Podcast: Who’s in Charge of the Church? (Sam Emadi)

April 24, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

A Question of Church Leadership

In today’s episode, Sam Emadi talks about the importance of understanding God’s design for church leadership and breaks down the different leadership roles that Scripture outlines, explaining how God designed all of them to strengthen the body and glorify Christ.

Who's in Charge of the Church?

Who's in Charge of the Church?

Sam Emadi

In this short book, Sam Emadi explains that church organization isn’t just transactional; it’s meant to be transformative. He describes how churches should reflect biblical authority, particularly members’ responsibilities to one another, their elders, and deacons.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:00 - Who Is Supposed to Be in Charge of the Church?

Matt Tully
Sam, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Sam Emadi
Thanks, brother. Happy to be here.

Matt Tully
We’re going to talk today about leadership and authority in the church context in the local church. And so maybe just to start off, I wonder if you could give us a short, succinct answer to this question: Who is supposed to be in charge of the church?

Sam Emadi
I think the short answer to that question that everybody of every denominational stripe and every theological tradition would agree to is that Jesus is in charge of the church. He’s the King of the church. He’s our Lord and our Redeemer, and so he sets the rules for how the church should function. We belong to his kingdom, and he is the King of that kingdom, so he gets to set the boundaries for what we do and how we govern ourselves. Jesus is in charge of the Church.

Matt Tully
Maybe some people are almost rolling their eyes as if that’s the Sunday school answer, so to speak, but why do you think it’s actually important to start there, to emphasize that fact before you get into the specifics of some kind of polity setup that you might believe in?

Sam Emadi
I think it’s important to start there because it reminds us that the enterprise of the church—what we do when we gather as a church, what it means to be a church, how we’re seeking to live our Christian lives in the context of the local church—isn’t something that we’ve invented. It’s not something that we have created. We’re not trying to model ourselves off of the best business practices of the world or the best marketing strategies of our culture. We’re not seeking to be innovative with how we do church. Instead, we recognize that we’re a people who submit to the King, and so we’re supposed to follow the King’s directives. He’s the one who established and created the church, so we have to look to him in order for how we should govern ourselves as a church, how we should live the Christian life within the church. So I think it’s important to start there because it reminds us that church polity and what we do as a church is a theological task. We are submitting ourselves to the word of Christ. We are holding to the sufficiency of Scripture. And if Scripture is sufficient to make the man of God equipped for every good work, well, how we organize the church is a good work and Scripture is sufficient to accomplish that task for us.

Matt Tully
What does that mean practically in terms of how we should think about the leadership structure of a church and how we go about making decisions as a church and as leaders? Does that mean that we literally only need the Bible and there’s nothing else that we could glean from broader leadership principles or anything that we can learn from “the secular world”? Is that the approach, or position, you would take, or should it be more nuanced than that?

Sam Emadi
So I would suggest that, like in all of life, God has revealed himself in two ways. There is special revelation, where God has made known to us his character and his law and the message of the gospel. In special revelation—in Scripture—we find God’s specific directives that give us an understanding of who he is, of what we’re supposed to be as a church, of how to organize ourselves according to the gospel. Now, of course, there are things we learn from general revelation. There are principles of wisdom, there are things that we learn just from the light of nature in terms of how we should organize ourselves as a church. There is just basic wisdom that of course we’re going to glean from general revelation. I daresay none of us really have our churches meet at 3:00 in the morning because we recognize that in order to gather well, we need to do it at a time where people are awake, where we’re generally alert, where we can sit under the preaching of God’s word in a reasonable way. So there are things I think like that that fall into the realm of wisdom that we can learn from general revelation, from observation of human nature and from the created order. But in terms of the specifics of what is a church, how it is to be organized, who’s in charge of what—what’s everybody’s job description—that all comes from Scripture.

Matt Tully
I know I can give this example because we’re both Baptists, but I think the skeptical listener could be thinking, That all sounds good, that we look to Scripture, but Robert’s Rules of Order* and things like that are not going to be found in the Bible. There clearly is some level of supplementing Scripture’s general principles and teaching on church leadership with other kinds of practical guidance and advice that we get from maybe the surrounding culture.

