Pastor Joel Webbin and Pastor Toby Sumter dissect ecclesiastical government, defining four divine spheres with specific tools like the "rod" for fathers and the "sword" for magistrates. They detail church officers, including ministers, teaching elders, and ruling elders, while explaining excommunication as a process using the "keys of the kingdom" to address unrepentant sin. The hosts argue that bad polity, such as mob rule or ignoring biblical due process, causes tyranny in both church and state, linking Presbyterianism's emphasis on checks and balances to the American Republic's foundation. Ultimately, they assert that true reformation must begin within the sanctuary before impacting the public square. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Bonus Content: Church Government00:02:45
Hey guys, real quick before we get started, I have a small request.
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Thanks.
All right, welcome.
This is episode four in a mini bonus series that we're doing with Theology Applied.
I'm your host, Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries.
And what I'm doing is I'm having a discussion with Pastor Toby Sumter.
On a catechism that he wrote about God and government, and particularly Christian government.
So, this is episode four now, dealing with the government of the church, ecclesiastical government.
So, you're in for a treat.
Tune in.
Applying God's word to every aspect of life.
This is Theology Applied.
All right, so we're picking back up with our journey through Toby Sumter's catechism on.
Governments and ultimately, he is laying out four governments.
And so, we have the government of the self, we have the government of the family, the government of the church, and the government of the state.
Not only do we have this idea of sphere sovereignty that we have different spheres, but these are governmental spheres, these are governments.
There is the government of the home, familial fathers, civil fathers, ecclesiastical fathers, and all of that ultimately falls apart if we don't have self ruled men.
We need men and women, but especially men who are governed by the fruit of the spirit, which is.
Self control.
Self control is self leadership.
So, if you're just tuning in, I encourage you to go back and check out the first three episodes.
This is a bonus series that we're doing underneath the banner of our Theology Applied podcast with Right Response Ministries.
And this is our fourth edition.
So, we have done the introduction, we have done self government, we have done family government, and we are now in this episode covering church government.
So, Toby, thank you so much for coming back on the show.
Absolutely.
I'm honored to be part of your bonus content.
Bonus content.
Well, just for the record, it's not bonus content like your content that is only available for club members who pay.
This is bonus content, meaning it's extra content, but it is publicly seen by all.
So you're getting as much exposure as we can give you.
All right.
I'm still on it.
Yeah, the bonus content makes it sound like, oh man, 20 people are watching this.
No, it's live for everybody to see.
So, all right.
This is church government.
Let's do what we've been doing, where we just each take a question and answer, and then we go back and forth.
You want to start?
Sure, glad to.
This is picking up at question 19.
The Great Commission and Worship00:02:30
What is the sphere and assignment given by God to church government?
God has given church government the Great Commission and authority over Christian worship.
Question number 20.
What is the means God has given to the church to carry out the Great Commission and Christian worship?
Answer God has given the church the word and the sacraments to carry out the Great Commission and Christian worship.
Question 21.
What is the Great Commission?
The Great Commission is given in Matthew 28, 18 through 20, where Jesus says, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me, therefore go, disciple the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you.
Question number 22 What is Christian worship?
Answer Christian worship is called together gathering of the church in person, principally on the Lord's day, to renew covenant with Christ through the word read, preached, sung, as well as through prayers.
And the celebration of the sacraments, all according to Scripture.
Question 23 What is the Word?
The word is the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation, the perfectly preserved testimony of the patriarchs, apostles, and prophets, proclaimed by evangelists, missionaries, and pastors, and thoroughly taught to all who believe in Christ for obedience in every human endeavor.
The Bible is the authoritative word to every human government, but it is the peculiar charter and constitution of the Christian Church.
Question number 24 What are the sacraments?
Answer the sacraments are baptism in the Lord's Supper, the signs and seals of membership in the Church, means Of grace for all of God's people instituted directly by Christ.
25.
Who are the officers of the church?
The officers of the church are qualified men called elders or bishops and deacons.
Question number 26.
What are the offices within eldership?
Answer There are three offices of elders ministers or pastors are elders tasked with the regular ministry of the word and sacrament, teaching elders or doctors are tasked with teaching the word.
Often in academic or missionary context, and ruling elders or lay parish elders are elders whose primary job is to rule the church.
All three offices of elders share the government of the church equally together.
The Sword of Scripture00:15:40
Question 27.
What is the office of deacon?
Deacons are qualified men who assist the elders in carrying out the ministry of the church and in caring for the physical needs of the saints.
Question number 28.
What are the sanctions of the church?
Answer.
Christ has given to the church the sword of Scripture with which it is authorized to preach, encourage, teach, rebuke, as well as private and public censure.
This authority is also called the keys of the kingdom, and it includes welcoming new Christian disciples through baptism, correcting for sin, and in cases when an individual persists in high handed, unrepentant sin, excommunication, barring them from the Lord's table, and reckoning an individual An unbeliever and outside the fellowship and inheritance of Christ.
