The Telephone Game and the Church

During the week I spent at Dallas Seminary in the spring, we heard some great lectures from experts in the field of Christian leadership.

We spent time each day presenting the results of the capstone projects that had been the subject of so much of our time during the previous seven months or so.

And we prepared for the graduation ceremony that, for most of us, would mark the end of our time in seminary.

It was a good week, filled with useful training, and I enjoyed the time we spent sharing the lessons we had learned and the challenges we had faced during our time in seminary.

But our professors had built into the week’s schedule a number of opportunities for us to spend time together in fellowship and worship, as well. And the truth is that it was those times that were the most meaningful to me.

On our first night in Dallas, the class gathered after our introductory lecture to have dinner together, and the dean of our program gave us an icebreaker exercise that will probably be familiar to you all.

Do you remember the telephone game that you probably played in kindergarten? The teacher would whisper something to the kid at the front of the line, and he’d whisper it to the next kid and so on, until the end of the line, when that person would repeat aloud what they’d heard.

Well, it turns out that this isn’t just a kindergarten game. It’s a seminary-level activity, too, at least in the context of an icebreaker for a group of students being taught something about communication.

And, just as you’ll recall from those kindergarten days, one of the things we learned was that a message is likely to be transformed in the retelling from the first person who hears it to the last person.

Sometimes, that transformation is minor, but sometimes the message degrades to the point of nonsense.

That’s just what happened in that big room in Dallas as 50 or so future ministry leaders took a complex takeout order and transformed it into utter nonsense.

But here’s the thing: I know what I heard, and I’m pretty sure I passed it along, just as I heard it. And I can’t imagine how anyone in this roomful of smart people could have done otherwise. Seriously, this isn’t rocket science.

So, I have a sneaking suspicion that somebody along that line INTENTIONALLY changed the message. Maybe they had been directed to do so in the first place. Maybe they wanted to sow chaos. Maybe they were just looking for a laugh.

I feel like this is the problem I’ve had with the telephone game since kindergarten. It’s not just a communication game; it’s also an exercise in trust.

You’ve got to trust that everyone else in line is striving for something other than chaos or a big laugh. And let’s face it: When the stakes are as low as they are in the telephone game, chaos and laughter might actually be BETTER and MORE PREFERABLE results than precision.

But the lesson of the telephone game is still pertinent, even 56 years after I first played it: Messages become garbled over time and distance and through many retellings. If you want to know what was actually said, you should go back to the source.

There’s a sermon about gossip there, but that’s not what we’ve got on tap this week. This week, we’re going to be talking about church leadership.

And the connection between church leadership and the telephone game is this: Through 2,000 years of church history, traditions have been passed down from one generation to the next.

But each time one generation passes these traditions to the next, the message is tweaked.

It has been degraded by misunderstandings, by carelessness and by those who have sought — if not to sow actual chaos within the church — to promote themselves and their own agendas by promoting unsound leadership doctrines.

This problem has been exacerbated by a Western cultural prejudice in favor of the individual and the democratic ideal.

So, what I want to do today, as we move toward the conclusion of our series, “The Church — Revealed,” is to take us back through 2,000 years of church history to the apostolic church of the first century A.D.

There, I believe we will find we were left with some pretty clear instructions as to how church leadership should be structured and why it should be organized that way.

Remember that we have been studying the Apostle Paul’s letter to his protégé, Titus, during the last part of this series. We will be there again today, along with a couple of stops in his pastoral letters to Timothy and in Luke’s account of the early church in the Book of Acts.

Let’s start in Titus, chapter 1. Paul lays the groundwork for today’s message in the first instructions he gives to Timothy for the order and organization of the church they had planted on the Mediterranean island of Crete.

Picking up in verse 5:

Titus 1:5–11 (ESV)

5 This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you— 6 if anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination.

7 For an overseer, as God’s steward, must be above reproach. He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, 8 but hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined. 9 He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.

10 For there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party. 11 They must be silenced, since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to teach.

Do you see it there? Appoint elders in every town, as I directed you.

Now, it’s important to understand the way the early church met and was organized. Various cities or regions would have had a church planted there.

