QUESTIONS - Are Multisite Churches Biblical? definitively rejects multi-site campuses with shared elder boards as unbiblical, arguing they separate local pastoral care from Sunday preaching like a husband undermined by another man. The speaker asserts local church authority supersedes global structures, warning such models divide Christ's body and the Lord's Supper, while noting Presbyterianism similarly elevates authority above congregations. Amidst this theological critique, the episode urgently promotes the May 5th–7th Theonomy and Post Millennialism Conference, highlighting only ~100 of 525 seats remaining for speakers including James White and Joe Boot. [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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Would Elders Remove a Saint00:04:49
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Are multi site, multi congregational church campuses with the same elder board and in person pastors, not video screens, a biblically permissible alternative to independent church plants?
No.
Thanks for the question.
No, it's not biblically permissible.
No.
For one, it's just a bad move.
Mark Driscoll, I think, had some problems.
I think he had a lot of great stuff too.
I think part of the reason that he got fired is because he flew a little too close to the sun and, in part, because of his views on men and women, the whole thing we've been talking about in this episode.
Mark Driscoll actually would address women in their sin and affirmed biblical masculinity in a lot of really good ways.
I think at certain points he got perverse.
I think he went across the line.
But a lot of it was really good.
A lot of it was really good.
And I think part of the reason that he was ultimately removed was because he really made some serious mistakes.
I think part of the reason he was removed also is because he did some things that were really good, like addressing the sin of women, and they came back with a vengeance.
And I think part of the reason he was removed is because of the multi site model.
Think about this for a second, all right?
Since we're talking about consummation and covenant and all these kinds of things, and marriage and men and women, imagine this as an illustration, all right?
Imagine that, well, it's like pre-Menoktra.
How do you say that, Nathan?
With the king on the first night sleeps with.
Menoktra.
Imagine that there are 12 married couples, and the men in each of these marriages are responsible for protecting and providing for the wife and children, and caring for her, loving her, leading her, all those things.
But then there's one man.
Outside of these 12 marriages, who has exclusive conjugal rights to these 12 brides.
So they're married to a man, each of them an individual man who is their husband and performs all of his responsibilities and performs them well.
He's a loving, good husband.
But then there's this 13th man who sleeps with all of them.
So the husband brings home the bacon, the husband cares for them, the husband does this, protects them, provides all these kinds of things.
But when it comes to sleeping with the wife, another man swoops in.
That's not going to go well.
What you're going to have is these 12 husbands are going to want to kill that man, and rightfully so.
Rightfully so.
Yeah, they're the husband.
They're doing the work, they're caring for the wife and the children, the family, and it is their right to be able to be sexually intimate with their wife.
Now, that's kind of a vivid illustration, which is in my mind because of the nature of everything we've been talking about in this video.
But I think in some sense, that's kind of what the multi site campus does.
You had 47, I think it was, 47 different elders, campus elders throughout the Mars Hill Empire.
And these men are doing the marriage counseling with every couple that's getting married.
These pastors are, if somebody dies, performing the funeral.
They're doing the grief counseling with a mother and father that lost their son.
They're doing all these different things.
They're the ones who are doing all the pastoral work, caring for.
The families in their church.
But then another man swoops in on Sunday morning to consummate, you know, the preaching is given to another man.
So you've got a pastor who's on the ground, a group of pastors, three of them, five of them, ten of them, in a particular campus.
They're doing all the pastoral work, but some other man swoops in Sunday morning for the preaching.
And you wonder why Mark Driscoll ultimately had all of his elders turn against him.
You know, and I understand what the record, you know, stated that, you know, he was harsh, he was quarrelsome, he was all these things.
And I think he was some of those things, some of those things.
Although there are two sides to every story.
But for sure, even if Mark Driscoll was a saint, if he was a perfect saint, I still think, maybe not guaranteed, but I still think, this is my suspicion, that there would be still a very high likelihood that his elders eventually would have removed him, outvoted him, and removed him.
