Presbyterian Church Government (Q&A with Marion Lovett & Christopher Brenyo)

Hi, I'm Chad Lewis. I'm the Digital Content Supervisor at Ascension Presbyterian Church, and I am here at the CBC Presbytery and Family Camp. And I am sitting here with two pastors who are present for this presbytery for a little Q &A.

So why don't you all introduce yourselves to our viewers, starting with you.

Sure. I'm Miriam Lovett. I'm a pastor of Heritage Church in Centerville, Tennessee.

And I'm Christopher Breno from Ascension Presbyterian in Longwood, Florida.

What Is a Presbytery?

Great. So, like I said, we are at the CBC Presbytery. So the first question I have for you all, just if you can explain for the people who don't know, what is a presbytery? What is the goal of a presbytery?

And just give us some examples of some of the things that are done.

Well, a presbytery is how we would see a form of government where there is an interdependence upon different congregations. We believe that there is one Lord, one faith, one Baptist, one church. And yet one church consists of lots of congregations.

And we don't believe there is an independency of these congregations, but an interdependency. And so we rely upon each other. There is also part of our government. So we kind of take the Acts 15 as part of a paradigm where you see the individual congregations coming together for a general council.

And they're meeting together as elders there to seek the mind of Christ for the will of His church. And there, as they deliberated and prayed together, the Spirit of God showed them the direction for the church.

And then it says they took the decrees back to the congregations. And it was that which the churches are coming together in a larger body. So it's a larger body of the church that is represented there.

And I would just add for clarification, it's not a more formalized hierarchy. It's not a bishopric. You have the elders making up the members of the presbytery. And so there's a moderator who is selected to officiate, to preside over the proceedings.

But the elders come as equals with shared responsibility. So there's a local eldership, and that eldership is translated to the presbytery level where they work together and make decisions. So it's not a top-down hierarchy, and it goes away from the idea of an autonomous local CEO model type church as well.

Yeah, and even in Acts 15, you've got James who is basically presiding, if you will, over that meeting. But yet you've got apostles, Peter and Paul, that are part of the deliberation on the floor. So it's really a group of men that are the elders and pastors of the churches and the leaders of the churches.

But all of them are as all elected equality and parity among themselves at that level.

Presbyterian Government Compared With Congregational and Episcopal Models

So along those same lines, I was wondering if you could give a brief explanation of how the presbytery form of government is distinct from other forms of church government, like, say, that practiced by Baptists or Methodists or another denomination like that.

The majority of church government in American evangelicalism is most likely a congregational government, meaning that the church itself—now, it may be elderly-governed on a local level, but the church itself could be governed by the congregation.

Some of the other churches might be independent churches, that they may be governed by some elders at the local level, but they're still independent, they're not interconnected to other churches. And again, we don't see that, I don't think, in the Bible, between the connection between Antioch and the Jerusalem church and the other Gentile church back to the Jewish church.

I believe there's an interdependency there. So that would be more of an independent or congregational form of government, or a quasi-form of elderly-governed church, but still independent. And then, of course, on the other end of the spectrum, you've got the Episcopal form of government, which would be a hierarchical form of government, where you have different levels of even elders and bishops and a cardinal college and this sort of thing.

So forms of government that would be represented there would be, of course, the Roman Catholic church, but also the Anglican church, Church of England, Episcopal church, United Methodist church. Those would be forms of Episcopal types of government.

Accountability, Apostolic Example, and Letters of Commendation

I think that's great. I want to build on something you said earlier on, 1 Peter 5. I think it's amazing that Peter refers to himself as an apostle.

I am a fellow elder.

He identifies himself with those elders serving in the churches. So if Christ is the head of the church, everybody's subordinate in leadership to him. And I think the Presbyterian model rightly has that balance, and that's a dangerous word to use, but there is a local authority with the session.

But if your session goes crazy, you can't get away with that. If you have an autonomous church, the session in the church can go apostate. In this system, there are some safeguards against apostasy allowed in false doctrine because of accountability of the presbytery.

If the presbytery gets wind of you preaching false doctrine, they would intervene and support the congregation. So the Presbyterian system has a greater level of accountability, I think.

