Presbyterian Polity

John Calvin worked out the presbyterian pattern in practice in Geneva in the 1540s and 1550s, reading the New Testament's references to a plurality of elders governing each congregation as a description of the church's intended government rather than an incidental first-century arrangement. The city's Consistory paired ministers with lay elders in shared oversight of doctrine and discipline, a model that traveled with the students who passed through Calvin's Geneva and carried it home across Reformed Europe.

John Knox studied there and brought the pattern to Scotland, where he and five fellow ministers presented the First Book of Discipline to the Scottish Parliament in 1560, setting out courts of elders as the government of a reformed national church rather than the rule of bishops the old church had known. The system was contested for over a century afterward, alternating with periods of enforced episcopacy under the Stuart kings, until the Church of Scotland's presbyterian government was permanently secured after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and 1689.

The Westminster Assembly, convened in London through the 1640s with substantial Scottish participation, gave the system its most influential confessional statement, the Westminster Confession of Faith and its companion catechisms, which Presbyterian churches worldwide still hold as their doctrinal standard alongside Scripture.

Presbyterian government runs through a series of courts, each made up of elders rather than a single office-holder. The session governs one congregation, consisting of its minister, called the teaching elder, sitting together with a number of ruling elders elected by the congregation; the session admits and disciplines members and directs the congregation's worship and affairs. Congregations within a region send ministers and ruling elders to a presbytery, which ordains and installs ministers, hears appeals from a session's decisions, and holds real authority over matters a purely congregational church would keep local. Presbyteries in turn send commissioners to a synod, and above that to a general assembly, the church's highest court, which interprets the constitution and sets denomination-wide policy.

The design is meant to sit between two alternatives Presbyterians reject: episcopacy, where a single bishop holds authority a congregation cannot appeal past, and pure congregationalism, where no outside body can correct a local church that has gone astray. A presbytery can discipline an erring minister or overrule a session in a way a congregationalist association cannot, while no single elder, minister or bishop in the system holds authority alone, since every court decides by the vote of elders meeting together.

This graded structure is what the tradition's name itself preserves, from the Greek presbyteros, elder, the office the whole system is built around.