What Are the Limits of a Church’s Authority?
What Kind of Authority Is Church Authority?
Christians have long said the church’s authority is declarative, by which they mean to distinguish it from the state’s authority, which is coercive. That’s true so far as it goes, but what kind of declaration is it? There are many kinds of declarations: romantic declarations; friendship declarations; the declaration of the Olympic official who says every four years, “Let the games begin”; a pastor’s declaration when he says, “I now pronounce you man and wife”; or a judge’s declaration when he says, “Not guilty.” The church’s declaration is most like the last two examples. It accomplishes something public and legal, though “legal” from the perspective of Christ’s kingdom.
Think about a judge’s declaration when saying “guilty” or “not guilty.” The declaration doesn’t actually make the law what the law is. Nor does it make the person actually innocent or guilty. But the judge’s declaration functions on behalf of the legal system to render a particular interpretation of the law as the binding interpretation, and it functions on behalf of the legal system to render a person innocent or guilty. Once the gavel hits the desk, the courtroom bailiff will either let the defendant go free or escort the defendant to a jail cell. Publicly, the judge’s declaration accomplishes something. It binds or looses the defendant on behalf of the legal system.
Authority
Jonathan Leeman
Through Scripture and engaging stories, Jonathan Leeman shows that godly authority is essential to human flourishing and presents 5 attributes of biblical authority.
So with the congregation’s use of the keys. It represents a church’s way of publicly saying, “This is the gospel we believe in,” and “These are the people we recognize as gospel believers and citizens of the kingdom of heaven.” If a judge speaks on behalf of a nation’s legal system, the church speaks on behalf of another legal system—the kingdom of heaven.
In that sense there’s a difference between you sharing the gospel with your next-door neighbor, and the preacher sharing the gospel from the pulpit on Sunday, even if he uses the exact same words. Both of you are speaking with the authority of the Bible. But when he speaks the gospel on behalf of the church, he’s also speaking with the authority of the church. It’s how the church says, “This is the gospel we believe in and that binds us together as a congregation.”
Why Church Authority?
Christians today tend to give little attention to the idea of church authority, just like we give little attention to church membership and discipline. Many churches don’t practice these things. After all, can they really be that important?
(1) Church authority is important because it tells us who and what on planet Earth represents King Jesus and his kingdom. It shows us where to go to start looking for God’s new creation.
Think about it. With the nation of ancient Israel, you could recognize the nation in all the typical ways you might recognize a nation and its citizens: a land, a king, an army, and all that. Yet these people disobeyed God, and so God said he would remake them as a new Israel by forgiving their sins and by placing his Spirit within them so that they wanted to obey God’s law. Christ then came and united that new Israel to himself by the new covenant in his blood.
The trouble is, the work of forgiveness and God’s Holy Spirit is invisible. How do we know who belongs to this new heavenly kingdom? Do I belong? Do you belong? Do we or our non-Christian neighbors recognize us as belonging?
Answering those questions is why church authority exists. Church authority is necessary for making the invisible universal church visible and local. It’s necessary for saying who on earth represents King Jesus. Someone has to say, “Yes, this is one of the members,” and “That right there is the doctrine we believe in.”
As I said a moment ago, different denominations recognize different people as possessing the authority to do that. Some say the pastors or elders; some the presbytery; some the bishop; and some, like me, the whole congregation. But the point is, every denomination agrees that somebody has to exercise this declarative authority. Somebody holds the keys, even if we disagree on who.
(2) Church authority creates the local church. Really, this is another way of making the last point, but it’s worth highlighting on its own. Protestant churches are formed in two steps:
- Step 1: someone preaches the gospel so that people hear, repent, and are saved.
- Step 2: those Christians then organize by coming together and declaring themselves a church through baptism and the Lord’s Supper. They “gather” and “agree” with one another, two ingredients that Jesus says are essential to making a church a church (Matt. 18:19–20). For several centuries, many Christians have called this agreement a church covenant.
Once a church is planted, it now constitutes an outpost of God’s new creation or an embassy of the kingdom of heaven. An embassy is the place you go to hear from another kingdom, its people, and its government. It’s where you should begin to experience a nation’s culture and hear its language. So with the local church. Its culture should be characterized by Jesus’s beatitudes and Paul’s fruits of the Spirit; its language characterized by the gospel, as in, “I forgive you, brother.”
(3) Church authority is also essential for the sake of Christian assurance and growth. Being baptized “into the name” of Christ and regularly receiving the Lord’s Supper together with Christ’s body offers the public assurance of our salvation. God never intended our sense of assurance to be entirely internal, but also external. When brothers and sisters receive you into church membership, that’s Jesus’s way of using other people to say, “We think you’re a Christian.”
That same recognition helps us to grow in the grace of following Jesus. It tells you and me whom we’re responsible for discipling and encouraging and correcting, when the occasion arises.