Question 29.
What is the duty God requires of all people with regard to the church?
God commands everyone everywhere to repent and believe in Jesus Christ, and so be baptized and received into membership in a local church, to be in submission to local elders, and to participate in the worship and life of the body through freely giving of their gifts.
Amen.
All right.
So this is.
Probably the only section where you and I would disagree slightly on a few things in terms of our ecclesiology.
But let's not begin there.
I think we should get there.
I think it'll be helpful for people.
But let's not start with our disagreements.
Let's start with our agreements.
Both you and I, maybe you can help me with the wording with this, but we would say that with these sovereign spheres of government, the self, the home, the church, the state, there has been assigned certain responsibilities, jurisdiction, right?
It's not just, oh, I'm in a position of leadership in the home so I can do anything.
No, you have jurisdiction within that sphere and within your office of authority within that sphere.
So, you only have as much authority as the Bible gives you.
And the Bible does not garner or limit the authority merely of church officers, but civil magistrates, as we'll get to later, and fathers and mothers.
And so, the Bible is the governing final arbiter of truth that lays out the jurisdiction for those people in positions of authority in all of these spheres, not just the church, but certainly also in the church.
And so, the Bible is going to say, These are the offices of authority, the positions of authority.
Here's the jurisdiction, the duties and responsibilities of the authority.
And then here are also the corresponding tools, and this is where maybe my wording is bad, but to each of these spheres has been given jurisdiction, duties, but God always, it seems like God always pairs, like two peas in a pod, rights and responsibilities together, right?
God doesn't tell someone to do something and not give them, with that responsibility he's assigned, he'd neglect to or fail to give them the corresponding rights and authority and ability to carry out that responsibility.
And so in the home, you could maybe say that God has.
Given fathers a certain responsibility in the home, but he has also equipped them with the rod.
In the church, we have the sword of the spirit or the keys of the kingdom.
And the civil magistrate has been given a sword, a literal sword, not the sword of the spirit, but a physical sword.
And so there are tools given to each of these spheres, those in offices of leadership within them, corresponding to this principle of corresponding rights and responsibilities.
Do you have anything you want to add to that?
Yeah, only just that I think that sometimes Christians underestimate the potency of those tools.
I think that we, you can, is a sign of the idolatry of our current day that we essentially worship the power of the state.
We worship the power of the sword.
We believe that the sword has been given to the state, the sword has been given to the civil magistrate.
It's a legitimate tool.
But it's a sign of our unbelief that we don't recognize and understand that the word of God is living and active and powerful.
And it is just as potent for doing the things that God assigns us to do.
In the church, it's a different kind of sword, it's a different kind of tool, but that's because it's suited to the task that we've been assigned to do.
If a church begins becoming, you know, sort of coercive, it's bad for everybody.
That's not what that sword is for.
But when we are obedient to the word and we wield that word in teaching the word, preaching the word, singing the word, when our worship is bound and governed by the word, that's potent.
The famous text in 2 Corinthians our weapons are not carnal, but mighty through God for pulling down strongholds and every thought that puts itself up against the lordship of Christ.
It takes every thought captive.
We should not underestimate the potency of the word of God when it's being preached, when it's being taught to little ones in the worship assembly, in Sunday school classes, in Bible studies, when we're singing the word together in the Psalms in particular, and the scriptures.
That's potent.
And powerful.
And we have to believe that as Christians and recognize that when God gives us those tools, those weapons of our warfare in the church, they really are mighty and we ought not to despise them in the slightest.
Amen.
And not just the word of God, it would be the most powerful tool of all.
But it seems as though we have de emphasized all these tools given to the various spheres of government.
So the sword, we.
There is a sense of statism, certainly.
There's that idolatry that is alive and well, especially in American culture today.
But even with elevating, emphasizing the state, there's a de emphasis of the state's God given assigned tool, namely the sword.
So, right, there's a push against capital punishment.
Well, is it really effective?
Does it really work?
You know, and all this.
And we try to, we often make a subtle indictment of God himself, a subtle accusation of God by severing and divorcing what God says is right and what God says is good.
Right?
So his law, it's not just the right thing, but it's the good thing.
I delight in your law.
It brings life.
And we're saved by the gospel alone in terms of eternal life, but the law leads towards human flourishing.
It does lead towards life.
And so, with the sword, the physical sword with the state, if justice is delayed, rebellion and sin and wickedness arise among the public.
But when the sword is used proportionally, impartially, all the ways that biblical justice is meant to be done with sufficient evidence, two or three witnesses, That's not just hearsay, but eyewitnesses, two to three independent lines of testimony, eyewitnesses.
So it is evidenced, it's substantiated, it's proportional, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, life for life.
It's unbiased, it's impartial, right?
Justice is supposed to be blind, right?
