The Baptists: Two Offices
The Biblical Situation
When one seeks to develop an idea of the biblical structure of the Church one encounters a problem. Clearly the Bible speaks of “servants” (generally just transliterated into English as “deacons”, 1 Tim. 3:8) and “elders” (generally called pastors, priests, or preachers, 1 Tim. 4:14). The Bible also speaks of “overseers” (1 Tim. 3:1), which were probably the same thing as elders. But we’re told that not all elders were involved in the teaching or preaching of scripture (1 Tim. 5:17). Additionally, it’s clear that the Apostles exercised control over multiple congregations and sometimes delegated this regional authority to proxies (Titus 1:5). What’s more, when Paul spoke of the various kinds of people in leadership in the church he included all sorts of “offices” in his lists (1 Cor. 12:28, Eph. 4:11).
Given all this, it appears that, as a recent Baptist theologian, Millard Erickson, has conceded, “There is no prescriptive exposition of what the government of the church is to be [in the Bible].” Further, even when we look for a description of the way it was (as opposed to the way it should be), Erickson admits, “the evidence from the New Testament is inconclusive,” and, “There may well have been rather wide varieties of governmental arrangements.”
Uniformity and Diversity
Be this as it may, the post-New Testament Church quickly came to adopt a three-tiered model of government as the official standard with deacons below priests who were in turn below bishops. As time went on this model was further embellished with subsets of each layer of the hierarchy: sub-deacons, archdeacons, archpriests, archbishops, and so on. When the Protestant Reformation rolled through Europe, though, this structure was challenged and abandoned in many places. As each group sought to be faithful to the larger Protestant rallying-cry of “scripture alone”, the various sects were forced to once again face the ambiguity of the New Testament text and, not surprisingly, produced various ecclesiologies. Anglicans and some Lutherans kept the classic episcopal three-tiered structure, Presbyterians and other Lutherans embraced synodical governance predicated on a two-tiered structure with serious congregational interconnectedness, and Baptists and Congregationalist opted for a two-tiered structure without much in the way of interconnectedness.
The Baptist Mainstream
As it stands today, most Baptists continue the tradition of only recognizing two levels within the clergy: deacons and elders. Generally speaking these are the only two offices for which one must be ordained. Other positions within the church (secretary, treasurer, usher, etc.) are not normally counted as clerical in the sense of being a part of the clergy. It should be noted, though, that even among mainstream Baptists this two-tiered structure is not as simple as it first appears. Just as in the medieval period these two tiers have been further subdivided by many congregations by postulating chairmen of deacon bodies and senior pastors which exercise authority over other pastors.
Exceptions and Corollaries
Despite the broad consensus of the Baptist mainstream, there are a handful of Baptist groups that do not embrace a two-tiered model or modify it in significant ways. On the one hand there are episcopal Baptists groups such as the Evangelical Baptist Union of Georgia, the Union of Baptist Churches in Latvia, and the Episcopal Baptist Church in Congo which all embrace a three-tiered view of the clergy with bishops at the top. On the other hand, a growing number of Baptist churches in the U.S. (including many Southern Baptists) are moving toward an “elder led” model of church governance in which the “two-offices” of the Baptist mainstream are retained but the office of elder is divided into “teaching elders” and “lay elders” resulting in something of a de facto three-tiered model of church government