The shift already adopted has great merit. It suggests that one’s service extends beyond pulpit, font and table to the other 167 hours of the week. More than that, it levels the playing field between the preacher and the other ordained leaders. It reflects a parity of authority that dispenses with the hoity-toity exaltation of a royal clergy class that prevails in many church traditions. To have churches being led by a “session” comprised of ruling elders and teaching elder(s) — each having exactly one vote — showcases a robust Reformed and Presbyterian witness about the body of Christ.
This constitutional shift has brought progress.
However, both the old and the new titles retain a fundamental problem. They exalt what should be brought low.
Outside our immediate families, nobody shaped our character as children like those elders we knew as teachers. We knew our status: we were little people — kids; they were big people — adults. They gave orders; we were expected to obey. They were smart; we hoped someday to become smart. The teacher might have been strict or might have been nurturing, but we knew who was in charge. The title “teacher” implied, and always will imply for us, someone who tells us what we need to know and what we need to do.
When we take the term elder — with its own elevated status — and attach the modifier, “ruling,” the problem compounds. The term’s meaning is not what it appears. In the Reformed tradition, it doesn’t mean ruling like a czar but actually “measuring” (like a yardstick) the health and spiritual vitality of the congregation. But, given that we don’t carry around 400-year-old dictionaries, the title does seem to imply “disciplinarian” or “sovereign.”
This problem is playing out all across the denomination as hundreds of congregations wrestle with the possibility of leaving this branch of the church. In many leadership circles, those who sit in positions of “authority” are ruling with a heavy hand — they’re “lording over” the rest.
Some local church teaching elders are filling the minds of their members with judgments about the larger church that are, shall we say, one-sided. That’s not to say that the judgments are all wrong. It’s just that some leaders are inviting their congregations into a “discernment process” and then are carefully managing the conversations to keep their members from even considering more than their own point of view. One justified his approach by saying that to do otherwise would be sending an “uncertain sound” — a justification worthy of the Communist Party in the former Soviet Union.
Then again, some presbytery leaders are reacting to the sincere questioning of earnest believers by shutting down the process, even preempting the conversations by yanking ordained leaders from their pulpits and sessions, taking jurisdiction over those congregations, seizing assets and evicting them as if they were squatters on holy ground.
Some congregations and presbyteries are doing better than that.
They’re reclaiming that other title, pastor, operating like shepherds. Shepherds, like teachers, give guidance, exercise leadership and scold misbehavior. But their first task, like that of the best elementary teachers, is to listen; their teaching flows from that. They will lead the sheep when they journey, but spend most of their time surrounded by them. They know each sheep’s voice. They’re not stunned when one wanders off, because they foresaw its waywardness. Unwilling to lose any of their sheep, they keep them close.
I could click off a list of elders, presbyters and pastors who serve their flocks as shepherds. Sadly, I could also click off a list of those who seem to do the opposite. We need elders to act like pastors in such a time as this.
