An Informal Introduction: The Sufficiency of the Bible for the Local Church
How is the gospel displayed in our lives as we live together with other Christians? What are we supposed to do? What are we supposed to believe? What are we supposed to do together in church? How are we supposed to make decisions? Lots of practical questions are faced by Christians when it comes to life in the local church, and Christians answer them differently—even if they preach the same gospel! How does that happen? What should we think about such differences?
Can you picture what I'm talking about? Suppose you are having a conversation with some Christian friends. And suppose that all of you agree about the gospel, the authority of Scripture, and numerous other theological particulars. But let's say also that they think there are some matters in the church's corporate life that God simply hasn't said anything about in his Word: On what day should we meet? What should we do when we meet? Should we all meet together, or can we have different services, maybe even different styles of services? Can we meet in different buildings, or in different parts of the city, or in different states, and still be one church? Is that OK? Does God care? Who should make decisions in the church? How are they to be made? Should we have members, or is that too exclusive? Most basic of all, how are we to make these decisions?
Over the centuries some Christians have answered such questions simply by reason and prudence. Others have let their experiences determine their answers, whether that's individual experience (an interior impression, a sense of God's leading) or corporate experience (church traditions). Still other churches answer the debatable questions by looking to what the people want, or to what the elders say, or to what the pastor says. For most churches the answers are found through some form of pragmatism—making the decision according to whatever works. The goal for many is to be sensitive to the particular culture that God has placed us in. The questions then become: How can we contextualize our message—to be Jews to the Jews and Gentiles to the Gentiles? Do we try to learn from the business world by adopting its best practices? Should the standards of creativity, innovation, productivity, and efficiency be our guides? What will help us reach the most people? What will best extend our influence?
A church's life, doctrine, worship, and even polity—all these are important issues. And they are so rarely addressed. In this book I hope to introduce the reader to what the Bible says about the nature and purpose of the church—what it is, what it is for, and what it does.
Everything we know about God and his will comes from God's own revelation. We only know the good news of Jesus Christ because God has revealed the truth about himself to us—and he has done that in his Word, the Bible. The truth of Christ is the means God's Spirit uses to reconcile us to himself. New life comes through the Word, just as Jesus prayed: "My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who believe in me through their message" (John 17:20 NIV, used throughout this book). Notice that belief will come through their message.
And that is what happens in the remainder of the New Testament. For instance, Peter preached to Cornelius and his friends. Then, "While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message" (Acts 10:44). Of course, God had told Cornelius to expect just this: Peter "will bring you a message through which you and all your household will be saved" (11:14).
Indeed, this is why Paul said that "faith comes from hearing the message" (Rom 10:17). Again, the preached Word creates life. Yet not only does the preached Word create the Christian life; it sustains and grows it. The Bible is our lifeline, our feast. Paul wrote toward the end of his life to Timothy:
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge: Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction. (2 Tim 3:16–4:2)
This book attempts to provide such careful instruction so that we might understand and recover faithfulness to God's Word on something that is not essential for salvation but that is both important and necessary for obedience—what the local church is to be and to do. The Scriptures teaches us about all of life and doctrine, including how we should assemble for corporate worship and how we are to organize our corporate life together. The Bible certainly doesn't teach us everything. But neither does it teach us nothing. It should be our desire to search out everything that God has revealed about himself and then to joyfully accept it, adopt it, explore it, submit ourselves to it, and enjoy God's blessings in it.
As in every other topic, our regular practice as Christians should be to seek God's will in his Word, either by explicit command or by reasoning from principles in the Word. We want to see that the answer is in the Bible. Here are four introductory questions that will help us find God's will about the church.
What Should Churches Do?
The answer to this question is in the Bible. God made us. He knows what we were made for, and so we must look to his Word for discovering how we should live.
God has always been concerned with how the people called by his name would live. When God called Abram out of paganism (Gen 12:1–3), he called him to believe a promise, and that belief was to affect how Abram was to live. As Abraham's descendants multiplied in Egypt, God instructed his people, his assembly, on how to live. This is what the books of the Law—Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—are all about.
In the New Testament, Jesus promised his disciples that his authority would be with them till the end of the age (Matt 28:18–20). Was this promise and the accompanying instructions just for those initial apostles? Evidently not. They wouldn't be around till the end of the age. This promise and these instructions were also for those who would follow the apostles. They tell Christians and preachers and local churches how to live: we are to go, make disciples, baptize, and teach disciples to obey. God's Word has to do with life.
