Religious Roles & Titles
Elder
Also Known As Presbyter · Ruling elder · Presbyter; Ruling elder
Christianity Roles
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Origin 1541
In Presbyterian polity the elder is the governing office of the church, and the whole system takes its name from it. Elders are elected by the congregation and ordained, and they sit as a session or consistory that governs the local church, with higher courts of elders above it. The tradition distinguishes teaching elders, who preach and are what other churches call ministers, from ruling elders, who do not preach but hold equal vote. The consequence is that a Presbyterian minister is outvoted by the elders of his own congregation as a matter of ordinary constitutional order.
Elder is also the term for the local lay leadership in many Baptist, Brethren and independent evangelical churches, where the plural eldership is often set against the single-pastor model on the argument that the New Testament knows no solitary church leader. In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the word means something different again: an office of the Melchizedek priesthood held by most adult men, and the standard title of a young male missionary.
Facts
Attributions
TraditionReformed and Presbyterian Christianity 1 Origins
Origin Period Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 1 Learn More
The Office the Whole System Is Named For
In Presbyterian churches the elder is the governing office, and the entire system of church government takes its name from it.
Government by elders
The word presbyterian derives from the elder, the presbyter, and it describes a church governed not by bishops nor by the congregation as a whole but by elders, who are elected by the members and who together form the councils that rule the church at each level. Two kinds are distinguished: the teaching elder, the ordained minister who preaches and administers the sacraments, and the ruling elders, elected from among the members to share in the government, teaching and discipline of the congregation, so that oversight is collegial rather than vested in one person.
Elected and ordained
A ruling elder enters the office by election by the congregation followed by ordination to it, and holds a genuine share in the spiritual government of the church, sitting in the session that governs the local congregation and being sent to the higher assemblies. This diffusion of authority among elected elders is the Reformed answer to the concentration of authority in the episcopal office, and it embodies a conviction that the government of the church should be shared and representative. The office looks back to the elders of the New Testament church, and it is the structural heart of the Presbyterian and Reformed tradition.
An Office Older Than the Church That Is Named for It
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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Reformed polity ordains both teaching elders, who preach and administer the sacraments, and ruling elders, who share in church government without preaching, per Calvin's Institutes, Book IV, Chapter III.
Element Of
The eldership is one of the offices the Reformed churches recovered from the New Testament, and its exercise in a consistory is the ordinary government of a Reformed congregation.
The kirk session of elders governs the congregation, and elders are ordained for life.
Each congregation is governed by a plurality of elders, and there is no authority above the congregation.
The ruling elder is the governing office of the Presbyterian church, and the whole system of session, presbytery and assembly is built from elders sitting together.
Held Differently
An elder in Latter-day Saint usage is an office in the Melchizedek priesthood held by men from the age of eighteen, and the title by which missionaries are addressed. It has nothing to do with age or with governing a congregation.
Instances
How this title is used in Presbyterian and Reformed churches.
Sources
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