Attempted Recovery. We take up the story at the start of the 16th century with Martin Luther. But before we do, let us remember that protest against the mutilation of Christ's church was not unknown during the Dark Ages. Men, and no doubt women, men like Claude of Turin, who died in 827, Tranquilm, who died in 1115, Peter of Broyes, flourished about 117 to 1131. Henry of Lausanne, who flourished about 1116 to 1148. Arnold of Brescia, 1110 to 1155. John Towler, about 1300 to 1361. John Wycliffe, about 1328 to 1384. John Huss, about 1369 to 1415, the Lollards and their like, should never be forgotten. They all made their protest against Rome, and in one way or another called for a return to the New Testament. I am not pretending that they had full gospel light, but in their various ways they all prepared the ground for the approaching reformation. And so to the dawn of the 16th century. When they came onto the scene, the magisterial reformers did a sterling job in getting back to New Testament teaching on salivation. They also re-established the principle of the final authority of Scripture in all matters of faith and conduct, thus enabling subsequent generations to reform in areas where the reformers themselves did not understand Scripture or failed to apply it to their own churches. For the fact is, sadly, reformers left a great deal to be desired in the matter of church life. They made bad mistakes in this area. They failed to jettison much of the corrupt medieval way of looking at the church, and so failed to return to the New Testament pattern. If only they had! Alas, it is a case of what might have been, grievously many treating them as virtual oracles have fallen foul of John Robinson's observation and ground to a halt where Luther and Calvin left them. On the matter of the priesthood of all believers, for instance, while the Reformers did resurrect this New Testament doctrine, they failed to appreciate its full importance and scope, limiting it far, far too much to the person or the individual. Yes, of course, it was a mighty weapon in the battle against Rome to be able to tell sinners as individuals to go straight to Christ. There was no need of, no place for an intermediary. Yes, this was liberating indeed. Again, to be able to assure believers that they had the right of private judgment, that they could and should think for themselves. Yes, another tremendous advance over despotic Rome. But as for the corporate aspect of the priesthood of all believers, too often the reformers limited it to responsive reading and participation in psalm or hymn singing, all far too heavily institutionalized. Nevertheless, to bring the language of worship into the vernacular was an immeasurable gain. and to allow participation in worship by the congregation, not to limit the laity to gawking at priests doing it for them, was another huge advance. But, as I say, it was all too liturgically structured and stereotyped. As a new presbyter had replaced old priest, as John Milton so pithily noted, so a reformed liturgy had replaced the Roman tradition. Even so, it continued, stylized, stultified, prescribed, and institutional. Gains there were beyond question, there were gains. Nevertheless, as Samuel Mather noted, the reforming churches flying from Rome carried some of them less, all of them something, of Rome with them. Sadly, the Reformers held on to the Roman medieval principle and practice in church life, with heavy consequences. What do I mean? How can I make good such a claim? The truth is, the mainstream Reformers, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, among others, like Rome, were all steeped in this mistaken application of the Old Testament to the church. One of the outcomes, just one of the outcomes, of going back to Moses and trying to impose the Old Testament on the church is the notion that true religion should be enforced upon the people by the state. Thus the reformers believed that the magistrate, the state, has the right and duty to enforce true religion upon its citizens. This is why the reformers are known as magisterial. They wanted the magistrate to enforce true religion. The end results were and are appalling. Many reformed people still hold to the disastrous idea. There it stands in the Westminster documents. I wonder, for instance, how many would like the UK government to put a stop to the building of mosques. Those who badger the government to take such a step are playing with fire. For a start, such laws passed today against, say, Islam, may well be used tomorrow against Christians. In any case, there is no New Testament warrant for the practice. The radicals of the Reformation, the Anabaptists, quite rightly, vehemently disagreed with the magisterial reformers over the attempt to enforce true religion by the state. Thus, reformers and their spiritual children, by and large, did not throw off the essence of potpourri as far as church government and care is concerned. True, they spoke of the priesthood of all believers, but, as I have just pointed out, this was largely confined to individual salvation, in opposition to sacerdotal priestcraft, but with little reference to corporate church life, apart from setting up a Reformed institution instead of a Roman. What is more, just as reaction against the Anabaptists