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Great insight from prolific author David Emechete, especially if you have a prophetic or apostolic gift. Below is a reminder about true discipleship. You can find out more about David by clicking here.

In the first century, after Jesus died and rose again, the leaders of the Christian faith went out boldly, preaching the good news and winning many new believers. Yet, one thing they refused to do was to gather disciples for themselves. None of them had disciples. They never saw themselves as great teachers who deserved followers. They saw themselves simply as lowly servants. The early Christian leaders referred to those who believed not as their disciples, but as fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. Yes, the new believers were called disciples, but not of Peter, Paul, James, or any other leader – they were disciples of Jesus himself.

The early leaders understood something that we seem to have forgotten today: Jesus is alive. When He gave the Great Commission, He said, “make disciples of all nations,” baptise in His name, and teach to obey His commands. These new believers are to be disciples of Jesus Christ, not disciples of the ministers. Gathering disciples around oneself would be breaking away from the living Christ and starting a personal movement. This was unthinkable for the early Christian leaders. They knew they were not founders of a new religion, but witnesses of a living Lord. Paul, for instance, sharply rebuked the believers who began saying, “I am of Paul” or “I am of Apollos” in 1 Corinthians 1:12-13. He pointed them back to Christ, the only true leader of the Christian faith.

Jesus Himself gave a very clear instruction when He said, “Don’t let anyone call you ‘Rabbi,’ for you have only one teacher, and all of you are equal as brothers and sisters.” (Matt 23:8). In those days, it was disciples who called their teachers “Rabbi.” So, by telling them never to accept that title, Jesus was teaching them not to have disciples for themselves. They were to see every new believer not as their disciples or students to be ruled over, but as a brother or sister to walk with. This is exactly what the first Christian leaders did. They understood Jesus perfectly and obeyed His voice. They never allowed themselves to be called Rabbi, and they never claimed anyone as their disciple.

Sadly, today, many have abandoned this way. Some Christian leaders now proudly gather disciples for themselves, as though it is a badge of honour. Yet this is not the way of Christ. It is not the way of the first Christian community. We cannot claim to understand Jesus better than those who sat at His feet, ate with Him, and were personally taught by Him. These men, who received these instructions directly from Jesus, knew exactly what he meant. When He instructed them not to be called “Rabbi” they understood that he didn’t want them to have disciples, and they refused to have disciples. Every believer was a disciple of Jesus, not of any human leader. Jesus told them that he is their only teacher, and the apostles understood that he meant every new believer is to be Jesus’ disciple, not the disciple of the minister who led them to Christ.

In the true Christian faith, discipleship is not centred around a ministry or a single leader. Discipleship is something that happens within the Christian community as a whole. Jesus, being alive and present by His Spirit, discipled His people directly. Believers do not grow by blindly following a single human teacher. No single minister is meant to be responsible for a believer’s spiritual growth. As a minister, you are not the one discipling that believer, you are merely a vessel meant to play a part in Jesus’ discipling of that believer. The responsibility of that person’s spiritual growth is solely in the hands of Jesus. You are meant to simply play your part and leave the rest to Jesus.

One major way believers are to be discipled is by living together closely in Christian communities, observing one another’s lives. As they see Christ-like virtues displayed in their brothers and sisters – kindness, patience, forgiveness, love they are moved by the Spirit of God within them to recognise these virtues as true expressions of Christ’s nature. It is the Spirit of God who teaches believers which virtues are truly Christ-like. As they observe these virtues in the community, the Spirit bears witness within them, helping them know what to imitate. In this way, believers are discipled by Christ Himself, not by any one man or woman. They learn from living examples of Christ’s character shining through many different members of the community, not from the personality or teaching of a single ministry.

This is why the Neighbourhood-based Christian Community is very important. For true discipleship to happen, believers need to live closely together, observing Christ living in the life of each member. Discipleship is not about sitting under someone’s ministry, listening to their teachings week after week. True discipleship goes far deeper than simply hearing words spoken from a platform. It is about observing Christ-like virtues lived out in the daily realities of life. Believers need to see with their own eyes how love, patience, forgiveness, humility, kindness, and courage are practised in the small and big moments of everyday living. It is not enough to hear lessons about love; believers need to see love in action. It is not enough to hear sermons about forgiveness; they need to witness a brother or sister forgiving a wrong, even when it is painful.

