Proper balance in heeding leaders

Paul had earlier talked about our need to submit to rulers in the church—pastors and elders—and we are to honour them and respect them. And now he is going to talk about the ministry we have to one another. That is important as we talk about these things—that we hold them in a proper balance: on the one hand, the role of the leaders in the church; on the other hand, the role of the rank-and-file members. And we see that balance in this passage. Whenever the church falls into error on one side or the other, it is crippled in many cases and led into needless strife.

Now one error that we sometimes run into with respect to ministry is the error known as clericalism. You have the clergy and you have the laity—the ordained leaders and the rank-and-file members. And clericalism says, Look, the real ministry—all of it—is done by the ordained ministers. After all, they are paid to do it. And so they do it. The church is about them and what they are doing. What the sheep are to be is docile little lambs who, of course, write checks and follow along. That, in other words, is the view of clericalism. The action is all with the men up front—the ordained leaders. Now, probably the best historical representative of that view is the Roman Catholic Church. Laypeople may be doing things in Roman Catholicism, but I assure you that the action is all with the priests, and the ministry is taking part through what they do—particularly with the view of the sacraments that Rome holds.

And yet we certainly see the same phenomenon among Protestants. Many ministers promote this view by insisting that they are in charge of everything. Sometimes pastors hold their churches in a virtual tyranny, and when everything is being done by the ministers, the church is impoverished. Why? Because the Bible is very clear that spiritual gifts have been given to all the church members, and we are all to be using our gifts in a proper sense. We all have ministries to perform, and the clergy—the leaders of the church, the ministers—are not to domineer over others. That is what Peter said in 1 Peter 5:3: Not domineering over those in your charge. And that is exactly what happens under clericalism.

Well, usually when you have an error on one side, you have another error on the other side. And sure enough, the opposite of clericalism is—you guessed it—anticlericalism. And here is a stripping away of the authority and the ministry that God gives to the elders, and particularly the ordained ministers, the preachers of the Word— in some cases even denying the validity of the offices altogether. And all you have to do is peruse the New Testament to see how contrary that is to the pattern of the apostles. Acts 14:1–28, at the very beginning of Paul’s missionary labours, shows that as soon as Paul established churches, he established formal leaders—he established elders for them. You also see this in Acts 20:1–38. The Pastoral Epistles—1 Timothy 1:1–6:21, 2 Timothy 1:1–4:22, Titus 1:1–3:15—where Paul is giving instruction about church organization, very clearly call for elders and deacons. They tell what they are to do and what their qualifications are. In 1 Corinthians 1:1–16:24 and in 1 Timothy 1:1–6:21, Paul specifically states that some men are gifted by God to teach the Word of God, and they are to be set apart for full-time labours in teaching and pastoral work. That is the calling of our ordained ministers. And so the proper approach—the true model—is neither clericalism, where the ministers do everything, nor anticlericalism, where there are no ministers or they are stripped of power. Rather, it is a dual approach to ministry of the kind that Paul so often teaches in his letters.¹

Richard D. Phillips