caused the Reformers to go wildly astray on baptism, so their reaction to Rome coloured their view of the priesthood of all believers. And this came at large and lasting cost. The vast majority of Reformed and Evangelical churches have been embroiled, bogged down in these consequences ever since. They are still with us. Just one instance, how few of us read the letters of the New Testament as letters to the people as a body, to the people as a whole. I get the impression I may be wrong. Do we not nearly always read them as letters to me, as an individual? I am not saying we should not do the latter. Of course not. But what about the former? Were not the vast majority of the New Testament letters written to churches, not to individuals? I have to confess that having to think about these penetrating questions has found me wanting. Now for a sketch of the history of these events. On occasion I will have to use terms which I will later explain in detail. Martin Luther. While Martin Luther in the main threw off potpourri, he was sadly muddled over church government. and failed to work out its New Testament order. He wanted New Testament results, of course, but he failed to see that to get them he had to go back to the New Testament template. Clinging to various Roman customs and forms, he reacted badly against the Anabaptists, whom underneath he envied, and remained a thoroughgoing Erastian, putting the church under princes and civil magistrates. The catalogue of his very serious mistakes in this area did not stop there. True, he plumped heavily for the priesthood of all believers, but he did this because he rightly saw it as a bastion against medieval Rome and its sacerdotalism. However, when he said that baptism is the means by which sinners are consecrated to the priesthood of all believers, and not as the Bible does, saying that saving faith and repentance Leading to union with Christ is the way sinners are made members of the universal priesthood. Luther, in steering sharply away from the scylla of sacerdotalism, came to grief in the charybdis of sacramentalism. He has dragged millions with him. Luther also held to ordination to the professional ministry. but he wanted to have his cake and eat it, by striving to rid the right of any thought of sacramentalism. The fact is, although he argued for the priesthood of all believers, Luther drew back, treating it as little more than a slogan. For the sake of public order, a few should do the work on behalf of the rest, he thought, with the bishop in some sort of overall control. the Anabaptists. Since they were anything but a homogeneous body, it is not possible to say the Anabaptists did this or that. Moreover, as with so many others, their positions changed and developed as time passed. But some things are fairly clear. The Anabaptists and the Magisterial Reformers were at loggerheads over the nature and structure of church life. this being a main bone of contention between them. The Anabaptists, certainly in the early days, by and large rejected both papist and reformed division of the church into clergy and laity, even though they did come to recognize shepherds in the local congregation. It is not that they had no clergy. The truth is they had no laity, since all of them, so to speak, were the clergy. Recognition of ministers was another issue, since their ministers had already been so say ordained under the papal system, should they submit themselves for reordination. A number of Anabaptists felt the need of this. They could not rid themselves of the notion that without this they would not be proper ministers. The magisterial reformers, however, in the main were happy to continue with their ministers as previously ordained by Rome. But along with baptism, the heart of the issue between the Anabaptists and the reformers in this area was the priesthood of all believers. Though both parties accepted the concept, the Anabaptists, at least in the beginning, made it a fundamental of great practical importance, pushing its corporate observance far beyond the institutionalized limits imposed by the reformers. In the early days, the Anabaptists stressed its fundamental and practical importance, rejecting the notion of hierarchy altogether, In this, they exceeded their warrant and ended up falling short of the New Testament and Christ's gift of stated and recognized ministers to his church. But this phase was short-lived. Within a mere 25 years, by the middle of the 16th century, the old ideas began to reappear, and the Anabaptists then went beyond the New Testament in that they began to make use of pastor elder, sometimes called bishop, and deacon, along with a passive laity. This threefold ministry became the Mennonite pattern, and a professional clergy quickly emerged. The old wrong-headed hierarchy was thus re-established. Nevertheless, Anabaptist congregations chose their own leaders, and in general professionalism was taboo, and with their emphasis on the priesthood of all believers, Authority resided in the congregation, not the theologians. William Tyndale William Tyndale denied episcopacy, but his greatest contribution to biblical recovery on church governance is, perhaps, to be found in his English translation of the New Testament, even though it met with severe opposition from