In Steve Lemke’s exhaustive offering that has been circulating in the blogosphere lately, I found something quite interesting and something I have issues with. He rejects, as does the BF&M 2000 the office of elders. He states:
Another common divergence from traditional Baptist distinctives concerns the appropriate offices of the church. According to the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, the two “scriptural offices� of a New Testament church are pastor and deacon. Many young ministers, sometimes driven by anecdotal horror stories about deacons, have followed pied Pipers from other denominations to add another office of elder and/or delete the office of deacon. However, I believe that you and I do not have the right to arbitrarily change the church offices delineated in Scripture. Elders are synonymous in Scripture with pastors or bishops, not another office. If young pastors want to force a Presbyterian form of church government on a church, they should have the integrity before they are called as pastor to speak honestly and openly with the church regarding their disagreement with article VI of the Baptist Faith and Message and their intention to lead the church to have a Presbyterian church governance.
I happen to pastor a church that has elders, and until our deacon resigned, deacons. I didn’t form it that way, it started that way as a church plant. I as the pastor am an elder. There is another elder who is a Senior level manager at a very large consulting firm. I don’t make decisions and he doesn’t make decisions. We as elders make the decisions. He is a pastor of the church. He is not the Senior Pastor, but a pastor nonetheless. We handle the administrative issues of the church and seek to empower the members to do ministry.
Our deacons handle things like benevolence and are very service oriented, not decision-makers. Unfortunately, in the typical polity of a baptist church, the deacons are the decision makers. This was not their role, especially in the beginning, and thus appears to demonstrate that those churches are operating in an unbiblical manner. So if I were to pastor a church with deacons who needed to decide everything am I being Biblical?
In Baptist polity, we are congregational, meaning we should vote on everything. But if you take a trip through scripture, you find very little about voting. From what I have seen, the only 2 votes taken in the Bible kept the Isrealites out of the Promised Land the first time and resulted in the crucifixion of Jesus. Are we unbiblical in our polity then because we vote? Maybe we could write a paper on “Voting in the Church, a Baptist Perspective”. I’d love to see how that would turn out!
The issue isn’t names but functions. Pastors/Elders/Overseers, from what I can discern and how it is worked out practically in our church, are the decision-makers, the main teachers when the church comes together for corporate worship, and the leaders of the church. The deacons have been set aside as helpers, doing things like serving tables and benevolence. I would like to think those within the SBC who are moving towards an elder model are using it functionally as we do, not trying to create a heirarchial, presbyterian model of church governance.
Heck, we’re even considering going from elders to a management team. Is there a difference? In name yes, in function, no! Doesn’t scripture even use different words for the same function? Hmmm…Hardline name vs. function.
That’s just my view…
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Another Issue with Lemke’s paper…
August 13th, 2005 at 4:58 pm
I enjoyed reading your thoughts and wanted to share mine. I believe that there is no group that has done greater damage to the Southern Baptist church than the deacon. Church splits — especially in the South — are primarily rooted in power-hungry deacons and committees. For the most part, deacons have become a “board”, rather than servants like Stephen in the Bible. Stephen was “a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit”, ready to die for his faith proclaiming Jesus Christ, but who also served at the table of widows. However, in my growing up years and in 25 years of ministry, nearly every deacon I have ever met wanted to be in control of the finances, decision-making and just run things in the church. I have rarely seen Stephen’s reflection.
My current church doesn’t have any deacons or elders at the moment. And yet we have more leadership among our men than I have ever seen in a church. We are growing, winning souls to Christ and it’s the most united SBC church I’ve ever been a part of. Although we have no deacons, we have a church full of men who are passionate servants that assist our pastor in every way. They are humble and kind and are there to serve our people. They would rather “be” servants for Jesus (a true deacon like Stephen), than to have a title that might turn them into a bully or modern day Pharisee.
It’s more important that we understand the Bible and the Lord’s true requirements, than anything else. “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” (James 1:27) If assigning “elders” would help the SBC to start functioning more as a benevolent and serving church, than I pray that in the future we’ll see more elders than deacons.