For small independent house churches the inevitable question keeps coming up :

Who is running the church? What about Pastors? Won’t it all fall apart?

This is a legitimate question and one that we need to assess in two sessions. I believe this next step that the Wide Margin Church is to take is the hardest hurdle of them all. So much of our understanding of “church” is coupled with pastors and ministers. To even think about doing church separate from them is difficult to grasp.

The average person, when they think of church, will think of a building, and then a particular man dressed in interesting clothes. To strip both of those images away is a paradigm shift for people.

So, in this two-part article we will be dealing with the topic of authority and leadership. These are big topics, and much can be said about it. But before we dive into this Fourth Step of our “Wide Margin Church Process”, a few preliminary remarks need to be said.

1. The Wide Margin Field has flattened authority and leadership in general

The Central field had a higher view of authority and centralized leadership in a few. People didn’t question the centre and obeyed its leading. This structure to authority can also be abused. You could have wrong leaders dictating and ruling, with the wider culture unable to get out of it. But today, since the 1960s, there has been a general “flattening” to leadership and authority. Or a better understanding is that leadership has become much more diverse in its practice. We have more types of leaders. We have had women become leaders. New people have arisen who lead, though they do not fit the mold of what we think of as a leader.

Obviously, this flattening, has had some downsides to it. People in authority are challenged more. Trust has diminished. The Government, Police, School Teachers, and Parents have all seen this “flattening” affect their roles. Increasingly it has become harder for people to lead in a dictatorial central way because everyone wants to give their opinion.

But there is some goodness to this. New ideas and gifts were appreciated. Good leaders started to raise up “teams of people”.

So authority and leadership started to shift from a one-man-leadership to a team-leadership.

Bosses started to understand the power of delegation. They knew there was a ceiling to how much they could influence by themselves, and so business started to incorporate teams of leaders to reach new heights. The “flattening” of leadership and authority meant more was achieved and more were involved in the building of their business goals.

Now this has also happened in the church. About 100 years ago most churches would just have one pastor and he would practically do everything in the service. He would always preach, always visit people, a literal one-man show. But now many churches would have an assistant pastor, or a secretary or a youth worker. In other words, leadership became more “staff-orientated”. Teams rather than individuals. But even though this has happened, the church has still retained some of the “pointedness” of authority and leadership. It has not successfully trickled down to the rest of the church members.

But this is where it gets difficult. The culture is becoming against authority and leadership, so what should the church do in regards to these things? This leads to my next preliminary point.

2. We should try and do church that fits our missionary field without abandoning the teaching of the Scriptures

This is the difficult situation for the church. We must be missional and contextualize church in an understandable way for the culture. But we cannot become the same as the culture. The fact is: Scripture has much to say about authority and leadership. So, we cannot swing the other way to things like “individualism” and “anarchy”. We will lose Christianity in the process.

The Scripture themselves are our authority. S0 we need to uphold that. But there are many practices that we do in church that we think are Biblical, when in fact they are just “traditional”. Is it in the Bible to have a single pastor doing everything? So we must uphold Scripture but also see what practices are not actually grounded in Scripture.

3. Authority and Leadership need to be upheld in talking about Church

This is the fact. Scripture talks about these things. So we cannot get rid of them. Having said that, I think the church has gotten “confused” with the terms Authority and leadership, to the point where we think they are synonymous.

That is, if someone is “leading” then they must have the “authority”, and vice versa. I believe that there is a distinction in those words though there is some crossover. So we need to be delicate with this step. We want to be faithful to Scripture when it comes to its understanding of authority and leadership.

So what is the next step that we need to take in regard to the role of authority and leadership? What is a better way of doing church that is both biblical and missional? I will outline the main components of this step, and then in part 2, I will outline 5 more points of this step in action.

Step 4

From Clergy-led Ministry
to Laity-led Ministry

This is the biggest shift to get your head around. Everything changes in your church once you implement this step. It will change how you do church and who does church.

First we need to explain these terms Clergy and Laity.

Clergy

A select group of people who do the bulk of the church ministry. They are considered “ordained” by the church at-large for their role, due to them completing a degree or going through some training, and hence, qualified to be clergy. Usually they are paid, they are up front, and they are in authority and leadership.

Laity

Is anyone else that is part of the local church. These would be committed Christians who may have been at a particular church for a lifetime, compared with a Clergy that may change dramatically every 5-10 years. The Laity are considered not ordained, and unable to do certain elements of the church service because of this.

So what most churches adopt is a Clergy-led ministry, which is similar to the Central Field system. That is, a smaller group controls the larger part of the group.

You can also show the Clergy/Laity split like this:

This highlights that the clergy are the smaller part, but also the part in authority and leadership. The laity sits under them.

But when you read the Scriptures it seems to me that there are indeed “functions” in the church, but there are no “positions”. There are people who “lead” but not someone whose position is “leader”.

So in this step we actually want to get rid of the Clergy/Laity split. So there are 3 primary points I want to make about this step, and a further 5 points will be made in session two.

