Why Bother with Church Structure?

By Jeff Jones 

Establishing and maintaining structure in a local church takes a ton of work, especially when a church has started without any denominational or mother-church support. All too often, efforts to establish and maintain structure in a young church fail to keep up with the growth of our fellowship, and that’s not good when it happens. I recall my friend and mentor Clint Humfrey, pastor at Calvary Grace Church in Calgary, saying to me and my fellow elders more than a decade ago that we needed to “set up some desperately needed trellis, lest the vine start to rot as it lays on the ground.” Constitutions and bylaws, policies and procedures, small-group studies, mentorship systems for emerging leaders, church membership processes—these are all elements of church structure and so they all affect the life and health of the church and those who make it up.

Why bother, though? Why is all that work important in the first place? In reflecting on that question over my years of pastoral ministry, I’ve come to see that my own growth in understanding this issue can be helpful to others. When I was a college-aged, young adult, I wasn’t well-informed about my faith. Like many young people, I looked at the church and questioned many things. Does membership in a church really matter? I didn’t think so. After all, I believed in God, and I prayed on my own, so as long as I did those things, I wasn’t very concerned about commitment to any particular fellowship. Why bother with doctrine? Some of my most unpleasant memories came from my days in a Dutch Reformed church, listening to a pastor droning on in a monotonous tone about fine points of theology. Yet that congregation, for all their attention to doctrine, always seemed to keep our family on the outside. If doctrine just made people cranky and unloving, I thought, what value did it have?

It’s not surprising, then, that by the time I had graduated college and moved to New Brunswick (the first time!) I found myself questioning other key elements of Christian faith and practice. When I heard about an excommunication in my brother’s United Reformed church, for instance, I reacted with disdain and indignation. What right, I wondered, did a church full of fallible human beings have to excommunicate someone? How dare a church pass judgment on a fellow sinner when it is God who will judge? Then there was the fact that a large, culturally-conservative church in Fredericton, a church active in the “evangelical scene” of the city, denied the doctrine of the Trinity. I wasn’t prepared to go that far, but I found myself questioning how we could be so certain about yet another “fine theological point,” especially one whose term appears nowhere in the Bible. God’s too big for us to understand, I thought; shouldn’t we be a bit more tentative in our conclusions about him?

These questions were, frankly, the result of my own youthful immaturity and a deeper lack of seriousness about my relationship with Jesus Christ. They all bore one thing in common, however. They all had something to do with church structure. It wasn’t coincidental that, surrounded as I was by a deeply secular military environment and by people with ever-moving moral values, I would wind up questioning the value of structure and organization in Christian faith and church life. See, I had internalized what Francis Schaeffer, writing about man’s view of the universe, termed a divide between the “upper story,” where matters of faith belong, and a “lower story” for matters of science and rationality. I had begun to think as if Christianity offered only religious or moral truth, and that its statements regarding more practical matters (like organizational theory) were of less value. What was ironic was that I deeply understood and observed the importance of structure and order in army life, while at the same time practically denying and increasingly doubting the need for order and structure in the Christian church and walk.

Alas, a similar skepticism is all too common in much of the North American evangelical church. It is more and more common nowadays for Christians to think of the church as a “centered set” as opposed to the more traditional “bounded set.” Here is an example:

We work at clarifying who is in, who is out; what the leadership structure is to be and not to be; what we believe and do not believe; which activities belong, which do not; and what behavior is appropriate and what is not. So the line between insiders and outsiders is clearly drawn. Paul Hiebert calls this kind of thinking “bounded-set thinking.” That is, there is a boundary that sets the standard. . . . We need to move from bounded-set thinking to what Hiebert refers to as “centered-set thinking” in our understanding of the church. (Len Hjalmarson)

In other words, the argument is that while the “old-fashioned way” defined the church according to boundary lines, the church is better described as a cloud with Christ at the center and an increasing commitment from believers as one approaches that center. Several years ago I would have agreed. Structure and dividing lines can’t create genuine fellowship, can they?

They may not be able to create such fellowship, no, but I now realize that they are indispensable elements for promoting and facilitating genuine fellowship. To use another example: in the secular world, people are waiting longer and longer to get married. Many simply don’t bother and just live together; after all, it’s often said, we don’t need a piece of paper to make love what it is, do we? And yet while Bible-believing Christians will immediately, and rightly, reject that line of thinking when it comes to the structure of the marriage relationship, too many of those same Christians make the exact same argument when rejecting the need for membership or doctrinal commitment or other formal structures in their own connection to a local church.

So, formal church membership may sound quaint, but without it, pastors and elders cannot be certain just who is in their flock, and fellowship in a church is made to feel like an optional element of the faith rather than being the non-negotiable that it actually is. As for doctrine, yes, it does divide. Yet in a centered-set church, a Bible study leader who starts advocating heresy—say, prosperity theology—not only may not be formally accountable to anyone else in the church, but under the assumptions of the centered-set model is simply on a journey to find Christ. Some kind of doctrinal dividing line is necessary, for without one, the church risks incorporating beliefs that simply aren’t Christian at all and therefore risks losing its Christian witness.

The structural element of church discipline is a vital part of church life. Yes, it needs to be understood in both its formative (that is, teaching, mentoring, and edification of the believers) and corrective (rebuking and excommunicating offenders) aspects. Yet if the church is not permitted to expel the immoral one from its midst, it is forced to tolerate poison in the fellowship and expose those who are young in the faith to eternal peril. I would hope that even a centered-set fellowship would expel a pedophile who was found to be preying on children in the church. However, if we really and truly believe that there is both truth that gives life and sinful beliefs that can kill, how is the one advocating, say, anti-Trinitarianism or works-salvation any less dangerous from an eternal perspective?

The example of the Trinity is no less important. While we can never know everything about God, even with our limitations we are surely capable of knowing some true and certain things about him! We know there is only one God, that the Bible calls three persons, the Father, Son, and Spirit, by the word “God,” and that these three are somehow distinct from one another. Moreover, within the mystery that is the Trinity, there is an irreversible order: the Father begets the Son, never the reverse, and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and not the Son or Father from the Spirit. Now, this is where Trinitarian theology can, to some, start sounding speculative and theoretical. But perhaps the modern lack of appreciation for the intricacies of Trinitarian theology might contribute to our skepticism toward church structure? Yet while the Trinity may not be easy to grasp, it is nevertheless a far more practical doctrine than many Christians realize. Since God, in his Triune nature, reveals to us particular features of irreversible order, it’s no surprise that Paul the apostle, speaking to a church that devalued order and structure, pointed out that “God is not a God of confusion but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33) before going on to say: “all things should be done decently and in order” (verse 40). The solution to the disorder in the church was, and is, to remember the very nature of God. This God is both one and three, and so order is inherent to his very nature. This is why he is a God of peace.

And you know what? This same peace can be ours, in our own churches, today. If, that is, we take our theology seriously. Let’s not shy away from “tough” subjects like the Trinity, then. And let’s not neglect and dismiss the theology of the church, even the seemingly “mundane” matters like organization and governance. It’s for our good. It’s for our joy!