How Important is Church Polity?
Stephen Kneale has served as the full-time pastor at Oldham Bethel Church since 2014, where he has carried the main responsibility for preaching and teaching. A prolific blogger, Stephen’s writings have come to be valued for their candour, theological rigour, and heart for the health of the local church.
Over the next few weeks, we will be sharing excerpts from the introduction to his new book Independent Eldership, the first volume in our church polity series ‘A People on Purpose’. You can read the first instalment here. In today’s article, Stephen considers how central church polity and organisation are to the work of sharing the gospel in the world.
Not only do organisation and administration matter, but the church which ignores Jesus’ commands about how it should organise itself is not a healthy one. Tom Schreiner puts it this way:
Jesus Christ is the head of the church, and we derive our instructions from him. The church is not a human institution or idea. The ordering of the church is not a matter of our wisdom or preference… He has given us instructions on the nature and design of the local church in His inspired and authoritative word. To jettison what God says about the church and supplant it with our own ideas is nothing less than astonishing arrogance.1
If this is true, we can’t just wave away polity, structures and administration as though they don’t matter. If we relegate everything that is not a gospel essential to the realm of secondary matters (for which read, unimportant), the Bible wouldn’t need to be nearly so long. Why did God give us so much Scripture when a short gospel pamphlet would do? The Lord would only need to outline primary gospel matters and let us work out the rest of the trivial details for ourselves. But he didn’t do that because, though these things do not determine our salvation, Jesus still thinks they’re important. They may not be first order gospel issues but they are equally not indifferent matters. They matter enough for him to give instructions about them. If he went to the trouble of giving us these instructions about the church, he wants us to follow them. When all is said and done, we set aside what Jesus tells us to do at our own peril. That includes such secondary matters as church organisation, administration and structures.
Though these things do not determine our salvation, Jesus still thinks they’re important. They may not be first order gospel issues but they are equally not indifferent matters.
But should we write these things off as unimportant as far as the gospel is concerned at any rate? When Paul wrote to Titus, his first concern was a matter of church polity. After a brief introduction, Titus 1:5 says, ‘The reason I left you in Crete was to set right what was left undone and, as I directed you, to appoint elders in every town’. Paul then goes on to outline the qualifications for eldership. If this has nothing to do with the gospel, why is it Paul’s first concern? Clifford Pond points out, ‘we can be sure this was with a view to effective gospel outreach and we can also be sure the subject of good organisation did not occupy endless church time; in the long run good organisation saves time.’2 This is supported by Acts 6 where the presenting issue in the Jerusalem church called for a structural solution. What is significant is that the specific fruit of that organisational restructuring was that ‘the word of God spread, the disciples in Jerusalem increased greatly in number, and a large group of priests became obedient to the faith’ (Acts 6:7).
All of which is to say, healthy churches with healthy structures make healthy disciples who in turn make healthy disciples. Establishing sound, biblical polity in our churches is an important means of achieving biblical gospel ends. Polity is, in the end, a gospel matter.
Footnotes:
- Foreword to Merkle, B. 40 Questions About Elders and Deacons, Kregel Publications, 2008, p.11
- Pond, C. Only Servants, Grace Publications Trust, 1991, p.15