Mark Dever on Church Government

On Mondays at Resolve we typically try to look at something particularly related to church life. Today's article extract is from Mark Dever entitled 'A Display of God's Glory'. This is from the section on Congregationalism and looks at the role of teh congregation in the life, ministry and government of the church. (HT Monergism)

'All of the letters of the New Testament (except Philemon and the pastorals) were written
to churches as a whole, instructing them as a whole on what their responsibilities were. Even in matters of the fundamental definition of the gospel, the congregation seemed to be the court of [earthly] final appeal. So in Galatians 1, Paul calls on congregations of fairly young Christians to sit in judgment of angelic and apostolic preachers (even himself! Gal. 1:8) if they should preach any other gospel than the one which the Galatians had accepted.

He doesn’t write merely to the pastors, to the presbytery, to the bishop or the conference, to the convention, or to the seminary. He writes to the Christians who compose the churches, and he makes it quite clear that not only are they competent to sit in judgement on what claims to be the gospel, but that they must! They have an inescapable duty to judge those who claim to be messengers of the Good News of Jesus Christ according to the consistency of their new claims with what these Galatian Christians already knew to be the gospel.

Paul makes this point again in II Timothy 4:3 when he counsels Timothy and the church in Ephesus on the best way to handle false teachers. When he describes the coming tide of false teachers in the church, he particularly blames, in 4:3, those who “to suit their own desires… gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” Whether in selecting them, or paying for them, or approving of their teaching, or in simply consenting to listen to them repeatedly, the congregation here is culpable. They are held as guilty for tolerating false teaching, as are the false teachers themselves. In basic doctrinal definition, the congregation as a whole is the final court held out in Scripture.'