Biblical eldership

This brief article seeks to look at various aspects of local church elders, like affirmation, ordination, and laying on of hands. It comes from  the perspective of ordination & laying on of hands not conveying grace, but still being an appropriate practice in setting apart teaching elders to the ministry of the Word. The difference between our practice and many others is that we reserve ordination for the main teaching elders, not for all elders, even though there is no hierarchy among the elders. It is simply a credentialing factor bestowed on those who are functioning as the main teaching pastors of local congregations.

Being ‘Plymouth Brethren’ is a quirky, contentious existence - a fine example of Protestant fundamentalism birthed in the early 19th century and strangely contagious among disaffected Christians in almost every place touched by English influence. Of the several contested notions which orient anyone silly enough to fight the fight of B/brethren identity, one will find primitivism, biblicism, and apocalypticism (or, if you don’t prefer -isms - the romantic longing for lost and pure ways, self-imposed neglect of critical tasks, and paranoid, self-righteous fixation on the inevitable end).

This quirky piece of pseudo-scholarship was my attempt long, long ago, to justify the habit of remaking autonomous church authorities known as elders in the collapsed in-between called the present age. If nothing else, it has come to irritate my old teachers because it betrays the boundaries of (their) so-called scholarship, and therefore I share it as a way of saying their irritation makes me happy.