Sam Emadi
That’s right. We need to distinguish between what theologians have historically called elements and forms. That is, in Scripture we find elements. We find what we might call idealized principles that we are supposed to live up to. For instance, I understand from Scripture that churches are to have qualified elders, and the job of the elder is to shepherd the congregation primarily through the ministry of the word and the ministry of prayer. Now, how many elders a church may have at any particular given time, how many elders meetings that church has, maybe different ways the elders interact with the congregation—maybe it’s a very structured This elder oversees this particular group in the congregation, or maybe it’s just a little more organic where all the elders are trying to keep tabs on the whole congregation—that’s the difference between an element and the form. We have the biblical principle that we try to live up to, but then there are going to be forms, different ways that we practice that in our individual context. And those forms need to be informed by biblical principle, right. We need to choose forms that don’t in any way subvert the biblical principle that we’re trying to promote, but there is also an element of wisdom to it in terms of how we’re going to best-practice that. One really easy illustration that I might point to would be in my own church, we have a membership directory. We actually put it in the foyer, it’s publicly accessible, people can go—

Matt Tully
It’s a physical book?

Sam Emadi
It’s a physical book with pictures. We encourage people to pick it up and pray through a page of the membership directory while they’re doing their daily devotions. If we were in a persecuted context where it would be dangerous for us to have a printed list of members that was put in the church foyer, we probably would not be doing that. Now, I do think every church should have a clear line of who’s a member and who’s not a member. But again, in terms of the forms, in terms of how you might communicate that within your congregation, those forms are going to look different.

Matt Tully
You’ve already established that, in terms of the ultimate question of Who’s in charge? it’s Jesus. It’s our King, Jesus. But then taking a step closer to the day-to-day lived reality of a church, you’ve already alluded to the office of the elder and their job of shepherding the church. What else would you say about the specifics of practically who’s in charge day to day, week to week of a local?

Sam Emadi
Yeah, brother. Before I answer that question, I feel like it’s probably important for me to back up for a second and give a bit of the lay of the land in terms of what perspective that I’m speaking from when I talk about the church. I’m a Baptist. I understand the Bible to teach the doctrines that the Baptists have historically held. And so as a Baptist, I believe in a model of church polity called elder-led congregationalism. I don’t believe it because I’m a Baptist; I believe it because I think it’s in the Bible. There are good, godly, wonderful brothers who I have profited from immensely who would think I am totally off on this issue, and I love those brothers, but I think they’re wrong.

Matt Tully
Actually, can I ask one quick question about that comment there? That’s something that I think some people have wrestled with and struggled with because they’ve heard you just say, I’m looking at the Bible. I’m really trying to derive my understanding of church leadership from Scripture itself. And then you’ve also said there are people who disagree—people who I respect and trust and who are godly. I think one question people can have is, Well, does that then reveal or betray that Scripture really isn’t very clear with who should be in charge of the church on a practical day-to-day level? Is it possible that Scripture itself is contradictory at worst, but maybe at best just unclear on this issue?

Sam Emadi
Well, in terms of the most extreme possibility that Scripture is contradictory, we would have to affirm out of hand that that can’t possibly be true because of the claims that Scripture makes about itself—because it identifies itself as God’s word, because it identifies itself in places like Psalm 19 and Psalm 119 as true and consistent and the light for our path. We understand that Scripture just can’t be contradictory. That’s certainly not the way that Jesus and the apostles understood Scripture. So, if we’re followers of Jesus, we have to embrace Jesus’s perspective on the Bible. Jesus understood the Bible to be true. Hmm. “Sanctify them by the truth. Your word is truth,” Jesus says in John 17. Now, the other question is, Why do Christians of good intent and goodwill differ from one another? Well, I think here we need to recognize that Scripture is clear and plain, but that does not mean that all sections of Scripture are alike clear and plain to the same degree. So certainly, when it comes to matters of salvation, when it comes to matters of the gospel and to the Christian life, there is a great deal of overlap between myself and an Anglican or a Presbyterian brother who would disagree with me on church polity. That’s why when you look at the historic confessions of the Christian faith, like The Thirty-Nine Articles or The Westminster Confession or The 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, the overlap between those documents is extraordinary. The amount of agreement that Christians have on Scripture is extraordinary. I think if anything, the level of agreement between gospel-believing Christians in different denominations proves the clarity of Scripture, not takes away from it. When it comes to issues of how we organize the church, I think this is just where we recognize that these can be complex and complicated theological topics. All of us are doing our best, not just to deal with the exegetical questions of individual texts, but we’re doing our biblical theology—trying to put the whole Bible together, trying to figure out how each text relates to every other text, how each doctrine relates to every other doctrine. And so when you start doing that theological work, even Christians of goodwill are going to come to differences and disagreements.

