For 35 years, Alexander Strauch’s book, Biblical Eldership: An Urgent Call to Restore Biblical Church Leadership, has been the premier book explaining the biblical teaching on church eldership, which is shared pastoral leadership by a council of scripturally-qualified elders. Theologically sound and eminently practical, Alex’s book helped ignite a worldwide awakening to this long-neglected and misunderstood subject. 

 

In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm welcome Alex to discuss his completely revised edition of his classic work. The new version, titled Biblical Eldership: Restoring the Eldership to Its Rightful Place in the Local Church, features a word-for-word exposition of all the key biblical texts on eldership—as the original—yet offers a new chapter, “Making Pastoral Eldership Work,” as well as a more developed discussion on the full parity—yet functional diversity—of elders within a local church.  

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Hey, today Jason and I have Alexander Strauch who just updated his book, Biblical Eldership, a standard work for elders and for churches. Really fantastic. So we're going to ask him about the changes, but also Alex is coming to our national conference. He's going to preach at our pastors conference, pre-conference, and then also the main conference on making disciples.

So hope you enjoy the discussion with Alexander Strauch. Jason, we have the privilege of having Alexander Strauch with us today. How about that? That's fantastic. We've been a beneficiary of your work for a long time.

Beneficiary fans. This book, this was the first book that we became beneficiaries of biblical eldership. Then he, this used to be called the New Testament Deacon. If I remember right, correct. Is that right?

Yeah, that is right. Now it's called Paul Paul's vision for, for the deacons. Fantastic stuff. You haven't lost your mind yet. Exactly.

Leading with love. Have to read that meetings that work, Alexander Strout elders meetings at work, bite and devour, and that's not all of them. But the reason we're here, well You should read all these books, but the reason we're here is that something new has come. It's called a new version of biblical eldership. Beautiful book.

I hope everybody gets it. And It's really, really a blessing to be able to talk about this book. It's been a great book. It's been the standard for so many churches. And I believe that this book really fomented a revolution in the church of shifting from deacon run churches to elder led churches.

So, And I think we all had a front row seat on that. Okay, so you changed this book. You updated it. So we wanna know what led you to update it because it was such a great book all along. Well, actually I did not update it.

It's a completely revised book. There's a difference. Updating a book is rather simple. You go through it, make some changes here and there. But this is a complete rewrite right from the start.

There's now 30 chapters. So you want to know why I did this? Well, it's been a textbook to thousands of churches, and a textbook has to be updated or it's lost in the shuffle of many, many books. So that just had to be done. But in the time between my last, which was an update, 95, you have the 95 edition in front of you, and this new edition, many new excellent commentaries came out on the pastoral epistles.

For many, many years, people complained, we don't have any good, technical, highly scholarly books on the pastoral. Well, all of a sudden, I. Howard Marshall did his, Towner did his, Knight did his, and these are top notch commentaries. They needed to be brought into biblical eldership, and I needed to read them to learn much more. These men are all really top of the totem pole for being Greek scholars and biblical scholars.

Not that I agree with everything they say, they say some very wrong things, particularly on the role of women. They butcher that passage. But because they butcher that passage, other passages, they do a nice job, particularly on the thing of the qualifications. They do a wonderful job. Another reason I updated it is that I wanted to put more practical things in, And there were some key issues that caused confusion.

For example, one of the issues is the whole thing of first among equals. It's a good statement. It accurately portrays what we have with the twelve apostles, and Peter being the outstanding preacher and teacher, and the dynamic leader among the twelve. It explains that. There are equals, parody.

All the apostles were equally apostles. But among the apostles, there is a diversity of giftedness. So, first among equals does explain that, but it confused many people, and many people misused it. So, in this book, I think I do a much better job explaining, which is a very big issue, parity among the elders. The elders are equal in their authority, in their position.

All the qualifications are to all the elders, not just one elder. And then diversity, I call it functional diversity among the elders. Some elders are very gifted in teaching, some are very gifted in pastoral care, others maybe in more managerial things. So among the elders, you have this functional diversity. I think it's probably a more accurate statement to explain elders who labor, as Paul says, 1 Timothy 5.17, a very, very important verse, a key verse in this topic, elders who labor, very, very strong word, a word used of manual labor in preaching and in teaching, and they are to receive some kind of remuneration for their labor.