the powerful in church and state. just one example, his use of elder was bitterly opposed by those who wanted priest. It is no accident that under James I the authorities wanted and got reinstatement of the old ecclesiastical words in the authorised version of 1611. Sad to say, in the seemingly endless debate about the use of the authorized version, far too few of those who, resolutely upholding what they consider to be its superiority over all other versions, have taken account of its preface and the explanation afforded us by the translators. For instance, We have avoided the scrupulosity of the Puritans, who leave the old ecclesiastical words and betake them to other, as when they put washing for baptism, and congregation instead of church. Alas, if only the proper words had been used, it would have saved a world of trouble. The Anglicans. The Anglicans went to the fathers, and argued for, God, and have kept, episcopacy, even though it was attacked at the start by mainstream Puritans, both conforming and non-conforming, and has been criticized by many dissenters down the centuries. In recent years, however, this dissenting confrontation with episcopacy has virtually died out. Indeed, episcopacy seems to grow in importance as the search for an ecumenical church gathers pace. John Calvin. John Calvin, it has been claimed, has given the fullest and most accurate exposition of the scriptural scheme of church government and ordination. Let us see. I, for one, question it. I cannot see how such a claim can be maintained In light of his own words, we know that every church has liberty to frame for itself a form of government that is suitable and profitable for it, because the Lord has not prescribed anything definite. Really? What did he think of episcopacy? He was not much bothered about it. As long as the bishop was willing to be under Christ, Episcopacy did not indicate any superiority of one bishop over the rest. The bishop, said Calvin, was simply a president over the elders. Just a president, I ask you? Pause for a moment. Is such a disgraceful and biblical move to be dismissed so lightly? Is it nothing a mere bagatelle that a man-made bishop is a president of the elders of a church? a president indeed. Should we just shrug our shoulders? Surely not. Yet Calvin, knowing full well what this step had led to, the papacy, adopted the same line of defense as the fathers for this unscriptural move, saying that men introduced this to suit the needs of the times. To this effect he cited Jerome, even though Jerome himself had passively acknowledged the unscriptural nature of the innovation. Calvin tried to draw the line. Conceding there is no hierarchy in the subtle New Testament pattern of church government, he called the notion improper. Even so, the Fathers, he claimed, in introducing their changes, did not want to set up Church government different to God's Word. What? How could Calvin say such a staggering thing? After all, he had conceded that the Fathers went beyond the Scripture, yet, he contended, they were cautious and hardly strayed from it. Really? I cannot comprehend how he could make such a preposterous statement, allowing that the very first move of the Fathers was not a large step away from Scripture. One step away from Scripture, however small, is one step too many. What is more, look where these small steps ended up. read again the decrees of the pre-Calvin 1438-39 Council of Florence and the post-Calvin 1870 Vatican Council. Besides which, Calvin contradicted himself. Was the bishop greater in dignity or not? He spoke against hierarchy in the abstract, but was sympathetic, to put it no stronger, to a system which was riddled with the abominable notion I ask again, how could Calvin adopt such a grossly unbiblical system? Did Mather, with his, the reforming churches, flying from Rome, carried some of them less, all of them something, of Rome with them, not hit the nail squarely on the head, in Calvin's case? Didn't Calvin prove it when, evolving his own scheme of church government, Instead of going back to scripture, he retained the essential features of the practices introduced by the fathers, practices which had been later encapsulated in the papal system. Had Calvin not witnessed the blossoming and harvest of such pernicious weeds in the Roman church? Coming to his own ideas, Calvin proposed a fourfold order of ministers, pastors whom he reckoned to correspond to apostles, to discipline, administer the so-called sacraments, admonish and exhort, doctors or teachers to interpret scripture and categoize, elders to rule the congregation, and deacons to look after the material concerns of the church. He not only distinguished between these ministerial orders as to their duties, But he also made a radical and unjustified distinction between these officers as to their appointment. While the pastors and doctors are normally elected by the pastors and elders of other congregations, the deacons and elders are elected by the individual congregations concerned. This unwarranted distinction carried sinister overtones. as did his division of the church into clergy, even though he conceded the idea is improper, and laity. Only ministers are clergy, ruling elders and all other church members are not. Calvin also vested church power