Matt Tully
Maybe you can continue and explain a little bit more what elder-led congregationalism actually looks like.

Sam Emadi
As a Baptist, I would affirm elder-led congregationalism. So what I mean by that is two parts to what I’ve just been saying. There’s the elder-led part and there’s the congregationalism part. Let me explain each one in turn. Let’s start with congregationalism because I actually think that’s the more important term in that phrase. It’s certainly more central, and I think theologically is a bit more central. When I say congregationalism, what I mean by that is I believe that Scripture teaches that the highest earthly authority in matters of membership, discipline, and doctrine is the whole congregation. The reason I believe that is because of Jesus’s teachings in Matthew 16 and Matthew 18. In Matthew 16. Jesus asked the disciples, Who do people say that I am? And what they do is they give a lot of wrong responses: Well, some say you’re Elijah, John the Baptist, one of the prophets. And then Jesus looks at Peter and he says, Okay, Peter, who do you think I am? And Peter gives not the wrong answer that everybody else is giving, but he gives the right answer: You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. And what Jesus does in that moment is he says, Peter, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly who I am. You have a true confession of faith. In fact, that confession of faith didn’t even come from you. That came from the Father in heaven. Something supernatural has happened in your life., Peter. You’ve experienced a supernatural conversion, and so you belong to the kingdom of God. So Peter makes this confession, and then Jesus says, Guess what, Peter? There are going to be lots of people who have this same confession of faith. There’s going to be lots of people who are objects of God’s supernatural mercy. I’m going to build a church—a church means an assembly of people—I’m going to build a church on you and your confession. But it demands the question, Okay, but if Jesus is in heaven while this church is being built, who on earth is going to be able to listen to someone’s confession of faith and look at their life and make the pronouncement that Jesus just made to Peter? Because Jesus just made a distinction—false professions, true profession. Not in the kingdom, in the kingdom. Well, Jesus turns to the apostles at that point and he says, I’m going to give you the keys to the kingdom. You’re going to be the spokespeople of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. These are complex, complicated verses exegetically, but I think at the bare minimum what we can say is it’s clear that Jesus is making the apostles the spokespeople of heaven, just like Jesus just acted as heaven’s spokesman. But what’s really interesting is you turn two chapters later and look at Matthew 18, and what does Jesus do? He’s talking about how a local church is supposed to address sin in the life of the congregation. So you’ve got this guy in your church and he’s saying, I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. But then he’s giving more allegiance to a particular sin in his life than he is to Jesus. He is confessing something that’s true, but his life doesn’t match up with his confession. He’s more committed to the sin than he is to the Lord. He’s unrepentant. So it’s a very patient and gracious set of steps that the Lord gives us. He keeps the circle small, gives an extended period of time for this person to repent. Have one person confront him, and then two or three, and then if he doesn’t listen to them, take it to the whole church, calling this person to repent. And then, if the person still refuses to repent, Jesus says the church should take action, that the whole church should consider this person as a Gentile and a tax collector. Basically, someone who’s confession of faith they can no longer affirm to be credible. We have to look at this person and say, We have no confidence that you’re going to heaven because you’re claiming Jesus, but you’re not really living consistently with that confession. So that’s the reason, ultimately, why I’m a congregationalist, because Jesus tells the whole church to guard its membership. Jesus gives the authority to the church to oversee who’s in the church and to oversee who’s out of the church. And in fact, he uses this same language that he used with the apostles. He’s going to give the church, the local church, the keys of the Kingdom of heaven, and whatever they bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever they loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. So the gathered church is taking the place of the apostles as heaven’s representative, heaven’s spokesperson, heaven’s press agent, we might say. That’s the congregationalist side of congregationalism, that the church is ultimately responsible for its membership and its discipline and its doctrine.

