Other than the role of the ordinances, the main ecclesiological disputes throughout the history of Christianity have occurred over matters of the church's organization. In particular three areas have drawn much of the disagreement: membership, government, and discipline. The third area is so intertwined with the first two that in times past a written work that dealt with all three topics might simply be called a "discipline." Someone must determine who is in and who is out of earthly communities (if corrective discipline is to be practiced); and that necessarily involves coming to conclusions about who has that right and responsibility, what processes determine inclusion in and exclusion from the community, and what the requirements of being "in" are.
Baptist Practice
Given that the New Testament restricts baptism to believers, Baptists have concluded that church membership is restricted to individuals who have made a credible profession of faith. The profession of faith should include submitting to believer's baptism and making oneself accountable to a particular local congregation with whom the professing believer regularly communes. These conclusions led both European Anabaptists in the early sixteenth century and various English separatists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to separate themselves from the established churches. They instead espoused a "gathered" congregation, which was a revolutionary idea. Not everyone born in a certain geographic area, they said, should be baptized and confirmed in church membership. Rather, congregations should be composed of the faithful who gather together voluntarily upon their own profession of faith, desiring to unite with others in the same area and form a Christian congregation.
Covenants and Their Use
In connection with these new voluntary gatherings, church covenants began to be used. Christians had certainly made pledges to one another before the sixteenth century, but the situation brought about by the Protestant Reformation created a fresh need for such pledges.1 If the boundaries of a parish could no longer define who should be included in a congregation's membership, what could? For many Christians the answer became subscription to a church covenant. Charles Deweese defined a church covenant as "a series of written pledges based on the Bible which church members voluntarily make to God and to one another regarding their basic moral and spiritual commitments and the practice of their faith."2 Sixteenth-century Protestants, particularly the continental Anabaptists, the Scottish Reformers, and the English separatists and Congregationalists, began using church covenants. Even the 1527 Schleitheim Confession of the Anabaptists contains an element of covenanting.3
By the seventeenth century, church covenants continued in use not only among Independent congregations in England and America but also among Baptists who adopted their usage, especially Particular Baptists. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, church covenants, often accompanied by a statement of faith, acted as the most basic document of a Baptist congregation. As recently as the late nineteenth century, Baptist congregations commonly gathered several days before celebrating communion in order to prepare for the Lord's Supper by reaffirming their covenant together. Over the last century, however, church covenants have had little role in the life of most Baptist congregations. Expectations of members (whether expressed in covenants, or by the practice of church discipline) seem out of character in an age in which congregations vie with one another for members.4
Confessions and Their Use
If a church covenant represents the agenda (things to be done) of a local congregation, statements of faith or confessions represent their credenda (things to be believed). From the earliest times Christians have practiced summarizing the content of their faith. Peter made the first Christian declaration of faith when he said, "You are the Christ" (Mark 8:29). Paul wrote to the Corinthian Christians,
What I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. (1 Cor 15:3–5)
In the early church simple formularies like the Apostles' Creed were developed for dealing with baptismal candidates. And Christians were shepherded away from heretical teachings with more complex and careful statements like the Christological definitions of the Nicene Creed (AD 325/381) and the Definition of Faith at Chalcedon (451).
The Protestant Reformation spawned numerous confessions: the Augsburg Confession (Lutheran), the Thirty-nine Articles (Church of England), the Belgic Confession (Reformed), the Westminster Confession of Faith (Presbyterian), and many more. Baptists also produced confessions of faith. In fact, Baptists produced more than any other group because of their decentralized, congregational polity. In 1611, for example, Thomas Helwys, one of the first Baptists in England, led a number of Christians to write a confession of faith. From the seventeenth century on, it has been common for Baptists to summarize the content of their faith in a confession, both for making their beliefs clear to outsiders and for having an explicit common ground of unity for the members of their own congregation.5 Confessions of faith have played a vital role in the history of Baptist congregations.6 As J. L. Reynolds concluded, "The use of a confession of faith, so far from disparaging the authority of the Bible, as a standard, really exalts it."7
A second aspect of the church's life that has developed over its history has been its polity or organization. Every group must determine how it will be governed. Churches, likewise, must have procedures for determining who is a member and who is not and who is the final earthly judicatory under God to give leadership, settle controversies, and so forth. To these questions several different answers have been given.