upward through various committees, synods, to an overall General Assembly. Calvin's fundamental problem was that he never threw off the medieval Roman view of the church. Oh, he spoke of the priesthood of all believers, yes, but it was for him largely an individual, private matter. In his view it played little or no part in the corporate life of the church, except to justify the laity's participation in a structured, reformed liturgy. As a result, in its place, he emphasized the institution of the church, its officers and structure. Take his famous dictum, wherever we see the word of God sincerely preached and heard, wherever we see the ordinances Calvin had sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there we cannot have any doubt that the church of God has some existence. Apart from sacraments, I am not saying I quarrel with this, but it is what Calvin fails to say that is vital. What about the members? Aren't the members the living parts of the body, the living stones of the building, and so on? Of course, Calvin, with his unbiblical view of a mixed regenerate and unregenerate church membership, based on a misunderstanding of the parable of the wheat and tares, coupled with infant baptism, was bound to flounder here. Indeed, given his unscriptural approach to the subject, he was bound to flounder on the issue. But this is the point. Calvin did not appreciate how far-reaching the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers is. It is not merely the icing on the cake. It is an essential ingredient of the cake itself. The illustration breaks down. The priesthood of all believers is one of the leading fundamentals of church life. Calvin missed this point entirely with grievous results. The index to my copy of his institutes, Calvin's primary sourcebook according to his own words, has no entry whatsoever for the priesthood of all believers. An amazing omission. I realize that Calvin was not responsible for the index, of course, but the fact remains that his editors did not discover sufficient emphasis on the subject within Calvin's more than 1,300 pages to merit such an entry. This can be accounted for only by his dependence on the legacy from the medieval Roman Church, and by his blind and obsessive prejudice against the Anabaptists. One of those consequences was the formation of a new priesthood, the Reformed Clergy, over a new institution, the Reformed Church, with its Reformed Liturgy. The Presbyterians Calvin's ideas on church government have greatly influenced succeeding generations of Presbyterians, especially through the Westminster documents. Thus, Presbyterians divide the church into clergy and laity. Only ministers are clergy. Ruling elders and all other church members are not. They also further distinguish between teaching and ruling elders, both in rank and ordination. The teaching elder is more important than the ruling elder. Teaching elders are ordained by other ministers, but ruling elders are ordained by the local congregation. Furthermore, both preaching and the administration of the so-called sacraments are the jurisdiction of the teaching elder. He presides. He is superior in rank. He is the minister of the Church. He is a member of the clergy. The members are laity. Like Calvin, Presbyterians also distinguish between doctors and pastors. The doctors working in the schools. Some leading Presbyterians have admitted the unworkability, let alone the wrongness, of their system, warning that the neglect of biblical principle has introduced carnal hierarchy, which in itself has grievously marred the witness of the gospel. Let me try to probe this distinction Calvin and the Presbyterians make between the pastor, teacher, elder, and doctor. These various officers acting as teachers, pastors, and teachers of pastors. All it wants to complete the crazy circle is pastors of teachers. It reminds me more of the Mad Hatter's party from Alice in Wonderland than a church based on the New Testament. As one who is not au fait with this sort of system from a practical point of view, may I raise what to me seems an important question for those who hold to the idea of a president of the church. It is this. If teachers preside over the education of pastors, as we are told by the advocates of this system, Who is the president of the church, after all? The pastor is the president of the church, yet the teachers preside over them in their education. I am not making all this up. The Westminster documents are clear, locating the main difference between a pastor and a teacher or doctor in the teacher's ability to excel in exposition of scripture, rather than in application. This is a ridiculous division in practice. Is a man really expected to expound scripture but not apply it? Just expound it? Is such a practice, even if it was workable, thought to be commendable? I should not care to sit under a man who expounded scripture but did not apply it. Exposition in itself is fruitless. The whole point of opening the scripture is to apply it. As the seminal Puritan William Perkins wanted people to ask of preaching, what's the use of it? In other words, what's the application? Proceeding with the Westminster documents, the teacher, it would seem, has his work in schools and universities. whereas the pastor moderates in the