But in the earliest church plants, there would have been no building large enough to hold all the believers from that city or region at one time. So, smaller groups would meet regularly in the homes of various people.

The church in Crete was one organism, but it came together from week to week in separate homes in each of the cities where there were believers.

And Paul’s instruction to Timothy had been that each of those cities where there was a house church should have elders in place to oversee that house church as God’s steward.

And their job of oversight would at least include being able to teach sound doctrine and to guard the church against false teaching.

In other words, they were in charge of the spiritual health of the church, and as God’s stewards, they would answer to Him for that work.

Now, this concept of elders goes all the way back to the Old Testament, when Moses gave instructions to the elders of Israel — to the heads of the Jewish households in Egypt — about how the first Passover meal was to be celebrated.

Later in the Book of Exodus, we see that Moses picked assistants from among the elders to help him in administering and judging disputes among the people on their way to the Promised Land.

Elders sat in the gate of the towns and cities of Israel to conduct municipal business and to pass judgment when there were disputes between people in their towns.

And one of the requirements for elders during this time tracks well with the requirements Paul set forth for elders in the church: They must be trustworthy.

As we move forward in history into the first century A.D., we see that elders were present in that very first church in Jerusalem that was born on the Day of Pentecost.

In Acts, chapter 11, Luke records that Paul and Barnabas were sent to Judea to deliver famine relief funds to the elders of the church there. In chapter 14, we read that they appointed elders in every church they planted.

In chapter 15, we see that they returned to Jerusalem from Antioch to meet with the apostles and elders regarding the question of whether Gentiles believers must be circumcised.

Again in that chapter, they were welcomed by “the church, the apostles, and the elders” who had gathered to discuss the circumcision question.

And finally, in chapter 20, as Paul prepared to leave Miletus for his last trip to Jerusalem, he called the elders of the church in Ephesus together to encourage them and remind them to be faithful to their calling as the stewards of God’s Church.

So, it’s clear that the office of church elder was part and parcel of the early church in all of its locations. And it’s important to note that in every case where the Bible refers to elders, it does so in the plural and it does so in the masculine.

Each individual manifestation of the church was to have more than one person in the role of elder, and each of those people was to be a man.

But something happened during the next 2,000 years, and what we see today is that biblical eldership in the church has waned, although it is experiencing a recent renewal.

And what I will suggest happened is the telephone game.

The church nearly lost the concept of biblical eldership because of misunderstandings regarding the word “overseer,” because of carelessness in surveying church history for examples of church structure, and because of Western cultural prejudice in favor of the individual and democratic ideals.

Let’s take a look first at the matter of this word “overseer.”

From the passage in Paul’s letter to Titus, it’s clear that the Apostle considered the elder and the overseer to be one and the same.

We can conclude the same thing from his first letter to Titus, where in chapter 3, Paul gives the qualifications for an overseer.

1 Timothy 3:1–7 ESV

1 The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. 2 Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. 4 He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, 5 for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church? 6 He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. 7 Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil.

Now, you’ll note that Paul doesn’t directly mention elders here, although the qualifications he lists for Timothy to look for track very closely with those he gave Titus.

But remember that word “manage” from verse 5 and turn to chapter 5, verse 17.

1 Timothy 5:17 NASB95

17 The elders who rule well are to be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who work hard at preaching and teaching.

The Greek word that’s translated as “rule” in this verse is the same one that’s translated as “manage” in verse 5 of chapter 3. So, it seems very likely that Paul is writing about the same person, that elders and overseers are the same thing.

Luke also seems to have considered them to be the same. Look at what he recorded of Paul’s meeting with the elders of the Ephesian church in verse 17 of the 20th chapter in Acts.

Acts 20:17 NASB95

17 From Miletus he sent to Ephesus and called to him the elders of the church.

The elders come to Paul, and he spends the next several verses encouraging them and telling them goodbye. And then, in verse 28, he gives them a warning.

Acts 20:28 NASB95

28 “Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood.

Here, again, we see that elders and overseers are considered to be synonyms. They are the same people. In fact, this verse reveals that they are shepherds, a duty that’s traditionally held by pastors.