So if you have to figure out what color, you know, what ethnicity was the police officer and what ethnicity was the civilian before deciding what was right in the equation, then you're not doing biblical justice.
You're being partial.
But when the sword is used in an appropriate manner and swiftly, It's not restorative, right?
This idea of restoring people, it's punitive.
It's meant to be justice.
It's meant to be punitive, but it is restorative to a society at hold.
It curbs evil in the hearts of men, at least the outward manifestations of that.
And likewise with the rod.
So I'm thinking about, you know, with the family also, the rod being a tool, we underplay that also.
You know, it's like, give them grace, give them grace, you know, and it's a cheap grace, it's a watered down grace, and it's like, 20 minutes explaining to them their sin and preaching the gospel, and not really believing that the rod actually.
I mean, this is a verse that just is crazy when I think about this, but rebellion is bound up in the heart of a child, and the gospel will remove it far from them.
No, rebellion is bound up in the heart of a child, and the rod will actually remove rebellion.
So these tools have power, the sword of the spirit, most of all, but also the rod and also the physical sword.
Any thoughts on that?
Yeah, we just want to remember that.
God's grace is communicated in the means that he has determined.
And we are not sovereign over those means.
And so when a father or mother faithfully, diligently, lovingly enforces the standard that God has set, uses the rod to correct rebellion in the heart of a child, that is grace.
That is grace because you are delivering them from their sin.
The other proverb says that you will deliver your son from hell.
That is grace.
It says, you know, the language is kind of rough in our modern ears, but it says, if you beat your son with the rod, he will not die.
You will deliver his soul from hell.
And that's probably illegal to say out loud now, but it's true.
And that means, though, that faithful, diligent, loving discipline is grace.
The same thing goes for capital punishment.
And then the last thing I'll say, Joel, is just that I think it's absolutely true, everything you said.
And at the same time, we have to recognize that God has given the church the job of discipling those governments.
It is the failure of the church.
Why does our state not carry out capital punishment faithfully?
Why do parents not discipline their children faithfully?
Because the church has failed.
It is the church's job to disciple the nations, to teach parents and civil magistrates what it is they are to do to obey God.
That's directly our jurisdiction.
Our sphere is to disciple the nations.
And the reason why our nation is in high-handed rebellion is because the church has failed to disciple it.
Amen.
Yeah, we can't complain about the state being lawless when the church is antinomian.
The church became lawless before the state did.
And I think part of the reason why the church became lawless is because it assumed that the state would take care of morality and that the church could just preach the gospel.
And it became this watered down, truncated, gospel centered, became gospel myoptic.
It's only the gospel.
And we had this theological minimalism instead of pushing theology out to the edges.
It's sola scriptura, which I would say yes and amen a thousand times, but at the expense of tota scriptura, right?
It's only the Bible, sola scriptura, but it's the whole Bible.
The whole Bible, not just the red letters, but the black letters too.
Not just the, we don't unhitch the Old Testament from the New, it's the whole of the scripture, the whole counsel of God for the whole of human society, or some people might say all of Christ for all of life.
And so we, the church stopped preaching law and became lawless, antinomian.
And many churches even adopted like New Covenant theology that would have a rejection, or at least in function, it essentially rejects the third use of the law.
And then we wonder why the state has become lawless.
Seems like you want to say something.
Yeah, I was just going to say, but I think you said at the beginning there, we assumed that the state would just do its job and we could do something.
We could kind of do a smaller, truncated version.
I think it's probably some of that, but I think the problem's deeper than that, in that I think it was pure unbelief and cowardice.
I don't think we believed God when he said, This is what you must do, this is how you must do it, and we saw the giants in the land and we were afraid.
Because it takes courage and faith, those two things together, courage and faith, to do the thing that God says to do.
If He says, go dip in the dirty Jordan, that's how you get cleansed of your leprosy.
And we're like, well, we were hoping for something more elegant and glorious.
But this is the means that God has determined.
This is how you disciple the nations.
You preach the gospel, the whole gospel, the whole word of God.
You establish churches where the worship of God is done, where the word is preached, where the prayers are.
Offered in Jesus' name, where the sacraments are celebrated.
And that's the way that God has determined to keep the other governments in their place.
But we didn't believe God.
We didn't trust Him.
We said, but they've got a lot more money.
They've got more guns.
They've got more bombs.
They have psychology degrees.
They have philosophy degrees.
And we bowed before those idols and we did not believe God and we became cowards.
And now we're inheriting that.
Agreed.
So let's talk about question number 28.
So there's something here that I think is really significant.
So this is, I want to talk about specifically excommunication.
The question is, what are the sanctions of the church?
And so, paraphrasing here, you said this authority, skipping down a little bit in your answer, but this authority is also called the keys of the kingdom.
It has the ability, as Jesus says, Matthew 18, to bind and loose.