proceedings of the officers. Only pastors have the power to carry out the laying on of hands and to ordain. This was Kalman's view. Where is the New Testament evidence for it? There is absolutely none, none whatsoever. My question remains, who in this system is the president of the church after all? In short, the idea that a pastor and a teacher are different is not based on scripture and history proves it to be unworkable. And as for dividing elders into those who teach and those who rule, the practical headaches of such a system are severe. Yet in a good supply of spiritual antisephalgias, that's headache curers, is the best advice I can offer anybody who is thinking of going in for the system. Finally, the point about the kind of hierarchy we are concerned with here must be pressed further, and must be applied right across the board. Hierarchy in the Church is an abominable notion, introduced by the Fathers. It does not come from Scripture. It should be polaxed. Included in this is the entitling of a man as a pastor, to distinguish him from other elders or to mark him out from ordinary lay members. And as such it needs to be said and as such it needs to be said to Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists or whoever else is guilty of the obnoxious practice. Plurality, the New Testament position, demands parity. Parity requires plurality. Once this principle goes, however subtle the changes, the people of God are on the high road to presidency and all that that entails. And of course the Presbyterians maintained ordination with the laying on of hands carried out by previously ordained men. Indeed the Westminster Assembly in 1645 produced the form of Presbyterial Church government and of ordination of ministers. This document, which still stands as one of the standards of the Presbyterian Church, is emphatic on the matter. the sext in the Commonwealth. We are talking about the time between the execution of Charles I and the reign of his son, Charles II. Taking advantage of their newfound liberty, the proliferating dissenters, the sexts as they were dismissively labelled by the authorities, were taught by a multitude of mechanic preachers. In church terms, lay preachers. Despite such a sneering, dismissive appellation, this freedom, in fact, had far more in common with the New Testament priesthood of all believers than did the institutionalized state church, reformed or otherwise of the time. The rigid church authorities hated and derided the sectaries and their preachers. They did more than deride them. After the Restoration in 1664 and twice in 1665, Parliament passed laws forbidding lay preaching. The authorities were afraid that if ordination was allowed to wither, any Tom, Dick or Harry or Sally might get into a pulpit or stand on a tub and preach, perish the thought, Cromwell, as usual, rose to the measure of events. Liberty was the issue. Keep the law out of religion. If they can find those who want to hear them, let the mechanics preach, and let the people attend them. Within a very few wide limits, Cromwell got his way. For all their excesses, a good job too, one might think. bearing in mind that the cattle mender John Bunyan was one such mechanic preacher. The Separatist The separatists who suffered under the professional clergy in league with the state church, whether Anglican or Presbyterian, saw ordination as a badge and shield of the privileged, the clergy in particular. As a result, separatist thinking in practice made a further contribution to anti-clericalism. Henry Barrow rightly argued for spiritual participation by all the members of the Church, all to edify one another in love, in exhortation, reproof, and comfort. But, he said, this does not preclude officers in the Church, including pastors, teachers, governors or rulers, deacons and relievers of widows. appointment to one of these offices in his five-fold system was by the election of the church members. But Barrow's attempt to distinguish between the pastor and the doctor, like Calvin's, proved unworkable. The Independents The handful of Independents at the overwhelmingly Presbyterian Westminster Assembly in the 1640s did not go along with Presbyterial ordination. In addition, whereas the Presbyterians recognized Episcopal ordination, the Independents would not. John Owen, the most able exponent of the independent system of church government and care, began in the right way by denouncing the corruptions introduced by the Fathers. As for the priesthood of all believers, Owen rightly dismissed the notion that ministers are sacrificing priests, this having been invented by the Fathers. All believers are priests, he properly observed, as members of Christ, being united to him, our great High Priest, the Lord Christ. He spoke of the access all believers have to God, their unction, their sacrifices of prayer, good works, self-denial, all, of course, as members of the universal priesthood, the priesthood of all believers. very good as far as it went, but still not reaching the full New Testament expression of that doctrine. When he came to the stated ministry and rule of the Church, Despite his honest analysis of the situation, Owen, like Calvin, was sympathetic to the early deviations adopted by the Fathers, was tolerant of the idea of Presidency, and