Discipleship is not a classroom where people gather information; it is a living community where believers see the life of Christ expressed through real human lives.

This is why, in order to have true discipleship, we need the Neighbourhood-based Christian Community. It is within the closeness of living together, sharing life, and facing struggles side by side that believers truly grow. They do not grow merely by sitting under the ministry of one leader, no matter how gifted that leader may be. They grow by watching Christ being formed in the lives of those around them. In this way, Christ Himself is the one discipling them. His Spirit within them bears witness when they see something that is truly of Him. Their hearts recognise the beauty of His character displayed through the actions of their brothers and sisters. They are drawn to imitate these Christ-like virtues, not because they were ordered to, but because the Spirit of Christ inside them calls them to it.

Thus, discipleship in the Christian faith is a practical, living experience. It is not the work of a man’s ministry. Ministers are meant to play a role by carrying out their God-given ministries. No minister is meant to shoulder the responsibility of discipling a believer. True discipleship happens when believers can look around the community and see the character of Jesus being revealed in the way others treat each other, in the way they handle trials, in the way they remain faithful even when it costs them everything. This way, believers are not just taught the words of Christ; they are shown the life of Christ. And seeing that life, they are transformed into His likeness by the Spirit working within them.

True discipleship in the Christian faith is a living, breathing work of Christ within His people. I will say it again for the sake of emphasis: discipleship is not about one leader raising followers for himself. It is about Jesus raising a family for Himself. It is about believers encouraging, observing, learning from, and loving one another, all under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. No ministry has the right to claim the role of discipling believers. That role belongs to Jesus alone. He is the only true Master and teacher, and we are all brothers and sisters under His leadership.

Today, if we want to be faithful to Christ’s command, we must return to this simple and powerful truth. We must tear down the walls of personal empires built on gathering disciples for men. We must stop this genuine but misguided effort to shoulder the responsibility of discipling a fellow believer. If you truly want to see the restoration of true discipleship, then rejoin the living work of Christ in the Christian community. Seek the emergence of the Neighbourhood-based Christian Community. It is there, among brothers and sisters walking together in humility, that Christ Himself teaches, shapes, and raises His disciples for His glory.

David has a strong online presence. His books are available on Amazon, he shares regularly on Facebook at facebook.com/david.emechete, and his videos are available on Youtube.

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I just started reading What Is Neighbourhood-Based Christian Community? by David Emechete and found this in the preface. It reveals the heart of the author, and perhaps it will resonate with you as well.

The truth is difficult but necessary to face: the way we’ve been practising our Christian faith for centuries cannot continue. It brings shame to our King’s name. The world sees Christianity and mocks God. They mock our hypocrisy, our lack of unity, and our failure to be a positive force in the world. We are called to be an expression of God’s glory and wisdom, demonstrating His love, holiness, integrity, and higher civilization. Yet, here we are, there is little difference between us and the people of the world. In fact, in some instances the people of the world are better than us. Some of us may think we’re fine, the body of Christ is fine the way it is. But if see how things were originally meant to be, you will mourn because of the current state of the body of Christ.

Let me share a story from the Bible that perfectly captures what I’m trying to say:

“When the builders completed the foundation of the Lord’s Temple, the priests put on their robes and took their places to blow their trumpets. And the Levites, descendants of Asaph, clashed their cymbals to praise the Lord, just as King David had prescribed. With praise and thanks, they sang this song to the Lord: ‘He is so good! His faithful love for Israel endures forever!” Then all the people gave a great shout, praising the Lord because the foundation of the Lord’s Temple had been laid. But many of the older priests, Levites, and other leaders who had seen the first Temple wept aloud when they saw the new Temple’s foundation. The others, however, were shouting for joy.” (Ezra 3:10-12)

This passage moves me deeply because it mirrors our situation today. Those who had never seen Solomon’s temple were celebrating, thinking the new foundation was magnificent. But the elders who remembered the original temple’s glory wept. They knew what had been lost. Similarly, when you truly understand how Christian faith was meant to be lived, you can’t help but weep at what we see today. Many of us think that what we have today is fine, some of us even celebrate it, but if only you can see the glory that God originally intended for His people. I’ve found myself crying – yes, actually crying – when I see fellow Christians behaving just like people who don’t know God, when I visit churches and find how much it is dominated by the flesh, when I watch religious leaders more interested in building their own empires than nurturing God’s people and Kingdom. I weep because I have glimpsed the Father’s heart and seen how gloriously He originally intended things to be. What we have today is far from it.

