One of the major points of division among protestant lies in the question of Church governance. How ought a church be ruled? The congregationalist say that the buck stops with the laity. The presbyterian would say the elders oversee the church as a collective session. The episcopalian would say the bishop is the highest office and all authority is delegated from him. We ought to have an allergy to the extreme reactions in either direction. One direction of saying everyone must do what is right in his own eyes, and the error in the other direction of totalizing our position and excommunicating the rest. Our first principle must derive from who rules the Church universally? There is one universal bishop, and it is not the Roman pontiff, it is the incarnate Lord Jesus Christ seated at the right hand of the Father. And Christ rules his Church as its chief prophet, king, and priest. All authority is derived from Christ. When a man is ordained to office, He is ordained by Christ. The apostles are ordained directly, and all other ordinations utilize a human mediator in the form of other ordained men. This is the model the apostle Paul delivers to Timothy (2 Timothy 2:2, 1 Timothy 5:22). If we overemphasize one office, or deemphasize the other offices of Christ (prophet, king, priest) then we will find ourselves with certain strengths and certain deficiencies. We ought to have a catholic impulse to have our churches ruled by the full gifts of Christ’s authority, this will require all the prevailing systems at present to show some repentance and charity.

How do Christ’s offices of prophet, king, and priest relate to the ordained offices of ministry? The prophetic office is most clearly seen in the bishop. The bishop is the primary teacher, the prophetic voice calling the people of God to hear the Words of God. In the early church the prominent theologians and apologists were almost all bishops. The kingly office relates to discipline and governance, this is seen in the office of elder (priest/presbyter). They also have oversight of the congregation and an aspect of teaching which tends to focus on discipline of life and morals or handling disputes as the elders under Moses were assigned to do. Lastly, we have the office of priest, the priest is the temple servant, this is clearly seen in the diaconate. The deacons serve tables, care for widows and orphans, and in the early church were frequently evangelists (Stephen, Phillip). There are ways each office carries traits from all three, however we are focusing on what is emphasized in each office to make it distinct.

As the Church has become more fragmented in her orders of ministry, we see various church bodies emphasizing one office over the others. Let us begin with the episcopal (bishop) focused communions. The Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Anglican communions emphasize their maintenance of the three fold – office of ministry; however they tend to over-emphasize their bishops. In the extreme cases they claim church bodies without a bishop consecrated by other bishops are not truly churches. In more modest discourse they will ascribe it to a lacking of fullness. This impulse largely comes from a rewording of St. Ignatius’s letter to the Smyrnaeans (107 AD), they will paraphrase Ignatius and declare “wherever the bishop is there is the church.” When instead Ignatius says, “the congregation should be wherever the bishop is, just as the catholic church is wherever Jesus Christ is.” Ignatius is writing in the midst of persecutions and various heretical movements. He is writing to people that can easily gather to their pastor and not run astray like lost sheep. While this passage does reveal the blessing of a bishop the EO, RC, and Anglican communions doth protest too much. Firstly their bishops cover too large of a geographic region for their “sheep” to gather to them as Ignatius exhorts, meaning they have kept the title but not the full substance. The primary blessing of the bishop is his prophetic office of teaching, guarding, and guiding. This is why these communions have blessed all of Christendom with those particular gifts; C.S. Lewis (an Anglican) and JRR Tolkien (Roman Catholic) wrote prophetic literature that continues to exhort our imaginations into the heavens. Some of the most prominent political theorists have come from the Roman Catholic Church (Oliver O’ Donovan comes to mind in particular). The Episcopal Church has produced more presidents than any other communion in the United States. While they have done much on the societal scale, these communions are also notorious for their nominal memberships, their syncretism, and their dismissiveness of “non-episcopal ordinations”. There is a lack of true charity and discipline because they have reacted against other non-episcopal communions and over-emphasized their distinct office.

This brings us to the presbyterian bodies. Presbyterians are notorious for their theological rigor, and interest in purity, hence the term “Puritan”. This shows up in various ways; certain applications of the Regulative Principle of Worship, a rich concern for pursuing a righteous life, and other kingly attributes. One of the stalwarts against liberalism in American Christianity was J. Gresham Machen founder of Westminster Theological Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.  One of the drawbacks of flattening the distinction between bishop and presbyter is that while both are given oversight of the Church, the bishop at his best is the unifying voice of the presbytery. Jerome notes this that the bishops in the ancient church were like Chief Presbyters that were set apart to prevent schism (I am of Paul, I am of Apollos, etc.). John Calvin notes this in his institutes that there is a value in their being a primary teacher for each flock that unifies the wisdom of the entire church council/session. Just as among the Godhead there are three persons but only the Son is called the Word of God, yet by the Word of God the single will of the Three Persons is revealed. Thus, when the ministers of a church are working in godly wisdom and love they will speak with one voice through their bishop/pastor because they are of one mind though many persons. Or to make a more human analogy a mother and father are both equally parents, but the father bears a distinct responsibility for the whole household. Even Presbyterians will recognize this and will have a stricter filtration/ordination process for their primary teacher. Whether they call him the teaching elder or the pastor. However, there is a strong resistance to the term bishop or acknowledging anything resembling bishops because of past abuses, which is a legitimate concern. What that has resulted in, however, is presbyterian/reformed communions easily separating from one another over rigorous points of doctrine; exclusive psalmody, communion practices, interpretations of the Westminster Confession, etc. The body of presbyters of all the congregations acts as a bureaucratic bishop.

