Why the Topic of Church Polity Belongs in the “Ethics” Section of a Christian Library

Jonathan Leeman

Jonathan Leeman (Ph.D., Wales) serves as editorial director for 9Marks

Introduction

Does the New Testament prescribe a particular form of church government for all times and places?[1] “No,” many Christian academics have long believed. The New Testament’s materials on church polity are characterized by “irreconcilable diversity,” says Markus Bockmuehl.[2] There is a lack of a “didactic material” and a “unitary pattern,” said Millard Erickson.[3] As a result, pastors and Christians today treat church structure pragmatically or—the more respectable word—as a matter of prudence.

While many day-to-day decisions in a church’s life surely depend upon prudence (“should we start a Sunday School program or small groups?”; “who decides on the church budget?”), the New Testament does prescribe a particular polity. Part of the reason we have difficulty seeing that fact is that we fail to recognize that the topic of Church Polity belongs in the Ethic section of the Christian library. That is not to deny the topic also belongs in the Theology section and the Ecclesiology section specifically. Yet open the average introduction to Christian ethics book today and you will find nary a word on church polity.

Just last month, as of this writing, a prominent evangelical theologian published a second edition of his massive volume on ethics. The author offered chapters on parents, marriage, government, capitol punishment, war, self-defense, abortion, war, euthanasia, suicide, aging and death, racial discrimination, health, alcohol and drugs, birth control, reproductive assistance, pornography, divorce and remarriage, homosexuality and transgenderism, property, work, prosperity, poverty and wealth, personal finances, debt, business ethics, environment, and the purity of the heart. Not one chapter is devoted to the church, our relationships within the church, what it means to be a church member, and how church structures (polity) govern our ethics. I have not conducted an exhaustive study on introduction-to-ethics volumes. Perhaps exceptions exist. But in my experience the above list—both what it includes and does not—is typical.

By the same token, when was the last time a conference for Christian ethicists compared congregational, presbyterian, and episcopalian church structures? Or offered a panel on the biblical viability of multisite churches? Or debated whether church membership is biblical? This paper will argue that these are unfortunate omissions, rooted in both our deep-seated individualism as well as the failure to reckon with the biblical data.

The rules of ethics concern the governance of behavior, which makes politics, governance, and polity generally a subcategory of ethics—call it social ethics. Institutions, including institutions of government, are nothing more or less than a set of moral evaluations that govern relationships. Not surprisingly, Aristotle turns in the final chapter of Ethics to the topic of legislations and constitutions as a segue to his next book, Politics. The virtuous ethical life requires the right social environment, which includes the right government. And the right government is a requisite duty of the virtuous ethical life.

Christian ethicists excel in discussing the social norms that bind Christians in their capacity as individuals. They tend to overlook how Scripture also means to bind Christians in their capacity as incorporated entities, which is to say, in their structured and bound life together as church members. In other words, it is important for us to observe the imperatival grammar of church-government related texts (“let him be to you as a Gentile and or tax collector” (Matt. 18:17); “You are to deliver this man . . .” (1 Cor. 5:5); “an overseer must be . . .” (1 Tim. 3:2); “obey your leaders . . .” (Heb. 13:17). Even more crucial, however, is Jesus’s foundational teaching on the keys of the kingdom, whose powers include binding believers together as a corporate entity and asking them to act as a corporate entity (Matt. 16:19; 18:18; 1 Cor. 5:4).

Does the New Testament prescribe a particular form of church government for all times and places? Yes, if we believe biblical ethics apply to all times and places. After all, church government is not just theology. It is ethics.

The Longer Version

All of that is the argument of this paper in the length of a newspaper op ed. Now we can observe the academic-paper-length version. Point 1: New Testament polity applies to today. Yet point 1 depends on point 2, which is the real burden of this essay—the argument that polity is ethics. To put the two points together then, the structures that constitute a church as a church and that govern a church are nothing other than moral norms that bind all Christians at all times in all places as put into place by Jesus and his apostles. If New Testament ethics apply to today, as most evangelicals want to assert; and if polity is ethics, it would seem that New Testament polity still applies to today.The larger version of that argument will proceed in three steps. First, I will consider the moral nature of all institutions. Second, I will look at the moral norms Jesus Christ put into place for constituting a church as a church in Matthew. Third, I will look at the moral norms Christ and the apostles put into place for governing the church. I will conclude by listing a few brief examples of the conversations everyone expects to hear among pastors and polity buffs are in fact conversations that the world of ethicists should be having.

Neo-institutionalism[4]

Part of what may hinder Christians from recognizing that ethical nature of church polity and its abiding relevance for today is the individualistic and anti-institutional nature of how evangelicals approach the church. We are happy to refer to our membership in the universal church and to extol the blessings of fellowship in the local. Yet in general we prefer talk of the organic over the institutional church. In that regard evangelicals too often participate in larger cultural bent toward individualism that has characterized the West since the Enlightenment, particularly the Romantic stream.

