1. The Issue(S)
Chapter 10
Laos and Leadership under the New Covenant
The New Testament is full of surprises, but perhaps none so much as with its generally relaxed attitude toward church structures and leadership; especially so, when one considers how important this issue became for so much of later church history, beginning as early as Ignatius of Antioch. Indeed, for most people the concept of “church history” refers primarily to its history as a body politic, involving both its evangelism and growth and its intellectual /theological development.
This paper was originally prepared for discussion at a Regent College faculty retreat. Rather than a research paper that tries to take account of the vast array of secondary literature (on church order and laity), I have attempted something more modest: an essay that offers one New Testament scholar’s reading of the biblical texts on specific issues related to the church as the people of God, namely, the interrelationships between people, clergy, ministry, and church order. Although what I do here is akin to reinventing the wheel, hopefully some items will be fresh — although on others I can be easily scored for not having consulted the literature.I am grateful to my Regent colleagues for a vigorous discussion of the paper, from which I have made a few small revisions and added some footnotes for greater clarity.
Probably for a variety of reasons,78 the New Testament documents simply do not carry a concern for church order as an agendum.79 The thesis of this paper is that the primary reason for this stems from their understanding of what it means to be the people of God under a new covenant, as that in turn is related to their common experience of the eschatological Spirit.80 The burden of the paper is ultimately hermeneutical — how we move from the first-century documents to twentieth (twenty-first) century application. But those questions, as always, must first be subject to the exegetical ones — how we understand the texts themselves.