David has a strong online presence. His books are available on Amazon, he shares regularly on Facebook at facebook.com/david.emechete, and his videos are available on Youtube.

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Biblical Church Leadership by Beresford Job is a great resource for understanding the role of leadership in the organic church. I highly recommended his book and also recommend his many blogs on the subject. Links to his sites follow this short excerpt about being a doormat. Beresford explains more in his video link.

There is tremendous significance in the fact that, at the Last Supper (and first Lord’s Supper) Jesus washed the disciples feet and taught them to do the same. I don’t take this particular act as something to be replicated as a normative part of church life today, given that, unlike other things such as the Lord’s Supper and baptism, the apostles didn’t pass any such instruction on to the churches. But the symbolism remains, and we have seen again and again that church leadership is servant-hood, and nowhere is that better illustrated in scripture than in foot-washing example, and church leaders and elders have a special duty in such regard. From many years of experience, functioning as both an itinerant ministry and a local elder, I can confirm that a part of it is having people walk all over you and treating you like a doormat. Indeed, in the Old Testament, the elders sat in the gates of the city and determined who was allowed in, thereby being seen as the way into the city. I am not saying that elders get to decide who is or isn’t in the church, but given that biblical churches meet in homes, and that a church is an extended family, the picture is pretty clear. You don’t get into someone’s house except by walking over the doormat, and that is the function of the elders.

However, when people do “walk all over you,” it does get at least some of the dirt off of them. It goes all over you, of course, but at least it’s coming off them and giving them a chance to be honest about whatever the dirt is, and get cleansed from it in the Lord. Those who do walk all over you may or may not end up being honest about their dirt of course, but at least the elders are there giving them the chance, laying their lives down (just like you lay a doormat down) in order to try and get them to a better place. Spiritually the hardest thing about being an elder (and again, I speak from long experience) isn’t the actual being treated like a doormat, it’s keeping the “Welcome” written on it!

We can sum up the function of elders like this: It is the building of close and significant relationships, through personal example, teaching, prayer, and the giving of wise and godly advice, they build up (edify) those in the church so that they come into more and more maturity and stability in the Lord. This brings about a decrease in dependence on the function of elders. The fellowship needs them less and less, not more and more. Elders will encourage and enable our increased dependence on the Lord, and work to decrease any dependence we have upon them. They will seek to raise us up into whatever ministry and gifts God has given us, doing all they can, in both prayer for us and encouragement, to get us going in the right direction. Elders will not shut you down or, even worse, try to shut you up. Because they know full well they have merely a function, and are free of the sin of needing a position, biblical elders have nothing to protect. They are therefore not threatened by others in the church who are being used by the Lord in any particular way. Indeed, it is the very thing they are labouring for. Of course they will be wise enough to help us not do things un-biblically, or go beyond our spiritual maturity. They give the church protection and security from troublemakers, protecting and defending the right of the flock to grow in the Lord in a calm, peaceful, untroubled and safe environment. Troublemakers can be dealt with because no one has the right to jeopardise, infringe or compromise the biblical rights of others. Biblical elders are, in short, the defenders and guardians of your freedom in the Lord as a believer and not the limiters of it.

The conclusion is that eldership is functional and not positional. Any type of clergy/ laity divide is wrong, whether it is the dog-collared-funny-hat variety, or the trendy Pastors with their ripped jeans and “cool” tee-shirts. Both kinds are robbing the Lord’s people of their freedom to grow and mature in Him. Anyone coming into a biblical church gathering would have no way of knowing there even were elders, let alone who they actually are. Their default mode as elders is that they are invisible and take a back-seat. They only come forward to “grab the wheel” should it ever be come clearly necessary for them to do so. In over three decades as an elder in the church of which I am a part, I have only ever had to do such a handful of times. That, and that alone, is what church life should look like, with everyone moving in the Lord according to scripture.

