• Jared Smith on Eldership

    Those Elders—What Are They?

    As I am in the middle of finishing an exhaustive book on the subject of elders, it is frustrating that I am not yet ready to fire back at those who are exerting great effort in promoting this newfangled theory of a plural eldership in Baptist churches. Their forceful claims to have received an inner revelation from God’s Word to which our Baptist forefathers were ignorant, is quite frankly a very arrogant position to nurture. When they boast their theory of leadership in churches is the ‘biblical way’, they censure and condemn all churches who have or are doing it different from themselves—and this includes all historic Baptist churches. Having dealt with many plural eldership advocates, invariably belonging to the Reformed Baptist movement,[1] I’ve come…