Archive for category Elder Rule
Putting Church in the Blender
Posted by Erik in Church, Church in the Blender, Definitions, Elder Rule, General on January 4, 2012
When we started the merger process between Grace Baptist Church and Heritage Baptist Church back in 2009, our elders and I did a lot of digging and found few resources to guide us. There just wasn’t much out there on church mergers, and what was out there was overwhelmingly negative.
Despite this, we decided that the Spirit of God was bringing us together, so we pressed on. I can’t even count the number of times I told the congregations, “We don’t know what we’re doing. We’re making this up as we go.” Some might consider that an admittance of weakness. To us, it was just being honest. We were making it up as we went. We were seeking what wisdom we could and being quite deliberate in taking our steps, but we were in undiscovered country.
Two years down the road, we know the things we did well and the things we did not do well. Overall, I thought the elders did an extraordinary job and the congregation was incredibly forgiving as we stumbled toward God’s vision.
Early last year, we were approached to assist in a merger between two congregations in Manchester. Actually, we were approached by a congregation looking for someone to merge with. We offered what we had gleaned from our experience, and over the next few months, we were able to assist them when we could.
A couple weeks ago, both of those congregations voted to what we called a “merger in principle” and they are calling their “blended worship.” I have received emails from their leaders – expressions of celebration as God brings them together. It is a joy to my heart to know that what God has done at Bedford Road can help others in the Kingdom.
Their emails got me thinking. All along, I have been contemplating and working on writing a resource on the subject of blending congregations. I have stopped and started several times. At one point, I have fifty pages written when I stalled out and stopped working. I could not figure out exactly why, but now as I am thinking over things perhaps I have stumbled on it.
I was trying to write as an authority, with the voice of someone who knows answers. In reality, we never knew what we were doing. We were somewhat surprised every time something we did worked. We were humbled to see God at work, because we knew that it could not be our own efforts.
At the same time, we were constantly bucking human authority and challenging trends. We were upstarts, doing something you weren’t supposed to be able to do in a way that had not been tried before. We were inventing structures and rethinking traditions in ways none of us had actually seen done in practice. Everyone around us, people we respected, told us we couldn’t do it. But we did.
That got me thinking that perhaps the problem was the way I was writing the book. Rather than trying to be the new textbook for this stuff, I should be writing it the way we lived it – stumbling and bumbling to keep up with what God was doing. We still haven’t caught up.
Leadership by Community, post 4
Posted by Erik in Church, Elder Rule, Heritage & Grace Merger, Leadership by Community on February 25, 2010
Why should we have one pastor (or more) who is paid while the rest of the elders are volunteers?
That’s a question I have contemplated a lot; and it is one I had to wrestle with since – well – I’m a paid pastor.
Ultimately, it boils down to the New Testament. The Apostle Paul makes it pretty plain:
Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching. [1 Timothy 5:17]
In the same way, the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel. [1 Corinthians 9:14]
There is a pretty clear indication here that some elders are paid while others are not. But it does not work the way most American churches work, where we hire a guy and then expect him to rule well. This is what has produced this professional clergy that is often the plague of the church.
We, as a church, must seek out those who already rule well, already proclaim the gospel, already labor in preaching and teaching and recognize the calling of the Lord on their lives. These men (and they were only men in the New Testament) are worthy of receiving their living from the preaching of the gospel.
Thus, we see that there is a distinction between lay elders and pastors. As we draft the constitution of “The New Church” (we don’t know the name yet), we are keeping this distinction in mind and building in some structure we have not seen in many places, balancing the role of the elder who rules (we call him the Senior Pastor) and the other elders.
Leadership by Community, post 3
Posted by Erik in Church, Elder Rule, Heritage & Grace Merger, Leadership by Community on February 23, 2010
A lot of times, people will come to me or to one of the elders and ask about something. Our natural reaction is to make a decision on the spot, but in reality, we do not have that authority. Unless the leadership community has made a decision and/or invested further decisions for a specific area in a specific elder, you will often hear us say, “Let me talk to the elders and we’ll get back to you.”
This is not a cop-out. As ministry moves forward, the elders have the responsibility of steering the church and keeping it within the vision of Jesus Christ. It is a shared responsibility and not one invested into us individually.
That’s important, so let me unpack it. The leadership responsibility is shared by the elder community. Individually, we have no authority. Anytime any of the elders act outside of the elder community, it is because the elders have discerned God’s direction in an area, and we are now moving about in our greater church community encouraging people to move forward in that direction.
When we encounter something new to the vision, we bring it to the other elders and we discuss it, meditate on it and pray over it. We ask hard questions of the Scriptures, of each other, and of the community. This is what we are striving for.
Leadership by Community, post 2
Posted by Erik in Church, Elder Rule, Heritage & Grace Merger, Leadership by Community on February 22, 2010
Elder leadership is not a committee-run church. It is also not a board, like the boards in large corporations. It is leadership by community.
com·mu·ni·ty (kə-myōō’nĭ-tē)
n. pl. com·mu·ni·ties
a. A group viewed as forming a distinct segment of society: the gay community; the community of color.b. Similarity or identity: a community of interests.
c. Sharing, participation, and fellowship.
The elders who should lead a church are a community within a community. They are a group of men, called by God and confirmed by God’s people to work together in leadership.
It is not common to think of laymen are being called into a specific ministry in the church, but biblically there is no distinction between the calling of a vocational pastor and a lay pastor. At Grace, we want everyone to understand that the distinction is one of role and not one of authority.
Neither the senior pastor or the lay elders have any inherent authority over the others. We are a community that has authority as a community within the church community.
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