Matt Tully
So then what would be the other half of that, the elder-led portion? I think people might be wondering, *Wow! You’re putting a lot of power and control and authority in the hands of everyday Christians, the people sitting next to me in the pews. So what is that pastor up front actually doing?

Sam Emadi
I think congregationalism really is a glorious and high view of what every Christian is called to do in the Christian life and in the context of the church. And I think you also need to recognize that Jesus equips the church to be able to carry out this task, because in the new covenant, all of us know the Lord—from the least of the greatest—and all of us have the Holy Spirit, all of us are priests in the kingdom of God and can guard the sanctity and the purity of the Lord’s temple, which is the local church. At the same time, Christians don’t do this alone. They have a job description that Jesus has given them to do; their job description is guard the gospel. But the Lord has also instituted an office in the church that gives them job training, and that’s what elders do. So the reason the Lord establishes elders in the church is to lead and shepherd the church. And the primary way that elders lead and shepherd the church is by teaching them the Bible. Elders are distinguished from members and from deacons, if you look at those qualifications in 1 Timothy 3, specifically by the fact that they can teach the Bible. They’re capable and able to teach. And so it’s the job of the elders to teach the members of the congregation how to do their job well. So the members have a job description from Jesus, and the elders give them job training to carry out that job description well. They do that through teaching the Bible. They also do that by modeling what it means to be a Christian. This is the big idea of 1 Peter 5, where Peter commends to the elders that he’s speaking to that they’re to present themselves to the members of their congregation as models of the Christian life. This is why, when you look at the qualifications for an elder in 1 Timothy 3, it’s pretty ordinary. There’s nothing in that list that’s really extraordinary except for able to teach. When you read that list, you kind of think, Well, isn’t every Christian supposed to be this? Exactly! That’s exactly the point. The difference is whereas those qualifications in 1Timothy 3 are things Christians should be, there are things elders must be. So the elder presents a godly example of living to the congregation. An elder stands up in front of the congregation—either formally or informally, publicly or privately—and they teach the Bible. And then they say, This is what God wants us to do. This is how God has called us to live. And then they say, Now watch how I obey this in my own life. Watch how I evangelize my neighbors. Watch how I seek to love my own wife as Christ loves the church. Watch how I disciple my children. Watch how I walk through suffering. Watch how I bring brothers and sisters alongside me to disciple them and encourage them in the Lord. Okay, now you come do it with me. Now you do it too. We’re going to do this together now. That’s the dynamic of elder-led congregationalism. The congregation is still the highest earthly authority. They’re still ultimately responsible for the church’s membership, discipline, and doctrine. But the elders of the church need to give them job training and they need to teach them how to do it well. To conclude this response, let me give you one quick illustration that I took from Jonathan Leeman. This is my favorite illustration for elder-led congregationalism, and I say this all the time in our membership class here. Elderly congregationalism is like an exercise class. Let’s say you have an exercise class of people who are eager to exercise and they want to get in the gym. Maybe some of them have some experience of exercising, some of them maybe don’t have a ton of experience exercising, and so they all kind of gather together and they’re doing their best to work out. Well, you’re probably not going to have the healthiest exercise class. At the same time, if you have some professional exercise instructors, but they just kind of cloister together and they only exercise by themselves, well, that’s good for them, but that’s not helping that class over there. But what happens in an exercise class is you have a group of people who are eager to exercise, they want to be healthy, they want to encourage one another to be healthy, they’re trying to get in the gym and do what’s right. Then you have an exercise instructor, and what does he do? He says, Look, I want you guys to be healthy. I want you guys to be fit. Let me tell you about this exercise we’re going to do. Let me teach you about it first. When you do this exercise, here’s how I want you to hold your leg. I want you to make sure you keep your toes bent. I want to make sure that you keep your shoulders up. Now, before you do it, I want you to watch me do it. Look at my posture when I do this. This will keep you from getting hurt. All right, now you do it along with me. Well, that’s a class that’s going to be healthy. That’s a class where everybody’s going to be fit and everybody is going to be healthy together. That’s the relationship between elders and a congregation. It’s the modeling and teaching to give you the job training so that we can all be healthy together.

