Supporting Church Leaders

Church members support their pastors and elders by placing a priority on the peace and unity of the church. Finally, Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 5:13, be at peace among yourselves. Few things more distract and discourage a pastor than when church members level needless complaints against other church members or disturb the church with quarrels and strife. Now, being peaceable, of course, implies a willing support of decisions made by church leaders. It is astonishing to me, over several churches now, how readily a congregation can prayerfully elect certain men because of their spiritual qualities and experience and reputation, to serve them as leaders. And then when those same men get together after long prayer and deliberation and announce a decision, the worst possible construction is then placed upon those decisions. My policy is, when people say to me, The session [consistory/council] did this or that, to start naming the elders and say, Now, which one are you talking about? And they say, Well, not that one, not that one, not that way. And we go through the whole session. Well, obviously, if none of the individual men would do that, the whole body did not do it either.

We must be at peace with respect to the leaders and also with one another. John Calvin noted the spiritual importance of good relations between leaders and church members: For Paul, in my opinion, had in view to oppose the artifices, especially of Satan. For Satan ceases not to use every endeavor to stir up quarrels or disagreement or enmities between people and pastor. How great is the advantage to our enemy when this desire for the cultivation of peace, which Paul recommends so strongly, is not exercised as it ought to be.

Well, all that Paul has taught here about church leadership and church membership needs to be applied with careful biblical balance. Leaders are to oversee, but not to dominate or stifle. Authority is to be in the Lord, not in the flesh. Church members are to respect but not worship their pastors. Christians are to obey and follow the leaders, but the leaders are to teach and make decisions in a way that is obviously in keeping with the Bible. Members are to love church leaders, but not so much for their gifts, which results in divisions and favoritism, but for their work on Christ’s behalf. Now the need for balance, and frankly, the difficulty in achieving it, ought to persuade every one of us of the great need we have to pray for ourselves and for the church.

And yet surely, however, no matter how poorly we may and really inevitably will, in many respects, achieve the biblical standard of both church leadership and church membership, one thing we should never do is hate the church. We must always love the church. Lincoln Duncan tells the story of being in Scotland and speaking to an elderly lady who had been a member of the church for decades and decades, like some of the people we have here. And she said to him, “I want you to know, the longer I live, the more I love the church; the less I trust it, but the more I love it“  She means, The more aware I am of all that is likely to happen, but it is Christ’s Church; therefore I love it. John MacArthur writes, “The church is the most blessed institution on Earth, the only one built by the Lord Jesus Christ himself, the only institution he has promised to eternally bless, and the one about which he declared the gates of hell will not overcome it. And for these reasons, in response to our relationship through faith with Jesus himself, Christians should treasure the church, join the church, pray for the church, bind together in the church for worship and work that worship and work which alone is designed by God to bring glory to Christ and to bring the gospel of salvation to a dying world”.¹

Richard D. Phillips