Paul also established churches and taught them—by his example and his letters—how to live (see Col 4:16). Churches should be marked out by the fruit of God's Spirit (Gal 5:22–23).
By direct command, example, implication, or principles, God's Word tells us everything we need to know about every aspect of following him in life—from dating to marriage, from working to grieving, from evangelizing to eating. What should churches do? The answer is in the Bible.
What Should Churches Believe?
The answer to this question is also in the Bible. God has revealed the truth about himself and about us. Therefore we are dependent on him for the good news and for everything else we need to know about God. In many ways a church is simply a group of people who are living lives of love (John 13:34–35) because they all agree on how they have been loved in Christ. Paul wrote:
Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. . . .
For 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. (1 Cor 15:1–4)
Belief in this message is mandatory, both to be a Christian and to be a church. This is why Paul was so hard on the Galatians when they began to be tempted by other gospels (Gal 1:6–9).
What should we believe? Whether the matter is explicit (as with substitutionary atonement) or implicit (as with the Trinity or church membership), the answer is in the Bible.
How Should Churches Worship?
Having seen how this normally works in the Christian life, we can't be surprised that a third question finds the same answer. The answer to the third question is also in the Bible. In Scripture, God tells us how we should approach him in public worship. We read the Bible, sing the Bible, preach the Bible, pray the Bible, and see the Bible (in baptism and the Lord's Supper).
A church is not simply a group of people who believe the same gospel and live distinctly Spirit-led lives. We are also a group of people who come together regularly in order to worship God, in Jesus' words, "in spirit and in truth" (John 4:24). Jesus' words pertain to all of life, and that certainly includes those times when we assemble together. We are commanded in God's Word not to forsake these regular assemblies (Heb 10:25), so it is no surprise that God should instruct us in his Word what we are to do together.
Though creativity and innovation can play a secondary role, they should not be the principles which govern worship in the local church. Think about it: Christians are required to gather as churches. Therefore, when a church decides to implement a nonbiblical practice, it effectively requires Christians to approach God through that nonbiblical practice. The problem, of course, is that human beings have always proven to be unreliable guides for inventing ways to approach God. In the Bible human inventions were again and again counted as idolatrous. Consider the golden calf incident (Exodus 32). The Israelites sincerely desired to worship the God who had delivered them from Egypt, but then they went horribly wrong in their approach to God. Their disobedience, idolatry, and adultery showed itself in a grotesque distortion in their public worship. Throughout the Old Testament we find that how God's people approach God in worship is a matter of utmost seriousness—a matter about which God himself is not indifferent.1 God has told us in his Word everything we need to know about what's necessary to approach him together.
One of the things that separated the false gods from the true God in the Old Testament is that the false gods were mute while the true God spoke. People can creatively devise how to approach a mute God, but they must listen to a speaking God. Jesus quoted Isaiah when he was correcting the distortions that the traditions of the Pharisees brought to the worship of God: "These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men" (Mark 7:6–7; see Isa 29:13).
Depravity makes us unreliable guides. We need God's self-revelation, or we are lost. Everything my own church does in our time together on Sunday morning we intend to do in obedience to God's Word.
How should we worship? The answer is in the Bible.
How Should Churches Live Together?
All this brings us to this final question, which gets at the matter of a church's polity or organization. Is there a diversity of church structures in the New Testament? Did the earliest churches start charismatic, as seemingly attested in Acts and 1 and 2 Corinthians, but end up presbyterian, as some say is the case in 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus? Or does the New Testament bear witness to a consistent form of local church government?
God created the church, which means he has all authority in the church. He tells us what a church is and how it is to function. How should the church be organized? Again, the answer is in the Bible.
We need to know what a church is intended to be before we can evaluate what our churches are doing and what we should do going forward. Imagine trying to be a good husband or wife if you didn't know what marriage was. One kind of freedom comes with ignorance, and another (very different) kind comes with instruction. The freedom of ignorance is unconstrained but also unfruitful. Feel free to try to use that piano as a vacuum cleaner! The freedom that comes with instruction—using something in accordance with the purpose for which it was designed—is far more satisfying, like using a piano to make music.