At least since Friedrich Schleiermacher borrowed language from the Romantics to pit religious experience against the Enlightenment’s rationalistic formulations of doctrine,[5] many Christians have called for “more community” and “less institutional authority.” That instinct shows up in everything from the communio theology influential at Vatican 2 to people today identifying themselves as “spiritual, not religious.”[6] Among evangelicals this anti-institutional impulse manifests in everything from church hopping to online church, a widespread apathy toward membership, and the failure to practice church discipline among many otherwise faithful churches.

We do not identify ourselves as individualistic because we love our friends and maybe even love some of the people who attend our churches. Yet what we fail to realize is that individualism is not the rejection of relationships, but the rejection of authority applied to relationships and rejection of someone else’s moral norms. Citizens of the Enlightenment West have never asked to be left alone socially, like Thoreau in the woods. Rather, we have asked one authority figure and their moral demands after another to leave us alone—from the king, to the church, to the Bible, to our parents and grandparents, to the village elders, to the philosophers, to the present scientific establishment, to every metanarrative on offer, and finally even to the demands of our XX or XY chromosomes. Individualism is the rejection of anyone else’s authority to define “me” and to make demands of me over and against my deepest feelings and desires. It is the claim that, as a moral matter, I possess the moral right to define me and determine my own moral path, which, frankly, is how so many evangelicals conduct their own discipleship to Christ.

Interestingly, similar anti-institutional impulses characterized the field of political science for much of the twentieth century. Academic enquiry followed the behaviorist emphasis on political actors and groups and why they acted the way they did, rather than the role of various institutions. In the behaviorist vision, both political behavior and governmental institutions have non-political determinants and bases such as class, other forms of group identity, and ideology, determinants which cannot be discovered through studying the formal-legal structures of government.[7] Moving into the 1970s and 80s, however, some political scientists increasingly discovered that the behaviorist explanations of political activity could not explain divergent activities among similarly situated groups in different countries.[8] Out of this grew a movement of sociologists and political scientists who refer to themselves as the neoinstitutionalists. The defining conviction of this movement: institutions matter. They influence an actor’s “Definition of his own interests”[9]—what he thinks he wants. It is not that the new institutionalists deny the various forces that animate behaviorist conceptions of politics, or that they claim institutions are the sole cause of political outcomes.[10] But they no longer treat those forces separately from the institutions, believing that institutions and actors implicate and shape one another: “institutions constitute actors as well as constrain them.”[11] While humans give shape to the institutions that bind them, those institutions in turn shape humans and their sense of identity. As such, it is important to think of institutions as not only constraining, but as commissioning. [12] They offer “bounded innovation.”[13]

What exactly are institutions? Various schools of thought answer that question differently.[14] But to capture the idea in as few words as possible for our purposes, we could call them identity- and behavior-shaping rule structures.[15] That is, they are the application of authority and moral norms to a relationship. Institutions exist wherever two or more individuals relate to one another according to some set of authoritative principles that commission and constrain the nature of their interactions. For the purpose of this essay, we also might define them as ethical edifices. To refer to institutions as “rule structures” or “ethical edifices,” then, is to say that every institution depends on a set of moral evaluations.

Institutions tell us how to act, and they give us opportunities to act. They help to define relationships, giving them purpose and direction. They even shape aspects of our identities. Consider just a few examples listed by the sociologists: marriage, the contract, wage labor, the handshake, insurance, the army, academic tenure, the presidency, the vacation, attending college, the corporation, the motel, and voting. [16] These are very different kinds of institutions, but all of them, in various ways, contain rules and opportunities for action, shape a relationship, and impinge upon identity.[17] Those moral evaluations might be heavy and universal, as with every nation’s law against murder. Or they might be light and contextually defined, as with the proper protocol for greeting a friend on the street—a handshake? A kiss to each cheek? Yet even the latter depend upon a baseline moral assumption that human beings owe one another a measure of recognition and honor, whether that is done through the handshake in one country or a kiss to each cheek in another. By contrast, there is no expected protocol—not institutionalized standards or moral norms—for greeting a bird or a rock.

Also, institutions can present as a set of rules (formal or informal), or they can present as an actual organization or polity. Really, an organization or polity is a fairly elaborate complex of rules and procedures, erected by the application of authority to a set of relationships, and all of which depend upon various moral judgments.[18] One sociologist describes the formal organization as “a packaged social technology, with accompanying rules and instructions for its incorporation and employment in a social setting.” [19] Since as an organization is an elaborately constructed institution, and since as an institution depends on a set of moral evaluations, I like the phrase “ethical edifice” to describe what an institution is. This descriptor calls to mind the fact that the foundation, support beams, walls, joists, and rafters of every organization is nothing other than a host of moral judgments.

