Let me point to what I believe should be the future for our church. And please note: when I say “our church,” I mean in the sense that we belong to it, not that the church belongs to us. Our church belongs to God. It’s His. He paid for it with the blood of His Son (Acts 20:28).

We have revised our church constitution twice in the last 28 years. Both times it was a lengthy, challenging process, even with the aid of computers. Both times we looked at our church constitution- which, like so many others, borrowed heavily from the business world of the mid-20th century- streamlined it, and brought it more into line with how we actually do things.

But we have also had an ongoing problem of diminishing interest and participation in the running of our church.

The church used to have quarterly “business” meetings. I put the word “business” in quotes because the real business- the mission of the church- is given to us by Jesus in what’s called The Great Commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:19-20; see also Mark 16:15, Luke 24:45-48; John 20:21; and Acts 1:8). Jesus defined the real business of the church. Anything else is just tending to details. And wasn’t it thoughtful of Him to give us our mission statement in five different ways, so we didn’t have to come up with one on our own?

Thankfully, I wasn’t here when the church had monthly “business” meetings. But even quarterly, in most of these meetings, there wasn’t much going on. We didn’t really have anything to decide. We read the minutes, went through the motions (pun intended), and went home. And as time passed, more and more of our church members stopped coming to these “business” meetings, for a very good reason: because they’d already been to one.

At times when we did have something we needed to vote on. But we couldn’t, because we didn’t have a quorum. So, we’d have to stop and phone church members, and beg them to come to church just long enough so we could vote. Frankly, I thought this was all embarrassing. The quorum was only 30 members. That’s not a lot, especially when our attendance was averaging 200. But we often didn’t have eventhirty people who wanted to come to a church “business” meeting, at least not without being asked.

So, we did away with the quarterly “business” meetings. Instead, we charged our Official Board—the Deacons, the Trustees, and the Board of Christian Education—to meet quarterly, and to call for a special church “business” meeting whenever they needed to ask the church’s permission to do something that wasn’t already designated in the annual budget. And we went to only one scheduled annual “business” meeting in December, so that the congregation could approve the budget and the list of officers for the next year.

But guess what? We still have the problem of meeting the quorum! In recent years, we’ve started having the annual meeting right after the morning service, and after a pitch-in dinner. That’s right: we have to bribe people with food to get them to come to the once-a-year “business” meeting.

The same trend has happened with the Official Board. With all three boards in attendance, we ought to have between 15 and 20 people in our quarterly Official Board meetings. But most of the time, we’re lucky if we have half of that. At the last meeting of what’s now called our Church Council, we had 10 people. That included me and Pastor Bobby, and frankly, we’re both paid to come.

People vote most convincingly with their attendance and their pocketbooks. And over the past nearly three decades, the trend has been unmistakable: our people overwhelmingly don’t want to participate in our church government in its current form.

Now let me switch gears, but I’m not really changing the subject.

Years ago, I talked with a very fine young pastor named Bobby Pell (who’s not so young anymore, but still a faithful pastor, and one of the leaders in our state convention). Bobby Pell had gone to Tennessee Temple University in Chattanooga. (Sadly, it’s no longer in existence.) That school was led by Dr. Lee Roberson, who always said, “Everything rises and falls on leadership.” I asked Bobby Pell what he thought about that. And he replied with such wisdom. He said, “David, I still believe that’s true, as long as you understand that leadership is plural.”

The kind of churches I grew up in exalted the position of pastor to that of a benign (and sometimes not-so- benign) dictator. The pastor functioned less like a shepherd and more like a Chief Executive Officer. Again, this was borrowed from the business world, not drawn from Scripture.

This kind of church leadership can work…but only if the pastor is a strong, gifted, entrepreneurial-style leader. That’s putting it positively. Most of the time, in actual practice, it was much more negative: it only worked if the pastor was dictatorial, insistent and persuasive…or more often, overbearing, arm-twisting, and manipulative, with a “my way or the highway” approach. Churches really did function more like a secular business than a New Testament church.