If that were not true, here you have Paul. And if you think about Paul being really out of the church of Antioch, Peter was still very much in Jerusalem, and remember how even an elder from another church had to withstand another elder, if you will, for the sake of the gospel.

And fortunately, Paul had the boldness of Christ and Peter the humility to be able to make those adjustments for the sake of the gospel.

And also, maybe a practical consideration, Paul's commendation of individual saints, what we do now, the letters of membership, that presupposes a relationship between the churches. When you get a letter of commendation from your elder, that would be held up as being valid by another elder.

So it speaks to almost a pre-existing relationship between the churches. And this independent model doesn't really work in that regard.

What Makes the CPC Distinct From Other Presbyterian Churches

Alright, well, just to kind of mile this home, I mentioned in the introduction that this is the CPC Presbytery. CPC obviously stands for the Covenant Presbyterian Church, which is a Presbyterian combination.

Would you mind explaining briefly how the CPC is different from other Presbyterian churches, such as the PCA or the OPC? And if you could kind of tie that into, if someone were looking at joining a Presbyterian church, what does the CPC have to offer?

Or what is distinct about the CPC that might draw someone to the CPC as opposed to a PCA or an OPC church?

Well, first of all, I'd like to say that we have a very high regard for other brothers in the PCA, for instance, or the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. These are fine people, we consider them brothers in Christ of a high, high sort, and a very familial bond with our brother of Orthodoxy.

The CPC was started for what we felt to be a need for a very familial and pastoral presbytery. One in which is not just a Presbyterian form of government with courts primarily in view, but one where we are not independent, but there is a fraternal, familial brotherhood of pastors.

And that really is how our Presbyterian Alley has been founded, but also how it's been deliberately built from its inception. And so when I have challenges at my local church, or even our session does, we have brothers that we can go out and solicit their counsel and advice.

When we have an alien church, we can go and help the alien church. We really look at this as a familial aspect of really the covenant itself being lived out within the body of the church. So perhaps maybe a distinctive that we would have that maybe the other denominations do not have, theologically, we have an openness that would allow for covenant communion, where the other, what I would call more traditional, Presbyterian denominations do not.

It is particularly an exception of the Westminster Confession of Faith, which is a very strong document of which is one of our substandards under the Bible, of course. And that's where we agree with the PCA.

We agree with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church on having a confession and being a confessional church. But we have seen, and because the Bible is ultimately our authority, that there is a strong biblical argument for covenant communion.

And not all of the people in PCA, I mean CPC, would hold that particular perspective. But we do think there should be charity on these things. Because the sacraments themselves are that which demarcate out the people of God from the world but unto themselves, we want to preserve the sacraments and the essence of those things as being a unifying essence in the body of Christ, not an area of division.

So we hold a charitable position for those who would desire to practice covenant communion versus a creative communion position, which would be more of a traditional. So I would say that would be one of the main points of theological difference.

And on the practical aspect, a little bit more of a familial Presbytery in the way that it's formed.

I would add to that that I think one of the dominant eschatological positions now in Presbyterianism is Amillennialism. And we are unashamedly post-millennial, but people are not excluded if they are on that grounds.

So there is a level of Catholicity that's distinctive of our denomination. Something like family integration would go a different, more thoughtful about that maybe than some of those other denominations.

I also really like, and one of the things I was most attracted to, was holding to the original Westminster Confession. And I know our American Presbyterian brethren view the Philadelphia as a better document.

I like the original, 1647. So for me that's not a bad thing, a disadvantage. We do have to acknowledge we are viewed as being a little bit peculiar among other Presbyterians. It's a brilliantly unfair charge.

So hopefully we'll gain some ground as the years go on and see us in practice and how we preach and how we live and how we conduct our business. And I realize that we are very much in a continuing confessional tradition of Reformational Presbyterianism.

All right, well thank you to both of you gentlemen for taking some time to answer some questions. And thank you viewers for tuning in. Hope this was helpful and beneficial to you. It seems like we probably had some audio disturbances in the background, so I do apologize for that.

Yeah, thank you both of you again.

Pleasure.