Jesus' Discipleship Program for Your Church

I believe that the Congregationalist model of plural church leadership is the discipleship program established by Jesus.

Part One of Jesus' Discipleship Program: Church Member Responsibilities

To understand what plural leadership has in common with discipleship, you need to look at two parts of it. The first part is congregationalism, which requires you, the ordinary church members, to take responsibility for other church members. That role is yours.

To fulfill your role, you must:

• Know the Gospel.
• Study the Gospel.
• Defend the ministry of the Gospel in your church.
• Work on the progress of the Gospel in the lives of your brothers and sisters in faith and in your relationships with the outside world.

In other words, you must care for your church, keeping it dedicated to God, just as Adam was to care for the garden and as the priests of Israel were to care for the temple, keeping it dedicated to God.

To be clear, I assume that responsibility comes from the power a person has. A person cannot be responsible for something they are not allowed to do. Don't tell me I have a job if you don't give me the power to do the job! That's like telling me to clean a building without giving me the keys to the building.

So the basic claim of the first part of Congregationalism is that the church that meets has authority because Jesus clearly gives it that right, and because He makes each believer responsible for proclaiming and defending His Gospel and His people.

The Second Part of Jesus’ Discipleship Program: Pastoral Training

But let us consider this: Who trains and equips believers for their duties? Who teaches them the Gospel and how the Gospel applies to every area of life? Who teaches them to distinguish true professions of faith from false ones, so that they can keep the church dedicated to the Lord?

Pastors or ministers!

This brings us to the pastoral part of Jesus’ discipleship program. The church needs its leaders to teach it how to do what it is called to do. Listen to how Paul puts it:

Jesus «gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, some to be pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ» (Eph. 4:11-12).

What do pastors do? They teach. What do saints do? They do the work of ministry. These two parts work together:

1. Pastoral leadership $⟶$ gives you training to equip the saints for the work of ministry.
2. Congregationalism $⟶$ gives you ministry (responsibilities and authority).

This is, in fact, the model of discipleship of Jesus. Or you can express it mathematically: multiple pastoral leadership + church authority = discipleship.

Add these two ingredients together and you have Jesus’ program for discipleship.

People worry that congregationalism involves putting church decisions in the hands of its least mature members. Really, If pastors do not teach the saints, their people will be immature and make poor decisions. But the very fact that the congregational model of plural church leadership does not allow leaders to simply impose their will on members, even immature ones, forces leaders to fulfill their responsibility to teach. Jesus’ program requires leaders to teach, explain, prepare, and nurture, guiding their members to maturity and the ability to make good decisions. Church members are like 16-year-olds with car keys. You better teach them to drive carefully. Don’t blame the church for bad driving. Blame their teachers.

A church that gives all the power to its ministers is damaging its own culture of discipleship. By giving up their authority, members become less responsible. They gradually move toward passivity, complacency, and ultimately worldliness. They make the church less secure.

Meanwhile, pastors who take away power from their churches are, ironically, giving up a form of their own leadership in doing so. They should work hard to teach the church how to use their power wisely. But if they take away that responsibility, their job will certainly be easier, but they will not be the leaders God intended them to be.

Is biblical congregationalism a democracy? No, it is a mixed form of government—part monarchy (rule by one), part oligarchy (rule by the few), and part democracy (rule by the many). Jesus is King through His Word; pastors or ministers govern; and the church has the final (human) say in some important matters. And it is the dynamic between the one, the few, and the many that creates a culture of discipleship and helps guide immature church members toward maturity.

See? When Jesus and the apostles talked about church governance, it wasn’t just a discussion of bureaucratic decision-making. It was the most fundamental and important issue of discipleship!

Editor's Note: This article is a slightly modified excerpt from Jonathan Liman's new book, Understanding the Congregation's Authority (B&H, 2016).