How Important Is Church Government? (Presbyterianism, Pt. 1)

How does being Presbyterian shape our life as a church and our lives as individual Christians? In what ways does it distinguish us from other Bible-believing Christians?

Editor's Note: This article is part one of a series adapted from talks given to Faith Presbyterian Church in Tacoma, a congregation of our denomination (PCA) and presbytery (Pacific Northwest Presbytery). We have retained specific references to that congregation to keep intact the flow of thought. 

Our first series of short articles concerned our worship here at Faith Presbyterian Church. I wanted us to know why we do what we do in worship on the Lord’s Day. As a worshiping community, we should have a clear sense of our identity and to be able, with understanding and conviction, both to practice our worship of God and to explain it to others. 

In a similar way, I thought it important to consider in a second series of articles what it means to be Presbyterian. We are Presbyterians. Our church is a Presbyterian Church. What does that mean? How does being Presbyterian shape our life as a church and our lives as individual Christians? In what ways does it distinguish us from other Bible-believing Christians? In the same way that our worship defines and shapes both our corporate and our individual lives, so does our Presbyterianism. Well then, let us be clear in our minds what that term means. Let us both appreciate the meaning ourselves and be able to explain to others its importance and its bearing on the practice of our Christian faith. 

The term Presbyterian literally refers to our form of church government, our polity. Presbyter is the English transliteration of the New Testament Greek word for elder. Presbytery is accordingly a gathering of elders, and Presbyterian is a form of church government exercised by elders. To be sure, most other forms of church government make use of the term “elder,” but we’ll get to that later. 

Nowadays questions of church government do not fascinate or agitate people as they once did. In the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, changes in church government preceded and anticipated changes in civil government. That made church government an extraordinarily important and controversial matter. Ideas that surfaced first in the church began to make their way out into the political thinking of Western societies. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the political revolution that brought democratic government to the western nations was born in the churches of the Reformation. In this way, too, the church changed the world. People understood that at the time. King James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England upon the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, and who had been raised in Scotland as a Presbyterian by Presbyterians, was only stating the obvious when he famously remarked, “Presbyterianism agreeth as much with monarchy as God with the Devil.” As king, he remained antagonistic to Presbyterianism for obvious reasons. 

In the same way that our worship defines and shapes both our corporate and our individual lives, so does our Presbyterianism.

It was precisely the incompatibility of Presbyterian ideas with monarchy as a form of civil government that led to the determination of the Stuart monarchs to exterminate Presbyterianism in Scotland. It was to defend Presbyterianism against the Stuarts that the Covenanters suffered and died throughout the second half of the 17th century. Lest we forget, the Covenanters were the last group of English-speaking Christians to suffer martyrdom at the hands of an English-speaking government, and they died as Presbyterians! Nor should we forget the influence of Presbyterian thinking on the founding of our own nation. It was not for nothing that one English MP said at the time that the colonies “had run off with a Presbyterian parson.” He was referring to John Witherspoon, the only minister to have signed the Declaration of Independence. A Hessian captain wrote in 1778, “Call this war by whatever name you may, only call it not an American rebellion; it is nothing more or less than a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian rebellion.” If in our day church government is a subject likely to elicit a yawn, it is well for us to remember that there was a time when Presbyterianism literally turned the world upside down. In ways few American school children are taught today, American civil government was created according to a pattern that first existed in the Presbyterian church.

Having said that, however, it is also important to note that historically, Presbyterians would be the last ones to say that church government is nearly so important a matter as Christ’s death on the cross for sinners, or the gospel of salvation by grace, or the life of faith and love to which the Lord Jesus has called his people. First things first; and church government is not first … or second … or third … or fourth. John “Rabbi” Duncan, the 19th century Scottish missionary and professor of Hebrew, a man of uncanny insight, once said of himself, “I am first a Christian, next a catholic, then a Calvinist, fourth a paedobaptist, and fifth a Presbyterian. I cannot reverse this order.”  The Son of God did not come into the world to make us Presbyterians. He came to save us from our sins! We understand that. We appreciate that some parts of the Bible’s teaching are more important than others. We know that some doctrines lie closer to the center of Biblical teaching than others. We will not say that our being Presbyterians defines us nearly so much as our being Christians or our being Calvinists. Nevertheless, church government is also something the Bible teaches and, if it is not nearly as important as the gospel, it is for that reason not unimportant. Church government has a place in the teaching of the Bible because it has important implications for the life of the church and the individual Christian.

Nowadays Christians of all stripes are likely to have only a vague idea of church government as a source of controversy in Christian history. They are likely to have only a vague notion of the government of their own church, much less how it differs from the government of other churches. This is perhaps not as true of Presbyterians as it might be of the members of other churches, but it is much more true of Presbyterians today than it was of Presbyterians in former days. Christians today, and Presbyterians among them, as a rule would be hard-pressed to differentiate one church government from another: Lutheran from Presbyterian, Baptist from Methodist, or Congregational from Episcopalian. In the following series I will try to make the differences more clear, to provide a Biblical rationale for Presbyterian church government, and to explain its importance.