okay. I think probably then I did overstate the case in saying that the, how did I say it? That the only people, I can't remember what I said now, charged to be guardians of true doctrine are the elders.

And you're pointing out that there are others for sure who are responsible in all of their teaching, like the older women in relation to the younger, to get it right. Okay, thank you. That's very helpful.

That was an overstatement. When we get to those texts that I was referring to, Titus 1 .9 and Apt to Teach in 1 Timothy 3 .2 we'll try to decide now do the elders have a unique role in equipping people like that so that there's kind of a ripple effect or a trickle down effect in the church, but absolutely everybody in the church then who is a small group leader or a Sunday school teacher or an adult Sunday school class leader, if you're not an elder, surely you are responsible to help be a part of the upholding of the truth and being part of that bulwark.

Good. Keep me careful here. When we do our work right, this is going to happen, Lord willing. The church is going to shine and declare and proclaim the excellencies of the one who called the people out of darkness, or to display the manifold wisdom of God to the spiritual powers of heaven.

The Gentiles are fellow heirs and fellow members of the body and fellow partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. To me, the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to preach to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ and to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God who created all things so that...

Here's the goal of the church. So that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places. That's one of the most breathtaking statements about why the church exists that I know of.

Whether this is demons, rulers and authorities principalities and powers or whether it is angels or both, it is big. And that the church God has designed and is guiding and equipping and supplying in the world so that as angels look on and as the devil looks on, the manifold wisdom of God will be seen and praised and known, or at least recognized if he has evil spirits in mind here.

I remember when I first came here, I preached a sermon called the Cosmic Church. In those days we were carrying an ad in the newspaper and I put Cosmic Church in the newspaper and boy did I get scolded for that because it sounded so New Age-y.

I mean, that was almost on the front end of the New Age back in the early 80's. But I said, well, what I mean is this, this. And then I preached the sermon from this text. One last observation of why the church and here you can see how the church as well, namely to show the authority and power of Christ.

Christ’s Authority and the Foundation of the Church

I say to you that you are Peter, Jesus said, and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. I will build my church so when the church flourishes, it's the work of Christ that's flourishing through whatever leadership structures are in place.

With regard to Peter here and the rock, I don't want to go into a lot of detail. Here's my interpretation of that is that Peter represents the apostles and Ephesians 2 .20 says that the church is built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets.

And so in as much as Peter is the spokesman for the apostolic authority and the apostolic authority is spoken through the apostles and then codified in the New Testament, we are on that rock of apostolic authority.

I don't think the rock here refers to Jesus. I think it is a play on this word Petros. Petros and rock. And I think Peter here stands for the apostles. I don't find in the New Testament a warrant either for the monarchical bishop though there may be Episcopals among us who would differ with that or the ongoing papal authority of the Catholic Church.

I was talking to a Catholic Wednesday night about that and sharing texts back and forth to each other. Questions on those few passages just to highlight the importance and the preciousness and the purpose of the church.

Okay. Let's talk about this word church a little bit. Where does it come from? What does it refer to besides the general statements we've seen? What does the word church refer to in the New Testament?

The word church comes from the Anglo-Saxon Circe, which in turn comes from the Greek Kyriakon, which means belonging to the Lord or the Lords like the Lord's Day. This word here, the Lords. We are the Lords.

So one could think of church, this Anglo-Saxon word based on this Greek word, the Lords as the people or the building belonging to the Lord. But, we shouldn't think of it as a building because in the English New Testament, the word church translates the Greek, ekklesia, which never refers to a building, but always to an assembly or a congregation.

The called out ones, ekk, out, and ekklesia, a form of the word kalaokal, and never refers to a building. Therefore, the church is the people who belong to the Lord Jesus. The called out ones would be one way to say it.

One even wonders, should you have the English word church? Is it a helpful word? Well, that's a battle none of us ought to spend any time fighting. It's a given, and the church is the church, and we should just, wherever we are, try to fill it up with as much New Testament meaning as we can.

The New Testament Uses of the Word “Church”

So just let me show you the uses of the actual word church. This is a little bit overlapped from what we've seen, but not much. There's the universal church of all believers, like in Ephesians 1 .22. And he put all things in subjection under his feet and gave him his head over all things for the church.

So there's the word church used for the entire assembly of believers everywhere. Then it's used for all the believers in an area. For example, Acts 9 .31. So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria enjoyed peace, being built up and going in the fear of the Lord, and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit it continued to increase.

So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee. The church. Not just churches, but the church throughout all Judea and Galilee. Then it's used of all the believers in a city. Acts 8 .1. And on that day a great persecution began against the church in Jerusalem.

The church in Jerusalem. Then it's used for the believers gathered in household congregations in the New Testament. 1 Corinthians 16 .19. Aquila and Prisca greet you heartily in the Lord with the church that is in their house.

So, back to Phil's question here. When you read church in the New Testament, you must simply attend to the context to see is there a local expression of it in view, or a district expression of it in view, or area-wide or city-wide or universal-wide expression of the church.