So I feel I straighten those things out much better. Alex, what were some of the wrong ways of taking first among equals in your experience? Well, as FF Bruth says, first among equals become first without equals very easily. So people use that to say, see, I'm the first and you better listen to me. I make the final decision.

So it was abused by people who didn't understand the equal part, first among equal disappeared with the equal side and went with the, Oh, first. Yeah. So, you know, when elders disagree, when you have the odd man out, what should they do? Well, we know they should pray. And as elders work together over time, they should learn to trust one another, understand one another's personalities and emphases in life.

And so it's very, very common. In fact, I had a long phone call the other day with eldership that was having a disagreement over bringing on a new elder. And so when you learn to work together over time and you remember that you're servants, one of another, we're one another group, we learn to give and take and to build consensus. This is where love comes in. It's so important that we have the Christlike virtue of love, or I could put it this way, you have Christ's teaching on humility, servanthood, brotherhood, and Christlike love.

Notice those four virtues in the teachings of Jesus Christ that has to come into the eldership. We are brethren, we are brothers, we're equally brothers, and we must bring in these great, great Christian virtues of patience, the fruit of the Spirit, the 15 descriptions of the Lord. They have to come into the meeting and we display them in our disagreement. So We have learned over many years to submit to one another, can't always have your way. We've learned to build consensus very rapidly.

And then we have issues we must have agreement. So I always separate between issues that we must have a complete agreement or we can't move forward because it'll be too destructive to the church. And there are many, most issues, different ones can give and take and submit and say, okay, let's go forward. We don't want to just be held up with everybody agreeing on every little thing. That's very ineffective.

So I just say part of it is acting out the Christian virtues one with another, and the eldership should be a model to the whole Church of brotherliness and the Christian virtues in practice. So I've learned a lot as an elder. In fact, I've learned so much in the way of wisdom and the implementation of all these magnificent truths of the Christian faith, it gets practiced in the elders' meeting. And you learn not to get mad at one another and forgive one another, and get aside with one another and work things out personally. So I've learned so much.

Between my wife and my fellow elders, I have learned a lot. So Alex, in what you just said, it's possible that there are circumstances where a plurality of the other elders would yield to the odd man out, just depending on the circumstances. So the odd man out might actually carry the day because his conscience is bound and he feels very strongly about it, but the plurality, the other elders are, are not bothered and, and really aren't prioritized over the issues. So they would be willing to yield to the one guy. Oh yes.

And one guy may be right. Right. He may be right. Yeah. And we've seen that in our eldership.

But when I say he's right, here's a separation. It's not just his opinion or I like this or don't like that. He brings reason to bear. He gives answers to his opinion. So the rest go, you know what?

That makes more sense than what we're thinking. So yes, we must always be ready for one of the brothers to see what others don't see. But again, I separate between that one brother just giving his opinion, I like this, I don't like that. And in the conversation I had yesterday over this very question of bringing on a new elder, really the objections were simply like personal feelings. We cannot run the church on personal feelings.

So that one odd man needs to present his reasons and objections, and he may even need to use scripture. And then if the elders are godly men and want the will of God, not just their own will, they'll go, all right, you're right, you convinced me. You know, we've said for many, many years, if we can't agree on something as elders, all of us unanimously, then what we're going to do is wait. We're going to wait until we can and keep talking about it. Did we get that from you?

Did we get that out of this earlier version of biblical eldership? Did you say that? When I said there are issues, there are issues that we must have unanimity. But there are many issues far more that we don't have to all go, oh yes, I totally agree. We learn to build a consensus among us because we're all different people and we have different likes and dislikes and we have areas of our expertise.

And so we learn to listen to one another, work back and forth. And one statement we always use is, all we can do is fail. You know, we try a lot of different things in evangelism. And let me give you an example. One of our elders, who's very evangelistically oriented still today, and has evangelistic Bible studies, well, he has a farm and he wanted to have for the college students square dancing and then bring an evangelist in, one we all knew, to talk to the young people.

So some of the elders go, we don't dance in this church. And it's going to be a bad statement going, our young people are dancing. I was one of those by the way. And so we had to discuss that. I was not for the square dance scene or wasn't for the dance scene because of the connotations it would have to our people.

