Topic
Church Polity
4 sermons · All topics
2LCF Chapter 26 - Of the Church
Chapter 26 of the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith ('Of the Church') teaches that Christ alone is the supreme and sovereign head of the church, from whom all authority for church governance flows. This session surveys five historical and contemporary models of church polity — Erastianism, Episcopalianism, Presbyterianism, Denominationalism, and Congregationalism/Independency — evaluating each against Scripture and the confession. The particular Baptist position is identified as plural elder-led associational congregationalism: each congregation of baptized believers governed by a plurality of elders under Christ alone, walking in voluntary associational communion with other churches for mutual edification, counsel, and support.
The biggest benefit of church associations
Church associations among Reformed Baptist congregations find their deepest rationale not in organizational efficiency but in the mutual burden-bearing and intercessory prayer that Scripture commands. Drawing on 2 Corinthians 1:11 and Colossians 4:12, this address argues that prayer is the primary and most transferable form of help one congregation can render another, even across great distances. The sermon proper expounds Psalm 131 as the theological and devotional ground for the humility that makes genuine association life possible.
Of the Church, Part II (2LCF 26.5-15)
The nature, governance, and life of the local church are expounded through 2LCF Chapter 26, paragraphs 5–15, a section that goes beyond the Westminster Confession of Faith and draws largely from the Congregationalist Savoy Declaration. The eleven paragraphs treat the Trinitarian foundation of the church, the regenerate membership required for entrance, congregational church polity, the two permanent offices of elder and deacon, the financial responsibility of churches toward their pastors, and the associational communion of independent churches. Christians are called to join themselves to particular churches, submit to both the privileges and discipline of those churches, and rest patiently in Christ's providential governance when offenses arise within the assembly.
The Duties Toward Elders: Ordination
Careful, unhurried ordination is not a bureaucratic nicety but a biblical obligation: 1 Timothy 5:22–25 commands the church to refuse hasty laying on of hands, because careless ordination makes the ordaining elders accessories to whatever sins an unvetted man brings into the office. The sermon works through four considerations under the prohibition against hastiness — the connection with prior discipline, the nature of the laying on of hands, the danger of implicating oneself in another's sin, and a parenthetic qualification on Timothy's abstinence from wine — before turning to God's providential coordination with the church's diligent use of means in vetting elders. The governing application is that the church must be ruled by the qualifications of 1 Timothy 3:1–7, not by felt need, public opinion, or subjective impulse, trusting that patient obedience to the prescribed process allows God's providence to make evident both the sins and the good works of men being considered for office.