22:26 - What’s the Difference between Elders and Pastors?

Matt Tully
Thus far, you’ve spoken a lot about elders. You keep referring to elders, and you’ve maybe said a little bit less about pastors. That could be a question people have is, What is the difference? What’s the relationship between elders and pastors? How would you explain that?

Sam Emadi
I think in the Bible, when you look at passages like Acts 21, 1 Timothy 3, and 1 Peter 5, you will actually find that the biblical authors use these terms interchangeably. They use the term shepherd or pastor, they use the term elder to refer to maturity, they’ll use the term episkopos to refer to someone who is ruling or leading the church. So I think if you look at the biblical data, you find all of those phrases interchangeable. Typically, I feel like in our own cultural context, at least in the circles that I swim in, people will often use the word pastor to refer to an elder who is paid, and then they’ll refer to an elder as someone who is not paid but still serving in that office.

Matt Tully
Do you think that is a good thing?

Sam Emadi
I think maybe it can be useful. In my own context, I try to buck against that a little bit. Sometimes I will refer to my associate pastor in front of the congregation as elder Casey. And then at other times I’ll point out some of the lay elders and I’ll refer to pastor Kipp or pastor Gary. And other times I’ll refer to them as elder Kipp or elder Gary. Basically, just as a way of trying to encourage our congregation to remember there’s no distinction between myself and these non-paid elders. The Bible uses these terms interchangeably, so we probably should too.

Matt Tully
It seems like what is often underlying that linguistic difference that is pretty common, at least in certain circles and certainly in my circles as well, is that people really do view a “paid” staff elder or pastor very differently than they would the lay elders. But it seems like you’re saying there really isn’t a biblical distinction between those two. So again, is that a healthy distinction that we should have in our minds in some way?

Sam Emadi
I think there’s no distinction in terms of authority or the right to lead and shepherd the congregation. I do think we see, even within Scripture, some distinctions with regard to a paid elder. There’s archeological evidence, I think in the New Testament, for something like a senior pastor, because you have Paul addressing Timothy and Titus along with the other elders of the church. First Timothy 5:17 talks about giving double honor to those who labor in preaching and teaching. And I think the main context there is setting aside somebody—the elder in the church who probably has the most gifts in preaching and teaching—setting that person aside and taking care of their financial needs for them so that they can give themselves full-time to that task. So I do think that the Bible does give us categories for recognizing that there can be paid elders and there can be elders who shoulder more of the load of leading and shepherding the church, because they do that full-time and because the church has set aside money for them to be able to do that, while at the same time, recognizing that an elder is an elder and a pastor is a pastor. One of the things that, as the senior pastor of my own church, that I’m constantly trying to do is raise the profile of other elders in our congregation, especially the lay elders, and generate and encourage in our own congregation more admiration and honor for those non-paid elders who are serving the congregation well. I want our congregation not just to see me as the pastor; I want them to recognize that there’s actually a team of godly brothers who love them and care for them and who are laboring for the good of their souls. I want those elders to be recognized and be given the honor and the admiration for the labor that they’re doing among the sheep of our church.

26:29 - Can Women Be Pastors or Elders?

Matt Tully
Another common question that a lot of Christians might have is if women can be pastors or elders. If not, why not?