So it can welcome in, this authority welcomes in new Christian disciples through baptism, but also correcting for sin and in cases when individual An individual persists in high handed, unrepentant sin, excommunication, and barring them from the Lord's table, and reckoning that individual as an unbeliever, tax collector, or a Gentile, an outsider in terms of Christian fellowship and an inheritance of Christ.
And so, the thing that I want to hear you talk about a little bit, because I like that you put this in here, because when I first kind of was adopting the keys of the kingdom and church discipline, I want to be a faithful church, right?
You know, where the word of God is rightly preached, the sacraments rightly administered, you know, and also, you know, you might add to that this characteristic of.
Church discipline and many reformers did, and so I wanted to be faithful in that.
But if you're not careful, especially a young minister, he might say, Well, the one sin, you know, and I used to say that the one sin that we would excommunicate someone for is impenitence, the refusal to repent.
And I would still say that today, but you have to be careful with that because you can deem something impenitent when it's like, but the initial disobedience was that they didn't invite me to their birthday party.
But we don't see that example apostolically in the New Testament.
Like the primary example that we have, 1 Corinthians 5, and then I believe it's the same man that Paul implores them to welcome back in in 2 Corinthians 2.
But it's a guy who was sleeping with his stepmom.
It wasn't just a guy who said something that they didn't like his tone and then they corrected him about his tone and he didn't respond to that correction.
They deemed him as impenitent and barred him from the Lord's table.
It was, Paul even explicitly says, a kind of sexual immorality that's not even heard of among the Gentiles and the pagans.
Can you talk about that for a moment?
High handedness, high handed sin?
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I mean, even Matthew 18, which is the passage that, you know, is the kind of the classic church discipline text where Jesus explicitly says that if your brother, Sins against you, you go to him.
You know, there's a process, and the whole point of Jesus underlines a couple times in that text is winning your brother.
And so the question that Jim Wilson is Pastor Doug Wilson's father, and he's got an old saying that we've all kind of inherited where he says, There's a deeper right than being right.
Confronting Persistent Sin00:04:41
And I think that's getting at the same point that you're asking about, which is the whole point here is we want to go to heaven together.
The point is, we all want to go to heaven together.
And we're a bunch of sinners, a bunch of lousy sinners, forgetful sinners, and the Holy Spirit's taking us there.
And I think the point there is the church's job with discipline frequently is, you know, it's a lot of encouraging, a lot of teaching.
There's a lot of, you know, we're all in this, we're all getting rid of the old man.
We're all slowly putting on the new man.
And so I think the point is that.
There's a kind of evangelicalism that doesn't practice church discipline and says, not perfect, just forgiven, which is sort of code for just give me a break, I can do whatever I want and ask Jesus for forgiveness on Sunday or something like that, which we don't have any interest in at all.
We really want to pursue holiness, we want to pursue godliness and so on.
But I think at the same time, it is easy to overcorrect.
And then have a standard that's, you know, that is, I think, in direct opposition to the point that Jesus says is, you know, you who judge your brother, are you judging yourself first?
Are you, the measure you use, are you measuring yourself?
And I would include things just like, you know, patience with people, willingness to go to them multiple times.
I just gave a message on Matthew 18 just a few weeks ago here at King's Cross in Moscow.
And I, you know, emphasize with people like, even these steps, It's not like once you do step one, like you have to go to step two.
Sometimes you might just talk to your brother and then realize, you know, we kind of differ over this, but it's like this is not a high handed sin.
You know, maybe you think he took your parking place and, you know, and was kind of, you know, grouchy with you.
You know, maybe he sinned against you.
And you go and you talk to him and be like, brother, why were you, you know, why were you frowning at me and scowling when you stole my parking place at church?
And he's like, you know, I don't know what you're talking about.
You're like, no, I saw you frowning.
I saw you scowling.
I think you were muttering some things under your breath.
And he's like, no, I don't know what you're talking about.
And you're like, what do you do with that?
Don't take that to the elders.
Just smile and laugh and say, Oh, well, maybe I misunderstood, or maybe he's wrong, maybe he forgot, maybe he's whatever.
It doesn't matter.
Or maybe he's lying and we're just going to cover it because that's what love, I think Wilson says this love covers or confronts.
And there is a choice.
So some things have to be confronted.
So there are some things that are so high handed, they must be confronted.
But there are other things where the Christian who has taken up the offense, the offendee who's been offended, Actually, it has the option to confront, but also has the option to cover.
And it's very possible.
There's, you know, again, refer to my mentor, Pastor Doug.
He says, he likes to say sometimes, there's no situation that's so bad that you can't make it worse.
So, you know, just as an encouraging thought.
And one of the ways you can make it worse sometimes is being that, like, the pedantic, you know, offended brother who just won't drop something and won't cover it in love.
You can.
In a sort of fit of piety, but I know he sinned against me.
You can be the one that's actually making it worse, and you don't know what spirit you're of.
It can be far more demonic, far more satanic of you to be chasing that down.
And the guy really might have sinned against you.