Here’s an illustration I often use: One evening two single men from my church joined my family for dinner. One had had an abusive dad, the other an absent dad. On that evening, one of my daughters was misbehaving, which annoyed me. Yet in that moment, it occurred to me that I needed to respond to her kindly and not harshly for several reasons: for God’s sake, for her sake, and finally for these young men’s sake. At church, they had heard lessons about being a godly father. The sermons and Sunday school lessons, you might say, offered them an outline, like in a coloring book. Yet sitting in my home, watching me respond to a misbehaving daughter offered these young men an opportunity to watch me color in that outline. Why would they look to me for that purpose? Simply because our church had formally recognized me through baptism and the Supper as a Christfollower and kingdom citizen. The church had given me the “I’m with Jesus” name-tag and the team jersey.
Now suppose I had treated my daughter harshly. Such behavior would have taught them that Christian dads are no different than non-Christian dads. Suppose, however, they corrected me, or asked the pastors or other members to correct me, even to the point of church discipline. Such discipleship or discipline in my life would serve to correct their impression of Christian dads. “Oh, I see, Christian dads should be different. The church won’t stand for such behavior.” In other words, the exercising of church authority, both in membership and possibly in discipline, would help these young men better understand Christlikeness and grow in grace themselves. It would also give integrity to the church’s preaching.
(4) Church authority is essential for the sake of Christian witness. When the church looks just like the world, we provide an unattractive witness. As I’ve heard our pastor friend say on a number of occasions, if there’s a known adulterer in your church choir, you might as well cancel your Tuesday night evangelism program. Church authority marks off the people of God, and it helps them to be distinct like salt and bright like light.
Church authority is important because it tells us who and what on planet Earth represents King Jesus and his kingdom.
What Are the Limits of Church Authority?
Another way to describe the authority of the church is to say it’s priestly (see 2 Cor. 6:14–7:1). Just as the priests of ancient Israel regulated membership in the people of God and their ability to approach the temple through sacrifices, so the whole congregation, together with its pastors, acts as priests and temple. We exercise our priestly function by teaching God’s word and by guarding the membership through the ordinances.
What that means is, the church’s authority is limited to these priestly functions concerning the what and the who of the gospel. Its authority is not kingly, like the civil government’s is. Christians might pick up the sword of state as individual members of the church, but the church itself must never pick up the sword of state as the church. It can render judgment upon its own members, as when Paul removes two blasphemers or tells the Corinthians to remove an adulterous man (1 Tim. 1:20; 1 Cor. 5:2, 5). But it has no authority over non-members or over a nation as a whole.
Further, the church’s authority is limited to declaring the word of God and not statecraft, except when a matter of statecraft is addressed in explicit fashion by the Bible or is clear “by good and necessary consequence,” a good phrase I borrow from the Westminster Confession.
By the same token, churches must not require their members to adhere to any particular doctrinal position—they must not bind consciences— on any matter that’s not addressed in Scripture. They should not divide themselves over the countless life and lifestyle decisions that Christians must make, except when such choices oppose the word of God. Just as the authority of the civil government must be paired with a strong doctrine of religious freedom, so the authority of the church must be paired with a strong doctrine of Christian freedom (see Rom. 14). Just as everything outside the walls of the government’s domain belongs to the fields of religious freedom, so everything outside the walls of the church’s domain belongs to the lands of Christian freedom. This is not to say that the principles of Scripture don’t apply in these lands. Churches should indeed instruct the consciences of members, preparing them to live in these lands. Yet then it should leave every individual conscience free to apply the Bible’s principles as each person sees fit.
As a congregationalist, I don’t believe one church can exercise formal authority over another church. But I do believe healthy churches frequently interact with one another and seek one another’s wisdom in all types of matters. In fact, I’ve argued at length that such a strong doctrine and practice of catholicity is the biblical pattern.
How the Church Gets to Work
The church then gets to work by gathering weekly to preach the Bible and affirm one another’s membership in Christ through the ordinances. The invisible church becomes visible—as in, you can see it with your eyes—in these gatherings.
Plus, exercising the authority of binding and loosing occurs with integrity when church members work to know and encourage one another throughout the week. This doesn’t mean every member is responsible to know every other member. It means each member knows maybe five to fifty fellow members, and the whole thing hangs together like a spider web.
When you touch any one part, the whole thing vibrates: “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” (1 Cor. 12:26).
If you call yourself a Christian, you should be a member of a church, which in turn means you have a job to do. Your job is to guard the gospel and to protect gospel citizens. You’re responsible to address the pastors should they begin to teach false doctrine, and you’re responsible to get to know your fellow members so that you might help them walk in faithfulness. By this token, you should let them get to know you, so that they can help you. Finally, your job is to be an ambassador for Christ’s kingdom by sharing the gospel with those who are not yet citizens of Christ’s kingdom. You should share the gospel in your own city, and you should work with your church to send other ambassadors to nations around the globe. No national borders have the authority stop the spread of this kingdom.
So ask yourself, when was the last time you encouraged or corrected a fellow church member? Likewise, when was the last time you invited a brother or sister to speak directly to you? Are you growing in your knowledge of the gospel, so that you can protect it? And when was the last time you shared the gospel?
This article is adapted from Authority: How Godly Rule Protects the Vulnerable, Strengthens Communities, and Promotes Human Flourishing by Jonathan Leeman.
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