So anyway, it's too bad you didn't have Jason and I, we would have voted with you, man. Well, I didn't understand. It's more like aerobic exercise and it's exhausting. So anyway, I compromised and here's my reasoning. Brother Doyle Roth, He's the head of evangelism.

He wants to do new things to draw people in. Why should I hold him up when that would be so frustrating to him? No, no, no. Oh, I just don't like it. It's going to hurt the church.

He said, if there's any problems, I'll take care of it. So you give in and you say, okay, let's try it. All we can do is fail. And if there's a problem, you say you're going to handle it. So, so things like that we compromise on and work together in love and We don't want to just frustrate each other all the time.

That's really good. So for people who are watching the podcast and are unfamiliar with your work, I'm very familiar with the work, and particularly with biblical eldership going back two decades now. The thing I've always appreciated about the book that I would just say to people who are watching and who aren't yet familiar, the strength of the book is that it is really a word by word, phrase by phrase exposition of the New Testament text. It just gives you a thorough understanding of what is said in the New Testament about biblical eldership. And even the practical parts of the book are actually tied into exposition.

So I've always been so thankful that we have a book on our shelves and at our fingertips that actually goes right to the New Testament text and just explains what the inspired writers of the New Testament were teaching on this topic. Yeah, that really is, that really is the genius of the book because it just takes you right to the horse's mouth without a lot of philosophy. And then you've always come down and apply it. But it always starts with, with exposition. Yes.

This is interesting how this emerged. Back in the mid-70s, when I started to have the fire go on in my mind and heart to do this work, right from the very, very start, and here's what happened. I was looking for other books and the only books I could find on this subject. There weren't many in those days. Now there's a number were written from a certain denominational viewpoint.

But I noticed they didn't even list certain texts. And I thought, that's not right. And I said, I'm going to make it a Bible exposition. So right from the beginning, that was a burden the Lord put on my heart. Go through every single text and do my best to let the writers do the talking.

I don't bring in any of my church tradition. Most people can't guess where I'm from or that, and that's what I wanted. Now in this new book, I believe the Bible exposition is much better. And that's what I'm happy with. That, and of course I've learned a lot over those years.

And I'll tell you how I learned talking to people, going out to conferences and people telling me things, how they read it, what their problem is, what are the issues they want dealt with. So over the years, you learn a lot listening to people. What else did you change or modify? I really didn't modify much. Oh yes, here's something.

Chapter 29, this is all new. Chapter 29 is how to make it work. That's a big criticism I heard. This doesn't work in our church. So the whole chapter is ideas for making eldership effective.

It's not good enough just to have the theory or the biblical ideal. It's got to be effective. You've got to be shepherding people. You have to be teaching people. They need to be growing into Christ's likeness.

So it's an entire chapter, it's a big chapter on practical ideas to make an eldership effective, ideal with the importance, the extreme importance of good elders meetings. And of course, we've got that whole book on it. But if the elders meetings are ineffective, Elders don't know what other elders are doing and you're just being ineffective, it's not going to work. So that's a whole chapter. Another very big chapter that I did not have in the other book is the relationship between the congregation and the elders.

This is a very, very big question. Whole denominations are created over this question. So I tried to be fair. I tried to let the text speak. And where the text doesn't speak, I make that clear.

The Bible doesn't comment on this. You have freedom, different ways to do different things. So those are two whole new chapters. Yeah, I'm looking, I'm flipping through it right now. And you have so much practical information, organization, communication.

Oh, let's stop at communication. We men aren't really that great at communication. We think people learn things by osmosis. You know, I stood next to Scott and he got all this. So there's a lot in there about the importance.

I even recommend in a larger church that you might have an elder who's over communication between the elders and the elders in the congregation. And you know, we elders think the congregation knows what's going on with us. They don't. And we need to remove that from the dark. We're not a backroom secret, clandestine organization that makes decisions and comes in with a helicopter and drops them down.

No, there is tremendous wisdom in the congregation. There's godliness, there's giftedness. So big decisions, decisions that will affect the whole congregation. We want the congregation praying about it. We give them time to think about it.

I like doing surveys. We want the people's names though. We give a nice survey and we want their feedback. And if we get some very important feedback, we call those people up. So for example, in Appointing a New Elder Deacon, they are going through a process.