But it's not high handed.
And I think the key distinction here that I would urge people on is we're talking about some kind of ongoing, persistent sin that is a poison to this individual andor the community.
And typically both.
And I'm talking about Ten Commandments stuff here.
We're talking about persistent, high handed rebellion against parents and those in authority.
We're talking about murderous hatred, malice, crimes.
We're talking about theft.
We're talking about adultery.
We're talking about pornography.
We're talking about these kinds of high handed Ten Commandments sins in an ongoing, persistent, and I don't care what you say sort of way.
That's when I think you get to the point where you say, look, this is not living like a Christian.
It ought to be.
Ordinarily, the kind of thing where everybody looks at it and is like, clearly they're not a Christian.
Treating the Sinner as a Believer00:15:16
Right.
This is why at the end you tell it to the church.
And it ought to be the kind of thing that, however, your polity works exactly when it's announced or when it's brought to the membership of the church, everybody should sort of be like, yeah, that's pretty clear.
He doesn't want to walk with Jesus.
Right.
And for those of you who are listening, this might be one of the differences between Toby and I in terms of our polity.
It's pretty much, you know, baptism and polity are where we would primarily disagree.
But in terms of polity, the Reformed Baptists with the 1689 has this idea of the common suffrage of the congregation when it comes to ordination, you know, of both elders and the diaconate.
We would hold to this, and this falls into the questions here, but the diaconate should be ordained, biblically qualified men.
So we'd hold a male diaconate, both Westminster and 1689, male eldership, different qualifications for those two offices within the church, but they both should be men, they should be biblically qualified, and they're ordained offices.
And so the Reformed Baptists with the 1689, that's going to be a congregational vote to ordain an elder, also to remove one to ordain.
A deacon also to remove one.
But then also, when it comes to church discipline, tell it to the church.
And if he does not, so we would read that as the church is church, the congregation, the ecclesia, the gathering.
And if he does not listen to the church, then treat him.
So we would see it as it's not informing the church of a decision made by the body of elders to already remove the individual, but it's actually what we're telling to the church is not the decision rendered by the elders, but we're telling the church the situation itself and the necessary pertinent details.
So the church can then function as the highest ecclesiastical court and render that decision themselves.
But I agree with Toby 100% in the sense that whatever the elders choose to actually bring to the church to that level of church discipline should be so clear and so blatantly obvious that the church, that decision of rendering and handing the person over, should be a fairly easy decision.
Hard in the sense that it's sad, that it's tragic, that our hearts are grieving for that individual, but not hard in the sense of is this actually the right thing to do?
One of the last things I'll just mention here, and it's not really in the catechism, but I. Always like to emphasize with people is that when you do reckon an individual an unbeliever, a tax collector, and sinner, as Jesus says to do, I don't personally, I don't know where you stand on this, Joel, but we don't practice shunning.
We bar them from the table, but we've had excommunicated people continue coming to church sometimes, and they are welcome to.
And the instruction that we give is they're to be to you as an unbeliever, which means they need Christ.
You're not to fellowship with them as if everything's still fine.
You're not to just hang out with them, just have a beer and shoot the breeze.
But you certainly can take them out for lunch and say, Brother, I want to explain to you why you need to repent again.
You certainly can pursue them with the gospel just like you would an unbeliever.
And in God's grace, I can speak to this over 20 some odd years being here in Moscow.
We have practiced church discipline.
I think maybe over the years, we've probably excommunicated, I don't know, maybe.
Maybe five to eight individuals, not tons, but I can remember at least, I think, two or three individuals that have been restored.
Praise God.
Because that actually is the goal.
Even in excommunication, the goal is to hand them over to Satan, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5, for the destruction of the flesh, for the saving of their soul.
The idea is, in a sense, what you do is you're setting them outside of the covenant protections of the people of God and the general blessings of the people of God.
And you're handing them over to the world so that it's sort of like, okay, you want to eat the pig food.
You can eat the pig food.
But the goal of that isn't because you want them to keep eating the pig food.
The point is you want them to come to their senses and say, what have I done?
I've rejected life in my father's house, and I'm sitting here as a slave eating pig food.
I'm going to go home to my father.
And so that's what we should be praying for and all that.
Right, absolutely.
So, you know, I've always said that on the one hand, church discipline, the keys of the kingdom, binding and losing, is given to the church, the government of the church, for protecting the purity of the church from the sinner.
But certainly it's also for the sake of the sinner that he might be brought to repentance.
And I think the process itself that Jesus lays out, which includes two or three witnesses following the law of Moses, shows us that it's not just to protect the purity of the church from the defiling sinner.
But it's also to protect the alleged sinner from the potential of an abusive church.
So, church discipline contains all these elements.
So, it's tough love for the sinner to bring him back to repentance, it's protection and love and grace for the church to protect them from being defiled.
But then again, it's also protection for the alleged sinner who actually is not in sin but is being abused from a church.
