1. Patterns of church leadership. Anthony recognizes that leadership patterns are quite diverse in the Evangelical and mainline denominations. If anything this diversity has increased in the twenty years since he published his book. On the one hand, Anthony recognizes that “it is not possible” to define conclusively “the appropriate roles and responsibilities of church officers” (45). But then chapter 3 proceeds to try and define the role of pastor, elder, deacon and trustee. While he notes that many church groups regard the terms “pastor” and “elder” to be synonymous, he proceeds to define them as distinctive. This treatment sends very mixed messages to the reader. Despite various caveats which he offers to try and deal with this discrepancy, it comes across as confusing.
From my reading of the New Testament and contemporary literature about church leadership that has been written in the last twenty years, I would conclude that the leadership patterns continue to diversify. This reflects the reality that many have come to the conclusion that the New Testament provides much direction on issues of character and spirituality, but considerable freedom when it comes to the types of leaders and the organizational structures that a church should implement. The role of elder seems to be rather generic, including a variety of teaching, pastoral, and general leadership responsibilities. The role of pastor, if it had specific identity in the early church, seems to be included among the elders. The deacon refers to people who fill diverse ministry leadership roles. It is quite possible that deacons were also considered elders, but with spiritual responsibilities that focused more on care-giving ministries in the church. If my read of the New Testament evidence is correct, then our attempts to develop closely defined roles that correspond to these titles are misguided. Rather we have a generic group of spiritual leaders (i.e. elders) who share various functions within the church, i.e. teaching, administering, caring, etc. Our contextualization of these responsibilities into roles such as pastor, elder and deacon and their organization into specific kinds of authoritative relationships is appropriate, but we have to be careful not to be dogmatic regards any specific organizational structure. The Spirit seems to give the local church significant flexibility in these matters.
I offer one quick observation that supports this perspective. The list of qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 is presumed by Anthony to apply specifically to elders. However, Paul does not say that explicitly in this chapter. Rather he refers this material to those who desire to be managers and administrators in the church. So we have two general groups of church leaders — managers/administrators (1 Timothy 3:1) and ministry assistants or care-givers (1 Timothy 3:8). Later in 1 Timothy 5 he speaks generally about “elders.” Note similarly in Philippians 1:1 the same groups (managers and ministry assistants/care-givers) are mentioned. When Paul talks about “elders” in Titus 1:6-9 he refers to managers and administrators (v. 7), but omits any specific reference to ministry assistants/care-givers. However, this silence does not necessarily mean that Paul excludes “diakonoi” from the quite general category of elders.
What are the implications of this? I would suggest three:
a. ministry leaders in the church generally can be termed “elders”, i.e. spiritually wise and gifted people whom the church recognizes as trustworthy to provide spiritual care.
b. within this broad group of spiritual leaders, i.e. elders, diverse roles (pastor, manager, ministry care-giver) emerged in the early church. We do not know how these diverse spiritual leaders were related to one another organizationally.
c. a local church has considerable flexibility in how it chooses to organize its spiritual leadership within the broad principles expressed in the New Testament.[1]