Bishops
One of the earliest answers to the question of who should govern was "the bishop." As demonstrated earlier, the word "bishop" (episkopos) in the New Testament is used interchangeably with the words for elder and pastor. The sayings in the New Testament which underscore the authority of church leaders (e.g., Heb 13:7,17; 1 Pet 5:2) point to the pastor as the one who possesses responsibility and authority in the church. By the second century the pastors of leading cities and towns had accrued increased authority, sometimes including over churches in nearby, newly evangelized areas.8 From the second through the fourth centuries, the diocese (taken from the Latin word for a district in Roman civil administration) developed as an ecclesiastical area with a single bishop as its head. Though their duties and responsibilities vary, bishops in this sense are recognized by most churches, including the Eastern Orthodox churches, the Roman Catholic Church, Lutheran churches, Anglican churches, and Methodist churches. The Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches regard this office as divinely established.
The Lutheran, Anglican, and Methodist churches, on the other hand, simply recognize the office as useful and expedient. In the last two centuries, many Episcopalian churches have democratized their structures, even submitting bishops to decisions made by representative bodies of clergy and laity. At the same time collections of congregations in many Pentecostal and charismatic circles began to recognize extracongregational authority for some bishops. Whole "apostolic networks" have grown up around the ministries of particular individuals.
The Pope
The Roman Catholic Church is distinguished from other Christian communions by its submission to and dependence on the bishop of Rome, the pope. While pope (papas) was a common way to address certain bishops in the early church, it was increasingly restricted to the bishop of Rome between the sixth and the eighth centuries, particularly in the West. Rome, the former capital of the Roman Empire, was regarded as the central and principal bishopric. The Eastern and Western churches broke communion in 1054 over the Western church's (and especially Gregory VII's) insistence that the bishop of Rome be recognized as the supreme head of the universal church. The West maintained (and maintains) that Christ declared Peter the first among equals and the chief of the apostles upon Peter's confession (Matt 16:16–19). Peter then became the first bishop of Rome, and those who succeed him inherit his authority as well. Thus the Roman Catholic Church recognizes the pope as the vicar of Christ, the head of the church on earth, with the authority to ratify and so define tradition.
Presbyterianism
With the advent of the Protestant Reformation, fresh interest was shown in the Bible's teaching on the structure of the church. The New Testament evidence for the plurality of elders (cited above) was rediscovered. And groups of ministers (called consistories) were put forward as appropriate replacements for bishops in the Swiss cantons that were reforming in the early- and mid-sixteenth century. Following the work of Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich and John Calvin in Geneva, others began to organize according to a Presbyterian system. Reformed congregations sprung up in the Netherlands, Scotland, Hungary, Germany, Poland, and France. In Scotland, John Knox took on the challenge of reforming the established church of an entire nation along the lines of this system he felt to be biblical. The nationwide General Assembly became the final arbiter recognized in the Church of Scotland. Thomas Cartwright at Cambridge began teaching presbyterianism in 1570 in his lectures on the book of Acts.
Though presbyterianism was a strong force for reforming the established church in England throughout the seventeenth century, it never became the polity of the Church of England. Presbyterian structures came to North America with the European settlers from Scotland and the Netherlands, where they have flourished. They have also flourished around the world, from Korea to Africa. Most Presbyterian bodies are connectional. In the United States the (national) general assembly of any Presbyterian body usually functions as the final arbiter in ecclesiastical matters, with regional synods and/or presbyteries ruling beneath them and with sessions (boards of elders) of a local congregation below them.9 Some independent churches are presbyterian in the sense that they are ruled by a board of elders, but they have no court of appeal outside of that congregation's own elders. Presbyterians generally teach that the principles of their organization, not the particulars, are taught in Scripture.10
Congregationalism's Development
At the time of the Reformation, churches, which were gathered not by a ruler or magistrate but by the shared convictions of individual Christians, began to organize, recognizing themselves as their own final earthly authority in religious matters.