Legal philosopher Nick Barber extends this lesson beyond organizations to all forms of social groups. Social rules and social groups are inextricably connected: “Groups can only exist where they are constituted by social rules. But conversely, social rules can only exist in the context of a social group, a group defined by—at minimum—their common acceptance of the rule, coupled with an awareness of their common acceptance.”[20]

With this connection between groups and publicly recognized rules in mind, consider one New Testament scholar’s claim that, in Matthew 16, Jesus’s statement about building his church “does not speak of the creation of an organization or institution,” but instead stands in direct continuity with the Old Testament tradition of “building a people.”[21] What should be clear from our short discussion of institutions so far is that the writer offers a false antithesis. Jesus’s promise to build a people is a promise to take an unconnected group of individuals and to institutionalize them—to place them inside of an identity—and behavior-shaping rule structure or ethical edifice. Membership in Christ’s universal church, whatever that assembly is, implies some rule, some moral evaluation, some expectation that binds and characterizes every member in contradistinction from non-members. And with permanent assemblies, which Jesus promised the church would be, those rules are deeply formalized.[22] Yet these kinds of false antitheses in discussions of the church, I believe, are typical.

This same category-confusion between a people and an institution also plagues any theology that pits communions and institution against one another.[23] A “communion of persons” is itself a kind of institution, a set of people set inside behavior shaping rule structures. Nick Barber again writes, “All social groups are constituted by rules. Even the very simplest social group consists of a collection of people bound together by shared rules—though the rules may be so basic, so elemental, that members of the group may be unaware of them.”[24] Any and every so-called communion presupposes some set of rules, norms, or practices for determining why some people belong to the communion while others do not. Furthermore, it is ill-conceived to pit relationships and institutions against one another. This is why institutionalists speak explicitly about “the ‘relational character’ of institutions; that is to say, on the way in which [institutions] structure the interactions of individuals.”[25] Thus, anti-institutionalism is really a preference for one set of rules over another.[26]

What I hope the above presentation of the neo-institutional movement among sociologists and political scientists has accomplished so far is to help the hearer grow suspicious of any arrangement that places church polity in one book and Christian ethics in another book. Indeed, if the essay stopped here, I hope any reader could begin to connect the dots for him or herself between church polity and ethics, which would then entail how New Testament polity binds believers today. Simply taking from the lessons we have just considered, the reader could say something like, “If, as Nick Barber said, groups can only exist where they are constituted by social rules, the mere existence of any church whatsoever would imply that some set of rules exist which constitute that church as a church, even if those rules may be so basic, so elemental, that members of the group may be unaware of them. That is, the very existence of a local church is an ethical reality.”

A side comment here is worth noting, when we mention the word polity, people quickly jump to questions about who the leaders are. Yet as the Barber comment draws out, the more important question for polity is what authority constitutes the existence of the organization itself and its membership, particularly in an organization in which membership and organizational existence are correlates—that is, the members are the organization. That is why, as we turn to connecting the dots for ourselves on the pages of the New Testament, rather than merely consider the example and arguments of the neo-institutionalists, it is important for us to begin with the authority and moral norms that constitute a church as a church, which brings us to our second point.

The Moral Norms that Constitute a Church as a Church

What constitutes a church as a church? Answer: the keys of the kingdom, which grant Christians both the authority to bind themselves together as churches and the obligation to do so through preaching the gospel and celebrating the ordinances, all of which are commanded as moral norms.

What makes it difficult to understand this point is that, while evangelicals understand biblical authority, they do not understand ecclesial authority, at least in my experience. The aforementioned volume on evangelical ethics will not provide an answer, because the answer requires us to grapple with the topic of church authority. Yet the almost thirteen hundred page volume contains four chapters on different authorities: parental authority, marital authority, civil authority, and other authority. This last chapter contains eight pages on an employer’s authority, just over one page on a teacher’s authority, and then one page on an elder’s authority. Church authority is simply a missing category from this mainstream evangelical theologian’s ethics, as it is from many evangelical minds. I do not point to this one volume as proof positive that all evangelical ethics lacks any regard for ecclesial authority. I assume I could find volumes that do better. Yet—once again—I do believe this lacuna is typical.

