[Editor’s note: This article is from February 2012. It shows this church’s commitment to being scripturally organized.-JS]
What would you do if you had to leave your children and go on a long journey? And I mean a long journey, like 20 to 30 years. If you had to provide for protection and nurturing of your children, would you take that decision lightly? Of course not. Well neither did God.
We are literally the children of God (I John 3:1). We are precious to Jesus our Savior and he won’t be back to get us for some time (I Thessalonians 5:2). Thankfully, God made provision for our care, protection, and growth.
God gave us the gift of his word, the Bible. Jesus promised his disciples he would “not leave you as orphans.”-John 14:18. He sent the Holy Spirit to guide the apostles to teach and write the 27-books we refer to as the New Testament. The mind of God provides us with “all things that pertain to life and godliness,”-II Peter 1:3. But God did more than just leave us with an instruction manual.
He provided for loving, paternal care in the form of elders. Mature Christian men and their wives who know what it means to love children of their own. The life experience of raising, feeding, and teaching children while settling disputes along the way, comes in handy when dealing with a flock. Jesus made sure his disciples would be properly cared for until he could come back for them.
Scripturally Ordained
The New Testament reveals only one form of church government. Individual congregations are expected to have their own elders* with deacons, preachers, and teachers serving under them. There is no other form of church organization mentioned in the New Testament. Synods, councils of bishops, conventions, cardinals, and popes are all man-made institutions and have no precedent in the word of God. In the Bible, there are local elders, overseeing local congregations.
The Holy Spirit guided men like Paul and Peter to write about elders and their role in the church. They are to be men with certain Christian character traits (I Timothy 3:1-7, Titus 1:5-9). Peter, himself an elder, appeals to men who oversee local congregations to, “shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.”-I Peter 5:2-3. Indeed, we have not been left as orphans in our instructions about church leadership.
Deacons are also given a list of spiritual qualities they must fulfill if they hope to serve a congregation. The word deacon means servant and indeed that is what they are. The apostles chose men to oversee the physical needs of the church so they could give themselves, “continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word.”-Acts 6:4. Likewise today, deacons handle the day-do-day needs of the congregation so the elders are not burdened.
Appointment
It is worth pointing out elders do no appoint themselves to the office. The local congregation (guided by the word of God) decides who the suitable men are for leadership. In Acts 14:23, Paul and Barnabas “appointed elders for them in every church” as they traveled back to congregations they had started previously. The Greek word for appointed in that verse is cheirotoneō. The word literally means, “to vote by stretching out the hand, to appoint”-NASB Greek-Hebrew Dictionary. Even though Paul and Barnabas were involved in the appointing, the local congregations were the ones to choose and approve the appointed men.
A similar occurrence comes in Acts chapter six. It is not elders who are being appointed but when the apostles looked for men to serve the local church in Jerusalem, they did not appoint men unilaterally. The local congregation sought out men for the job and when the apostles introduced these servants of the church, the decision “pleased the whole multitude.”-Acts 6:5.
[Editor’s note: God blessed us with overseers in 2022. Today we pray for the appointment of a third shepherd that, “pleases the whole gathering.”-Acts 6:5]
Please pray for men to appear as elders for the church of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that meets at North Second Street. Pray with hope and expectation that men and their wives will prepare themselves to become the kind of Christians a congregation thinks of as worthy shepherds.
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