A Church must
always have a plurality of elders. This is essential for protection from evil. Spiritual
authority and protection comes through submission to authority. If one man leads a church,
he is not really submitted to anyone, and therefore has no spiritual covering. True
protection comes when a group of elders all submit to each other. They agree to do nothing
important without first submitting it to the other elders. Each elder is accountable to
the other, and protected by his submission. The other members of the Church are protected
by submitting to their elders. It is dangerous to have just one person leading a
church. If all the church members submit to him, he has tremendous authority. But because
he is not under authority, he is liable to satanic attack and deception. In most
situations where Christian groups have gone haywire, it is because they were led by one
man or one woman. A Church will not have one professional minister who leads and pastors
the whole Church. The biblical model is always plurality of eldership. Even the apostle
Paul, a mature and experienced leader, never worked on his own. He always had other elders
with him for protection.
In our modern culture, there is an obsession
with celebrities. This has also crept into the church.
Professional Leadership
Although professional, trained leadership has become the norm for
modern churches it is not an essential part of the church. Paul and
Barnabas appointed teams of elders not individual leaders. There is
not a single example in the New Testament of one person being
appointed to take charge of a church.
One of the fundamental ideas of the New Testament is the doctrine
of the priesthood of all believers. This means that every believer has
access to God, and can exercise a ministry for Him. But this does not
really happen in the modern church, because most of the work is done
by the ordained minister. Our modern system of professional ministers
belongs more in the Old Testament situation, where ministry was
limited to a priestly class. This has severely weakened the
effectiveness of the church, because it can only achieve as much as
one man is able to do. Most church members have not been mobilised for
action, because there is no place in the structure for them to get
involved in ministry.