On the whole, I think this is as God intends it. If you can look out onto a people hoping to hear the Word of God fed to them by you, and not grow in fatherly affection for them, something is terribly wrong. Something essential is missing in the heart of the preacher. For after all, preaching is not merely or primarily an intellectual exercise. It is primarily an exercise of the heart… the preacher pouring His into the Word of God, then pouring out into the people, and the people opening theirs to be filled with the glorious riches of God in the preaching moment. If love is missing, the heart is defective.
And so it’s also natural that the primary preacher accrues a certain kind of authority in the eyes of the congregation as well. Loving authority stemming from loving teaching and preaching seems to be the plan of God.
But the human heart is also an idol factory. Without Spirit-filled thinking, men and women may easily begin to “worship” the pastor. No one will use that word to describe their affections and allegiance, but their hearts and actions will be fairly close to “worship.” At the least, there is such a thing as being overly devoted or loyal to a pastor. The problem affected Corinth and it affects many churches today.
If we are to prevent church splits one thing we must do is make sure that the natural affections and authority that accrue to the teaching office is dispersed among the leadership of the church. We must find obvious and subtle, planned and spontaneous ways to attach the allegiance of the people to the church and the leadership as a whole. Four things come to mind. I’m sure there are others and welcome the feedback.
Teaching
One practical thing we can do is make sure that other gifted men in the leadership and the body have an opportunity to exercise their teaching gifts. We certainly should use such men in Sunday school and small group settings. But we should also provide them opportunity in the more public meetings of the church: Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings (if you have them), and mid-week Bible study.
Men don’t have to be seasoned, professional preachers. They should be clear communicators or the meetings won’t be edifying. But taking a “risk” on a younger man or a man with little preaching experience is a perfectly fine thing to do. A couple of churches I know use the Sunday evening service with this purpose in mind. They often find new teaching gifts in the body and are able to help hone those gifts.
As the congregation grows accustomed to hearing more of their leaders love them through teaching, we help to inoculate the body against one chief cause of church splits: disproportionate attachment to one leader. And as a rule, the more charismatic a leader you are, the more important this sharing of teaching authority becomes.
Comments
If we’re the main preaching/teaching elder, the other way we can spread authority and esteem for the entire body and leadership is to make specific, edifying comments about other leaders in the body.
I don’t mean we need to flatter our leaders. Our words should be true and proportionate to the situation or quality we’re commenting on. And they should be specific enough in detail to model for the congregation both how to give godly encouragement and why they should be thankful for their leadership.
Moreover, our comments to the wider church should always underscore, not undermine, the leadership of the church. Wherever there may be disagreements or discontent among leaders it should be expressed and resolved in meetings with the other leaders. The surest path to wider congregational discontent will be for leaders to act, comment, or react in ways that suggest fraction and division among the leaders. When members stumble on issues that divide the leadership, or issues that the leaders are currently weighing, we should politely and with positive tone invite their continued prayers for the leaders as the discussions continue. We must cultivate a culture in our churches where members “make every effort to maintain unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:1-3), and this culture must begin with and be modeled by the leadership. Our public comments go a long way in spreading authority, supporting that authority, and preventing tensions that lead to division.
Submission
I have served as an elder in two churches prior to receiving the privilege of serving as senior pastor at FBC. Both of those pastors, Peter Rochelle and Mark Dever, were good models of submission to the elders as a whole. They were “first among equals,” but they did not abuse that position and authority. They accepted counsel, they listened, they contributed, and they were longsuffering with those of us who disagreed and in many cases knew less about an issue than they. They were willing, despite better biblical and theological knowledge and greater wisdom from experience, to submit to the direction of the entire group. That was humble submission.
That’s not to say there weren’t times when they were strongly convicted about an issue and would hold the line. There were times of disagreement, sometimes strong disagreement. In those times, the group of elders needed to be humble and to submit to the senior shepherd. We needed to determine more precisely (a) what questions needed to be answered, (b) what decision criteria were necessary, (c) what mutual goals should govern us, and (d) what exact timeline for making a decision was necessary or wise. In those situations, by God’s grace, mutual submission and trusting that all who shepherd have the same goal—the glory of God revealed in His bride, the church—provided much needed unity in the leadership. This can take time to build, but toiling for it is necessary for protecting the church from splits. We must war against our sense of “entitlement” as pastors or elders, and against the conceit that whispers to us that we see more clearly or more learnedly than our brothers who lead with us. We must give ourselves to cultivating godly humility that submits.
Leading
Lastly, leaders must lead. Pastors must lead. There is a danger of being overly passive in the face of situations and decisions that require clear thinking and charting a course. In those cases we must lead.
And we can’t be afraid to lead in this dance. There may be 1,000 things we must be sensitive to, but we must resist the paralysis that comes from over-analyzing and tea leaf reading. Leadership is as much an act of faith as prayer. We must trust that God is at work in our leadership of the church, and that He will providentially rule in our prayerful efforts.
When People Leave
And we must not be afraid to lead the church toward a split in order to prevent a split. This may sound counter-intuitive. After all, the entire series of posts is about preventing splits.
I’m convinced that merely showing up and being yourself will be a “splitting” factor for some people. We can not give in to fear of man and seek to please people. It is required of stewards that they be faithful. And sometimes being faithful requires upsetting some apple carts. You don’t necessarily start out to do so, but in the course of applying God’s Word and pursuing faithful church practice some disgruntlement is bound to happen. When it does, we must keep leading. For some, this will have the feel of “forcing” an ever so gradual “split” of sorts, as some people peel away and leave.
If this is necessary, then hopefully that’s a one-by-one peeling, with people leaving in positive rather than disruptive ways. But if we’re being faithful, we must remember that we’re building deeper foundations that hopefully the church can rest upon for generations to come. We must not let the short-term struggles that arise upset the long-term goal of preserving the unity and growing the entire body into full maturity in Christ.
Third, I think churches often split because they’ve abandoned the Word of God in charting, teaching and communicating, explaining and/or defending future directions for the church. The place where you really need good elders and leaders is in resolving those questions, issues or disputes that have no clear biblical answer and are therefore a matter of Christian liberty or wisdom. It’s easy to chart, communicate and defend a decision when it’s a matter of right or wrong, obedience or disobedience. But when it’s a matter of wisdom… things become a bit trickier. The tendency at times is to insist you’ve felt or received “God’s leading” or a particular “calling” as an explanation. Or, there are knee-jerk, defensive appeals for “submitting to leadership.” Our people see through this. After all, they have “leadings” and “callings,” too. The church develops the habit of resolving disputes by deciding who offers the strongest insistence that “God told me so” or “you need to submit.” In a congregational context this is deadly. It teaches the people that there really is no authority outside of ourselves when it comes to the less clear matters, which in the minds of most people are the most important or at least the most impassioned matters.