Sam Emadi
I think this is an issue where the Bible is just really abundantly clear if we just follow the exegetical evidence. If you look at 1 Timothy 2:12, there Paul says that he doesn’t permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she used to remain quiet. Paul doesn’t ground that command in any particular cultural situation. It’s not a product of some sort of bygone, patriarchalism. Or, as I’ve heard other people suggest, Well, women in the Ephesian culture weren’t educated, so it was only for the Ephesian culture. No, as Paul explains the argument, when he gives a because here’s why, he actually looks back to creation. He looks back to the created order. And so that command there—“do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man”—Paul’s not just there talking about the office of elder; he’s including the function. He’s being even a little broader than just that women shouldn’t hold the office of elder, but instead that they shouldn’t do the function of eldering as well. And then he grounds that in the goodness of the created order. Now, why is Paul doing that? Well, it’s because the church is the new creation. Everything that was good and right and glorious in God’s design in the old creation is now restored in redemption in the new creation. And what God established in the garden was that the original family was supposed to be led and shepherded by the husband, by Adam. Now, of course, by saying this we’re not suggesting that women don’t have a significant and essential and indispensable role in the life of the church. In Mark 10 Jesus makes this promise to us that if we abandon everything and turn to him, in this life we may lose mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, but what we gain—not only, Jesus says, in the age to come, but also now—is mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers. And so just as mothers and sisters are indispensable in our own family lives—I think we all recognize that. I think we all kind of intuitively know, Man, when I have one particular set of needs or questions, I go to my dad. There are other times I just really feel like I need to talk to my mom. I feel like I need some counsel from my mom. That’s the life of the church. The life of the church is mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers all helping one another persevere in the faith. Sometimes guys will come over to my house and we’ll go on cycling walks together—there’s a park near my house—and so we’ll just walk around the park and I’ll ask them questions about their lives, how they’re doing pursuing holiness, and we’ll talk about finding ways to apply God’s word to their life. And then when appropriate, sometimes we’ll come back to my house and I’ll just pull my wife in and say, Hey, here’s something so-and-so and I have been talking about. Do you have any counsel for him? Do you have any ways that you would try to apply the Bible to his life? Because I know that this brother needs not only me, he needs a good sister in the church, or a mother in the church, to also be part of his life. So men and women are essential and indispensable in the mission of the church, though to restore the goodness of the created order, to restore the goodness of male leadership that God established in that original created order, Paul restricts the office and function of eldering to men in 1 Timothy 2.

Matt Tully
What would be a couple examples of the wrong way to understand and apply that teaching that Scripture does have about the office of the elder, the office of the pastor, being restricted to men? What are the wrong ways to apply that in the life of a church?

Sam Emadi
I think one wrong way to apply that in the life of a church would be to create a culture that would be subversive to what Paul commends in Titus 2. Because in Titus 2, Paul sees the older, more mature women in the church instructing and teaching younger women in the church. He sees them, and I’m going to use this language again, as essential and indispensable to the church’s health. I addressed the women in our church a couple of months ago when they were having a women’s fellowship, and we walked through that passage together. And one thing that I tried to encourage them with is we want the women of this church to just be locked and loaded theologically. We want the most theologically mature, articulate women in our congregation, because that’s good for the brothers of this church, that’s good for the sisters of this church, that’s good for the health of this church. We want women who read Calvin and Bavinck and memorize the Bible and are just theologically, spiritually encouraging one another, encouraging their brothers. So I think one way to wrongly apply 1 Timothy 2 would be to create a church culture in which you’re unintentionally subverting the type of glorious ministry that God has called women to do in the life of the local church that we see in places like Titus 2.

32:11 - Authority Is a Good and Dangerous Gift

Matt Tully
One of the big issues surrounding authority and leadership in a local church that seems like we see headlines about almost every day is the issue of spiritual abuse and the mishandling and misuse of that leadership in the context of a local church. And so I wonder if you could speak to the person listening right now who has seen a lot of that and would have to say that they are kind of skeptical of leadership. Maybe they do acknowledge that Scripture does seem to teach that this is an important function for elders and pastors in a church, but they would have to say that they just feel like so often it goes wrong. How can I actually trust this kind of leadership?

