Council Counsel
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

Here we are, trying to decide who we are. For just about a year the session of Saint Peter Presbyterian Church has been wrestling with two questions, at what point do we leave the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church denomination, and after that point, where do we go? In March our congregation left the ARP. Now to the second question. We have people in our congregation who would like to see us join another conservative Presbyterian denomination, like the PCA, or the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. We have others who would like to see us join the Reformed Episcopal Church. And still others would like to see us join the Confederation of Reformed Evangelicals, which, while holding that the local church should be ruled by elders, has no higher courts with any binding authority. We're making great progress, having narrowed our thinking down to options that are all Reformed, but which represent the three contending views of what church government should be: rule by bishop, by elder, or by congregation.

That we have failed to narrow our options down further is evidence of one of two things. Either I'm not leading like I should, or the Bible is not at its most perspicacious when it touches on the issue of church government. The issue becomes all the more muddled when we realize that whatever church government God established in the New Testament, it was built on the authority of the Apostles, and apostles these days are harder to find than a good pianist. I'm not alone, however, in being confused. While Augustine, Aquinas, Lattimore, Ridley and Cranmer were all episcopalian (that is, holding to rule by bishop), Edwards and a host of Puritans were congregationalists, and Knox, Thornwell, Dabney, Hodges, Hodges, Alexander, Warfield, Murray, Gerstner and the Westminster divines were all Presbyterian. (Okay, so I showed my hand a little bit.) History doesn't seem to be a great help. Rome, Constantinople, Canterbury are all off in left field. Try to find a United Congregational Church pastor who believes in the resurrection. And don't get me started on the PCUSA. It seems when the people in the pews are lame men instead of laymen, we want more central power and authority. And when the powerbrokers go bad, more power to the people.

There is at work in this fallen world a principle at work that I call institutional entropy. All institutions tend toward apostasy. It seems to follow from the basic pattern of the people of God in general. We begin by being faithful. Such brings the blessings of God, whether it be in terms of the local church body, a denomination, or even the labor of our hands. In the prosperity that comes from blessing, we forget the Giver of the blessing. Desperately trying to keep up our standard of living (again whether it is at the church, or in the home), we begin to throw over our core principles to stay afloat. And so comes more judgment. The end result is we start marrying sodomites, but don't call it marriage, and don't call them sodomites.

This is the pattern in the book of Acts. The church is being faithful to its charge. And lo and behold, the next thing you know the Gentiles are knocking at the door. And so division sets in. Some said the Gentiles must become Jews, others said they did not. The leadership behaved like good presbyterians, and called a meeting. In Jerusalem the men met to discuss the issue. The Judaizers were routed, and the word was sent out to all the churches. So the Judaizers were never heard from again, right? Wrong. They just formed their own denomination. To be sure it was an apostate denomination, but it was a denomination nevertheless. The unity was broken by the truth, or to put it another way, the peace was broken by the purity.

What cannot be missed is that the Jerusalem council spoke with authority. To be sure they did so gently. The handled the matter covenantally, that is with all the precision of a law court, and all the gentleness of a family. Whether as someone receiving a court order, or orders from dad, the local churches were expected to get in line, to abide by the decision. Elders from one group of churches had authority over elders and congregations at a set of individual churches.

Independent churches miss out on this. Episcopal churches may get too much of this, with bishops requiring the ordaining of women, or merely permitting the ordaining of infidels like Spong. There is no system that can weed out the reality of our sin, no machine that can protect the purity of an organization forever. We shouldn't expect such. What we should do is what we do with a host of other less than clear issues. With clean intentions we make our best guess. And we seek to live at peace with those who have guessed otherwise. Like the issue of apologetics we discussed at our June feast, the issue of church polity is an important one, but one that we should not break fellowship over. We should not seek to bind one another's consciences on this issue, just as the council gave a bare bones list of the requirements they would lay on the Gentile converts. Polity will not ultimately tell us what the gospel is. Only the Word of God can do that. And as the gentlemen said in their creed at what was perhaps the greatest church council since Jerusalem, "All synods or councils since the apostles' times, whether general or particular, may err, and many have erred; therefore they are not to be make the rule of faith or practice, but to be used as an help in both" WCF 31: IV.

My guess is that the best choice, the closest to the early church, the closest to the rule of Israel in the Old Covenant, is rule by elder, with courts of appeal. But my conscience is held captive by the Word of God alone.