Yet it is the Lord Jesus himself who introduces the topic of church authority, which he does when he introduces the keys of the kingdom in Matthew 16, 18, and, by implication, 26 and 28. In these chapters, he establishes a local church with the keys and assigns every member with an office. In Matthew 16, he grants Peter and the apostles the keys of the kingdom for binding and loosing on earth what’s bound and loosed in heaven (v. 19). In chapter 18, he arguably hands those keys to the gathered congregation (v. 17-18), though we can suspend for the purposes of this article whether elders or overseers can exercise those keys on behalf of the congregation.[27]

What is the authority of the keys to bind and loose? Since I have discussed this matter at length in many other works, I will simply summarize here: the keys give their holder the authority to render earthly courtroom-like judgments on behalf of the kingdom of heaven on the what and the who of the gospel—confessions and confessors.[28] The keys give a church the opportunity to say, “This is a true confession” and “You are a true confessor.”

Writers sometimes contrast the church’s authority with the state by observing that the former is declarative while the latter is coercive. That is correct, yet that does not fill out what kinds of declarations the church makes. There are many kinds of declarations: friendship declaration, romantic declarations, campaign promises, and so forth. The keys of the kingdom enable a church to make court-room-like declarations on behalf of Christ’s kingdom. That means a church’s formal declarations do not merely openor shutthe way to salvation, as writers sometimes say. Rather, a church’s declarations bindor loose. Compare, for instance, a judge’s interpretation of a law with a law professor’s. The judge and the law professor might use precisely the same words to explain their interpretation of the law. And both might render the precise same judgment upon a defendant sitting in the courtroom. Yet when the judge offers his interpretation and pounds his gavel, rendering the judgment of “guilty” or “not guilty,” his judgment binds or looses, unlike the law professor’s. It binds or looses not just the defendant, but the entire legal system to treat the defendant as if he is innocent or guilty—from the courtroom bailiff to the police department and city council, to every citizen within that judge’s jurisdiction. To be clear, the judge did not write the law. Nor did he make the defendant actuallyguilty or innocent. Yet he speaks with a legal authority on behalf of his jurisdiction’s legal system. So, it is with the key-wielding church. Invoking Old Testament rules of due process Jesus grants the gathered local church his own authority to make these binding/loosing judgments on behalf of a legal system (Matt. 18:16, 18-20). Which system? The kingdom of heaven.

How do churches exercise the keys of the kingdom? They do it through declaring the gospel and celebrating the ordinances. We see the necessity of declaring the gospel in Matthew 16 and 18. Jesus asks Peter who he is. “You are the Christ.” That is right, Jesus answered. And I will build my church on confessors confessing this confession. And then in Matthew 18:20, again, churches then gather in this name. So, we exercise the keys by declaring and mutually affirming a rightly interpreted gospel. And we exercise the keys through the agreement we enact in baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which we see as we turn to Matthew 26 and 28.

Jesus institutes the Lord’s Supper as the sign and seal of the new covenant in Matthew 26, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out form many for the forgiveness of sins” (v. 28). Then he connects this ceremony to “my Father’s kingdom” (v. 29). Jumping ahead in the biblical storyline, we notice how Paul treats the Supper as a community meal or corporate marker: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor. 10:17). How does a church know it is one body? It partakes of the one bread. Partaking of the one bread shows, reveals, illumines, shines a spotlight on the fact that we are one body. The Supper, in other words, is not for dad and kids at home, or the college group at summer camp, or the pastors attending a conference. It is not a mystical time of enjoying the tingly presence of Christ with your eyes closed, while you happen to be in a room with other people. It is an eyes-open, look-around-the-room-to-see-who-is-there church meal. It is how we formally affirm one another in an ongoing way as new covenant members and kingdom citizens.

When we turn to Jesus’s commission in Matthew 28, we see the keys put into action with the command to baptize. Christians often read this commission in isolation. Yet at least three textual connections tell us to read these final verses in the context of Matthew 16 and 18. First, the one given all authority in heaven and on earth (28:18), presumably, is the right one to have authorized churches to bind and loosed on earth what is bound in loosed in heaven (16:19; 18:18). Second, those who gather in Christ’s name with keys in hand (18:18, 20) would seem to be the right ones to baptize into the name (28:19). Third, those with whom Christ dwells now (18:20) are apparently those with whom he will dwells always (28:20). In other words, Matthew connects these three texts with the language of authority in heaven and earth, the name of Christ, and the language of presence. The Great Commission is to be carried out by churches, for it is a church text.

So, again, I started with the claim that understanding a church’s polity means understand first who or what has the authority to constitute a church as a church. That requires us to ask, what is church authority? To strip off all the layers and whittle it down to its barest minimum, church authority is nothing more or less than two or three people agreeing about the gospel. Again, we get this from Jesus, “Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (Matt. 18:19–20). Church authority is a property of that agreement, and this understanding of church authority is perfectly consonant with the idea that all believers are priests.

