The word elder translates a term already used for the leadership of the Jewish synagogue before Christianity existed, and the earliest Christian communities, organised in continuity with synagogue practice, appointed elders of their own almost from the beginning; the term appears repeatedly in Acts and the pastoral letters for the leaders of local congregations, often without a sharp distinction yet drawn from the overlapping word for bishop.
The Reformed tradition's use of elder as a lay governing office, distinct from and equal in council to the ordained teaching elder, is a sixteenth century innovation rather than a straightforward recovery of the New Testament pattern, developed by Calvin in Geneva and given its fullest institutional form in Scotland, whose General Assembly of elected elders and ministers became the model exported wherever Scottish Presbyterianism travelled, to Ulster, to North America, and from there to mission churches across Africa and Asia.
That export has meant the office is now exercised in cultural settings far removed from sixteenth century Geneva, while retaining the same basic constitutional shape, a session of elected elders governing the local congregation and delegates from those sessions constituting the higher courts of the church, a structure some independent and Baptist congregations have separately adopted, by conviction rather than denominational inheritance, under the banner of a plurality of elders.