You can check out Beresford Job at his website, his blog here or his YouTube channel.

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Many of us are aware of the great work Dr. Tom Wadsworth is doing. His popular YouTube videos, podcasts, and writings have made a significant impact on those seeking a better way to do life together. While his 300-page PhD dissertation may be more than most of us are ready to tackle, we are looking forward to seeing his research adapted into a book for a broader audience in early 2027.

Below is an excerpt from The Shift. In this short work Dr. Wadsworth examines the shift of Christian worship. All of Tom’s writings are available free of charge on his website tomwadsworth.com.

In the third century, several Christian writers such as Minucius Felix, Origen, and Arnobius repeated the common refrain that Christians have “no temples, no altars, no images.” Origen even affirmed that Christians “object to building altars, statues, and temples.” These patristic citations reveal the normative teaching about the temple as found in the first three centuries. Christians oppose temples, along with the worship, altars, sacrifices, and images that commonly accompany them. Since God now dwells in the human heart, Christians honor Him by living righteous and holy lives. But these texts do not represent the entirety of patristic thought in this period. At a very early stage, some writers introduced concepts that would begin to shift away from this normative view.

The shift between first-century terminology and fourth-century terminology is astonishing. “In its first centuries Christianity was a religion highly inhospitable to the idea of ‘holy places;’” says Robert Markus, “by the end of the fourth century it had become highly receptive.” Even as recently as Origen in the third century and Arnobius in 300, Christians proudly proclaimed that they had no temples, no altars, and no sacrifices, which are principles grounded in NT teaching. But with the transformation emboldened by the imperial support of Christianity, Eusebius reveals that (at least some) Christians embraced such temple concepts less than one hundred years after Origen and only twenty years after Arnobius.

Such terminology runs against the grain of NT teaching. Regarding the Lord’s Supper as a sacrifice is “a distinct break from the teaching of the apostles.” As I. Howard Marshall says, “Nothing in the NT suggests that the Lord’s Supper is to be seen in any way as an offering by us to God, and the practice of offering the elements to God reverses the whole direction of the atonement in which God himself offers his Son to die and gives to us the benefits of his passion.” In the NT, Christ’s sacrifice was accomplished “once for all” (Heb 9:27; 10:12). If Jesus’s sacrifice is viewed as inadequate so that it must be repeatedly offered, have we not, in the words of Heb 10:29, “spurned the Son of God, profaned the blood of the covenant, and outraged the Spirit of grace”?

Beginning with this foundational idea that the Lord’s Supper is a sacrifice, the fourth-century church had fully resurrected the associated “temple worship” ideas of altars, priests, and temples. Do any of these four concepts have sin-remitting power? One might argue that these terms are only applied figuratively, with no intention of resurrecting a Christian sacrificial cult. However, in reality, if a table is called an altar, it will be viewed as a literal altar. If a minister is called a priest, he will be viewed as a literal priest. If a Christian building is called a “temple” or a “house of God,” it will be viewed as a literal house of God. Such terminology will lead each new generation of Christians to fail to see the great difference between the ἐκκλησία of the NT and the temple of the OT, if not the fundamental difference between Christianity and Judaism.

Free resource material from Dr. Tom Wadsworth at https://www.tomwadsworth.com/the-christian-assembly.

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Many of us are aware of the great work Dr. Tom Wadsworth is doing. His popular YouTube videos, podcasts, and writings have made a significant impact on those seeking a better way to do life together. While his 300-page PhD dissertation may be more than most of us are ready to tackle, we are looking forward to seeing his research adapted into a book for a broader audience in early 2027.

Below is an excerpt from The Origin of the Christian Assembly. In this article, adapted from the author’s 2022 doctoral dissertation, Dr. Wadsworth examines the origins of the structure of the ekklesia. All of Tom’s writings are available free of charge on his website tomwadsworth.com.

In summary, scholars have suggested several different sources that may have served as the origin(s) of the early (first-century) Christian assembly. The primary proposal with a long history of support is the synagogue. A few scholars reject the idea, but since Christianity emerged from Judaism, and early Christians were certainly familiar with synagogue meetings, most scholars believe that the synagogue is a credible source, even if it is only “an influence.” A small number of scholars have suggested the temple as the origin, but this proposal is plagued with significant problems that are related to the temple’s sacrificial cult and the Christians’ lack thereof.

