Rethinking Elders – What Does the Bible Really Say?

Let’s go into the book of Acts. Acts starts with twelve apostles. A little later, the church selects seven “waiters.” The entire body of believers selects seven waiters. Did you follow that? Thank you. Did anybody not follow that? Okay, they’re going to wait tables because, up until then, the church planters had been waiting on the tables; they’d been taking care of the food. Now, there are no elders, but there is brotherhood. You’ve got the twelve apostles, and you’ve got God’s people, but God’s people are meeting in homes all over that city, and a closeness is growing up among them.

When they get in those meetings—and this is something that needs to break down completely—those meetings are not a bunch of people sitting on the floor all in a row with somebody standing up in front of them talking to them while they just kind of nod their heads as we do in our age. Those brothers and sisters were doing the same thing described in Corinthians, Colossians, and Ephesians; they were talking, praising the Lord, sharing with one another, having a grand little time of it, and also having personal difficulties. But out of it was growing an intimate relationship, an incredibly intimate relationship with the freedom of Jesus Christ, thicker than syrup, and it’s all over the place.

This goes on for seventeen years, and every once in a while, the church in Jerusalem shuts down. Don’t you like this when it’s in its chronological order? You get a whole lot of new things in here. Every once in a while, because of persecution, the church shuts down. I don’t know why they appointed elders at any particular time, but I have a notion there are two reasons: one is that the church planters were always running from somebody, and also, at that particular time, the church had lost its church planters, who had gone out into Judea, helping those dozens, if not hundreds, of churches that Paul of Tarsus had forced into existence by his persecution of the church.

Did you follow that? Somewhere around the seventeenth year, you got elders. Now you tell me that on the day those elders got elected, God’s people suddenly fell into tyranny. You tell me that they clammed up, that brotherhood ended. You tell me that all of that closeness…now we have a covering of elders who are going to watch us like hawks.

Let me tell you what would happen if I appointed elders in Denver, Colorado today, and suddenly we shut down the freedom you have. Those elders begin to make the plans for the meetings, tell the sisters what they should do, tell the brothers what they should do, and plan the meetings and speak. At the same time, God’s people sit there with their open Bibles listening, and they have these little meetings of elders who handle all the problems, and what are we going to do about Mr. and Mrs. so-and-so and so-and-so.

I will tell you what would happen. Is there a large river around here anywhere? The Platte River. Three bodies would be dredged out of that river. Wouldn’t stand for it, because brotherhood preceded eldership. I want to remind you that traveling, itinerant men, with the church’s approval, selected those men.

Now, brother, you may disagree with anything I’ve said up till now, and you may win your case up till now, but you can’t win it one inch beyond right now, because the business of the elders comes into such close focus beyond this point. The next time we know anything about elders, other than the elders in Jerusalem, who, by the way, faced a former brother of the church in Jerusalem and a brother who had never been a brother in the church in Jerusalem, and they conceded that this wild, swinging gospel that those two men were preaching was of the Lord, along with the twelve church planters and James, the half-brother of Jesus.

Now we’re going to go to Galatia. That’s a part of Asia Minor, southeast. Now we’re going to see two men plant four churches. These men didn’t belong to those churches, and they didn’t stay long. In fact, any Bible scholar who has studied the timeline will tell you they averaged four to six months in each town, and they left them without elders.

What grew up was brotherhood—close, living, breathing brotherhood. Brotherhood that had paid a price of unity, a brotherhood that had suffered, and a brotherhood that had gone to the cross, but those churches functioned, and they were not organized; they were an organism. The people were illiterate, desperately poor, and they did not have any New Testaments. In fact, the first piece of Christian literature ever written on this planet was written to them. And no, they did not have the Old Testament, as we call it, because finding Scripture in those days was extraordinarily difficult, and it was usually kept under lock and key in synagogues. That’s not all.

The particular kind of weather in Judea, and that part of the world, ate up and melted the papyrus and caused the ink to run off most Scripture. When you have a Scripture that has taken years and years to produce, and it rots—did you know not a single piece of papyrus has ever survived in Israel other than those hidden in pots, away from the weather? You’ve got scrolls coming out of Egypt by the truckloads because it was dry. You’ve got scrolls by the truckloads in other parts of the world, but you don’t have anything Jewish that survives today intact because of the weather. Those people constantly had to throw away the Scripture and rewrite it. They had people who did nothing but that, and it was long and laborious, and that stuff was expensive to come by. You never heard that before in your life, did you? And the people in Galatia had none of this, but they had brotherhood.

Now then, saints, Paul of Tarsus and Barnabas came back, and this is the difference between that and your little Bible class and those two or three people who really love your teaching who’ve got to be an “elder.” It was the process of time alone, in a situation where everybody was functioning and holding anything to them for their life, and carrying on the total responsibilities of the church, brothers and sisters alike. You could walk in there in the midst of a people—not people who had sat in the living room and had somebody teaching the Scripture to them—but people who had been in a living, breathing, organizing, painful, exciting, glorious experience together.

That’s a world of difference between you teaching a group of people in a home while everybody sits there quietly. The two men came back, and they said, “Well, look here, look who the Holy Spirit has made elders.” So there are ordained elders in all four of those churches. I’ll declare that Barnabas and Paul agree with me. There should be elders in the church, but the three of us do not agree with how you practice that, brother. In fact, what we’re about to see right now torpedoes almost every concept you have of what an elder is.