The Pastor Not in His Church00:08:14
Even if he wasn't quarrelsome, even if he wasn't harsh, even if none of those things were true.
Why?
Because at the end of the day, pastors preach.
Pastors preach.
And to be a pastor, a spiritual father in a congregation, an ecclesiastical father, caring for these people and spending time all week long knowing the needs of the people, knowing what struggles they're going through, knowing what questions they're asking, knowing what spiritual direction they require.
And then here's your chief opportunity to feed the sheep.
This is the climax, the pinnacle of sheep feeding, the Lord's day hour, preaching the word.
And you don't get to do it.
Some other guy swoops in week after week after week.
I don't know about you, but yeah, I would start to probably really struggle with resentment towards that guy.
And if that guy got even close to being disqualified, I'd be hopping on that like white on rice.
I would be saying, Yeah, he is quarrelsome.
Yeah, I think he is quarrelsome.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think he is disqualified.
Did I hear somebody?
Yeah, I think that's part of what was going on.
So, yeah, I just think it's a dumb model.
I think it's a bad model.
But I also think more than that, not just that it's foolish or not strategic.
I really do think that it's not biblical, that it's actually not biblical for a number of reasons.
But one of the biggest reasons is because we're called to disciple and train people up.
That's one of the roles of a pastor.
And we need to be church planting, we need to be planting churches, not campuses, not just expanding empires, but actually planting other.
Churches.
I think that the multi site thing is kind of like globalism.
It's the evangelical equivalent in the church world of globalism.
No, no, no.
We want nationalism.
We want independent sovereign nations.
And we want many of them, not one big George Soros global economic forum.
We don't want that.
We want individual nations.
And so too, we want individual churches.
The highest, I believe that the Bible teaches, the highest ecclesiastical court on earth is the local church.
It is the local church, and that local churches should be independent and autonomous.
And then that gets into the question of not just who is the church, that's the people of God, those who are regenerate, but also what is the church?
What is the church?
And the church is many things, and you know, the called out ones, ecclesia, you know, but the church is also a gathering, it is an assembly.
And so, wherever you have an assembly, that is an assembly of the saints on the Lord's day for the right administering of the ordinary means of grace.
That is a church.
Some of you guys probably don't know this, but I'm not just a no multiple campuses guy, I'm a no multiple services guy.
Probably didn't know that about me.
If I have anything to say about it, I will not have more than one church service because it's two gatherings.
Even in just the administering of the Lord's Supper, we would be dividing the people of God and dividing the table.
We would be taking the Lord's one table and the one bread.
1 Corinthians chapter 10 says, Just as there is one loaf of bread, we who are many are one, are one in Christ Jesus.
And what we would be doing is we would be taking, instead of one loaf of bread, you'd have two loaves of bread.
Instead of one table of the Lord, you would have two tables of the Lord, one at 9 a.m., one at 11 a.m.
And instead of the family of God coming together and bellying up to the Lord's one table to eat of the Lord's one loaf of bread, we divide the family.
Even if there aren't factions emotionally among us, there is a literal, physical time divide where half of the church shows up before and the other half shows up after.
We're not made one.
We're not partaking of the Lord's Supper together in unity, but we're actually partaking of half of the supper with half of the church and then half of the supper with half of the church.
It's two ecclesias, it's two churches, it's two gatherings.
And so, yeah, I think that that's just in terms of time.
But when you say it's not just two different times, two different groups of people, but in one place, but now you're talking about two different cities and two different buildings and two different communities with different campus pastors, still, yeah, one board altogether, but three of them are here and four of them are here.
That's just different churches.
I think it's just foolish, absolutely foolish to do anything but to cut those churches off in a Most positive way possible, but cut them off, release them, release those elders, release those congregants, and say, You're free.
You are free.
You don't have to continue the brand.
We're not starting Starbucks and franchising out, we're planting churches.
