Church Politics

Message / Question

Dr Dave with the election over I had a question to do with church politics which you might like to add your two cents. What are churches best to do about it, what about church splits, fundamental disagreements, etc? Would you admit that the leadership of many churches is also held in the "balance of power"? Is it better to have dominant leaders who can break up the power of these useless political groups?

Response

There are several systems of church government over which theologians have argued for centuries. The one thing that we can all agree on is that Christ is supposed to be the head of the church! The true church is not a democracy – Israel didn’t get to hold a referendum on whether the wording of the 10 commandments was appropriate and whether they really only needed 9 or perhaps actually needed 11! They came as commandments, not suggestions or even recommendations! Whenever a group of people get together to form an organisation, you can guarantee that there will be a range of opinions about most things – and there’ll be a group of people who are more forceful than others in expressing their opinion. Thus political factions develop within the organisation. The church is such an organisation. There shouldn’t be such a thing as church politics, but there is. I know of people who withheld their tithes and offerings from their church until the church ran out of money and the pastor has to be laid off. Is this God honouring conduct? Of course it’s not. Yet some pastors are held “hostage” by “political factions” within their church, so they cannot freely exercise the leadership role to which they have been called. Church politics is a blight on the church and must be confronted carefully and wisely by church leadership. We need to get used to theoracy, that’s what the Kingdom is about, that’s the system of government that we will experience for all of eternity – I sometimes wonder how some Christians will cope!!!!