The process, that's why it's detailed.
So, there's all these things that work.
In regards to how do we treat the tax collector or a Gentile, certainly they're an outsider.
How much relationship, what type of relationship would we have?
Three verses that come to mind.
One is just Matthew 18, hand them over, treat them as a tax collector, a Gentile.
And I think there's something that can be gathered even from that.
That, you know, Christians in the New Testament church were not forbidden from having any engagement with tax collectors and Gentiles.
So that's one thing that we can see.
But two, I'm reminded, you know, just the concept of the grace of shame.
And I'm reminded of what Paul says elsewhere, where he says if anyone does not take note of what I've written here, right?
So if somebody's disobedient, they're not acknowledging the weight of the apostolic authority of these commands, that these commands come ultimately from Christ and should be obeyed.
He's not listening, he's not observing and obeying them.
Have nothing more to do with this individual.
And there we see the tough love also, so that he might be ashamed.
And that shame is meant to ultimately bring him back, that the shame would be used as a grace by God in order to bring about that individual's repentance.
But in that, you said, you know, we don't advocate for shunning.
And I know what you're saying, and I want to just get further thoughts from you, because there is a sense in which it says that, you know, like Paul, it seems like he's advocating for a corporate shaming of the individual, that we're having nothing more to do with him so that he might feel a sense of shame.
We are depriving him of shame.
Of the gift of relationship with the saints in such a way that he might be put to shame and that that shame might drive him back to the cross and the church.
What do you think about that?
Right.
So, but he also says in the same text, but to treat him as a believer.
So I take that text to actually be somewhere short of excommunication.
So I would take that text to be you're somewhere in the process of church discipline, you haven't yet put them outside the church yet.
And so, in that context, yes, we would occasionally.
So, the two applications that we have for that text is occasionally like a public rebuke of somebody who's in some kind of high handed sin, but we haven't yet reached the point of excommunication.
And so, we're letting everybody know this person's not obeying, they're in sin, and we sort of publicly rebuke.
And so, that's letting everybody know everything's not okay.
Don't just fellowship with them like everything's normal, but they're still within the church.
So, we're doing that with the hope that that sort of public shame will bring about the grace of repentance, but they're still reckoned a believer.
Gotcha.
And then the second application is that we do occasionally practice what we would call a suspension from the table, which is not a permanent barring, but occasionally when we have a kind of a pretty high handed, scandalous sin, and we think this person needs a shot across the bow, like you better repent here, or we're not sure if we've gotten the whole story out yet, we will occasionally.
Suspend somebody from the table for like two weeks or three weeks or something like that.
And that's an application of the same principle.
They're still a brother or sister, but we are barring them from the table.
So we're not even eating with them in that sense.
And depending on the situation, that's sometimes announced publicly or sometimes only told to them, but it's semi public because there they are in church not taking communion.
So that would be the way I would take that text.
Prior to excommunication, because Paul says, still treat them as a brother.
Got you.
That's super helpful.
I honestly just hadn't thought about it, but as soon as you said that, it became so clear that I think within, I haven't read any Reformed Baptists on this, but somebody, I don't know, maybe like Nehemiah Cox or John Gill probably would say exactly what you said.
And I think where they would put it in, in terms of steps, where it would be placed with Matthew 18, would probably be tell it to the church.
And if he does not listen to the church, then treat him.
So it would probably be right in between the telling of the situation to the church.
And before the church, and during the listening, and if he does not listen to it.
So, what's said there in Matthew 18 is there actually is an extended period of time, however long that may be, but there is a period of time between the matter being told to the church, where the church now can put him to shame in the godly sense of the term, but he is given time to listen to the church.
And what is he listening to?
In part, he's probably listening to the church and its unified decision to put him to shame.
Will he listen to the shame that is coming from the church?
The church, because of his actions and repent.
And if he does not listen, if the shame doesn't work, then it's a further shame in a sense of actually excommunicating.
That's probably where that would fit in, I think.
Yeah, I think that's a good natural spot.
Cool.
All right, super helpful.
Let's just talk about one more thing within this.
You know, we can talk about signs and seals.
I think that would be helpful also.
But real quick, let's just talk about elders.
So that's one of the differences between Reformed Baptists and Presbyterians is that you guys have, you know, so we have two officers in the church, ordained officers of the church.
We both believe that they're male.
To be held by biblically qualified men, elders, and deacons.
But then you guys have subsections within that elder category of ministers and then teaching elders and then ruling elders.
And some Presbyterians just have two, I've noticed.
So some it's just teaching elders and ruling elders.
You guys have three.
And some don't even make any distinction between them at all.
So this is Calvin's view that we hold at Christ Church.
I think probably the majority view is what you said is probably just distinguishing teaching and ruling.
Calvin actually had the third category where he broke out minister and teacher.
But there are some Presbyterians actually who nevertheless only they just say elder is an elder is an elder.