Our final group are those that emphasize the office of deacon/laity. These tend to be your baptistic/independent congregations. There are myriad jokes about Baptist deacons because of how emphasized that office is amongst Baptists. The strengths of the diaconate tend to be the strengths of the Baptists. They are highly evangelistic and tend to be service oriented/action oriented. These are your Billy Graham Crusades, operation Christmas Child, Salvation Army.  However, these groups tend not to work well with others, there tends to be a lack of theological depth and historical continuity with the church throughout the ages. They have discarded the practices of infant baptism, wine in communion, liturgical forms of worship, and often times the very idea of ordination being required for exercising authority in the church. There tends to be a disregard for any authority aside from the members private interpretation; hence many American Christians go find churches that just agree with them at present, rather than desiring to be lead and taught by an ordained minister.  

It's easy to make criticisms, but what is the path forward? Do I have anything constructive to say? Yes. We ought to first return to the scriptures, then to the early testimonies of the church fathers to see how the offices of ministry were understood by the first few generations of Christians. This question requires multiple books to be written to make comprehensive arguments, I will synthesize for the sake of brevity and invite further dialogue regarding particular sources. First, the episcopalian church bodies need to diminish their definition of “apostolic succession”. They deem only bishops can validly ordain and ordinations must be traced back to the apostles through bishops alone. The problem with that is the bishop shared territory with the presbyters in the New Testament and the post-apostolic era. Beyond that there are accounts of presbyters ordaining other presbyters and deacons into the Middle Ages. The requirement of ordination can be made much more modest and historical reliable and consistent with Scripture if we define apostolic succession this way; the continuation of a pastoral ministry in the church in which the ministers are attested to by the people and ordained by other ordained men. Second presbyterian bodies need to return to a more clearly articulated three-office model of governance. Third Congregationalists need to yield the governance of the church from the people primarily into the hands of the ordained officers. Then the office of bishop needs to be relocated back into the congregation. For the first three hundred years of the church it would be unheard of to have a bishop with a dioceses that covered multiple states, or even an entire state. A diocese at most was a city center. The Didache instructs each community to select bishops and deacons. The church in Philippi was under the care of multiple bishops. The ancient bishop that scripture and the early fathers describe, is a congregational bishop much more like the Minister of Word and Sacrament as described by the Belgic Confession. Hear how a service is described in the third century in Constitutions of the Holy Apostles

“In the middle let the bishop’s throne be placed, and on each side of him let the presbytery sit down; and let the deacons stand near at hand…like mariners on a ship…when lessons have been read let the hymns of David be sung and the people join in at the conclusions of the verses. Afterward let a deacon or a presbyter read the Gospels…and while the Gospel is read let all the presbyters and deacons, and all the people stand up in great silence; for it is written: ‘Be silent and hear, O Israel (Duet 27:9)’…in the next place let the presbyters one by one exhort the people and the bishop in the last place as being the commander…”

While these writings aren’t actually from the Apostles they do give us a description that in the first three centuries of the church it was normative that each congregation was governed by all three offices in their midst. If each local body can strive for a more consistent form of governance where the ministers are attested as worthy by the people and lawful ordained by other ordained men and organized as three offices that work in one love for Christ and His Church, this would go a long way toward healing schisms and equipping the saints. The work is great and the laborers are few, we need laborers that embody all three offices of our Lord’s ministry, prophet, priest, and king.

In closing here is Article 30 of the Belgic Confession of Faith (1561)

We believe that this true Church must be governed by the spiritual policy which our Lord has taught us in his Word – namely, that there must be Ministers or Pastors to preach the Word of God, and to administer the Sacraments; also elders and deacons, who, together with the pastors, form the council of the Church; that by these means the true religion may be preserved, and the true doctrine everywhere propagated, likewise transgressors punished and restrained by spiritual means; also that the poor and distressed may be relived and comforted, according to their necessities. By these means everything will be carried on in the Church with good order and decency, when faithful men are chosen, according to the rule prescribed by St. Paul to Timothy.