Early in the Reformation, Martin Luther strongly advocated recognizing the congregation's responsibility to determine who would preach God's Word to them regularly. Reasoning from a wide variety of Scriptures—such as John 10:4–8 about the sheep's knowledge; warning the sheep about false teachers, as if they could do something about them in Matt 7:15; and the pattern of electing deacons in Acts 6:1–6—Luther concluded that, as he entitled one tract in 1523, A Christian Assembly or Congregation Has the Right and Power to Judge All Teaching and to Call, Appoint, and Dismiss Teachers, Established and Proven by Scripture.11
In England advocates of a congregational polity arose in the 1580s. Robert Browne's A Treatise of Reformation Without Tarrying for Any (1582) and Henry Barrow's A True Description out of the Word of God of the Visible Church (1589) laid out a doctrine of polity which was not reliant on structures above the local congregation. In the 1630s, as many Christians began to regard the structures of the Church of England as incorrigible, congregationalism found new and prominent advocates.
John Cotton, John Owen, and Thomas Goodwin advocated "the congregational way." In 1658, the Savoy Declaration (an adaptation of the Westminster Confession) laid out congregational principles of church government.12 By the time of the American Revolution, two out of every five Christians in the American colonies were in some kind of congregational church, whether Congregationalist or Baptist. Today many independent churches are congregational in structure. Baptist churches are also congregational. Such congregational churches have often joined together voluntarily in local associations and national unions or conventions.
The Rights and Responsibilities of Congregations
Advocates of congregationalism understand that the Bible teaches the local congregation is ultimately responsible for its discipline and doctrine. Disputes between members (Matt 18:15–17), as well as matters of doctrine (Gal 1:8; 2 Tim 4:3), church discipline (1 Corinthians 5), and membership (2 Cor 2:6–8) are all recognized as congregational matters. No other authority may obtrude itself into the position of giving final correction to the congregation or overruling them on such matters. Nor may the congregation delegate this authority to an elder or bishop or any other structure, thereby deferring their own accountability before God for doctrine or discipline.
Historical data on the life of the church immediately after the New Testament period is only intermittent and partial. The church was, after all, a small and sometimes illegal group. Written sources multiply greatly after the Christian church was legalized throughout the empire under Constantine. For the 1200 years between Constantine and the Protestant Reformation, church discipline, whether by individual excommunication or interdict (withholding the sacraments from the population of a political entity), was often used more to protect the church's corporate interests against the claims of the state than to reclaim Christians from sin and protect the gospel's witness.
When the leaders of the Reformation began to recover a more biblical understanding of preaching and administrating the sacraments as the two marks of a true church, the recovery of church discipline as a consequent mark followed. Implied in the right administration of the sacraments was the correct practice of church discipline. After all, if marking out the church from the world is one function of the sacraments, then discipline becomes the mechanism for enforcing that mandate. The right discipline of the church became so significant that it began to be presented as a third mark of a true church.13
The twenty-ninth article of the Belgic Confession (1561) stated:
The marks by which the true Church is known are these: If the pure doctrine of the gospel is preached therein; if she maintains the pure administration of the sacraments as instituted by Christ; if church discipline is exercised in punishing of sin; in short, if all things are managed according to the pure Word of God, all things contrary thereto rejected, and Jesus Christ acknowledged as the only Head of the Church.14
In our own day Edmund Clowney has summarized these marks as "true preaching of the Word; proper observance of the sacraments; and faithful exercise of church discipline."15
While some Anabaptist groups like the Mennonites practiced banning, or social exclusion, this was exceptional. The most well-known example of church discipline in American history—the scarlet "A" sewed on Hester Prynne's clothes—was a product of novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne's historical imagination and not an accurate record of either a historical event or of the general practice of church discipline in colonial New England. In the vast majority of cases, whether in Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist, or Methodist churches, congregational exclusion meant barring the sinner from communion and, ultimately, membership until repentance occurred.