Suppose three Christians crawl onto a desert island after their cruise ship sinks. They discover one another, discover they share the same gospel, and agree to regularly gather as a church to read from their water-logged but rescued Bible and to take the Lord Supper together (albeit with coconut milk with purple food die in it rescued from the cruise ship’s kitchen). By this action, this agreement, this judgment they bind one another with the keys of the kingdom. By this agreement, they form a church. Suppose then a fourth survivor walks up, claims to be a Christian, but describes Jesus merely as a great teacher. The first three would not agree with the fourth’s confession. They would not receive the fourth into their communion. And that refusal—that lack of agreement with the fourth—would be their exercise of church authority.

In other words, the ability to gather in Jesus’s name presupposes (1) an agreement with one another about the good news of Jesus, (2) as well as an agreement that the other two persons possess genuine faith in the good news about Jesus. And right there, in those two points of agreement over a confession and the status of the confessors, we find the very heart and substance of church authority. It is two or three or three-thousand people agreeing that we are talking about the same good news; and agreeing that we’re all his followers.

Consider again what church authority is. It is not the authority to make or unmake a Christian. Rather, it is a political or group-organizing authority, allowing the people of an invisible new covenant to become corporately visible. As such, it enables Christians to go public together. That kind of language might sound too exclusive to contemporary ears, but doing away with it is nonsensical. Without it, there is no baptism, no Lord’s Supper, no visible church on earth. Administering a baptism requires two or three people to agree. Enjoying the Supper requires two or three people to agree. Being a visible assembly (which is what the word “church” means) requires two or three people to agree. And the authority of a church, once again, is that agreement. Without church authority, there is no group; there is just a bunch of self-defining individuals. That means, by definition, an individual Christian cannot possess church authority, because church authority requires the agreement of two or three. Agreeing with oneself does not do much to build a church.

Though church authority is a social necessity, church authority is not simply born of the sociological necessity for how groups must form, that is, through agreeing with one another that they are a group. Rather, Jesus puts his own authorization behind the agreement in two ways. First, by referring to the agreement of two or three in Matthew 18:20 (as in verse 16), Jesus invokes an Old Testament courtroom principle from Deuteronomy 19 that says two or three witnesses must agree in order to bring a legally binding charge. Yet now Jesus puts that old principle to new work. These two or three who agree now legally bind one another from the standpoint of his kingdom. They are covenanted together. The Old Testament judicial glue finds a fresh use: binding a church together.

Second, Jesus seals that agreement with the promise of his own presence. “Where this happens, I’m there. They have my seal of approval. They raise my flag. They represent me, just as the temple once represented God’s authority and presence.” When we turn to the rest of the New Testament, we see such authority put into action. Here are two examples, one pertaining to the what of the gospel, the other to the who of the gospel. In Galatians 1:6-9, Paul invokes the authority of each of the churches in Galatia to denounce and discipline teachers who deny a right gospel confession, even if those teachers claim to have the authority of an apostle or an angel: “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed” (v. 8). Paul presumes agreement on the gospel he had delivered. And he tasked not merely the leaders but the Galatians churches themselves with removing such false teachers.

Likewise, Paul instructs not merely the leaders of the Corinthian church to gather in Christ’s name, recognize that that they possessed the power of the Lord Jesus, and remove a gospel confessor whose life contradicted his profession: “When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan” (vv. 4-5a). Apparently, he received Jesus’s Matthew 18:20 memo (“For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them”).

To conclude section two, what constitutes a church as a church? Answer: the keys of the kingdom, which grant Christians both the authority to bind themselves together as churches and the obligation to do so through preaching the gospel and celebrating the ordinances, all of which are commanded as moral norms. We are commanded to declare the gospel. We are commanded to make disciples by baptizing and teaching. We are commanded to receive the Lord’s Supper. We are commanded to engaged in the agree and affirm one another in all of these ways. We are also commanded to guard the what of the gospel in places like Galatians 1 as well as the who of the gospel in places like 1 Corinthians 5. In short, the structures that constitute a church as a church are nothing other than moral norms that bind all Christians at all times in all places as put into place by Jesus and his apostles.

The Moral Norms that Govern a Church

The structures that not only constitute a church as a church but that govern a church are nothing other than moral norms that bind all Christians at all times in all places as put into place by Jesus and his apostles. To be sure, a host of disagreements divide Christians on the topic of who governs the church. Yet Protestant Christians from every tradition can affirm the basics of church power as I described them above. The Dutch Reformed Herman Bavinck or the Scottish Presbyterian James Bannerman both unpack church authority in a manner similar to how I did above.[29] Where authors like Bavinck and Bannerman disagree with a Baptist and small “c” congregationalist like me is whether or not the elders can exercise the power of the keys independently of the congregation. A long tradition of churchmen, really from at least Cyprian, have argued that the leaders represent the church and therefore can exercise its authority in the stead of the congregation. Baptist like me do not believe they can. Yet we do not need to resolve that disagreement for the purpose of this essay because we can all agree that we are building a church’s structure on nothing more or less than a host of moral norms. The church is an ethical edifice, whose foundation, support beams, walls, joists, and rafters of every organization is nothing other than a host of moral judgments. The episcopalian (small-e) may think we need to build an apartment building all under one bishop; the presbyterian a row of condominiums all connected by the presbytery; and the congregationalist (small-c) a neighborhood of independent homes, albeit one where all the neighbors get along and share frequent potlucks together; but we can all agree our churches are ethical edifices.