Sam Emadi
Authority is a good and dangerous gift. The story of authority goes back to the Garden of Eden where we see God using his authority not to suppress and oppress people, not to create creatures and then make life difficult and inhospitable for them. God uses his authority to create life, to create flourishing, to create thriving. And then he gives authority to Adam. He tells Adam to exercise dominion over creation—to do what? To continue that life-giving work that the Lord himself was doing in the act of creation. Adam is supposed to tend the garden. Adam is supposed to nurture creation. Adam is supposed to continue to bring life through dominion and multiplication. Authority is wonderful. Good authority used rightly causes people under that authority to thrive and to flourish spiritually. The problem is we live in a fallen world, and we see that in the Garden of Eden with Adam himself he doesn’t use authority to try to cause what’s under him to thrive. He actually tries to subvert God’s authority. He tries to put himself in the place of God. He refuses to live according to God’s design and under God’s reign. He basically says, I’m going to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which means I’m going to decide what’s right and wrong. I’m going to decide what’s good and evil. And what we find after that in the biblical storyline is people abusing authority, such as to create pain for those that have been put under their care. In the very next verses in Genesis 3, what is Adam doing? He’s not protecting his wife. He’s not loving his wife. He’s blame shifting and trying to accuse his wife. Lord, it was the woman you gave me. So authority is glorious when exercised rightly, and it’s dangerous when it’s abused and exercised poorly. One of my favorite verses is in 2 Samuel 23 where David talks about what good authority does in the life of people:

“Now these are the last words of David:
The oracle of David, the son of Jesse,
the oracle of the man who was raised on high,
the anointed of the God of Jacob,
the sweet psalmist of Israel:

“The Spirit of the LORD speaks by me;
his word is on my tongue.”—2 Samuel 23:1–2

It’s a really thick introduction that David is making. “The God of Israel has spoken. The rock of Israel has said to me, ‘when one rules justly over men, ruling and the fear of God, he dawns on them like the morning light, like the sun shining forth on a cloudless morning, like rain that makes grass to sprout from the earth.’” That is just a glorious and poetic description of authority that’s used well. So what I would encourage folks who are struggling with authority and struggling with the idea of submitting to authority is just to consider a couple of things. Number one, if you’ve been under ungodly authority that is oppressive and is abusive, the Lord despises that more than you do. The Lord will judge that. But I would also encourage that person that just because we see authority abused doesn’t mean we should reject it out of hand, because we see in the Bible the goodness of authority. So it is scary, and we have to trust the Lord’s sovereignty. We have to trust the Lord’s goodness, and we have to lean into, by faith, what we know to be true by Scripture. Find a church that has elders who are serious about living up to the qualifications of 1 Timothy 3. Find a church that has elders that know that authority is a good and dangerous gift. Find a church that has elders that make it their ambition to cause the people under them to spiritually thrive, both in shepherding and nurturing and caring for them, and also having the boldness to confront sin in the lives of members of their congregation. And if you do that and you trust the Lord’s goodness in giving us the gift of authority—even though none of us who are in authority are ever going to use that perfectly—but if you lean into the Lord’s promises and trust that submitting to godly authority is a good thing for you, I think the Lord will bless that in your life.

Matt Tully
How can a church guard against that kind of abuse among the leaders, especially speaking from your context, a congregationally-ruled church? What does it look like? What mechanisms can there be in place, even practically speaking, that help to protect the church from that abuse?