In the last thirty years, two other theories have gained some support: voluntary associations and the banquet/symposium. If the temple and synagogue might be described as “religious” sources, these latest proposals might be described as “non-religious” sources that mirror some of the secular qualities of the early Christian assemblies. Associations and the banquet/symposium proposals have provided much food for thought, but at best, they merely offer interesting similarities to the Christian meeting.

Would the early Christians have relied on a secular or “worldly” convention as the definitive model for their meetings? Jesus said that He, His kingdom, and His disciples were “not of this world” (John 17:16; 18:36). Paul urged Christians to “not be conformed to this world” (Rom 12:2). James said that pure religion is “to keep oneself unstained by the world” (Jas 1:27) and that “friendship with the world is hostility toward God” (Jas 4:4). And John urged the faithful to “not love the world nor the things in the world” (1 John 2:15). Given these fundamental teachings from nascent Christianity, it is hard to conceive that the early church would have adopted a Graeco-Roman social convention as the model for the perpetual assembly of the faithful.

Whatever origins might be proposed, it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify a certain source that gave birth to the Christian gathering. Since the NT itself never speaks of a model assembly upon which the church gathering was based, scholars are left to speculate. And their speculation inevitably focuses on meetings that are “similar.” But as Ken Neller aptly noted, similarities do not necessarily indicate influence.

While scholars have intently searched for the origins of the Christian meeting, is it possible that there is no origin? Brunner sees the Christian assembly as “manifestly something radically new,” and Dunn says that the early home churches must have seemed “very odd” to the surrounding culture. Since Christianity was known for its new wine that needed fresh wineskins (Mark 2:22), its new covenant (Heb 9:15; 12:24), its new and living way (Heb 10:20), its new teaching (Acts 17:19), and its new song (Rev 5:9; 14:3), it is not a far-fetched idea that its gatherings might also be “new.” After all, the God who “makes all things new” (Rev 21:5) does not need to recycle and revamp some existing meeting tradition, whether from Jews or Greeks. The “newness” of Christianity does not negate the possibility that its meetings are patterned after some other meeting. But the “fresh wineskins” of the gospel should prompt – at least – the possibility that Christianity required no model.

Free resource material from Dr. Tom Wadsworth at https://www.tomwadsworth.com/the-christian-assembly.

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My good friend Ace hooked me up with this awesome 56-page PDF entitled Believers, the Spirit & the Ekklesia by David H. J. Gay. Highly recommended, and the PDF is available here. It’s well worth a read, especially since most Christians don’t like each other.

From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:16-21).

Christ appears six times in that extract on reconciliation. Yes, the fundamental reconciliation at issue is that which Christ, by his death, accomplished between God and his elect (Rom. 5:10-11; Eph. 2:14-17; Col. 1:19-20). No question of it! But since every believer is reconciled to God by Christ, every believer must be reconciled to every other believer. This is the standard. And it is more. By the Spirit, Christ himself, in the believer, is the power which enables believers to be reconciled to each other. Christ! Christ! Christ!

Take the experience of Philemon and Onesimus as another classic example. To bring about an effective reconciliation between two believers who were in serious dispute, is it not significant that, in his short letter to Philemon, Paul referred ten times to the Lord Jesus Christ? Paul didn’t, as so many ‘pastors’ do, nag Philemon and Onesimus; nor did he do as so many Reformed ‘pastors’ do, and reach for what has become known as Calvin’s whip of the law, and lash them with that. No! It was Christ all the way! Christ! Christ! Christ!

And new-covenant unity, unity in Christ, has massive, far-reaching benefits extending far beyond the ekklēsia – even to unbelievers, convincing them that believers really do belong to Christ, that Christ really was sent by God the Father, that he – Christ – and believers are one in being loved of the Father. As Christ declared to his disciples:

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:34-35).

And as he expressed it in his mediatorial prayer:

I do not ask for these [that is, the apostles] only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me (John 17:20-23).