Furthermore, we can all agree that, when we turn to the topic of elders or overseers or pastors of the church, the relationships between the members and leaders of a church are glued together by a series of moral imperatives, even if, again, we might define the authority the officers possess a little differently.

First, elders or overseers must keep watch over the entire congregation:

To the elders in Ephesus, Paul commands: “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood” (Acts 20:28).
Peter also issues a series of commands: “So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed: shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:1-3).

The moral nature of the charges given to elders is heightened by the promise of accountability.

Peter continues: “when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory” (1 Peter 5:4).
The author of Hebrews refers to leaders as “those who will have to give an account” (Heb. 13:17).
James says that “we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (3:1).

Further, just as a series of commands instruct the elders or overseers, so a series of commands instruct the members:

Hebrews 13:7: “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith.”
And verse 17: Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.”
1 Thessalonians 5:12-13: “We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work.”

Furthermore, where do Christians obey passages like Hebrews 13 and 1 Thessalonians 5? Must we obey all the church leaders in a city or country? No, we are to obey our own leaders in our own churches. Obeying a verse like Hebrews 13:17, like so many other verses in the New Testament, requires the existence of churches as well as church membership. Will elders give an account for all the Christians in a city? No, they will give an account for their own members.

In short, I do not think it is difficult to see that the structures that not only constitute a church as a church but that govern a church are nothing other than moral norms that bind all Christians at all times in all places as put into place by Jesus and his apostles. Acts 20:28 binds all elders. 1 Peter 5 binds all elders. Hebrew 13 and 1 Thessalonians 5 bind all members.

Conclusion

Let me conclude by listing four examples of the conversations everyone expects to hear among pastors and polity enthusiasts, but that I am recommending that the world of ethicists should have.

Conversation 1: is church membership required? If you are a Christian ethicist, you should care about this conversation. Insofar as Jesus turns the “I” into a “we,” who gives who the right to say someone belongs to the “we” of his people? Further, what rights and obligations belong to every member of the “we”? I would argue that the Christian life isthe church member’s life. In the New Testament, you do not have Christians who are not united to churches. And that belonging, that union, then dramatically shapes the nature of Christian’s discipleship, which is to say, a Christian’s ethics. Have you studied that? Do you teach your students that?

Conversation 2: are episcopalian, presbyterian, or congregational church structures most biblical? If you are a Christian ethicist, you should care about this conversation. The differences between these structures will impact both how I view my relationships with my church officers, as well as our collective relationship with other churches. As a church member, am I finally responsible with the other members of my church for a case of excommunication? If so, that will impact how I should be relating to the members of my church all week in good times and in bad so that, if an occasion for excommunication arises, I can play my part in the discipline process with knowledge and integrity? Or are just the elders responsible? Or the presbytery? Or the bishop of another church? If so, that, too, will subtly change my own discipleship and ethical responsibilities. The larger point here is, change a church’s structure and you change the moral shape of the church. You change how people relate—their sense of responsibility to one another—however subtly and imperceptibly. Changing from a congregational to a presbyterian or an episcopalian church government changes its moral shape. It distributes responsibilities and duties between leaders and members differently. You give more responsibility to the leaders, less to the members.

Conversation 3: are multisite church structures an acceptable alternative to single site? Just as changing from a congregational to a presbyterian or an episcopalian church government changes its moral shape, so does changing from one service to two, or one site to three, even if people are not fully aware of those differences. Whether you mean to or not, you inevitably shift some degree of authority and responsibility upward onto the shoulders of the leaders, even if you maintain the same formal structure (congregational, elder rule, and so on.). Over time, that shift, like two guns aimed at just slightly different angles, will dramatically impact the direction of their relationships inside the church and how they fulfill their mission outside of it.

