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Does Titus 1:5 REALLY Prove Plural Eldership?
By mwilhite | July 2, 2008
| This post is part one of a two part series on the Biblical model of church government. |
A disturbing trend has emerged in Southern Baptist circles in recent years – that being the trend to a Presbyterian, plural-elder model of church governance. Most base their theology in this area on Titus 1:5, which says to us: “This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every city as I directed you.”
To those who firmly adhere to the plural-elder system, this verse is like a mantra that they will almost always assert as the definitive verse on the issue. But is it really? I want to examine this verse closely and see what it really says today. The typical scenario proposed is this: elders is in the plural and city is in the singular. Therefore, it is a plural-elder system. Of course, the assumption that HAS to be made here is that each city only had one church. If it were more than one church, this logic wouldn’t work at all.
Would each city have only had ONE church? Remember that the early church met in houses in an underground fashion so to speak. And in numerous places, we see that the church gathered into a larger meeting place, with these house cells coming together. It seems there would have been a necessity for more than one pastor in a city due to the number of house churches meeting there. It seems most likely that each house church would have had its own pastor and that the larger group was comprised of these smaller houses meeting on a regular basis to hear someone preach.
So, does Titus 1:5 REALLY say that each house would have had more than one pastor? NO, it simply says in the most plain meaning of the text that Titus was to appoint pastors in every city where a church was meeting. It is unwise to read too much into this text, for reading a plural-elder system into this is merely eisegesis and not exegesis.
Furthermore, the letters to the seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3 are addressed to the angel of the church in the singular. The most plain meaning here is the pastor, as angel in Greek is “messenger.” It seems unlikely that an angel would have delivered these messages, but rather that the pastor would read them on a Sunday morning to the congregation. Some would argue that this seems to be addressed to the teaching elder, but this seems a far cry from the normal reading of the text. It seems better to understand it as what we would call today the Senior Pastor of the church.
In my next post, I will go through the reasons why a plural-elder system is not healthy for a local church to ascribe to and give Biblical reasons why the single-elder model is the model of the New Testament church.
Topics: Biblical Church Government |