Actually, the word “pastor” never appears in the New Testament, except in the some translations of Ephesians 4:11. Even there, the Greek word means “shepherds.”

What I want you to see here is that elders and overseers and pastors and shepherds are all synonyms in the New Testament, and all these words describe men who have been set apart to shepherd the flock of Jesus, our Good Shepherd.

This is important, because the telephone game came along in the second and third centuries A.D. and introduced the idea of bishops who were over a cluster of individual churches.

The idea was based on a very technical translation of the Greek word “episkopos” that helped give rise to the organization of the Catholic and Episcopal churches, whose priests answer to a bishop.

But that’s not the kind of organization we see in the early church. If anything, the elders in the churches answered to the Apostles, but even the Apostles made it clear they answered ultimately to God.

So, there were misunderstandings based on bad translations. And there were misunderstandings based on the carelessness of not looking back to church history.

It will please some of you who have been here a long time to hear that the earliest churches seem to have been congregational in polity.

In Acts, chapter 6, we see the congregation of the church in Jerusalem acting by and on its own behalf to select deacons.

In chapter 13 of Acts, we see the congregation of the Antioch church gathering corporately to lay hands on Paul and Barnabas and send them away to plant new churches.

And in chapter 15, we see the whole Jerusalem church choosing men to accompany Paul and Barnabas back to Antioch with a letter about the elders’ decision regarding circumcision of Gentiles.

In 1 Corinthians, Paul chastises the whole church in that city for not removing from its fellowship a man who was caught up in flagrant public immorality.

And then, in 2 Corinthians, he charges that whole congregation with accepting that man, who had apparently repented of his sin, back into their fellowship.

This tells us two things: Church discipline is important. And church discipline should be done by the CHURCH.

So, the earliest model of church polity suggests a congregational model of governance led by self-controlled, upright, and holy men who rule or manage the church at least in part by teaching sound doctrine and guarding against those who would contradict it.

But from about the third century A.D., congregationalism disappeared, as the Catholic church spread its doctrine and polity around the world.

Only when the Reformation took place did people begin to notice again what the Bible had to say about this matter. It was the Puritans who re-introduced Congregationalism to England.

And the Puritans, who had suffered much because of their opposition to Catholicism, brought Congregationalism to the New World.

In 1648, Congregationalists in Massachusetts adopted the Cambridge Platform of Church Discipline, considered as late as the mid-19-century to be the “basis and standard of Congregationalism.” [Punchard, A View of Congregationalism, 7-8.]

The Cambridge Platform included a discussion of the offices of the church, as prescribed in Scripture, and it is clear that the early Congregationalists in the New World found only two such offices: elder and deacon.

Elders and the congregation were to share “church power,” and deacons were to be responsible for service.

Congregationalism was the predominate form of church polity in the early history of the American colonies, especially in New England.

But it had waned by the end of the 19th century. And where it remained, it was a shadow of what the Puritans had envisioned.

Biblical eldership was on its way out. There was now a national structure in place to which individual churches were accountable. And the responsibility of church discipline largely had been taken out of the hands of the congregation and put into the hands of pastors or even regional councils.

Many churches, including this one, gave the responsibility of overseeing the church to church councils instead of elders.

So what had happened? The telephone game happened. And this time, the message was mangled by our own cultural prejudices.

We liked democracy as a political institution, and so we decided that it would be a good way to run our churches. And we LOVED the idea of individual autonomy, so we decided we no longer wanted to be submitted to the authority of elders.

Now, I know this is a lot of inside baseball. Actually, I hate baseball, so everything about baseball is inside baseball to me.

But I understand this has been an unusual message and that it’s been full of technical stuff that may seem like unimportant to your everyday life as a Christian.

Why should we care about all the history, for instance? And why does it matter whether the church is governed by an executive board, by a senior pastor, by a bishop, or by elders?

Well, the history might not matter, except to give perspective on how and why things have changed over the years.

But the choices we make about how we structure the church’s leadership SHOULD matter, because they mattered enough to God that He gave us instructions in His Word.

A while back, I asked you all whether it made sense for a Christian to structure his or her life according to God’s Word, and you all agreed that it DOES make sense to do that.