Conversation 4: can people join a church without being baptized? I remember watching Mark Dever and John Piper debate the question of whether Baptist churches like theirs should allow professing believers who had been sprinkled as infants join their churches. Piper pleaded, “Mark, how can I not let Jonathan Edwards or Sinclair Ferguson join my church?! That’s ridiculous.” Mark replied, “I would want them to join my church, too! But Jesus has not given me the authority to override or ignore what he’s commanded.” Notice that Mark was appealing to what the Bible says, yes, but also, he was treating it as a matter of what authority he understood himself to have or not have. In other words, he was making a biblical argument, yes, but more specifically, he was making an ethical argument. It is an ethical conversation.

These are the types of conversations I encourage the teachers and students of ethics to add their books and lecture notes. After all, they are every bit as relevant for a life of faithful Christian obedience today as the more popular conversations about marriage, sexuality, capital punishment, justice, money, and every other favorite topic of the ethicists. In fact, let me use Dever’s “I don’t have the authority” comment that to make my final point. People often make the distinction between first tier and second tier doctrinal issues when it comes to theological triage. First tier doctrines are those issues that are necessary for salvation, like our doctrines of God, sin, Scripture, and salvation. Second tier doctrines are those doctrines that are necessary for becoming a church as with the ordinances, ordination, and church polity.

Notice, however, three things about these second-tier issues. First, they are all ethical issues. The doctrine of the Trinity is not an ethical issue in quite the say way as the doctrine of baptism. Baptism intrinsically involves a “must.” Second-tier issues are ethical issues. Second, second-tier issues exist to display, recognize, and protect first tier issues. One does not need a right understanding of membership and the ordinances to be saved, but if you want to protect your preaching of salvation of the church, you need to protect it inside of a church. Just consider, how well have those Christians you have known who tried to follow Jesus outside the fellowship of the church fared over the decades. Do they prosper in the faith? Do their children or neighbors follow them into the faith? Hardly, the quickly prove nominal and eventually abandon the faith.

Third, second-tier church doctrines, being ethical gospel-protecting issues, are precisely where Christ means for faith to put on deeds, albeit the social deeds of our unity and obedience in Christ. Show me your faith apart from your deeds and I will show you my faith by my deeds, said James, because faith without works is dead. To translate this into our conversation, show me your so-called membership in the church universal apart from your membership in the local and I will show you my membership in the universal by my membership in the local. For membership in the universal apart from membership in the local is dead.

Conversion is individual, but it is also corporate. It turns the “I” into a “we.” It signs us up for a family photograph. And that new status and identity brings with it a host of obligations and responsibilities that we owe to one another. Yet where do we then fulfill those obligations and responsibilities? Where do they get demonstrated and proven, even as deeds demonstrate and prove faith? In the same place the invisible becomes visible. Christian identity assumes its existence—we join the Christian “we”—inside of church membership. We gain all the rights, prerogatives, and obligations of a Christian there. Christ did not commission a kingdom of free agents, each of whom have the right to declare themselves, express themselves, direct themselves, and generally remain unbound by other Christians and Christian leaders. Rather, he means for us to commit ourselves to a community of Christians and to submit to its oversight and the oversight of its leaders. As such, the Christian life is a church member’s life. Following Jesus as disciples means doing so in the fellowship of the church.

[1] This article was originally delivered as a paper in the ethics section at the Evangelical Theological Society, San Diego, November 2024.

[2] See Markus Bockmuehl, “Is There a New Testament Doctrine of the Church?” in Scripture’s Doctrine and Theology’s Bible: How the New Testament Shapes Christian Dogmatics, ed. Markus Bockmuehl and Alan J. Torrance (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 35.

[3] Millard Erickson, Christian Theology 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 1094-5. Thanks to Bobby Jamieson for pointing me to the Bockmuehl and Erickson quotes.

[4] A number of paragraphs in this section have been adapted and reworked from chapter 2 of Jonathan Leeman, Political Church: The Local Assembly as Embassy of Christ’s Rule (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2016).

[5] See Roger Haight, Christian Community in History, vol. 2, Comparative Ecclesiology (New York: Continuum, 2005), 312-13.

[6] Among them, Johann Adam Möhler in particular helped inaugurate a “conceptual revolution” in the doctrine of the church among Catholics in the 1820s with his Unity in the Church or the Principle of Catholicism: Presented in the Spirit of the Church Fathers of the First Three Centuries (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995); 355. See also Dennis Doyle’s helpful overview, Communion Ecclesiology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000); and Avery Cardinal Dulles’s chapter “The Church as Mystical Communion” in Models of the Church, expanded edition (New York: Image Books, 2002), 39-54.

[7] James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, “Elaborating the ‘New Institutionalism,’” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions, edited by R. A. W. Rhodes, Sarah A. Binder, and Bert A. Rockman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 5. See also March and Olsen, “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life,” The American Political Science Review 78, no. 3 (September. 1984): 734-37.

[8] Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” in Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis, edited by Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen and Frank Longstreth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5.