again, like Calvin, tried to keep this unscriptural notion in bounds by saying that this Presidency involved no new order, power, or authority. Really! As I have shown, history is against Owen. As I will show, contemporary church life is against him. Above all, the Bible is against him, as he himself had to admit. the best scriptural defense he could offer, was vaguely to suggest that Peter, it seems, was president among the apostles, I ask you. True, impetuous Peter was often the first to plunge into the unknown and first to speak or blurt out, but I see no suggestion that he was president. Some might argue for James. Yet on occasion, Owen could argue for the biblical twofold order. But by making subtle distinctions, he ended up with a three or fourfold order, just as the fathers and Calvin. Owen, again like Calvin, divided the elders into two, teachers and rulers. The teaching elders he called pastors and teachers. He went further and differentiated between the pastor and the teacher. but the difference was in degree but not in order. I confess I do not understand this distinction, nor I suspect do most church members in those churches where Owen's system and logic applies. I am not saying that men may not have different skills, weaknesses, and strengths, but it is the making of two distinct officers, based upon degree but not order, which is to me not only incomprehensible, but objectionable. Furthermore, why stop at two? And not only that, the overwhelming majority of Christians, it seems to me, really do think pastors are more important than elders or teachers, if they exist. After all, the pastor can do things, important things, which no other person in the church can do. What does that mean? If it does not mean he is more important, more special than everybody else. The upshot of Owen's distinction was to produce a fourfold order, with the pastor as the first officer or elder of the church, even though Owen had said he didn't like the idea of hierarchy. He admitted there is no scriptural difference between bishops and elders, but to avoid dissension he fell back upon the invention of the fathers and came out for a single pastor assisted by elders, even though he also explored the question as to whether there should be one or more pastors in a church. Owen did not seem to mind the clergy-laity split, What is more, in an obscure passage, he seemed to distinguish between an uncalled or private Christian, by which he meant non-ordained, and the minister. As far as I have been able to unravel him, O.M. was allowing that an ordinary Christian might preach Scripture in unusual circumstances as a charitable act. But only a minister, an ordained man, a professional expert, can give the authoritative interpretation of scripture. Indeed, Owen said that only a minister can open, explain the scripture. The ordinary believer can apply it once, I presume, he has swallowed what the minister has spelled out to him as the official kosher line of biblical interpretation. In other words, There is a big difference between a clergyman and a layman when it comes to preaching, opening, and interpreting the Word of God. If I have read Owen Wright, he ended up in an obviously unscriptural cul-de-sac. How does it square with Acts 1711? And what happens when two clergymen don't agree? Furthermore, allowing, as I have, that not all believers are capable of sustaining a public teaching ministry, and that Christ instituted the stated and recognized elders and teachers in His Church, how does Owen's dictum match the many New Testament passages which so clearly teach that every believer is competent by the Spirit to edify another? more, that every believer is expected and privileged to edify his fellow believers. The Baptists At the end of the opening decade of the 17th century, Thomas Helles separated from John Smith, left Holland, and brought the General Baptist Church back to England. Ellis, rejecting Smith's view on the ministry, argued that it is not right to restrict the ministry to a certain class of men, in effect turning them into the ordained, the clergy. Ellis pointed out that Smith, with his views, was virtually falling back into apostolic succession. But things did not stay still. During the years 1650 to 1750, The General Baptist went back to ordination with the laying on of hands and developed a threefold ministerial order, bishops or messengers, elders or pastors, and deacons. The messenger, who approximated to an apostle, was an itinerant officer with power to ordain pastors. Later, as denominational ideas developed through associations and unions, a sense of ministerial hierarchy evolved. This in turn led some general Baptist churches in the 20th century to cede their Christ-given powers upwards to their association or union. These latter bodies then handed over their powers to a national assembly. The 1644 particular Baptist confession was non-ordination. It did not mention ordination in connection with office, and it expressly stated that baptism can be carried out by any preaching disciple, it being nowhere tied to a particular church, officer, or person extraordinarily sent. With the Restoration, however, and with the, it was felt, necessity of showing a common front with other dissenters, the particular Baptist drew up their 1677 or 1688 