The New Hampshire Confession of Faith defines a local church as follows:
A visible church of Christ is a congregation of baptized believers, associated by covenant in the faith and fellowship of the Gospel; observing the ordinances of Christ; governed by His laws; and exercising the gifts, rights, and privileges invested in them by His word; that its only scriptural officers are Bishops or Pastors, and Deacons, whose qualifications, claims, and duties are defined in the Epistles to Timothy and Titus.
A church is governed by Christ's laws and lives in obedience to his teachings. In other words the Bible tells churches how to function. This is what the Westminster Confession said as well:
The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men. (WCF 1.6; cf. 2 Tim 3:15–17; Gal 1:8–9; 2 Thess 2:2)
I realize that many evangelicals today may not accept the idea that the Bible tells us how we are to organize our churches. There are a few reasons for this. Many question whether the Bible teaches on this at all, either explicitly or implicitly. In most evangelical and even Baptist seminaries today, it is suggested that there is no consistent pattern of polity in the New Testament.2 (If that has been your assumption, ask yourself what you would do if there were teachings on this in the Bible.) Others point out that Scripture can be deemed "sufficient" without specifically addressing every question that might pop into our minds. Or they say that people imagine things and read them into the Bible.
Of course, these last two points are certainly true. But to observe that Scripture is "sufficient" is to observe that it's sufficient for helping us do whatever God would have us do. And in the Bible God demonstrates that he does care about the organization and structure of the local church. He has established different kinds of people in the church, including teachers and administrators (1 Cor 12:28). He seems to be interested in "how orderly" a church is (Col 2:5). And God calls churches to consider carefully their members' lives and professions of faith (Matt 18:15–17; 1 Cor 5; cf. 1 John 4:1–3).
Others may reject the whole conversation, saying that it is not important. There is almost an impatience with anything that is nonessential. Too often Christians today have only two gears on their theological bike: essential and unimportant. If something is not essential for salvation, it is treated as unimportant and therefore dismissable. But the Bible presents us with a number of matters that are not essential for salvation but which nonetheless are important, even necessary, for obedience to God's Word. And these commands are not arbitrary. Obeying them bears good fruit. Questions of polity and organization fall into this category. In the life of a local church, they can sometimes become crucially important for the church's health and even survival.
One last objection to consider may be simply, "Nobody thinks this!" But this last object is historically unfounded. Christians have long thought about such matters, which is why whole denominations are called Presbyterian or Congregational or Methodist or Episcopalian, designations that refer to how these churches do things. John Bunyan and Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley and C. H. Spurgeon—all of them believed that the Bible taught us how we should organize our churches. One could even say that New England was founded over such matters. So were Baptist churches. Many Christians before us have thought these matters were important because they saw them in the Bible.
Speaking for the congregation I serve, our church agrees with the Christians before us, including the ones who founded our local congregation in the 1870s, that the Bible does teach about these matters. We believe these matters are important enough to consider carefully and to study Scripture carefully, expecting to find some answers on how we are to structure our lives together in the local church. We aim to fashion our church structure and practices on the explicit and implicit teaching of the Bible found in commands and examples.3
Example 1: Who Is the Church?
Having established the basic principle of being directed by Scripture, and having considered some popular objections to it, let's turn now to three examples of how the Bible's teaching on polity matters, even if many Christians today rarely seem to understand or appreciate what the Bible says here.
The first and most basic matter of church polity is, "Who is the church?" And the answer is fairly simple: the members comprise the local church. And just as the Bible determines what a congregation believes, so it also determines who has the final say on who its own members are.
In these passages on discipline, the meaning of membership is seen. Discipline draws a circle around the membership of the church. Careful practices of membership and discipline are meant to mark off the church from the world and thereby define and display the gospel.
Churches which practice no formal membership and discipline at least make it more difficult for the believers who are part of it to follow Christ and more difficult for those elders to know for whom they are to give an account (Heb 13:17). In fact, I would go a step further and say that churches which practice no self-conscious membership are in sin since Christians cannot follow basic biblical commands without it. According to the New Testament, church leaders need to know who is and who is not a member of the congregation. And perhaps even more important, Christians need to know this—for their own souls' sake!
Example 2: Who Is Finally Responsible?
A second topic of polity which the Bible addresses is, "Who is finally responsible for what happens in a church?" The last example touched on this, but I want to make it explicit: the New Testament gives ultimate responsibility to the congregation.
It appears to give final responsibility to the congregation in matters of discipline and, by implication, membership. Consider again the three passages listed above, such as 2 Cor 2:6, where a majority made the decision to excommunicate the sinning member. The church made the decision.
