Rethinking Elders – What Does the Bible Really Say?

This message is dedicated to the brothers and sisters living in England. I’m dedicating it to you because you have earned it. You went out of your way to get this tape. Let me tell the folks who I’m speaking to here in the United States of America that in March I was in England, an innocent colonial over visiting Her Majesty’s country. I got up to speak and did what I always do. I threw the thing open to questions. One or two, three, somewhere down the line, someone asked me about elders. As innocent as a man going to slaughter, I answered that. Whoa. a

I’ve never had anything like that happen to me in the United States. I don’t know if it’s the difference in the history of Christians outside the organization here or over there, or if I’ve been moving around in different company, or if the brothers and sisters in Great Britain had never heard anyone give those particular kinds of answers, but then neither have the folks in America, because I can assure you the answers that I’m about to give would not be heard anywhere else in the world. I have to be really careful here with the British, because they take it very seriously. I’m saying all this more or less lightheartedly…Nah. Some of this stuff, I’m going for the jugular. (laughter)

Anyway, I had to come home and reflect on why I believe what I believe about elders, and for clarity, it has to be done contextually. I gave you brothers and sisters here in Denver a little context Friday night and this morning, but I’m going to give my brothers in Great Britain a little background on why they believe in elders the way they believe it…that it’s completely wrong…and why it sounds so valid, even though it is completely wrong. It has nothing to do with elders; it has to do with the Christian mind. So I’m going to talk to the brothers and sisters in England a little bit about where we got our Protestant mind.

In Germany, with Martin Luther, John Calvin, the Frenchman in Geneva, Melanchthon, and all the other stars of the Reformation, the Protestant mind was born. By the way, for those of you who don’t know this, the Protestant Reformation affected almost nobody. We hear preachers waxing eloquent about what great things it did; it sounds great in oratory, but here are the facts. Virtually everything that happened to establish Protestantism in Europe and give birth to the Protestant Church, other than the writings of these men and the confines of a small group of people, the rest of it was done by the sword.

Probably fewer than 10,000 people in Germany were involved in the Reformation, and the reason is simple: only 10% of Germans could read, and half of that 10% could read only at a very basic level. That left only 5% of people in Germany who could read the things being thrown around at the time, and most of them weren’t very interested.

The printing press and the pamphleteers played their part, but the sword did most of the work. It was the sword of Frederick the Wise that freed Germany from Catholicism. The same was true in Geneva, Switzerland, and in the Scandinavian countries, though with precious little bloodshed. It was a government action, but out of it the Protestant mind evolved. The Protestant mind is very theological. It was the Protestants who blessed us with the New Testament that is in absolute chaotic order. It was the Protestants who gave us—we Protestants—this battle with chapter and verse. You and I think today not in wholes, but in parts, and not so much in parts, but in fragments, or to put it another way, numbered sentences.  Ephesians 2:4 says; Colossians 1:7 says; there’s no such thing as Colossians 1:7 or Ephesians 2:4. Those were living, breathing letters to people.

Throughout its history, the Protestant church has never given much value to context. If you pick up a book on Romans, you’ll read five pages on context. If you pick up one on Thessalonians, you’ll get four or five pages on context. Then you come into this great theological morass, but nobody has ever built a model of the entire context. It has never been done in the English language; if it has, it is hiding somewhere that none of us have ever been able to find.

Did you understand what I mean by a model? A complete model. A contextual model from the day of Pentecost to the end of Revelation, telling the story in chronological order and a clear, clear presentation of everything that’s going on. You’ve never seen it or heard it. I’ve never met a theologian, including all the seminary professors that I sat under. I’ve stood in meetings over and over again and just briefly stated the most elementary way the context of the first century, and have laymen and ministers stand in line with pen in hand asking me questions about what in the world I was talking about, and that sounded real interesting, and I’d like to know a bit more.

Now, we came out of the Protestant mind into the evangelical mind, and out of the evangelical mind came forth the fundamentalist mind. The fundamentalist mind flows from the Plymouth Brethren, who began in about 1820. Although they are not well known, they nonetheless are the fathers of fundamentalism. Now then, it just so happens that most of us who are Christians outside the organized church are fundamentalists. Therefore, the mind of John Darby and the mind of the Plymouth Brethren pervade our thinking outside the organized church.

I want to come to the front of the room and stand up, take my hat off, and say, I am not a fundamentalist. I’ll go even further: I may not even be a premillennialist. You can’t prove I’m not, but after reading The Return, you won’t know whether I am a pre, a post, a pan, or a who-cares. I do not have the mindset of a fundamentalist. After I presented my views on eldership in England, someone asked whether I knew anything about the New Testament, and the answer is…I probably don’t, but whatever it is I don’t understand about the New Testament, however poor a Bible scholar I may or may not be, brother, I know ten times more than you fundamentalists do.

Let me describe some of the ways we get into a fundamentalist mindset and don’t even know it. I said this to the brothers and sisters here in this room this morning. Almost every one of us went to some sort of home Bible class, and we got in on the first session, and the very first session was: we need to get in the Word of God. Then we began learning verses from the Old and New Testaments about why we need to know and understand the Word of God, and those verses overwhelmed us so much that we never realized that it is actually nothing in the world but a group of sentences stitched together and then interpreted. We think that it is established that the Word of God is just the Bible.