or 9 Confession. Because of the supposed necessity just mentioned, this confession drew heavily on the Presbyterian Westminster Confession, and ordination was thus established among the particular Baptists, including the laying on of hands, though lay preaching was allowed. The particular Baptist John Gill, 1697-1771, very strongly opposed ordination, even though he used the word, and the laying on of hands, rightly arguing that sacramentalism is inevitably bound up with both. Sadly, his scriptural arguments went largely unheeded. Tradition, the love of it, triumphed. It always is the default position. Many particular Baptists, including Gill, adopted the scheme of one pastor and several deacons. Take Andrew Fuller. Fuller, incidentally, argued for ordination, and restricted the administration of the Lord's Supper to an ordained minister, unless the circumstances were extraordinary. On the pastor, however, He started in the right way by castigating churches who have a plurality of elders in name but not in reality. But unfortunately he threw the baby out with the bathwater. Conforming to the common practice, Fuller distinguished between ministers and elders and without any scriptural justification adopted the title pastor for the bishop. He conceded that large churches might need more than one pastor. but he thought it all a question of size. No biblical principle is involved apparently. In reality a single pastor ought to preside, this pastor being the sole ruler of the church. Fuller, it seems, was simply not able to conceive of a pastor except in terms of an ordained minister, a professional clergyman. He tried to draw back, deploring a minister talking about my church, my deacons, but it was a case of shutting the stable door far too late. It seems impossible to shake this notion of presidency. It must be very deeply ingrained in fallen man. It comes up everywhere. We want a king, said Israel. We must have a king. And so say all of us, it seems, or nearly all of us. Let me take up this point about the pastor and his people, about which Fuller expressed himself so vehemently, even though he was condemning himself in the process. After all, Fuller himself called church members the pastor's people. This kind of language is practically universal today. How frequently the pastor speaks of the church as my people, a virtual blasphemy. Why do I say that? Because the people of God are God's people. This would seem self-evident. The saints are the people for God's name, for Him. They are His elect. Converts are people who are added to the Lord. They are his, they belong to him. They are never called the pastor's people. They are never addressed in that way, in the Bible I mean. An abundance of scripture goes to prove all this. In 1854, the gospel standard strict Baptist J.C. Philpott hit the nail squarely on the head. He was writing against what he called the carnal priesthood, priestly domination, which he defined as tyranny or priestly power, sacerdotal authority. He was, of course, speaking of Rome and Puseism, but did not leave it there. dissenters, and even many particular Baptists, he said, are guilty of recognizing a religious Freemasonry, a clerical brotherhood with priestly power. They certainly do. C. H. Spurgeon and his brother J. A. held to the traditional threefold order and hierarchy in church care and government. Although he was one of two pastors at the Metropolitan Tabernacle at the time, Even so, C. H. Spurgeon thought in terms of the single pastor who is the presiding elder, the ruler of the church. In the past fifty years, it is true, there has been a recovery of the biblical principle of the plurality of elders among Reformed Baptist churches, at least in name and theory. Sad to say, very sad to say, too often this kind of talk has been in name only. the biblical principle and its corollaries have not always been understood and worked out in practice. Not only so, a plurality or equality of elders has been resisted by some leading Reformed Baptists. Men such as Peter Masters, David Fountain and Nigel Lacey have strongly advocated the popular but non-biblical threefold system, although disagreeing over details. Of course, in their writings they have struggled to avoid elitism and cultivation of VIP-ism, but they have struggled in vain. When the equality of eldership is dismissed as novel, when the pastor is called the permanent president, when pastors are senior men, elders of a unique kind, specialists in Bible teaching, while non-pastors are lay elders, who carry out their duties only under the chairmanship of their pastor, and when such claims are illustrated by army ranks, the field officer, the pastor, the subordinate, ruling elder and the private, the ordinary church member. Of course it's vain to try to keep out elitism or hierarchy. Yet those of us who will not go along with all this are castigated and castigated by those who are prepared to exceed scripture and prepared to go to the fathers and their inventions for church order. The boot is on the other foot. Why this clamour for a permanent president? It is not unknown for such presidents to boast that nothing happens, nothing is even raised in their, note the word, church, without their say-so. And this is regarded as a sure indication of the orthodoxy and