The Elder

Principle

The elder shares in Christ’s ministry of Word, Sacrament, and Order, gathering a people around font and table and ordering their common life so that the gathering continues. The elder is ordained not to a congregation but to the whole connection, and shares with every other elder in the oversight of the church’s life and of one another.

Background

Ask an elder what they are and you will usually get the three words: Word, Sacrament, and Order. Ask what the three words mean together and the answer generally becomes a list of duties, as though ordination were a job description with three headings.

They are not three jobs. They are one action described from three sides. Christ gathers a people to himself by his Word, he sustains them at his table, and he orders their life so that the gathering holds. An elder is a person through whom that one action goes on happening in a particular place. The preaching is for the sake of the gathering, the sacraments are how the gathered are fed, and the ordering exists so that next week there is still a congregation to preach to and feed. Take away any one of the three and the other two stop making sense. An elder who preaches and will not administer, or administers and will not order, has not chosen a specialty. They have taken up a third of an office.

Our own examination of elders says this better than our Discipline does, and it says one thing more that we have almost entirely forgotten. The bishop tells the candidates that an elder is called to preach and teach the Word, to administer the sacraments, to lead the people in worship and prayer, to lead persons to faith, and then this: “to exercise pastoral supervision, to order the life of the congregation and the connection.”

And the connection. Every elder in The United Methodist Church has stood before a bishop and an annual conference and affirmed a rule of life that includes ordering the life of the connection, and has then gone out into a ministry in which “ordering the connection” is understood to be someone else’s job, belonging to district superintendents and bishops and paid staff. We have taken a charge given to the whole order and assigned it to a few officers.

This is where the elder’s genuine distinctive lies, and it is not any of the three things usually named.

It is not itineracy. Full-time local pastors are appointed by the bishop and moved by the cabinet, and deacons are ordained and do not itinerate in the elder’s sense at all. Whatever itineracy sorts, it does not sort ordained from unordained.

It is not security of appointment, and it is not a seminary degree, for reasons taken up in later sections.

It is the relation to the whole conference. An elder is not ordained to a congregation. An elder is received into an order and into membership of an annual conference, and from that moment the other churches of that conference are not merely neighbors in ministry. They are, every one of them, places this person may be sent. The elder is ordered to the whole, and is therefore sendable to any part of it. That is a genuinely different way of belonging to a church than any other in our system, and it is the thing itineracy expresses rather than the thing itineracy creates.

Once that is in view, the neglected half of the examination recovers its sense. If the elder belongs to the whole conference, then the oversight of the conference’s life is not an administrative function delegated upward. It is the order’s own work, exercised together. The Lima text puts three dimensions of ordained ministry side by side and insists all three are needed: it should be personal, collegial, and communal, and it asks each church to “ask itself in what way its exercise of the ordained ministry has suffered in the course of history.” For United Methodists the answer is not in much doubt. Our personal dimension is robust and our collegial dimension has thinned into administration. We have bishops and superintendents who oversee, and an order of elders that meets.

The word for what the order is meant to do is one we already own. Wesley’s definition of a Methodist society, printed among our doctrinal standards, is “a company of men having the form and seeking the power of godliness, united in order to pray together, to receive the word of exhortation, and to watch over one another in love, that they may help each other to work out their salvation.” That is what an order of elders is: not a professional association with worship attached, but a company of people who have agreed to watch over one another in love, in the oldest and most exacting Methodist sense of the phrase, which never meant encouragement alone.

I owe this way of putting it to the Rev. Dr. Thomas Martin of First United Methodist Church in LaGrange, Georgia, who asked in conversation what it would mean for an elder, in ordering the life of the church, to think past the local congregation and into the realm of superintendency: not superintendency as a district superintendent’s administrative work, but elders actually superintending and looking over one another in love. That is the question this section is trying to answer.

Three supports for this, the first and weightiest from Scripture.

The New Testament does not describe our arrangements, and this document has no interest in pretending that it does. But on the one point at issue here it is unusually direct. Paul, at Miletus, “sent to Ephesus, and called to himself the elders of the assembly,” and then told those same men, “Take heed, therefore, to yourselves, and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the assembly of the Lord and God which he purchased with his own blood” (Acts 20:17, 28). The elders are the overseers. Paul writes to Titus to “appoint elders in every city,” and in the next breath gives the qualifications of “the overseer” (Titus 1:5–7), moving between the words without explanation because no explanation was needed.

And 1 Peter puts the whole of this section into four verses:

“I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder, and a witness of the sufferings of Christ… Shepherd the flock of God which is among you, exercising the oversight, not under compulsion, but voluntarily, not for dishonest gain, but willingly; neither as lording it over those entrusted to you, but making yourselves examples to the flock. When the chief Shepherd is revealed, you will receive the crown of glory that doesn’t fade away.” (1 Peter 5:1–4)

An apostle calls himself a fellow elder. He charges elders, in the plural, to exercise oversight. He tells them the danger of the work is not neglect but domination. That is the collegial dimension, presbyteral oversight, and the warning against lording it over the flock, all in one paragraph, and all of it addressed to elders rather than to a separate order above them.

Wesley held, and said so in writing when he acted on it, that “bishops and presbyters are the same order, and consequently have the same right to ordain.” If that is true, then oversight is not something the presbyterate lacks and the episcopate supplies. It is something the whole order possesses, which the church focuses in particular people for the sake of good order. A Methodist theology of episkopē that begins anywhere else has left Wesley behind on the one point where he was most explicit.

And the ecumenical conversation has been waiting on precisely this question. The Lima text observes that “the relation of the presbyterate to the episcopal ministry has been discussed throughout the centuries, and the degree of the presbyter’s participation in the episcopal ministry is still for many an unresolved question of far-reaching ecumenical importance.” United Methodists are unusually placed to say something useful here, because our bishops are elders, our orders are conference-shaped, and our founder thought the two were the same order. We have been sitting on an answer and treating it as an embarrassment.

Practice

Orders of elders should do what the Discipline says an order is for, which includes holding its members accountable (¶ 307), and should treat that as the practice of oversight rather than as a program. An order that meets for a speaker and a meal, and never once looks at how its members are actually doing in ministry, is not exercising the collegial dimension of the office. It is having lunch.

The charge to “order the life of the congregation and the connection” should be taught to candidates as a real obligation and examined as one. An elder who has no working relationship to the wider conference is not simply under-involved; they are living at odds with the vows they made.

Superintendency should be understood, and where possible practiced, as the order’s work focused in particular officers rather than as a separate class of activity performed upon the order. District superintendents and bishops are not the church’s oversight. They are its concentration.

And when the church asks what distinguishes an elder, the answer given should be the one that is true: not a salary floor, not security of appointment, not a degree, but a covenant with the whole conference and a share in the care of the whole church.