To state the obvious, disunity among believers is tragic – both internally (in the ekklēsia) and externally (in the world), and, above all, it robs the triune God of his glory.

Think of all the trouble which ‘Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free’ could have caused if it had not been for ‘but Christ is all, and in all’. Think of the troubled areas of the world, even as I write: the Middle East, for example. Politicians do not have the answer. They, perhaps, can produce a temporary cessation of open warfare, but it is Christ and Christ alone, by his Spirit changing men’s hearts, who can actually bring about such concord as this passage of Scripture is describing.

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Released in 2001 by F. LaGard Smith, Radical Restoration is a 315-page book that asks the tough questions. The book is a call to throw off denominational thinking. This is the 2nd excerpt with thoughts on elders. You can read the first excerpt here.

The widespread lack of mature Christian men is one of the most devastating results of not having a strong mutual ministry. When what you have, in effect, is a rather exclusive clergy system, the “laity” simply don’t develop as they ought. As long as men can remain mostly-passive spectators, they will never become the kind of elder statesmen who are naturally sought out as spiritual leaders.

Which only compounds the problem. In the absence of true elder statesmen, we are forced to settle for overseers who are chosen, not so much for their spiritual maturity, but for their demonstrated success in worldly matters. This is not to say that elders can’t also be successful in their normal employment. But look closely, and you will see far too many elders whose chief qualification for the job is that they are good businessmen, respected professionals, or even (in more rural communities) the most successful farmers. Of course, this approach is a perfect fit for what has become the most common model among today’s “elderships:” that of a corporate board of directors.

One of the tell-tale signs of this corporate model is the practice, in some congregations, of having set “terms” for those who serve as elders. And voting them into office, or out of office. Of course, that’s simply not how shepherds and flocks work. Nor “wise old men.” Worse yet, instead of the church taking the model of shepherd leadership into the world, we have brought the world’s model of doing business into the church.

At that point, it becomes a matter of chickens and eggs. Do we have the “corporate board model” because of the kind of men we have appointed as elders; or are we appointing that kind of elders because they are most likely to be good “board members?” The answer, of course, is “yes.” Both! No prizes for guessing why the next generation of the church then produces so few spiritual shepherds.

If elders are not to be “board members” for a “corporate church,” what are they to be? From the historical association between Israel’s elders and the city gates, one would not go far wrong to think of elders as gatekeepers. Ever wonder why Israel’s spiritual leaders sat around at the city gates? A good guess is that they were keeping a close eye on who was coming into the community and who was leaving. In an era of great fluidity in “church membership,” do elders today (especially in larger congregations) know who is coming in to be fed, and who is leaving, perhaps because they are not being fed?

Israel’s gatekeepers were not only judges over matters in dispute, but as watchmen at the gate, they used their wisdom and understanding to judge with discernment between those who were bringing prosperity to the city, and those who were bent on destruction. With that in mind, Paul’s warning to the Ephesian elders takes on added meaning. “I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock” (Acts 20:29). Therefore, he tells them: Guard the flock over which you have been made watchmen.

Do our shepherds in the church understand the seriousness of today’s spiritual crisis in which a virulent strain of cultural values is silently and inexorably destroying God’s people? What’s being done to shut the gates? What warning signs are being posted?

Jesus spoke of the way in which he-as the Good Shepherd-would come through the gate to save those within the fold. “The man who enters by the gate is the shepherd of his sheep,” said Jesus. “The watchman opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice” (John 10:2-4).

The three-fold application is obvious. Elders, first of all, are to be the watchmen taking responsibility for who comes and goes within their fellowship. Second, like Jesus, they are only able to lead their congregations effectively when they know each disciple by name. And finally, the congregation is willing to follow the lead of their elders because they recognize their voices. Not the voice of a hired hand, mind you, but the voices of the shepherds themselves.

Of all the things in the church today which need to be radically restored, nothing is of greater urgency than bringing elders back to their role of prayer and proclamation (which, at least relative to prayer, has seen great strides over the past couple of decades). Wherever it still lingers, the board-of-directors approach to “eldering” is, by any measure, an abomination. Interminable “elders meetings” to decide matters having little to do with the spiritual health of the flock are a mockery. And abdicating responsibility for teaching and preaching of the Word by hiring professional “pulpit ministers” (as distinct from full-time elders) couldn’t be more misguided.