order of their church. It is nothing of the sort, of course. It is a sure mark of a low-level, popish stasi. Of course, certain issues can only be raised and discussed in private. Not everything can be discussed in an open public meeting, but such issues are exceptional. On the agenda of the business meeting, assuming there is an agenda, and there is a business meeting at which to have an agenda, is there a section called Any Other Business? If not, why not? If there is, how do things get raised at that time? Even more important, how are things prevented from being raised in public? And what happens to those issues? I merely ask the questions. The Brethren Anthony Norris Groves, 1795-1853, while preparing to become an Anglican priest, realized he could not be ordained, since this would mean giving sanction to military service. Rejected because of his lack of ordination by the Church Missionary Society, he came to the conclusion that ordination was not necessary for a real minister of God. John Nelson Darby, 1800-1882, was ordained deacon in 1825, then priest, 1826, in the established Church of Ireland, but in 1828 resigned his position as curate. The Brethren movement soon split into two main factions, Exclusive and Open. The former recognized no elders or deacons at all, but quickly fell into more and more splinter groups, showing staggering signs of authoritarianism. So much so, the most notorious of all the brethren groups today has a form of potpourri second to none. The open brethren recognize the rightness of eldership and structure, and although there has been a degeneration this past a hundred years, in company with nearly all evangelical groups, the Open Brethren have in their diversity made large contributions to the events of the Gospel. This then, in brief, and I'm afraid somewhat simplistically, is a glance at the way that although the Reformed churches have rejected the grosser perversions of the papacy, many, if not most, have not shaken themselves free of the basic corruptions of church order and rule introduced by the Fathers. Sad to say, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Independents and Baptists are all guilty. How has this happened? What is the root of the problem? We have glanced at history, tradition, common practice, very good and proper in its way. But the crux of the matter is that many, most believers have taken biblical words and misused them, abused them, with disastrous consequences. Scripture is what counts. Scripture gives us the words we must use, and Scripture must define the meanings of those words, not history. not theologians, not tradition. We must base our practice on Scripture, its words, and what it means by them. Remember Humpty Dumpty. There are four words we must look at. The words I have in mind are pastor, minister, clergy, and ordain. Comparing what is commonly thought of today when these words are used, comparing that, I say, with what Scripture intends by these words, will take us to the heart of the problem. And having got to that, if we can return to the New Testament on these things, the gain would be immense. Let me sum up so far. As Frank A. Viola put it, Church history is rife with examples demonstrating how virtually every past renewal has been hampered because the new wine has been routinely repackaged into old wineskins. By the old wineskins, I mean those traditional church structures that are patterned after the old Judaic religious system, a system which separated God's people into two separate classes, required the presence of human mediators, erected sacred buildings, and laid stress on outward forms. The facets of the old wineskins are many. The clergy-laity distinction. spectator performer style church meeting, the single pastor system, the passive universal priesthood. All of these facets represent old covenant forms in New Testament garb. What are the essential characteristics of this departure from the pattern set up by Christ? First of all, New Testament priesthood of all believers has been forgotten or treated as a mere slogan. The New Testament emphasis upon participation has been replaced by the notion of passivity. And this has allowed three things to take center stage. One, The churches elevate a man, set him apart from other believers, set him apart from and above other elders, and afford him a dignity, honor, title, and status far beyond New Testament warrant. President, as I have observed, seems to be the key word or underlying ethos even when the word itself is not used. 2. Thus the churches adopt a threefold order of officers instead of the biblical twofold order. 3. The churches divide believers into two clergy and laity or of course chicken and egg The invention of the clergy-laity split has led to passivity, but whichever way it is, it has all come about because Christians down the centuries, and even to this day, have repeated one of the basic errors of the fathers. That is to say, they have taken New Testament words, or in particular, pastor, minister, clergy, and ordained, adjusted their meanings, and thus taken them far beyond the New Testament. It is time to look at what the New Testament means by these four words and probe the way that they have been abused. It should be enlightening. Frightening might be a more appropriate word.