Last night, we had a business meeting that will probably go down in the church's history as one of the most important decisions that this church has ever made. We amended our constitution by changing the entire section on church government. The old constitution had almost all power in the hands of one single pastor and authority shared with the deacon board. Over the years, this church has suffered because of the abuses of power by the pastor: the office of the pastor has had no oversight, very little accountability and almost all power to do whatever he has wanted. In the past, this has led to pastors making unbiblical or unethical decisions because the pastor has had no other pastor to oversee him.
The current pastor, Will Dudding, has tried to lead in a way that would not abuse that power. But even in trying to be careful about that, there is a natural leadership vacuum. Either deacons will be empowered, or the congregation will be empowered. In the New Testament, there is no evidence of the sheep running the sheepfold and there is no evidence of deacons being authorities with power in the church. Furthermore, you will NEVER find one single pastor calling all the shots for any one church (except maybe Diotrophes in 3John 9). Pastor Dudding has determined, after much study of the Bible and study of other churches, that the 'single pastor led', deacon led' or 'congregation-led' church model is deficient at best and dysfunctional at worst. The Biblical pattern found all over the book of Acts and in the Epistles is a church that is led by elders who have authority that is shared among a plurality of equals. There will no longer be THE Pastor. There will be "Pastors". Pastor Dudding will continue to be the lead pastor who does the majority of the teaching and preaching for which he is paid full-time; but he will seek to share his authority with other God-called and qualified men who will work with him as a team to lead the church. We voted last night to move our church in this direction so that the kinds of mistakes, abuses and bad decisions that have hurt the church in the past will not be repeated by this inherently faulty system of leadership that we have lived under. In an ironic way, it was awesome to see a plurality at work in the business meeting between Pastor Will, Bob Bixby and Bro. Ashish all in lock step and in unity together leading the church to make a good decision!
This is a decisive victory against the Devil whose design has been to sow dysfunction in this church under continued vying for power between pastor, people and deacons. This power struggle that has been won by certain pastors at times or various deacon boards at other times is finally going to come to an end and the power will rest in a plurality of elders as God intended for his churches to be led! We have a long way to go because a church that has not been led this way all these years is not going to immediately understand plural elder leadership and how it works. This is why we are going to need help from other pastors who have experience in an elder-led church to help us get the experience we need and the training we need to raise up men to be elders. We will be spending the next few weeks teaching about this on Sunday nights and in our community groups in order to fully understand what Biblical Eldership is according to the Bible.