[9] Peter Hall, Governing the Economy: The Politics of State Intervention in Britain and France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 19.

[10] Thelen and Steinmo, “Historical Institutionalism,” 4.

[11] Powell and DiMaggio, “Introduction,” 7. Ronald L. Jepperson puts it, “Institutional accounts…suggest, typically, that actors…are highly institutional in their origins and operation and, moreover, that in modern polity forms they are often constructed institutions themselves…” in “Institutions, Institutional Effects, and Institutionalism,” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, edited by Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 158; see also Ronald Jepperson and John W. Meyer, “The Public Order and Construction of Formal Organizations,” in Powell and DiMaggio, eds., New Institutionalism, 204-231..

[12] Jepperson writes, “Institutions are not just constraint structures; all institutions simultaneously empower and control. Institutions present a constraint/freedom duality…: they are vehicles for activity within constraints . . . All institutions are frameworks of programs or rules establishing identities and activity scripts for such identities.” Jepperson, “Institutions,” 146.

[13] Margaret Weir, “Ideas and the Politics of Bounded Innovation,” in Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth, eds., Structuring Politics, 188-216.

[14] Peter A. Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor offered one of the first essays which distinguished three different schools pushing the neoinstitutional agenda that “developed quite independently of each other”: historical institutionalism, rational choice institutionalism, and sociological institutionalism. Hall and Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,” Political Studies 44, no. 5 (Dec. 1996): 936-57; see also Marie-Laure Djelic, “Institutional Perspectives—Working Towards Coherence or Irreconcilable Diversity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Institutional Analysis, edited by Glenn Morgan et al (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 15-40. Colin Hay provides a useful two-page chart comparing four different forms of institutionalism in “Constructivist Institutionalism,” in Rhodes, Binder, and Rockman, eds., Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions, 58-59; Thelen and Steinmo helpfully compare historical institutionalism and rational choice in “Historical Institutionalism,” 7-10.

[15] Elizabeth Sanders, “Historical Institutionalism,” in Rhodes, Binder, and Rockman, eds., Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions, 38.

[16] Jepperson, “Institutions,” 144.

[17] Oliver O’Donovan, in the good intention of placing human authority inside of divine rule, pits human institutions against human actions since he wants to draw a direct line from divine authorization to human action. It is not clear to me, however, why our formulations need to denigrate the role of human institutions in the process. If it is only to make the point that human institutions are relative, then I agree. See O’Donovan, Desire of the Nations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 20.

[18] Economists sometimes distinguish institutions and organizations. See, for example, Douglass C. North “The New Institutional Economics and Third World Development,” in The New Institutional Economics and Third World Development, edited by John Harris, Janet Hunter, Colin M. Lewis (London: Routledge, 1995), 23, while political scientists more often treat organizations as one type of institution; see Jean Blondel, “About Institutions, Mainly, But Not Exclusively, Political,” in Rhodes, Binder, and Rockman, eds., Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions, 722-23; also Hall, Governing the Economy, 19.

[19] Jepperson, “Institutions,” 146-47.

[20] Nick Barber, “The Constitutional State,” in Oxford Constitutional Theory, edited by Martin Loughlin, John P. McCormick and Neil Walker (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 69.

[21] Ladd, Theology of the New Testament, 107-108.

[22] Barber writes, “A rule becomes formalized when it is articulated in a definitive fashion. This is a matter of degree. At one end of the scale a social rule may start to become formalized when it is expressed by community leaders whose statements begin to clarify the rule. At the other end of the scale, law provides an example of an extremely formalized set of rules: it contains rules which are frequently written in canonical fashion, coupled with institutions empowered to resolve disputes that may arise over their interpretation.” In “Constitutional State,” 73.

[23] Jenson and Wilhite, Church, 21, 51.

[24] Barber, Constitutional State, 67. The more formalized a group becomes, of course, the more “aware” group members will be of those rules that constitute them as a group.

[25] Peter Hall, Governing the Economy, 19.

[26] Compare with Jenson and Wilhite, Church, 21.

[27] For several centuries, Presbyterians and Anglicans have affirmed that the entire congregation possesses the keys, but that elders or overseers exercise the keys on the congregation’s behalf. This distinction between possession and exercise can be found in the PCA’s and OPC’s books of church order, for instance.

[28] For my interaction with biblical commentaries on the keys, see Jonathan Leeman, The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love: Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010). For my most recent explanation of the keys, see One Assembly: Rethinking the Multisite and Multichurch Models (Wheaton: Crossway, 2020).

[29] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 4, Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation, edited by John Bolt, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2008), 375-76; James Bannerman, The Church of Christ: A Treatise on the Nature, Powers, Ordinances, Discipline, and Government of the Christian Church (1869; repr., Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2015), 288.