Have Your Elder Call My Elder

The presumed authority of elders has gotten crazily out of hand. They are neither referee nor umpire, neither Thought Police nor Tone Police. Let's consider together what the Bible says.

I think we all look back at thoughts of ourselves and grimace from the cringe, from time to time. My moment of cringe-grimace comes from sitting across from a church planting catalyst from the Arkansas Baptist State Convention, Phil, in the Pizza Den in Hoxie, Arkansas.

“So, we’re going to have an elder-rule church,” I told him.

I had met with Phil to discuss planting a church with a former college friend. I had already planted one church in partnership with the ABSC, a few years prior, and was explaining to Phil how my ecclesiology had changed.

Phil nodded and said, “You mean elder-led.”

“No,” I snapped back. “Elder-ruled.”

This was shortly after the period in which, amidst managing a car lot after leaving ministry in my early 20s, I came across Romans 9 and it changed my life. Every day, for a period of about 4 months or so, I read Romans 9, trying to find a way for it not to say what it clearly seemed to say. I cross-referenced Romans 9 and topics like election and predestination to everywhere in Scripture my Bible would take me. And danged if I couldn’t find a way out of this.

Apparently God is sovereign and stuff. Who knew? The heavens kind of opened for me during this time. Until recently, I thought Calvinism rent the veil of the skies for me, but looking back, I’m pretty sure it was just the intensive study of God’s Word that set my mind aflame.

Anyway, after months of studying nothing but the Scripture, I typed “Calvinism” into the web browser on the company computer. The first search result that popped up was “Mark Driscoll.” The year was 2007.

When I had discovered that my very well-meaning pastors growing up didn’t exactly teach me everything God’s Word would have one know - as I discovered from their omission of Romans 9 from every sermon ever - I went out to discover what else might be hidden in the pages of Holy Writ that had been concealed. And as God would have it, I found a few things.

Born-and-raised Southern Baptist, I learned about the concept of “church discipline” for the first time, in that Bible-searching era of mine. I learned about a concept known as the “Means of Grace.” And, I learned about the concept of “elder leadership,” which might be surprising to most millennials and certainly Gen Z’ers, but for those of us on the tail-end of Gen X, that’s not a concept you would have heard about in the Lifeway Sunday School quarterly.

Anyway, the church planting catalyst wasn’t interested in helping an “elder-rule” church because, he told me, it led to too many disagreements or problems. But not long after that, we decided the 104th Southern Baptist Church in that community probably wasn’t that necessary, and I found myself in Montana. And shortly after arriving there, we approved a new church constitution that installed elders in the congregation for the first time.

The church treasurer immediately turned in his membership, claiming - and I quote - “the elders killed Jesus.” We carried on anyway.

Ultimately, we stayed true to Baptist polity. We had elders and deacons, the first of which had authority within the church and the latter had no authority, but were merely servants dedicated to specific tasks. Elders, of which the lead pastor would be one, were appointed by a vote of the congregation. Their nomination would be made by elders only, approved by the church council, and then voted upon by the church after a mandatory period of prayer and fasting (ditto for deacons).

The congregation maintained ultimate say-so over who was an elder, and could dismiss them if they became unqualified. The congregation also maintained the ultimate say in matters of church discipline, because - frankly - that’s the way Jesus told us to handle discipline in Matthew 18. Elders could implement temporary discipline, if it was an emergency or immediate action was necessary, but according to the constitution, church members could appeal directly to the congregation in the third-step of church discipline (also lined out by Jesus in Matthew 28).

The church also had say-so over the church budget, and elders had authority to spend within their budgeted guidelines without permission, understanding that the guidelines were sufficiently detailed. But those amounts, and what the budgeted items were for and how they were defined, was the purview of the congregation via democratic vote of church members over the age of 16. It turns out, I did not believe in elder-rule government after all, once the Scripture was considered in this process, but elder-led government.

HAVE YOUR ELDER CALL ME, WE’LL TALK

It’s gotten really weird on X lately, with the notion that elders have censor-power over tweets being almost ubiquitous out there in the Reformed Evangelical realm. David and I discussed this recently in a Bulldogmatic Polemics Round Table, heard by our Protestia Insiders.

Can elders demand that you edit your tweets (which is the equivalent of editing your thoughts)?

Neil Shenvi, the JD Greear apologist who has some convinced he’s an opponent of Critical Theory instead of the Devil’s Rodeo Clown that he is, recently told a critic on X, “Show this tweet to your pastor, and have him call me.”

This one is especially weird. Apparently, in Shenvi’s thinking, he - who is not an elder - will only listen to an elder, having refused to speak to someone who’s not an elder.

Can elders intervene in controversies and disagreements, based on the virtue of their eldership authority?

