Biblical Eldership Church Leadership

The Acts of the Apostles

Nearly sixty years after Paul’s meeting with the Ephesian elders, Ignatius, overseer of the church in Antioch of Syria, wrote to “the church which is in Ephesus,” calling special attention to the preemi nence of the overseer (episkopos) of Ephesus whose name was Onesimus (ca. AD. 1 15).‘9At the time of Paul’s farewell address, how ever, there was no single overseer to call upon. There was only a body of elders. Like the churches of Galatia (Acts 14:23), the church in Ephesus was at that time led by a council of elders, not a council of elders and an overseer. Some scholars reject the concept of multiple elders within a single congregation. They try to explain the plurality of elders by saying that there were various house churches that made up the citywide church in Ephesus, that each house church had one presiding overseer, and that these house-church overseers (sometimes collectively called elders) presided over the citywide church. Lea and Griffin maintain this view. In their writing on the Pastoral Epistles in the The New American Com mentary series, they state: “Probably the overseer served over a single house-church with the group of overseers from within a city constitut ing ‘the overseers [elders]’” (brackets mine)20 In a similar vein, R. Alas tair Campbell, an instructor at Spurgeon’s College in London, writes: We may then envisage the situation as follows. The church at Ephesus has grown to the point where it has a number of episkopoi [overseers], each, we may suppose, the head of his own house church. Together they are the elders of the church, and it is [as] such that Paul summons them and reminds them of their responsibilities. They are the elders of the church because they are the overseers of the household congregations of which it is comprised.21 Such claims are pure guesswork, however. The fact is, there is abso lutely no biblical evidence that a single overseer presided over an indi vidual house church. There is, indeed, evidence to the contrary. A number of prominent commentators believe that the Epistle to the Hebrews was written to a house church in Rome.22 If they are correct, the house church is exhorted to obey and submit to a plurality of leaders, not to a single overseer: “Obey your leaders and submit to them; for they keep watch over your souls (Heb. 13217; cf. 1 Thess. 5212). There is certainly no reason why a house church could not have two or three elders.

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