No distinction between elders at all.
So that's not an.
And that's what the Reformed Baptists would say.
Yeah.
So it's not an unheard of Presbyterian view too.
But the reality is so for those Presbyterians who say an elder is an elder is an elder, and for Reformed Baptists who, you know, Who unanimously would say that there's no subcategories within eldership?
The reality is, you know, just showing a little bit of humility.
Functionally, we agree with you.
And so, so, so we don't have the label.
That's what we're saying.
That's, I know, exactly.
So I'm trying to be fair here and say that functionally, I do the same thing.
And it'd be hypocritical of me not to admit that.
That, um, right now we have, you know, we're a year into a brand new church plant going across the country from California to Texas.
So we don't have, um, we're still organizing as a church, but we have, um, About 100 people on the Lord's Day, 50 of them are members in the church, and then we have lots of new people.
And then we have zero deacons as of now, but some men that we're looking at for the diaconate and two elders.
And with the two elders, right now I'm preaching, I'm administering the Lord's Supper every single week, every Lord's Day, and I'm preaching about 10 times, and then the other elder steps in and preaches once, and then I preach another 10 times.
And so for me to say, an elder is an elder is an elder.
In terms of, again, the label, the title, I agree with that.
You know, in theory, but in function, anybody who's a member of my church would say, but okay, an elder is an elder, but the two elders in our church seem to have some fairly big distinctions between what they actually do.
I think sometimes there is a little bit of talking past each other with words, because I think Calvin was willing to use the word offices.
Within the eldership.
But I think sometimes that word office can maybe throw some of our, you know, two office or, you know, Reformed Baptist brothers off because we don't mean that those three different kinds of elders have like some kind of completely distinct office.
We're talking about it within the eldership.
And that's why the last line there of the catechism all three offices of elders share the government of the church equally together.
Right.
We believe in what's sometimes called the parody of the elder board.
But just that I've only got one vote.
I'm a pastor, a minister in this setup.
Dr. Ben Merkel is the president of New St. Andrews College.
He's a teaching elder in our church.
And another gentleman is my brother, who is actually a ruling elder in our church.
But the The buck stops with the elder board as a whole.
Even though I've been given a particular task to teach and preach and administer the sacraments.
And the basic biblical verses we're pointing to, which I'm sure you're aware of, but just for your audience's sake, would be in Ephesians 4, where Paul says that he gave some to be apostles, prophets, and evangelists, some to be pastors and teachers.
Uh, you know, Paul's at least okay with giving different names, and we're gonna assume that pastors and teachers are both elders, yeah.
Um, and then in First Timothy, uh, uh, five, you have um, Paul saying, um, to um, honor those, um, rule well, who rule well, especially those who labor in word and doctrine, right?
And so, um, what we're seeking to do in making a distinction within the elder board is just simply do that, it's just basically saying we're going to honor their, their, um, We want to honor all the elders.
All of them are called to rule.
Some of them rule particularly well, and some of them labor in word and doctrine.
Presbyterian Structure and Offices00:05:52
Right.
And so, between those two passages, pastors and teachers, ruling and laboring in word and doctrine, we're just giving some measure of honor to those tasks by designating them.
But again, that doesn't mean that I have more authority than a ruling elder.
Right.
Amen.
Yeah.
And so, for the Reformed Baptists, same thing.
Like, we would see that distinction of there's ruling and there's teaching, and that distinction is.
Clearly in the scripture.
And the question is, do we, so do we put, we see the distinction, both of us see the distinction in function.
And then the question is, do we also have a distinction in title to go along with that particular function?
The Reformed Baptists would say, no, it's just, it's just elder and elder and pastor or shepherd, these are all synonymous terms.
And so elder is an elder is an elder, but we do see a distinction in the ministry of different elders.
That brings me to one more question, though.
And I know the answer, but for the sake of our listeners, ruling elders, right, within the Presbyterian framework, or at least your framework of, Three different offices of elders, right?
The minister, the teacher, the ruling elder.
It seems, you know, if somebody read that quickly, it could seem to imply that the minister and the teacher don't get a vote, right?
You said I only get one vote.
But what we're meant to assume here is ruling elders, maybe I'm wording it wrong, but ruling elders get a vote, they rule.
And the other guys, it's not that they don't rule and only the ruling elders rule.
The other guys rule along with the ruling elders and have additional responsibilities that the ruling elders don't have.
That's correct.
Yeah.
I understand.
I think there are some, you know, there's variations in Presbyterianism, and I think there maybe are some.
So, in high, what I would call kind of higher Presbyterianism, there actually is a kind of hierarchy in the Presbyterian polity where the presbytery, which is the regional gathering of the teaching elders and ruling elders, actually has kind of a hierarchical rule over the local churches.
And in that structure, pastors.
Of local churches are actually members of that presbytery, that's right, not members of the local church, which I don't like, which I don't like either.