1. Laity-led Ministry is Jesus-led Ministry

The first point is to show that in all churches, the actual “leader” and “authority” is in fact the person of Jesus Christ. Actually, every church would agree with this point when we talk about leadership and authority.

I believe that Laity-led ministry reflects this truth better than adopting a Clergy-led style. And it’s interesting because one of the pushbacks of organic ministry is that it does not have a senior pastor. But we have to be reminded that Jesus is that senior pastor. He is always present with us when we gather, so “authority” and “leadership” are still there in the person of Jesus Christ.

So when thinking of our pyramid above, if the churches are honest, they know that Jesus is at the head of the pyramid.

But we can go further than this and collapse the Clergy into the Laity as one group. In other words, you have Jesus, and then you have his “disciples”.

So every church, whether they know it or not, has a leadership structure. The Wide Margin Church has it in Jesus Christ, through the power and presence of the Holy Spirit. So we elevate this authority and leadership properly into Christ. It does not reside in a Pope or a “senior pastor” or staff team. It goes beyond them.

When it comes to Laity-led ministry the gathered people have an understanding that this gathering is in fact under the rulership of Jesus Christ. Sometimes Clergy can get in the way of people seeing Jesus, that the service becomes all about that individual. Increasingly I believe the culture wants to have a clearer access between themselves and Christ, rather than going through Clergy.

2. Laity-led Ministry flattens & elevates Authority and Leadership

It puts everyone on the same playing field. There isn’t Christ above, Clergy second, and then the Laity. Rather it is Christ above, and then everyone else as Disciples. So there is a flattening that happens.

When you have Clergy you expect them to do the bulk of authority and leadership. This then leads to people sitting back and making the Clergy actually do everything in the life of the church.

If the Clergy all got sick at the same moment, most churches wouldn’t know what to do when they met together.

But having a Laity-led ministry will flatten and smooth this out. It’s not concentrated in one or two individuals. It should be much like an orchestra. Everyone is on the same level. Different instruments but all playing together. Christ is the conductor, and we are all equal players with differing gifts.

Occasionally there are solos but for the most part everyone is participating. There is no one instrument that totally stands out whilst everyone just sits there. That would not be an orchestra. And neither is there a player with an instrument that never gets to play.

This “flattening” I believe would resonate with the Wide Margin Culture. It elevates each person, and everyone is seen as equal in the mechanics of the church.

In other words, it is a bit of a paradox. It is true to say that no one leads the church. That is the work of Christ. But it is also true to say that we are all leaders in some shape or form. Because the way that Jesus leads the church is through elevating each of us according to our gifts by the power of the Spirit, to then make everyone lead.

So Laity-led ministry elevates and flattens leadership and authority by making Christ ruler and freeing up the laity to lead. Instead of 1 or 2 individuals leading, a proper laity-led ministry would be saturated with leadership.

I think people have a wrong view of what “leading” is. It is one person showing another person how to live, with the hope that that person can now “lead” someone else. Leading is not controlling others but empowering others. True leading making more people lead.

No one leads, because Christ leads.
Everyone leads, because Christ leads.

3. Laity-led Ministry does not mean Elder-less ministry

Someone will cry that the Bible teaches that there are Elders, hence, a Clergy/Laity distinction. But they fail to understand what an elder actually is. The Bible clearly does teach that elders exist, and that there is a distinction in some way. Elders can also be known as Pastors.

So what do we do with this?

I would say that a laity-led ministry does not mean elder-less ministry. A plurality of elders seems to be a desired structure to a church. But people have a wrong view of Elder. They see the word “elder” and think “leader” or “the authority figure”. They then start to see the Elder as synonymous with the one that is in charge and controls everything.

But really, what an elder does is that they are “looking over” the church. An overseer.

Usually, in the early church, they would have been mature, older, male figures, much like a spiritual father of the gathering. One that is mature in the faith and has lived the Christian life for a while and experienced the highs and the lows.

Elders were to “manage” the gathering, to oversee it. They were not lording it over themselves. They were equal to everyone else. They were not going around doing everything. They are like a body part that checks the other body parts to see if they are working properly.

Elders are much like the local lifeguard at the pool. They oversee it all. If things go off course, they deal with it through their maturity and experience. They too are in swimming gear and will jump in when needed.

So this is the difference between “leading” and “pastoring”, or “eldering”. You can pastor in a way that does not bottleneck leading. A bad elder or pastor will want to do all the leading. But their role is not to lead but to manage and oversee.

Again, good luck being a pastor if you have 100 people to oversee. That’s why Step 4 makes more sense after doing the first three steps. It is easier for an elder to oversee a smaller gathering than a larger one.

It should be more like a large family with a spiritual father looking over the gathering and knowing where everyone is at, encouraging each member to utilize their gifts properly.

In the next session we will look at 5 more points showing the benefits of Laity-led ministry over Clergy-led ministry, and why these 5 points will resonate more with the cultural setting that we are in.