A Display of God's Glory/Congregationalism

From Gospel Translations

Do you consider church to exist merely for your own spiritual growth? When you gather on Sunday morning with your congregational family, you are not simply having your personal devotionals with lots of other people. No, you are participating in the life of a particular church. And when Christians gather as a congregation, it is not merely as individual consumers who happen, by temporarily shared tastes, to be in the same room. We are actually assembling as a living institution, a viable organism, one body. I wonder why YOU go to church.

Let me ask you a question that might help to get to the nub of the matter: What’s the use of the church? Take a moment and try to answer that question. When you understand something more of the church and what it’s about, then the Christian life becomes a lot more than a simple sustained moral effort to cultivate a list of private virtues and avoid a list of private vices. You begin to understand the church as the manifestation of the living God in this world.

Congregationalism—What it Means

Mistaken conceptions of Congregationalism

People have often misunderstood congregationalism. Its detractors have presented it as a kind of lone-rangerish independency. “Separatism,” it’s been called. One writer has defined it as “the claim of individual congregations to act as if they were alone in the world, independently of all other Christians,” (Roland Allen, Missionary Methods, p. 85n1). On the other hand, some of its champions have presented it as straight and simple democracy, tying it up with the inalienable rights of man. Charles Finney presented congregationalism this way:

Episcopacy is well-suited to a state of general ignorace among the people. Presbyterianism, or Church Republicanism is better suited to a more advanced state of intelligence and the prevalence of Christian principle. While Congregationalism, or spiritual Democracy, is best suited and only suited to a state of general intelligence, and the prevalence of Christian principle. (Charles Finney in his Lectures on Theology)

Correct Conception of Congregationalism

None of these are good understandings of the picture of church life that the New Testament leaves us. Congregationalism in no way inhibits cooperation with other congregations in missions, education, evangelism, disaster relief, and so many other things. It does mean, though, that no body from outside can mandate something for a particular congregation, whether in a matter of discipline or of doctrine. Relying on the clarity of Scripture perhaps more than in any other polity, we congregationalists assume that God will lead His people as a whole to understand who should be recognized as members and leaders, what should be believed, and in what should be done.

Some may dismiss congregationalism as just a reflection of enlightenment political theory. But that is simply not the case. In Clement of Rome’s first letter to the church at Corinth, written around AD96, we read of elders being commissioned “with the full consent of the church,” (trans. Staniforth, p. 46). Other examples abound. Certainly Christians in the past have understood this to be taught by Scripture.

Congregationalism is simply the understanding that the last and final court of appeal in a matter of the life of the local church is not the bishop of Rome or Constantinople or Washington. It is not some international body, or some national Assembly, Conference or Convention. It is not the president of a denomination or the chairman of a board of trustees. It is not a regional synod or ministerial association. It is not a group of elders inside the local church, or the pastor. The last and final court of appeal in a matter of the life of the local church is, and should be, the local congregation itself. This seems to be evidenced by the New Testament in matters of doctrine and of discipline, in matters of admission of members and the settling of differences between them.

Four Areas in the New Testament where the Congregation has Authority.

Let’s look at just these four matters in the New Testament:

1. Matters of Dispute between Christians.

In Matthew 18:15-17, Jesus told of a dispute between brothers:

If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over. But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector.

Notice here to whom one finally appeals. Notice what court is the final judicatory. It is not a bishop, or a presbytery; it’s not an assembly, a synod, a convention or a conference. It’s not a pastor or a board of elders, or a church committee. It is, we read, “the church,” that is, the whole local congregation whose action must be the final court of appeal.

If you look to the passage we considered earlier, Acts 6:1-5, we see an important event in the life of the early church. There was a problem over the distribution of the church’s resources, and this problem was evidently requiring a good bit of the apostles’ attention. Verse 2 reads,

So the Twelve gathered all the disciples together and said, ‘It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the Word of God in order to wait on tables. Brothers, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them and will give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the Word. This proposal pleased the whole group.

And then Luke goes on to name those whom the church chose.

One of the complexities of using the New Testament as a guide to our church life is the presence of the apostles in these churches. You understand the difficulty. How fully can we later elders, pastors and overseers assume the apostles’ practice as a guide for our own? Can we define doctrine, delineate error, or recall the words of Christ as these could who were with Jesus throughout His earthly ministry, who were taught by Him and who were specially commissioned by Him to be the foundation of His church? Are the names of those of us who are elders here to be inscribed on the foundations of the New Jerusalem as the apostles’ names are? Clearly, the answer to all these questions is “no.”

Our problem with the model of the apostles is that in following it, present-day church leaders might ascribe too much authority to themselves without the competence to deserve such authority. Yet in Acts 6, we see these very apostles handing over responsibility to the congregation. They were recognizing in the assembly the same kind of ultimate authority, under God, that Jesus spoke of in Matthew 18.

Following these examples, Paul, too, taught that the discipline and doctrine of a local church is held in trust, under God, by the congregation. Paul, when writing to the Corinthian church, told them that they were to judge those inside the church (I Cor. 5:12). He writes,“appoint as judges even men of little account in the church!” (I Cor. 6:4). In matters of dispute between Christians, the congregation as a whole is the final court held out in Scripture.

2. Matters of Doctrine

All of the letters of the New Testament (except Philemon and the pastorals) were written to churches as a whole, instructing them as a whole on what their responsibilities were. Even in matters of the fundamental definition of the gospel, the congregation seemed to be the court of [earthly] final appeal. So in Galatians 1, Paul calls on congregations of fairly young Christians to sit in judgment of angelic and apostolic preachers (even himself! Gal. 1:8) if they should preach any other gospel than the one which the Galatians had accepted. He doesn’t write merely to the pastors, to the presbytery, to the bishop or the conference, to the convention, or to the seminary. He writes to the Christians who compose the churches, and he makes it quite clear that not only are they competent to sit in judgement on what claims to be the gospel, but that they must! They have an inescapable duty to judge those who claim to be messengers of the Good News of Jesus Christ according to the consistency of their new claims with what these Galatian Christians already knew to be the gospel.

Paul makes this point again in II Timothy 4:3 when he counsels Timothy and the church in Ephesus on the best way to handle false teachers. When he describes the coming tide of false teachers in the church, he particularly blames, in 4:3, those who “to suit their own desires… gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” Whether in selecting them, or paying for them, or approving of their teaching, or in simply consenting to listen to them repeatedly, the congregation here is culpable. They are held as guilty for tolerating false teaching, as are the false teachers themselves. In basic doctrinal definition, the congregation as a whole is the final court held out in Scripture.

3.Matters of Discipline

In I Corinthians 5, Paul appeals to the whole Corinthian congregation (not just to the elders) to act, in verses 5, 7, 11, and 13. This is not a matter merely or finally for Paul the apostle, or for whatever elders the local Corinthian church may have had. This was a matter for the congregation as a whole. They had all accepted this one in to their number, and they were all now tolerating him. So they were all now implicated in his sin, and they must now either turn loose of this man, or turn loose of their claim to be Christ’s disciples. In matters of church