The people of the Lord, the people, the ecclesia, the called out one, the assembly conceived of at these different levels. And I don't... I would be hard put to say that there is an official expression at each of those levels.

Like there should be an official church of Minneapolis. I've related to a lot of guys in this city and some of you may be there who think there should be an eldership of Minneapolis. Who are the elders in the Christian church of Minneapolis?

This is the teaching of Watchman Nee and others. That every city should have a body of Christ. And you could make a case for that in the New Testament. There was a body of Christ in Corinth and a body of Christ in Athens and a body of Christ in Thessalonica.

And then you'd have the elders. But to me, there's not enough to mandate that. Possibly. Maybe there should be some Minneapolis expression like that. Maybe. But I couldn't get dogmatic about that, I don't think.

In fact, what you'll find, I hope anyway, is that on some of these ecclesiastical governance issues, I don't want to be real dogmatic, period. Because some of the things I'm going to be defending as far as structures go are I don't think as ironclad as some other doctrines are.

Which is probably why there is the Episcopal structure and the Presbyterian structure and the Baptistic structure. Those three big structures that we all learn about if we're studying these things in history.

This is a thicker pile. And this is point number three on your outline. Any observation or question you want to raise right there about the use of the word church in the New Testament? Yeah, David. Well, there are about, I think, 200 different names of the church in the New Testament.

So I've left out about 192. I didn't even think in those terms. But the household of God is the Father. But I wasn't trying to think... I've got to make sure I find some names of the church relating to Christ, some relating to the Spirit, and some relating to the Father.

But you certainly could do that. We could do that. Now, let me tell you what you're looking at here. We produced a document in the late 80s through many long months and years of study. And this is an excerpt plus a lot of changes that I made in it today in which we tried to come up with principles that would guide our study.

Principle One: Christ Governs the Church Through the Apostolic Word

Goals that would guide our study as we were thinking through biblical church governance. So there's 11 of these, I believe. 11 of these principles of biblical local church governance. And they provide a backdrop against which we will look more carefully at the eldership.

And so these are very historically significant for me and for us here at Bethlehem. Biblical principles of local church governance. Number one. So I've got a principle and then I've got followed by text to try to support it.

The local church is governed by Christ. Matthew 16, 18, I will build my church. This governance, as well as other text on his headship over the church. This governance was mediated through the authority of the apostles and their close associates.

I'll come back to these texts. Today, Christ still rules through the words of his apostles as they are preserved for us in the inspired writings of the New Testament. Therefore, every effort will be made to conform the structure and procedures and spirit of church governance as closely as possible to New Testament guidelines with a constant eye to promoting the glory of God and the advancement of faith.

Now, before we look at the text, let me just re-say that in my own words and apply it to our church. Christ is the head of Bethlehem Baptist Church, the local expression of the universal body, alongside millions of other local expressions.

He rules over this church, not by some esoteric, magical, secretive words spoken to elders, but through his apostles, who now are all dead. We don't have apostles here. I have good friends who lead denominations who do have apostles.

It's because they define them differently than this. But we don't have that office here. The apostles are the book. There's my Bible. Okay. The New Testament here is the written expression of the Word of Christ and the charter of the church and the rule over the church.

The elders then are responsible to be apt to teach and to correct people with good doctrine by knowing this book and effectively applying it to their people so that Christ mediates his authority and his power and his teaching and his love through his Word and the apostles teaching of it and the elders understanding of it preached and taught through that.

Now, of course, I'm going to talk about these later principles. There's going to be the priesthood of the believers. But I wanted to lay that down first as Christ being the teacher and the leader and the governor of his church.

Matthew 16, 18, I will build my church. Ephesians 2, 19, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets. Now there's all kinds of disagreements as to just what and prophets refers to. Whether there was another office there of prophets or whether they were just charismatic prophets here and there or whether this means apostles and prophets meaning apostles who are prophets, which is the position of Wayne Grudem.

And I'm inclined to think that may well be what it means. But I don't think we need to settle that one tonight either. The apostles and their authority however it was shared by prophets or whether they are the prophets here is the foundation of the church.

Now I mentioned inspired writings. Here's one of the texts I would go to to defend that. 1 Corinthians 2, 12 to 13. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is from God that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God and we impart this, this wisdom, we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit.

So there is one kind of claim in Paul's writings for his own inspiration that he doesn't teach in words taught by human wisdom. And we could add here 2 Peter 3 where Peter says there are some things in Paul that are hard to understand and men twist them to their own destruction as they do the other Scriptures.

So Peter already aligning Paul's writings with Scripture. So Paul's writings being inspired are among the apostolic writings that govern the church. Here are some texts that show the kind of authoritative function the apostles had in the church which they still have through the writings of the New Testament.

He says in 1 Corinthians 7 .17 Only let everyone lead the life which the Lord has assigned to him and in which God has called him this is my rule in all the churches. Or this is my dictate. This is my...