So, for the record, we're on the same page there.
Um, and um, but that so, those pastors actually, because they're not technically members of the local church, don't have a vote on their local session.
I'm pretty sure, I think they vote at presbytery, but not at the local session.
They they teach and you know encourage at the local session level, but then the local session does make the votes, uh, votes, um, and makes the decisions now.
Presbyterian denomination, I'm part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, is a what I would just call kind of a lower Presbyterianism, where we have, I think we wisely decided at the founding that that structure has some inherent problems with it and challenges at the very least.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it's sinful, but I would just say I think it's not as wise.
And that is because I think what can happen in that hierarchical structure is those, we, That hierarchy tends to get corrupted, and that corruption then bleeds down into local churches.
And so, we know that local churches, of course, can still fall into sin as well, but we prefer to have that authority decentralized.
And so, in our polity, pastors must be members of the local church that they pastor.
And that's why I have a vote then on my local session.
But you're absolutely right.
In all Presbyterian polity, all elders rule.
Some elders rule and teach, and some elders rule, teach, and preach.
Yes.
Okay.
Great.
All right.
Anything else you want to add on this section, the government of the church?
Only that it's so important and it's so potent.
And I think recognizing that if we want reformation in the public square, we must have reformation here first.
That's the main thing, I don't think we can underestimate the failure of the church in what has then, you know, the.
The public square is downstream of the sanctuary.
We are reaping what we have sown at every level.
Just morality, we have immorality in the church, but also in the practical things like you've described, like the requirement of biblical justice in the church, two or three witnesses, due process.
There's arguably a very strong case to be made that a form of Presbyterianism is actually the foundation of the American Republic.
The whole idea of representative government, separation of powers, a blended government of different parties and interests.
There's been scholarly work done on that.
A lot of the work that Calvin and the other reformers did, which again, I mean this sort of in a generic Presbyterian way, not in a high or capital P Presbyterian way, but just the notions of a representative government, the notions of different representatives representing different interests and different kinds of people not being brought together, and then there being checks and balances and separation of powers.
It flowed from the Reformation.
King George actually called the American Revolution the Presbyterian Revolt.
That was his name for the American War for Independence.
He says the Presbyterians are revolting.
And this was partially because lots of Presbyterian pastors were involved in the war and preaching that this was a just war to be a part of.
But it was partially because he saw clearly as a King George, as a Church of England Anglican, looking across the ocean, he says, this is Presbyterianism in full bloom.
Avoiding Ecclesiastical Tyranny00:03:05
They want to be free of the king.
And because the king was the head of the Church of England and still is.
The Queen of England today is the head of the Church of England.
So, I just want to emphasize what happens in church, what happens in church government and worship flows out and impacts everything else.
And if we want to get the public square back confessing the Lordship of Jesus as we should, we want families raising children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord as we should.
It starts in the church.
And church government is not just a way to organize our nice little religious club.
It's a government that God has established, and the gates of Hades won't prevail against it.
Yeah, amen.
Bad polity in the church has led towards bad polity within the state.
Two things that I think of real quick is one, tyranny at the top, and then also cancel culture, mob rule.
So, in churches, without there actually being due process, without following the steps that Jesus laid out for church discipline, you still see somebody being put to shame, but wrongly within a church.
This one woman, because of something illegitimate, is not invited to the women's gatherings.
She's ostracized, right?
So, that's mob rule, that's cancel culture.
And that's one wrong thing that doesn't follow church polity.
And then, boom, we see it in the state.
And then tyranny, right?
Like, what I always tell people when it comes to, you know, whenever I preach on excommunication or church discipline, Matthew 18, people, you know, it makes them nervous.
Anybody who's coming to the church thinking about joining our church is like, well, do I really want to join now?
Do I want to subject myself to the possibility of, you know, and what I always tell them is this again, it's not whether but which.
Every church kicks people out.
The question is how.
Some churches kick people out by bringing them, you know, the leaders in the church, the pastors in the church, bring them into a back room and they break their kneecaps.
Right?
They, you know, metaphorically, they kick them out the way a casino would kick out a card counter.
You know, and so you don't hear about it, but the fact that you don't hear about it is not a good thing.
That means they weren't given a fair trial.
They weren't treated properly.
You know, the steps in scripture were not followed.
And so that's tyranny.
That is ecclesiastical tyranny.
And so we've seen ecclesiastical tyranny because it's not as though churches stopped practicing excommunication, they stopped practicing biblical excommunication.
Churches still are kicking people out left and right.
Megachurches do it all the time because they've deemed someone divisive.
But it was never actually the steps of church discipline were not followed.
So, if you don't want backdoor justice taking place, if you don't want tyranny, and if you don't want mob rule and cancel culture, you need to snuff it out in the church first.
And as we seek to deal with it in the state.
So, amen.
Let's go ahead and conclude this episode.
This was ecclesiastical government, this was government of the church, episode four.
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