What will it take for us to see how far removed most of our congregations are from the pattern of leadership in the early church? To honestly admit that there’s been a paradigm shift of the greatest magnitude? To have the courage to fundamentally change how we are fed and led?

When the dereliction of Israel’s elders finally resulted in Jerusalem’s destruction and the exile of those self-same elders, the lament of Lamentations (5:14) said it all: “The elders are gone from the city gate….” Simultaneously, that statement spoke to both cause and effect. The reason Israel’s elders were “gone from the city gate” is because they had long since abandoned what they were supposed to do at the city gate! They had let somebody else do their job. They had been content to be administrators and decision-makers, but they had forgotten what it meant to be shepherds among God’s people.

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Released in 2001 by F. LaGard Smith, Radical Restoration is a 315-page book that asks the tough questions. The book is a call to throw off denominational thinking. This is the first of two excerpts. You can read the second one here. Warning…below is an excerpt that is indeed pretty radical.

The irony is that if, in fact, we were all radically changed as individuals, then automatically we would be a radically-changed collective body of Christ, and a book of this nature likely would never be necessary. If the discussion within even these pages seems to focus on organization and ritual, let it not be forgotten that no radical restoration is more important than our own: one by one. Christian by Christian. If we, ourselves, were truly transformed in faith and life, most of the problems of “the church” would take care of themselves. Without doubt, the single, underlying, bedrock cause of most church problems is our hopelessly misconstrued concept of “church” itself.

Look how convoluted the system easily becomes. When even passionately penitent believers begin to think of themselves as an institutionalized church instead of simply being God’s sanctified people, they no longer produce other passionately penitent people who can perpetuate that spiritual body. Instead, they produce people who are wet but not warmed-people for whom mere attendance suffices for fervent participation, and pre-packaged ritual (whether traditional or contemporary) is assumed to be synonymous with things spiritual. Loyalty to God is measured by loyalty to the church.

When that happens, the time has come for a top-to-bottom spring cleaning. One can almost see our Lord striding through the temple courts with a determined glint in his eyes and a talis cord wrapped tightly in his right hand as he begins to knock over tables and animal pens-sending coins, merchants, and doves flying! It was not a time for just a little tidying up here and there. Jesus wasn’t merely concerned about the corruption of the moneylenders, or the irreverence of wide-open commercialism in the temple courts. From the priests to the rabbis to ordinary Jews, God’s people had lost all sight of true religion.

Over time, temple practices which were meant to encourage meaningful spiritual worship had evolved into a highly-structured political, social, and economic system that more often served to obscure faith rather than to promote it. Yet if you had asked virtually anyone in Israel, they would have insisted that their religious system was definitely of God. They could even (in today’s terms) quote book, chapter, and verse. Every point of doctrine was certified; every practice justified; every questionable assumption conveniently rationalized.

Through the lenses of Christian thought and comfortable hindsight, of course, we immediately recognize how deluded the Jews were in their ritualistic concept of worship. We even heap scorn on them for their Pharisaical exclusivism and legalism. But to possibly think that we could be equally deluded is unthinkable! Surely, Jesus would never walk into one of our congregations and create a scene….

Are we absolutely certain about that? Is it so unreasonable to think that if our Lord suddenly appeared among us he might begin knocking over lecterns, and smashing communion cups, and ripping down basketball nets in our family life centers? If what we are about as a fellowship of believers is not of God, then we dare not take comfort in the fact that the Lord is no longer on the earth to literally overturn our tables. Instead, we ourselves must manifest divine outrage and cleanse the temple of its impurity.

If this somehow seems a terribly radical thing to do, should it not give us pause to consider that the alternative could be more radical yet? John hints of it in his Revelation letters:

To Ephesus-“If you do not repent, I will remove your lampstand from its place.”
To Sardis “If you do not wake up, I will come like a thief….”
To Laodicea “I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”

At the Resurrection of the living and the dead, will we not also be judged for our unfaithfulness? If Spirit-led, apostolic faith and practice is ever to be recaptured, it can’t wait for Forever. Surely, the time for being radical is now.

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