The Bible also seems to give ultimate authority to the congregation in matters of doctrine and, by implication, the selection of leaders. This is evidenced, for instance, by Paul's appeal to the Galatian congregations to trust their own judgment over that of an apostle or even an angel, should an apostle or angel ever attempt to alter the content of the good news (Gal 1:6–9). Again, it is not the elders Paul called to act. In another letter he blamed churches for gathering around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears wanted to hear (2 Tim 4:3). Surely this is an example of congregational authority poorly used. The apostle John called on another church to do just the opposite—exercise its responsibility carefully by taking heed to the teaching it received (2 John 10–11).
In these examples the New Testament shows clearly that it was not something external to the local church, like an association of churches or a general assembly or a bishop, that had final responsibility for what happened in a local church. It was the congregation itself. Nor was final responsibility held by some subset of the membership, like a council or the elders or a pastor. Though elders do have increased accountability due to their public teaching of the Word (Jas 3:1), such decisions are finally matters of the congregation's responsibility.
This final responsibility of the congregation need not undermine pastoral leadership. Rather, it can both reinforce it and guard against abuses of it. In a healthy church the congregation will always (or almost always) support the elders. They will have the same understanding of Scripture and will generally take the same view of practical matters. The New Testament's congregational responsibility is not like a New England town meeting, with no elders to lead them. Normally congregations should joyfully submit to the church's pastors and elders. However, they should also maintain the ability to reject what the elders might bring to the members. This is an important, biblical, and sometimes even gospel-saving emergency break, which has been revealed by God in his Word.
Example 3: Should Churches Have Multiple Leaders?
This question raises one more example of what the Bible teaches on church polity. If talk about what the Bible teaches on church structure is met with skepticism by many evangelicals today, surely claims about the nature and number of officers in a church follow suit.
With all due respect to those who would disagree, I think the Bible clearly teaches that local congregations should be led by a plurality of elders. This is the consistent pattern of churches in the New Testament. For instance, Paul told Timothy to appoint them at the churches in every town (in Titus 1:5; cf. Acts 14:23). He addressed the elders (or "overseers") as a group at the church in Philippi (Phil 1:1). And he did the same with the elders of the church in Ephesus (Acts 20:17). James also referred to "the elders of the church" (Jas 5:14). In short, nowhere does the New Testament say something like, "Submit to the elder in your church." Instead, the word always occurs in the plural. The example is uniform (cf. the references to the elders in the church in Jerusalem in Acts 11:30; 15:2; 21:18). If Paul and the apostles encouraged and instructed the earliest churches to follow this pattern, it would seem we should follow this pattern as well.4
Such conclusions are important because God has revealed his will for us on these matters. The Christian response should be to hear and heed his Word. William Ames, author of the theology text used for decades at Harvard College, Marrow of Divinity, asserted just this very thing:
Man . . . does not have power either to take away any of those things which Christ has given his church or to add things of like kind. Yet in every way he can and ought to make certain that the things which Christ has ordained are furthered and strengthened. . . . [Because Christ alone is the head of the church] the church may not properly make new laws for itself for instituting new things. It ought to take care only to find out the will of Christ clearly and observe his ordinances decently and with order, with greatest edification resulting.5
Insisting that Scripture governs what a local church is and does might raise a few more questions for readers, such as the following.
Do We Have to Be Inflexible on Everything?
No. Many other issues of polity and organization allow for flexibility and for consideration to be given to the particulars of time, place, and even culture. Examples include whether a church has a Sunday evening gathering, committees, Sunday school, or task-specific deacons. Scripture speaks to none of these directly, and the local congregation has the liberty to address such questions for its own edification.
Does Lacking Any of These Things Mean That a Church Is Not Really a Church?
Here's a simple way Christians in the past have thought about this question: Churches which preach the gospel are true churches; churches which do not are not. Churches that preach the gospel but possess a biblically deficient form of polity can be considered "true" but "irregular" churches. They are "irregular" since they are not organized according to the rule—God's rule, the rule of his Word. The role of good pastors is then to move their congregations—as they should their own lives—toward increasing conformity to God's Word, even if such work is slow.
Can Christians Share Fellowship Even When They Disagree on These Kinds of Polity Matters?
