The local church raised me. Don’t get me wrong. I have great parents, but part of what makes them great is that I grew up deeply involved at Hardin Baptist Church. My pastors, Sunday school teachers, youth leaders, and even just the people I saw every Sunday and Wednesday deeply affected my life, and I’ve carried them with me wherever God has called me through the years.
Christ established a church, and the expression of that church in this age is local churches. Christ sent out his apostles to make disciples, that is, to call people to personally commit their lives to following Jesus, but the apostles executed his mission by planting local churches. Either the apostles missed the point, or they understood that the execution of Jesus’ mission required an essential and vital link between the individual disciple and the universal church. That vital and essential link is the local church, which is constituted as an outpost of Christ’s kingdom—both in its concept and in its actual task and structure.
Many churches and many Christians have lost their way when it comes to ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church. When church growth defined our mission as attracting seekers, the local church became mutilated into a platform for entertainers, and the currency of success became customer satisfaction. We are all so acclimated to this version of Christianity at this point that we pursue its means and ends without even noticing how adrift from the Bible we have become.
But what if we began to think about the local church the way that Christ thinks about it? What if we began to love the local church the way that Christ loves it? What if we sought to plant and grow local churches the way that Christ instructed them to be ordered?
The Biblical Case for Christ’s Headship
Over the next several weeks, I hope to share a series of posts examining Christ’s design for local churches, and the best place to start is with the Head. Christ is the Head of the church.
Both Ephesians and Colossians emphasize that Christ is the Head of the church. The Greek term κεφαλή (kephalē), translated “head,” denotes authority.1 Paul writes, “And he is the head of the body, the church” (Col 1:18) and also calls Christ “the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God” (Col 2:19). In Ephesians, Paul cites the headship of Christ as the reason for the headship of the husband in marriage: “For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior” (Eph 5:23; cf. Eph 4:15).
In fact, Christ is not only the Head of the church but is also the Head of all things: “[A]nd you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority” (Col 2:10). While Christ is the Head over all, he is also uniquely the Head of the church because the church recognizes and submits to his authority. Paul compares the authority of Christ over all and over the church, writing, “And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph 1:22–23).
Since he is the ultimate authority in the church, Christ is rightly called “the great shepherd (ποιμένα, poimena; elsewhere translated “pastor”) of the sheep” (Heb 13:20), “the chief Shepherd (ἀρχιποίμενος, archipoimenos)” (1 Pet 5:4), and “the Shepherd (ποιμένα, poimena) and Overseer (ἐπίσκοπον, episkopon) of your souls” (1 Pet 2:25; cf. John 10).
Christ’s headship means he has the authority to remove a church’s lampstand (Rev 2:5), and it is the basis of the church’s mission in the world: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt 28:18). How does Christ exercise this authority? Christ exercises his authority over the church through his word and his Spirit.
Reclaiming Headship in Church History
While most Christians throughout history have recognized Christ as the Head of the church, the Roman Catholic doctrine of the papacy has asserted that the pope is the Vicar of Christ and the earthly head of the church. For this reason, the Reformers and early Baptists explicitly sought to reaffirm the sole authority of Christ. The Second London Baptist Confession (1689) represents the Reformation’s reclamation of Christ’s headship:
The Lord Jesus is the Head of the Church, in whom by the appointment of the Father, all power for the calling, institution, order, or government of the Church, is invested in a supreme and sovereign manner, neither can the Pope of Rome in any sense be the head thereof, but is that Antichrist, that Man of sin, and Son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church against Christ, and all that is called God; whom the Lord shall destroy with the brightness of his coming (26.4).
While not all Protestants today would identify the pope as the Antichrist, we continue to affirm that there is no earthly head of the church and that Christ himself exercises his headship directly through the word and the Spirit.
How We Submit to the Head of the Church
Your local church belongs to Christ. It exists for his glory. It has the duty and joy of obeying Christ, and ultimately, it is accountable to Christ.
Therefore, your church does not belong either to your pastor or to your grandmother. Christ is the one who has purchased it with his own blood (Acts 20:28). It does not exist to boost its membership or its brand. Nor is it a purely democratically governed organization to be directed by the majority or a specific group. Neither can outside ecclesiastic or secular authorities demand the church act contrary to Scripture.
None of this is to say that we shouldn’t try to welcome guests or shouldn’t post to our church’s social media accounts. It’s not to say that the local church should be frozen in a specific historical style of architecture or music or ministry programming.
It is simply to say that your church belongs to Christ and is accountable to Christ. This then is the very basis of the entire discussion of how to order a local church, what we call church polity. We are not free to invent the way that a local church will be led or to redefine the obligations of disciples to Christ’s church. If Christ is the Head, then we should seek to pursue his mission in his way. That way is to plant and grow rightly-ordered local churches.
Wayne Grudem, “The Meaning of Kephalē: A Response to Recent Studies,” in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism, ed. John Piper and Wayne Grudem (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 499–568; “The Meaning of Κεφαλη ( head’): An Evaluation of New Evidence, Real and Alleged,” JETS 44.1 (2001): 25–65.