Now, as we look ahead to the next chapter in this church’s long history, I would like to suggest that we consider taking the same approach to how this church will organize itself.

We are not a business. We are not a political organization. The Church is something entirely new and different on the face of the earth.

It was bought with the blood of Jesus, shed on the cross for the forgiveness of sins. It belongs to Him as the body under His head and the Bride promised to Him.

As such, it should be His to organize and administer in the way He sees fit. He knows what’s best for the Church, anyway.

I said this was an unusual message, and it’s unusual in this regard, too: I don’t have a word of application for you or a special encouragement related to the message for the coming week.

What I have is a desire that what you’ve heard today begins a discussion here about church leadership, both in light of what you’ve heard today and in light of what’s been revealed to us all during the past couple of years regarding the old church structures.

I’m not trying to take anything away from anyone, and I want to honor the history of this church and of Congregationalism in general.

But if we’re going to honor church history, then let’s give the greatest honor to where it began — at the cross of Calvary and in the streets of Jerusalem on Pentecost.

We’ve played the telephone game, and as it normally turns out in that game, the message has become all garbled and corrupt, not just here but at churches around the world.

The answer to our problem lies right here in the original message. We have it in our hands. If we don’t get it right, the only reason will be because we chose to ignore it.

Let’s pray.

Now, this being the fourth Sunday of the month, today is Lord’s Supper Sunday. It’s a time for we who have followed Jesus in faith to remember His sacrificial death on our behalf and in our place by partaking of the bread and juice of the grape in the manner He commanded.

Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper in the upper room in Jerusalem, where He ate with His disciples on the night of his arrest, before He was crucified the next day.

He told them to repeat this observance to help them remember what He was about to do for them and for us.

This is a memorial observation. We do this, in part, to help us remember the great price that Jesus paid for our salvation and also to remember that He will return in His resurrected body to take we who have believed in Him home.

In his letter to the church at Corinth, Paul says we do this also to proclaim the good news of salvation.

1 Corinthians 11:26 NASB95

26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.

Our participation in the Lord’s Supper is a portrayal of the message of the gospel — the good news that God Himself came to us in the person of His unique and eternal Son, Jesus.

That He lived a sinless life as a man so we could see what perfect obedience and fellowship with God looks like.

And that He gave Himself as a sacrifice on the cross, taking upon Himself the guilt for OUR sins and bearing the punishment that we deserve for them.

And, finally, that He rose from the dead on the third day, demonstrating His victory over death itself and His ability to keep His promise of eternal life for those who follow Him in faith.

This is what we proclaim to the lost world when we partake in the Lord’s Supper.

But there is also something that we proclaim to ourselves and to one another as believers. We proclaim that we bear the marks of the church.

We proclaim that we are one in Christ, sharing the same savior and sharing the Holy Spirit who has been given to us as a seal of our faith and of God’s promise.

We proclaim that we are holy, set apart for Him and blessed to share in the bread and the juice as symbols of how, as Paul put it, we have been crucified with Christ.

We proclaim that we are part of the universal church, partaking in the same ritual that Christians of all times and all places have always observed.

And we proclaim that we honor the teaching handed down to us from the apostles in God’s holy word.

Now, the conditions during the Last Supper were different than the conditions we have here today, but the significance of their observance was the same as it is today.

While the deacons are distributing the bread and juice, I’m going to ask Andy to play Rock of Ages. After that, we will pray and then eat the bread.

SONG/BREAD

Jesus told His disciples that the bread represented His body, which would be broken for our transgressions.

Let us pray.

Matthew 26:26 NASB95

26 While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is My body.”

As Jesus suffered and died on that cross, his blood poured out with His life. This was always God’s plan to reconcile mankind to Himself.

“In [Jesus] we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us.”

Let us pray.

Matthew 26:27–28 NASB95

27 And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you; 28 for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins.

Take and drink.

“Now, as often as we eat this bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”

Maranatha! Lord, come!

Here at Liberty Spring, we have a tradition following our observance of the Lord’s Supper.

Please gather around in a circle, and let us sing together “Blest Be the Tie that Binds.”