It appears as though some Internet apologists and “scholars in residence,” a Director for Apologia Church (I have no idea what a church “director” does) and Douglas Wilson - who I’ve also admired, albeit with *asterisks on my endorsements - seem to have implied that those who are not elders must listen to others who are elders, despite them not being their elders.

Do elders have a “walking authority,” to go around insisting that they have carte blanche authority over those not even in their congregation?

Tom Buck recently opined as to whether or not the elders of the church could intervene on a husband exercising domineering control over his wife, in the hypothetical situation in which he wanted her to exclusively wear red dresses.

Can elders step in when a father or husband isn’t exercising his authority incorrectly?

These are all questions I’ll attempt to answer here, although briefly.

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WE’LL WALK YOU DOWN THE AISLE

When I - and everyone else - discovered that I had a serious dependency upon prescription Xanax, I was carted off to rehab at the insistence of loved ones (as I should have been). I was then summarily fired from the church (as I should have been, although it would have been better had they accepted my resignation to begin with).

So far, no harm - no foul, right?

But then, a few strange things started to occur. First, deacons stepped in and strong-armed the one remaining elder in the church, who took a soft back seat to their contrived authority. Suddenly, over night, it became a deacon-ruled church.

Secondly, some of these men began to say some really odd and creepy things to my wife. One example includes a response to her hesitancy to attend church without me, “Lots of men would be lucky to take you to church.” It was then followed with insistence that she move into their home to have “spiritual covering.” Keep in mind, I never taught any of that covering nonsense, as most of my readers very well know. That’s not even in the orbit of our theology.

Third, almost immediately, they cornered my daughter who was soon to be married, and encouraged her to disinvite me from her wedding, under the promise that they - the new church authorities - would “walk her down the aisle.”

Both of those things were enough to set the Hall women against them pretty dang quickly, as well as raise their spidey senses and also their hackles.

In the weeks that followed, congregational meetings were held in which members were informed of the “discipline process” against me - which amounted to texting me “once an addict, always an addict” in rehab. The membership had voiced opposition, with some pleading with them to slow down the process, allowing me time to process and for my mind to heal before the proceeded. I could not comprehend how it was possible that the church was acting so vastly different from the way I taught them, or how we had ever done discipline before, or how divergent it was from our governing documents.

But then, more than a year later, that quandary was solved.

Our investigation, which was necessary because of charges they eventually made against me, reveal that one woman who made the plea of patience was quieted, and she was told in a business meeting, “You don’t get a say, because you aren’t leadership.”

I was aghast at that, because it was so fundamentally different from the polity we designed in the Constitution, or had ever modeled. Words as ugly as, “You don’t get a say,” was never anything remotely suggested in my long tenure there. In the weeks that followed, many left the church over actions they believed were contrary to our polity. Most never got a phone call from their new “leadership” to say they were missed.

When I asked to speak directly to the congregation, among my many pleas of apology, they refused to follow constitutional guidelines. When Mandy asked to conduct Matthew 18 against those who had demanded she divorce because I had become dependent upon a prescription drug, they refused to let her. When church members asked to see the accounting with their own eyes, which was their right according to our bylaws, they were denied. Each time, they appealed to their authority as “leaders,” despite the constitution not enumerating them those powers.

And, as you’ve read in the papers probably, those who wrestled control of the congregation made an accusation of “theft” because I spent funds precisely as the Constitution and bylaws allowed, as I did for 15 years without complaint. They marked money spent on fuel as theft, for example, despite having a fuel budget and the budget defined in the church bylaws. They marked flowers sent to missionary funerals as theft, despite the bylaws authorizing the pastor to use funds marked as hospitality and benevolence. They marked funds spent on background checks for AWANA workers as theft, despite a vote of the congregation mandating it. And despite all of those expenses having legitimate ministry purposes having been already voted upon by the congregation each year, they made their accusations anyway.

By the time they charged me, neither police nor the prosecutor had even reviewed church documentation to determine what the polity of the church actually was. They did not know for example, that claims we stopped having budget meetings were fictional, that budget meetings were had just as they should have been, and the witness claiming we stopped having budget meetings, was recorded in the meetings as not only being present, but opening them in prayer.

And once we performed a professional forensics audit and compelled discovery from the church regarding our polity and meeting minutes where these expenditures had already been approved, the prosecutor was eager to drop charges in a period of 18 months, so long as I paid them only the amount that neither side could demonstrate what it was for (or even who spent it), which amounted to - over five years - less than I gave in tithe in a single year. I was happy with this, and immediately gave them a check in the full amount, happy to have it behind me.

In any event, I describe this hellacious experience of my own to demonstrate that the best church polity in the world cannot prevent the church (or elders) from ignoring their own polity. In that event, it will always become anarchy and chaos.

With it understood that no polity is perfect in every scenario, and it’s only so good as it’s followed, let’s review key Baptist doctrines dealing with the issue at hand.