Baptists, being committed to regenerate membership in the visible church, were vigorous practitioners of church discipline. Greg Wills's research shows that in Georgia, pre-Civil War "southern Baptists excommunicated nearly 2 percent of their membership every year," and yet at the same time the membership in Baptist churches grew at twice the rate of the general population.16 Though fruitful and beneficial to the gospel, the work of confronting and disciplining was never easy. Basil Manly Jr. expressed his own "profound grief" over one case of discipline in the church he pastored.17
So why did this practice end? Wills convincingly argued that discipline among Baptists
declined partly because it became more burdensome in larger churches. Young Baptists refused in increasing numbers to submit to discipline for dancing, and the churches shrank from excluding them. Urban churches, pressed by the need for large buildings and the desire for refined music and preaching, subordinated church discipline to the task of keeping the church solvent. . . . They lost the resolve to purge their churches of straying members. No one publicly advocated the demise of discipline. No Baptist leader arose to call for an end to congregational censures. No theologians argued that discipline was unsound in principle or practice. . . . It simply faded away, as if Baptists had grown weary of holding one another accountable.18
And what was the result? John Dagg put it provocatively: "When discipline leaves a church, Christ goes with it."19
By the twentieth century the absence of church discipline was generally assumed and only occasionally observed as a problem.20 In 1944 Greek scholar H. E. Dana observed:
The abuse of discipline is reprehensible and destructive, but not more than the abandonment of discipline. Two generations ago the churches were applying discipline in a vindictive and arbitrary fashion which justly brought it into disrepute; today the pendulum has swung to the other extreme—discipline is almost wholly neglected. It is time for a new generation of pastors to restore this important function of the church to its rightful significance and place in church life.21
It is questionable whether the generation of pastors in the 1940s heeded Dana's call. However, as the surrounding culture has become more overtly immoral, twenty-first-century churches show some signs of recovering practices that promote the purity of the church, including the practice of corrective church discipline.
Through all the changes of the centuries, Christians can be confident that the survival of the church is not ultimately based on human faithfulness. In both the parable of the growing seed, in which Christ taught that, whether the sower sleeps or gets up, "the seed sprouts and grows" (Mark 4:27), and in Christ's promise that "the gates of Hades will not overcome [the church]" (Matt 16:18), Christ has given a sure pledge of his church's success. In everything from the church's obedience to its life and organization, the span of church history is a demonstration of Christ's faithfulness to his promises.
1 Writing in AD 112, Pliny referred to Christians making certain moral pledges to one another. Such covenants were also practiced by the followers of Jan Hus. See Charles W. Deweese, Baptist Church Covenants (Nashville: Broadman, 1990), 19–23.
2 Deweese, Baptist Church Covenants, viii.
3 See Daniel L. Akin, "An Expositional Analysis of the Schleitheim Confession," CTR 2, no. 2 (Spring 1988): 345–70.
4 Deweese suggested a number of factors which have led to the decline in the use of the church covenant among Baptists in America (Baptist Church Covenants, 88–91).
5 Standard collections of Baptist confessions of faith have been assembled by W. J. McGlothlin, Baptist Confessions of Faith (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1911); and William L. Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1959). For a defense of the use of confessions among Baptists, see Reynolds, Church Polity, 334–42.
6 E.g., the Second London Confession (1689), the New Hampshire Confession (1833), and the Baptist Faith and Message (1925, 1963, 2000).
7 Reynolds, Church Polity, 340.
8 A good example of this would be the authority that Ignatius had as a bishop. He advocated that this authority legitimately belonged to the bishop.
9 A fine, concise explanation of Presbyterian government is Sean Michael Lucas, What Is Church Government? (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2009).