My family was part of a church for a long time that had a pastor who was a dictator. He was a godly man, and a faithful preacher of the Gospel. But he left a lot of broken, shattered relationships in his wake, including my parents and grandparents. I never wanted to be that kind of a pastor.

But many churches almost subconsciously accepted the “pastor-as-CEO” mentality. And frankly, that puts a lot of unnecessary burdens on a pastor.

Several times over the past nearly three decades, we’ve had to deal with problems that had the potential of causing real damage to our church. Each time I agonized over it, lost sleep and my appetite because of it, and did my best to figure out what my responsibilities were in the situation. I’d meet with the deacons, talk with trusted counselors, pray, and try to discern the best way to proceed.

Each time, after consideration, the same collective conclusion was reached: it was agreed that, since I was the pastor, I should be the one to deal with the situation. And each time, here’s how it went: “We have a problem. We think you should deal with the problem. We don’t like the way you dealt with the problem.” After the fact, there always seemed to be criticisms about how I’d handled it…even if we had all more-or-less agreed about how to proceed.

That puts an awful lot of unfair burden on any one man, whether it’s me or somebody else. There has to be a better way… a more Biblical way.

I began studying ecclesiology- What the Bible says about the church- back in college. I love the doctrine of the church. I love the church, period. The church is Christ’s plan for spreading the Gospel in this age.

There are two offices of the church described in Scriptures: pastors (also call elders and overseers– or bishops in the King James Version- three different words of the same office); and deacons. Each New Testament church made its own decisions (i.e., was congregational in government), was led by the pastors/elders/overseers, and was served by the deacons.

In the early church, there was always a plurality of elders, i.e., more than one. This can be understood in different ways, and frankly, I don’t think we should throw stones at each other over our different conclusions. As Pastor Bobby likes to say, “The Apostle Paul never wrote Third Timothy to clear up all our questions about church organization.”

But can I tell you something? After all this time, after all my reading and studying of the Scriptures, and after all the hard experiences I’ve been through in various churches, I am finally persuaded that leadership is plural, that a single pastor was not meant to bear all the responsibilities for the flock by himself. I really believe it is best for the church to have a plurality of elders. Of course, there should be pastor-teachers who give themselves full-time to the ministry of the gospel, and who are supported financially by the church. But there should also be others—at least two or three—who, while being employed in other ways, nevertheless are just as capable, just as qualified (according to 1 Timothy 3:1-7), and just as spiritual as the pastor-teachers.

This represents a real paradigm shift for me. Several times in the past, sometimes even encouraged by others, I’ve thought, “Here’s a problem. How am I going to deal with it? I need to pray and decide what to do.” But long, hard experience has taught me that it would have been much better if instead I’d thought: “This is a problem. How are we going to deal with it? We need to pray together, and decide together what to do.” Everything really does rise and fall on leadership. And leadership, according to the Bible, is plural.

I believe the future of our church lies in recognizing this simple, Biblical truth, and changing the way we “do church” to reflect this. Newer people have come into our congregation and experienced frustration with the way our church operates. Older people in our church have quietly but firmly expressed dissatisfaction with the way our church operates, by not coming to the appointed “business” meetings of the church, even when they’re only once a quarter, or once a year.

In the past, our church had been through such bitter, hurtful experiences that we just needed time to heal. It wasn’t the time to think about things like this. But after all this time, and after twice doing our best to streamline our current system, I believe it is now time for us to openly talk and pray about these things.

With the best of intentions, the previous generations of our church have done their best to work through our current church structure. As we turn over the reins to the next generation—something we have long prayed and hoped for—we need to do our best now to encourage the next generation to find a way to be the church, to obey Jesus’ Great Commission, and handle the inevitable problems in ways that don’t put unfair and impossible demands on one person. Or ruin his health.

Let’s all think and pray about that.

Soli Deo Gloria!

Pastor David