Assuming that Christians share the gospel, they should be able to enjoy some form of fellowship, even if their polity differences mean they will belong to different churches. We may be convinced that a brother or a sister is in error, but we should show the same kindness to them that we hope they will show to us in our mistakes. This is precisely how Paul instructed the Roman Christians to deal with one another when disagreeing over secondary issues (Romans 14).
Why Do Some Christians See More About Polity in Scripture Than Others Do?
This is puzzling, but polity certainly wouldn't be the only area in which Christians maintain diverse interpretations. Perhaps some churches have been shown it by those who have gone before; they have read older writers. The important thing is that we should not approach such matters by arguing but by pointing to the Bible and then letting the Bible do its work. By this token the goal of this book is not so much to encourage Christians to draw lines between themselves and other Christians but to draw out clearly the path upon which we will walk.
So God created the church, and God the author has authority. In his Word he tells us what a church is and some important things about how a church is to function.
For some this introduction has already gone too deep. For others the importance of this topic will draw them into the pages that follow and through them, it is hoped, to the Scriptures and to the reflections of many others who have gone before. Suffice it to say that this topic is worth the study. Indeed, it is far more important than many realize.
My hope is that the reader sees how Scripture's beautiful sufficiency frees us from the tyranny of mere human opinion. God has revealed himself by his Word. He is speaking to us, preparing us to represent him today and to see him tomorrow! A congregation of regenerate members—fulfilling the responsibilities given to us by Christ himself in his Word, regularly meeting together, led by a body of godly elders—is the picture that God has given us in his Word of his church—what he calls his "household," a household bought with his own blood (1 Tim 3:15; Acts 20:28; cf. Mark 3:31–35).
Finally, consider what God is doing through the church. Paul said, "His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Eph 3:10–11). This is what God is doing! As such, our concern should be like Paul's—"that the church manifest and display the glory of God, thus vindicating God's character against all the slander of demonic realms, the slander that God is not worth living for. God has entrusted to his church the glory of his own name."6
For the sake of his name, then, God marshals us as his mighty army. Here's how one pastor put it in 1589:
This holy army of saints, is marshaled here in earth by these officers, under the conduct of their glorious emperor Christ, that victorious Michael. Thus it marcheth in this most heavenly order, and gracious array, against all enemies both bodily and ghostly. Peaceable in itself as Jerusalem, terrible unto them as an army with banners, triumphing over their tyranny with patience, their cruelty with meekness, and over death itself with dying. Thus through the blood of that spotless lamb, and that word of their testimony, they are more than conquerors, bruising the head of the serpent; yea, through the power of the Word, they have power to cast down Satan like lightning: to tread upon serpents and scorpions: to cast down strongholds, and every thing that exalteth itself against God. The gates of hell and all the principalities and powers of the world, shall not prevail against it.7
This is the glorious subject of this book.
1 Consider the examples of Cain (Gen 4:5), Nadab and Abihu (Lev 10:1; Num 3:4), and Uzzah (2 Sam 6:6–7). God condemned Israel's hypocritical worship (Amos 5:21–23) and the Corinthians' wrong celebrations (1 Cor 11:17).
2 One example of this from an earlier generation would be this typical statement "As to 'polity,' New Testament roots for Episcopal, presbyterian, and congregational models are traceable; but there is no clear-cut case for the dominance of any," Frank Stagg, "The New Testament Doctrine of the Church," The Theological Educator 12, no. 1 (Fall 1981): 48.
3 The question of which examples are to be followed is both important and sometimes unclear. There is a small, middle category of examples (and even some commands) that were temporary and situational (like greeting one another with a holy kiss), and yet even they embodied larger, abiding principles. Unending discussion can occur on these kinds of examples.
4 As William Williams, founding professor of church history at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, put it, "Are we under obligation to adopt that polity which divine wisdom has pointed out to be the best adapted to promote the ends of church organization, or may we feel at liberty to change it or to substitute some other, according to our views of fitness and expediency?" ("Apostolical Church Polity," in Polity: Biblical Arguments on How to Conduct Church Life, ed. Mark Dever [Washington, DC: Center for Church Reform, 2001], 546).
5 William Ames, Marrow of Divinity (1634; repr., Boston: United Church Press, 1968), 181.
6 Mark Ross, "An Address at the PCA Convocation on Revival."
7 Henry Barrow, "A True Description of the Visible Church" reprinted in Iain Murray, ed., The Reformation of the Church: A Collection of Reformed and Puritan Documents on Church Issues (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), 200–201.