And I do talk more in there about training elders, how to move forward on that. But we always present them to the congregation. They're going to lead the people, the people. And you know, I'll tell you something I've learned, the people know things that we don't know. I'll give you a quick illustration.

We were bringing forth a deacon, good man, been in the church for a number of years, wonderful family, and all the elders wanted him as a deacon, which is the assistance to the elders. And 99.9% of the congregation said, yes, this is a man who meets the qualifications. One person objected. So we said, well, what is that objection? Is it a biblical objection or do you know something or is it just a personal, you don't like him because he doesn't use the same kind of tie you wear?

Well, he said, have you ever visited this man's job? Have you ever, do you know what he does? Well, we had an idea what he did, managed a bookstore. He said, you ought to go to the bookstore. They had first rate books on Satan, the Satan's Bible, and a lot of King's books.

And so we went and looked at it. And so we said, a qualification for the deacon is consistent with the faith. Your job is not consistent with the faith. In fact, it's an offense. So anyway, he became very angry.

Of course he would. We're hurting him. He's a good, good man. And then of course he said, well, everyone works in jobs where they have things that are... I said, well, no, this is different.

You're a Christian and you're selling Satanic literature. So Anyway, he wrote John MacArthur and wrote Chuck Swindoll. Guess what they said? You don't qualify. So he did calm down.

And about a year later, he got out of that business. And again, a very good, godly man. He just, you know, didn't see it at the time. It took some time. So one person turned the whole thing around because this isn't an election who get the most votes.

This is does he qualify? And this one person said He doesn't qualify. And we said, you're right. We're going to follow what you've just said. So you also, you made some changes on your descriptions of senior pastors, lay elders, and things like that.

Could you tell us about that? Yes. I think I clarified that much better. The key issue is vocabulary. Vocabulary matters.

Language matters. Paul is a master. He is the creator of much of our Christian vocabulary. Justification by faith, propitiation, adoption, grace, election, all these big, great, grandiose, wondrous words that explain Christ and the work of Christ. He never tires of talking about the person and work of Christ.

Well, we should try our best to use biblical vocabulary as much as possible. And There is no such person in the New Testament called the senior pastor, which in many churches turns out to be a third office above the elders. Some churches call the minister. Only he has the rights to administer the Lord's Supper, to preach, to baptize. He has a status and a privilege.

The other elders don't who are called lay elders. I despise that term. Acts 20 28, The Holy Spirit of God set you men as overseers to shepherd the Church of God. What right do we have to call them lay elders? Some of those men are better shepherds than the so-called pastor elder.

So there is no terminology for this person called the senior pastor. When you come to 1st Timothy 517, notice the elders, plural, who labor in preaching and teaching, they don't get a special name, they're elders with the qualifications. There's no special qualifications for the senior pastor. We are all brothers. That comes back to the teaching of Jesus, look particularly at Matthew 23,8.

You are brothers, equally brothers. Now within the brotherhood, there is differences of gifts and talents and functions within that, but we are brothers. We should do everything we can to keep that brotherly equality, elder equality. That's the parody side match with the side of functional diversity. We have to Keep them in balance and intention and not go this way or that way.

Keep them in tension. Let the word speak to you. Well, Alex, I hope a lot of people go out and buy your new book and get refreshed by it. Thank you so much for doing it. You can get it right on Amazon or you can come directly to us, Lewis and Roth publishers.

Yeah, Lewis and Roth. Is it lewisandroth.com or what is the? Yes, lewisandroth.com. Yes. Good deal.

Okay. Well, Thank you. Thank you, gentlemen. Yeah. I can't wait to see you at our conference.

Yes. It's just water. Maybe two months away. Yeah, that's right. Yes.

I'm looking forward to it too. And by the way, I am preparing some special messages and I'm hoping that this will be a real life-changing conference. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Well, we are too.

Sign-ups are really strong. Can't wait to see you. Oh, praise the Lord. Yeah. Okay.

God bless you, brother. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Hope to see you next time, but hope to see you at Ridgecrest at our national conference on making disciples. Alex Strouk is going to be there preaching at both the pastors conference, pre-conference, and the main conference. See you then.

Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out churchandfamilylife.com.