Sam Emadi
It’s such a massive question, and I’m sure the couple of points that I make are going to be very insufficient in terms of a complete package. So I just give that as a caveat for the rest of this answer. There will be so much more to add after this. I can just say in our own context what we labor to do is we try to very clearly, with our elders, distinguish between what is law and what is wisdom. We don’t want to bind people’s consciences to do anything that the Bible tells them that they don’t have to do. So one of the things that I tell new members at my church in our new members’ class is that, as pastors, we want to do two things in your life. We want to hold up the Bible, and we want to bind your conscience to the Bible. We want to obey everything that the Bible says. We want to do what Jesus said in Matthew 28. We want to obey everything that Jesus commanded. So we’re going to bind our conscience to the Bible. At the same time, we want to protect your conscience from anything that’s not in Scripture. We don’t want you to feel burdens that you’ve got to do things that the Bible never commands you to do so. Your pastors want to bind your conscience to the Bible, and at the same time, we want to protect your liberty of conscience. We want to be on the front lines of protecting you from legalism, protecting you from any sort of idolatry or false religion that’s going to bind your conscience to something that Scripture doesn’t explicitly command of you. So that’s one way that we as a church try to safeguard ourselves from the abuse of authority, by reminding ourselves of the difference between law and wisdom, and protecting liberty of conscience. And then one other practical way is as we’re considering elders, we want brothers who’ve shown that they know how to submit to authority. I tell my elders all the time, as the elders come to maybe vote on a particular issue or consider different things, Guys, if I, as the senior pastor, win every vote, then this isn’t really a plurality of elders. I like that I have elders that are willing to hear me make a case on something and then vote me down. And I gladly submit to the authority of my elders.

Matt Tully
And that actually happens sometimes where you’ll be outvoted as the senior pastor?

Sam Emadi
Yeah. In our church we have had a tremendous amount of unity in my time here. But I think there was just in the last year one occasion where that happened. And I’m happy for that to happen, and I anticipate there’s going to be a lot more of those situations coming up. And then there are other brothers who have been on the losing side of a vote, and they gladly submit. So we try to build that culture into the elder board of glad submission to authority.

Matt Tully
Maybe unpack that a little bit more in terms of specifics. I think one of the dynamics that we often see when there are these examples of an abuse of authority is it tends to be the vocational pastors, at least those are the ones who get the news headlines. The dynamic that sometimes comes out is that there might be a team of elders around him who were theoretically supporting him, but there’s a culture of yes-men and of just deferring to the guy at the top who charges ahead with always having the right answer, and the other guys tend to step back and let him make those decisions. Even if they maybe did have some reservations, they don’t feel like they can raise the red flag. So how would you advise a pastor listening, or maybe elders listening, in how you cultivate a culture within the leadership team that would be open to that kind of pushback and disagreement?

Sam Emadi
Again, I’m sure there’s so much more that could be said here than what I might suggest. One thing that we try to do is have regular times—scheduled times—in our elders’ meetings or in other regular gatherings that we’re doing where we can practice giving each other Godly encouragement—and receiving that—and giving each other godly criticism—and receiving that. So I do that with my preaching pretty regularly, just asking the brothers for feedback, for both encouragement and criticism. And we do that as well just with different shepherding issues in the life of our church. Brothers, should we have done this? Do you think I should consider approaching it this way instead of this way? So we just try to have a culture of openness, and even kind of scheduled times, for elders or a different group of people that’s meeting for a service review to be able to express concern or criticism. That’s one way in which we’re trying to protect that. And then many times, there’ve been situations where maybe a particular thing in the life of our church is controversial, and I’ll go specifically to the lay elders in our elders meeting and I’ll just ask the lay elders, As those who have been here the longest, I trust you brothers, as you have been in this congregation longer than I have. I’m happy for you all to render a judgment here and decide what’s best. And so that’s another way in which I’ve tried to submit myself, especially to the lay elders of our congregation.

Matt Tully
I’m struck by how so much of that does ultimately come down to the character of the leaders, both the guys who are being paid and guys who are not being paid. That’s why those spiritual requirements that we see listed in Scripture are so important, because they do ultimately determine how these things happen.

Sam Emadi
And I’m just so thankful for brothers in my life who model this well. For Greg Gilbert, who’s also an author with Crossway and pastors Third Avenue Baptist Church, for Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman. These are brothers that I got to sit under their ministry, watch their use of authority, and benefit from it. And I’m so extraordinarily grateful for their godly model and example of how to use authority well.

Matt Tully
That’s great. Sam, thank you so much for joining us today on The Crossway Podcast and for sharing some of this wisdom that you have from Scripture as to who leads the church—who’s in charge.

Sam Emadi
Thanks, brother. Glad to be here.

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