It's radically different.
All right, that's all I got for today.
Nathan, let's go ahead and one more time.
Let's bring up.
Actually, you know what?
Was there one more question that's a short one?
Not really.
I wanted to clarify.
He said in person pastors.
Right.
Well, yeah, in person pastors.
Oh, yeah, you're right.
In person pastors.
So there would be an in person pastor preaching.
And so there would have to, but it's not the same pastor, I guess I was imagining.
Because I know some churches where the guy literally will get on the helicopter and fly to the other campus, you know, in between services and go preach.
But let's assume it's different men at different campuses preaching live.
Almost Presbyterian.
Yeah.
At that point, you're just Presbyterian.
Yeah, so at that point, that's good.
That's way, way better than what I was saying.
And let's, I'm assuming that each of these churches, in terms of their giving, have separate accounts, because that would be another thing.
You know, different financial accounts that if this church chooses to be generous, that church that was generous benefits from that generosity.
And it doesn't just go into a pot, you know, a pool between a dozen churches or something like that.
But assuming that they're independent financially and they each have a pastor who is preaching live and a team of elders, if it's all those things, then they are separate churches.
And the fact that the elders still Combined form one board, that's not multi site.
That's just Presbyterianism.
So, yeah, I'm okay with Presbyterianism.
I'm a Baptist, so I wouldn't do that still.
But that's what every Presbyterian is independent churches, but each of the pastors actually sits on a presbytery, and that's regional, local, and then it goes higher and higher and higher.
So you have the session of elders, and you have ruling and bifurcation, ruling elders and teaching elders, and sometimes there's three different elders depending on what presbytery you're a part of, if it's OPC or PCA, but you have.
Elders, a session of elders, multiple elders at a local church, but then the teaching elder, a minister, a pastor from each of these local churches sits on a presbytery.
And they would use Acts 15 and different texts, the Jerusalem Council, to be able to biblically make their case for that.
But that's pretty much, if that's what he means, he's just describing Presbyterianism.
That's what that is.
I have a problem with Presbyterianism because, again, I believe that the highest ecclesiastical court in the land is a local church.
So, that there is no presbytery or council or synod or pope or cardinal or anything that can actually, with ecclesiastical authority, tell outside of the local church, speak in and tell that local church what they must do.
I don't believe that that's biblical.
I also don't like the idea that in many presbyteries, not in the CREC, so I appreciate that, but in the PCA and I believe the OPC as well, the teaching elder, the minister, pastor, who is on the presbytery, he's actually not a member of his local church.
Did you know that?
So he's pastoring all these people who belong to this church that he actually doesn't formally belong to.
He's not a member of his own church where he's preaching.
He's a member of the Presbytery.
I don't like that.
Houston, we have a problem.
I repeat, we have a problem.
RightResponseConference Almost Sold Out00:01:33
Our conference is about to sell out.
I mean, about to sell out.
We probably have about 75 to 100 seats left.
Our venue holds about 525 to 550 seats, and we currently have 450 people who are registered for this conference.
The excitement is.
Is tangible.
A lot of people registered because they wanted to hit the early bird rate.
We're now at our normal rate $130 for an adult, $50 for a kid who's 11 to 17 years old, and kids 10 and under get in free.
You can bring the whole family.
But the problem is not that we're going to raise the rate again, the problem is we're going to run out of tickets and we're going to run out pretty fast.
Again, we've got about 100 seats or less.
450 people six months out are already registered for this conference.
We don't want you to miss it.
So, To ensure that you get to make it to this conference, you need to register not a month from now, not a week from now, not tomorrow, but today.
You want to be there for the Theonomy and Post Millennialism Conference, May 5th, 6th, and 7th, with James White, Joe Boot, Gary DeMar, Dale Partridge, and yours truly, Joel Webbin.
Go to RightResponseConference.com.
Again, that's RightResponseConference.com.
It will sell out very soon.
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