10 For an exception to their general posture, see Robert Reymond, "The Presbytery-Led Church: Presbyterian Church Government," in Chad Brand and R. Stanton Norman, eds., Perspectives on Church Government: Five Views of Church Polity (Nashville: B&H, 2004), 87–138.
11 Luther's Works, vol. 39, trans. Eric W. and Ruth C. Gritsch (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970), 301–14.
12 In the section on "The Institution of Churches" appended to the Declaration of Faith, the Savoy divines declared: "IV. To each of these Churches thus gathered, according unto his minde declared in his Word, he hath given all that Power and Authority, which is any way needful for their carrying on that Order in Worship and Discipline, which he hath instituted for them to observe with Commands and Rules, for the due and right exerting and executing of that Power. V. These particular Churches thus appointed by the Authority of Christ, and intrusted with power from him for the ends before expressed, are each of them as unto those ends, the seat of that Power which he is pleased to communicate to his Saints of Subjects in this world, so that as such they receive it immediately from himself. VI. Besides these particular Churches, there is not instituted by Christ any Church more extensive or Catholique entrusted with power for the administration of his Ordinances, or the execution of any authority in his name" (A. G. Matthews, ed., The Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order 1658 [London: Independent Press, 1959], 121–22). Would such an understanding contradict those "more extensive" organizations—like central authority in a multisite church—in the same way it intended to contradict Episcopalian and Presbyterian claims to exercise the authority of Christ outside of and over local congregations? For a careful, detailed study of debates around this time about the keys of authority that Christ committed to his church, see Hunter Powell, "The Dissenting Brethren and the Power of the Keys, 1640–1644" (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation; Cambridge University, 2011). Powell concluded that the most significant seventeenth-century defense of congregationalism was John Cotton's 1644 work, The Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. (For a modern edition of Cotton's Keys, see Larzer Ziff, ed., John Cotton on the Churches of New England [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968] 71–164). For a modern distillation and analysis of Cotton's Keys, see Powell, "Dissenting Brethren," chaps. 4–5. For a Congregationalist critique of Samuel Rutherford's Scottish Presbyterian polity, see Thomas Hooker, A Survey of the Summe of Church-Discipline (1648). Perhaps the most comprehensive explanation and defense of congregationalism of this period is Thomas Goodwin, The Right Order and Government of the Churches of Christ (1696).
13 For an example of a modern popular treatment, see D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Church and the Last Things, vol. 3, Great Doctrines of the Bible (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998), 13–18.
14 Cf. the Scotch Confession (1560), Article 18: "The trew preaching of the Worde of God . . . the right administration of the sacraments of Christ Jesus . . . Ecclesiastical discipline uprightlie ministered."
15 Clowney, Church, 101. In this book Clowney has a good summary of the marks of the church considered biblically, historically, and in context of current questions of church versus parachurch (see pp. 99–115).
16 Greg Wills, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority and Church Discipline in the Baptist South 1785–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 22.
17 Ibid., 119.
18 Ibid., 9. Cf. "Church discipline presupposed a stark dichotomy between the norms of society and the kingdom of God. The more evangelicals purified the society, the less they felt the urgency of a discipline that separated the church from the world" (Wills, Democratic Religion, 10). "Activism became the crowning virtue of Baptist piety in the twentieth century" (Wills, Democratic Religion, 133). On documenting the decline, see Stephen Haines, "Southern Baptist Church Discipline, 1880–1939," Baptist History and Heritage, vol. XX, no. 2 (April 1985): 14–27.
19 John L. Dagg, A Treatise on Church Order (Charleston, SC: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1858), 274.
20 E.g., Josef Nordenhaug, "Baptists and Regenerate Church Membership," R&E, vol. LX, no. 2 (Spring 1963): 135–48; and James Leo Garrett Jr., Baptist Church Discipline (Nashville: Broadman, 1962).
21 H. E. Dana, Manual of Ecclesiology (Kansas City, KS: Central Seminary Press, 1944), 244.