After the Amen!

Yesterday I preached on biblical eldership in congregationalism and sought to answer this question, "Is plural, elder-led, congregationalism biblical?"

Since we are a Baptist church, another question people also have is, "Are elders Baptist?" Many people think that elders are unbaptistic. But a brief survey of Baptist history shows that this position is untenable. A survey of historical Baptist confessions of faith shows that up until the late 1800's, most Baptist churches had the word elder in their terminology.

John Piper has done an excellent job presenting the historical usage of this word in Baptist documents so I see no need to duplicate his research. He writes, "The purpose of this historical survey is to show that, from their earliest beginnings Baptists, have held to the view that the two ongoing church offices presented in the New Testament are elders and deacons, and that only in more modern developments has the eldership largely disappeared from Baptist churches."

Piper concludes his article by making this imporant point:

Of course our only infallible rule for faith and practice is not tradition, either old or new, but rather, is the Word of God. Nevertheless, we believe that humility and wisdom commend the careful consideration of what our fathers in the faith have taught and practiced. We are not the sole possessors of truth. And we are very prone to be blind at the very points where perhaps they saw clearly. The least we can say from this historical survey of Baptist Confessions is that it is false to say that the eldership is unbaptistic. On the contrary, the eldership is more baptistic than its absence, and its disappearance is a modern phenomenon that parallels other developments in doctrine that make its disappearance questionable at best.

But in the end, the issue is whether the Bible itself teaches a form of church governance including elders and deacons as the two abiding officers of the church.

If elders used to be found in Baptist churches, why did they seem to disappear? Mark Dever in The Display of God's Glory explains, “Elders could be found in Baptist churches in America throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century.” But our century is different. During most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, elders fell out of normal Baptist structure and church life. Dever suggests that the change in structure may have been caused by either the neglect of biblical teaching or the rapid spread of the church into the frontier regions of our nation. With so many churches started so quickly, the local leadership may have been hampered in forming the plurality of elders. The growth of Baptist by 1844 “represented an increase of 360 percent in thirty years,” while the population increase of the nation was only 140 percent in the same period. Much of the growth took place in rural and frontier areas under untrained ministers planting churches among a people of imbued with individualistic and democratic ideologies in the wake of the American Revolution. The Baptist emphasis on congregationalism, combined with the early American emphasis on individualism, likely resulted in the decline of churches being governed through elder plurality. Additionally, with the move into the frontier, the “one elder” structure of a pastor, who often served several churches, was a necessity of last resort rather than biblical conviction.

Another great resource that has helped me understand that elders are baptistic is Phil Newton's Elders in Congregational Life.