Rethinking Elders – What Does the Bible Really Say?

Then a lot of people leave, and a lot of people get hurt, and a lot of people never, never follow the Lord again, and those are the people I meet who say, “Gene, we had this wonderful, wonderful group of Christians; it was just wonderful, and then one of two things: we built a building, or we got elders.

I’m going to stop a minute. How many people do you figure in this room? How many of you have some identification, or a whole lot…let’s start with a whole lot of identification of what I just described. Would you raise your hands? What do we have here? Half the people in this room? Okay. That wasn’t quite half, was it? Well, it’s too many. I want to re-present my proposition, brother. Fifty-seven people; thank you, brother. About half the people in here have been hurt by this. It’s either been a church building or elders. I want to propose, sir, that you’re not an elder.

I’m not even going to back down. I propose, sir, that you’re not an elder. I propose that, by scriptural means, you have absolutely no right to use the word “elder” in anything you do. I would like to believe that this recording could be put everywhere and slow you down, because eldership, as you teach it and practice it, is destroying God’s people outside the organized church all over this planet.

So at this point, you have concluded that I do not believe in elders. Brother Jim Milnick told me something a few minutes earlier, after the meeting was over today, that blew my mind. Jim, would you come up here and stand close enough to me that this could be heard? Jim: I met with this brother a few years back, and he asked us at that time—this is in 1980—he asked us to write this in our Bibles—one line. I got here at the end of this quote; it says, G-E 8-2-80. So that’s August 2nd, 1980. Gene Edwards said, “The Church of Jesus Christ will die without elders and workers.” And that’s it.

Thank you. I believe in elders, and I believe in workers, but not the way either you or John Darby ever proposed. I believe that they are one of the most destructive forces, as they are presently presented, unleashed in the world.

In England, actually, almost everybody in the room was happy and smiling from ear to ear. Brother Mike, were you a witness to that, to what I was saying? They just loved it. Several brothers came up to me, or I came to them—I hate that term, “he came up to me”—I was talking to some brothers, and they said, “Gene, I used to be an elder, and I wasn’t an elder.” Or “my husband used to be an elder, and he wasn’t an elder.” Brother, you probably are not an elder either. It’s just a pipe dream, and it is a way of control, and it usually ends up being despotism on God’s people.

Okay, you’ve got your string of verses; I’ve got context. Here’s my context as opposed to your string of verses. Context—you who want to be scriptural. There is no elder in the New Testament, but that he came into being at the hands of an itinerant, non-local, extra-local, trans-local church planter. Not a single one. Are you going to be scriptural? Then, sir, be scriptural. Eldership comes out of the practice in the hands of extra-local church planters, and those men are so rare that it pretty well negates virtually anybody today—and I know I’m being a little extreme here—but virtually anybody. I didn’t say anybody; I said virtually anybody being an elder by scriptural means.

Taking the book of Acts, we’re starting with Pentecost. Taking the book of Acts, we don’t have to worry about Christian eldership before the birth of the church. Would you agree with me on that?

By the way, I don’t know how many references there are to elders in the book of Revelation, but it is just sagging with them. They’re just all over the place. I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t quote anything from Revelation, because all those elders are in heaven; each one is a heavenly elder. They are creatures, not of our species, so just forget the book of Revelation. Every reference in the book of Revelation is to some twenty-four men—I’m sorry, creatures—who are heaven’s elders; the elders of heaven.

If you say, “Well, Gene, those might have been human beings,” my response is, “Thank God we know, praise the Lord, there were twenty-four elders who got to heaven.” You figure you’re one of them?

We will start with the book of Acts, then move through the epistles, and we will take them up chronologically. I want to try to communicate something here: that there was something that preceded—and that word is “adelphos” – and that word probably means brothers and sisters. As I noted in the little booklet, there are over 130 references to brothers in Acts and the epistles. This is something that is not understood, and it’s one of the reasons I can stand up here and so blatantly say, sir, you’re probably not an elder, because a powerful brotherhood in the body of Christ precedes eldership. So does a church planter, and so do several other ingredients; especially, it was very clear in the life of Paul of Tarsus and his way of seeing churches raised up.

Now, if you start philosophizing and say, “Yes, but we don’t live in the first century, and those were missionary activities,” and so on and so forth, sir, you have flown the coop. You have left Scripture and turned into an Aristotelian philosopher to defend your turf. I’m sorry, sir, but you don’t have scriptural grounds to be an elder…and if you do, you’re a really rare bird.