The CRC is bureaucracy-ridden.

How come?

Well, once upon a time a bureau, or board, or agency, or committee was created to get a job done. Work was projected for an executive and staff; funds were provided by the parent body.

Once in place, who was strong enough to disrupt so cozy an arrangement?

The agency found more and more for itself to do, requiring ever more people to do it, and ever more funds to keep all running smoothly. The Church was persuaded to go along, though this might sometimes require a public relations agent who funnels more and more propaganda with less and less information out into the denomination. The bureau has become, perhaps almost accidentally, a bureaucracy.

Now, what’s wrong with that?

What’s wrong is that giving the Church over to bureaucracy is undoing the work of the Reformation. And if the Reformation was right, as judged by the word of God, then returning to bureaucracy is wrong.

The Reformation was fought to transfer the seat of authority in the Church from the hands of a bureaucratic hierarchy into the hands of the lay eldership elected to office by the membership. This was a momentous transformation. Not because such a transfer was some whim of the Reformers, especially Calvin. Not at all. But because this is the polity, that is the form of church government, established by the Bible.

This is how Reverend Idzerd Van Dellen, whom we have quoted before, puts it as regards one example:

“In process of years our Home Missions were more and more centralized in the Board with headquarters in Grand Rapids, Michigan. True, the local Church still calls the missionaries, but they work under the supervision of the Board and are directed by that body. The calling Church and its consistory functions as a servant of the Board. Even Classis has very little to say in Home Missions matters . . . .

“We believe that this is contrary to our Reformed Church polity. The consistory and Classis lose their place and their right. The present system gives more and more power to a committee of Synod, and has a tendency to create ‘bishops’ or ‘superintendents,’ who are called to supervise their fellow ministers and even consistories and Classes” (p. 98).

This, then, is what is wrong with bureaucracy: it “is contrary to our Reformed Church polity,” that is contrary to the rules and regulations set down by the Lord for the governing of His Body. What this sage student of Reformed Church polity would, were he living, have to say about the web of bureaucracy in which the CRC is now entangled would be interesting and instructive to hear.

Observe carefully what is at issue here. It is not whether you or I happen to like bureaucracy, though in fact I don’t.

The issue is not, either, whether you or I care for bureaucrats, though many tend to be dubious about them.

The issue as suggested by Van Dellen is this, and it is very important: May we believe, on the basis of the Word and our tradition that bureaucracy is the Lord’s way of wanting His Body’s work done in the world? That is, does the Bible teach that through bureaucrats runs the route the Lord chooses to build His Church and mold history? Or, again, among the offices instituted by the Lord in the Church is there also the office of bureaucrat?

Student that he was of Reformed Church order, Reverend Van Dellen obviously did not think so. Not as his own view, but as the teaching of Scripture.

I suppose we might say that if the Lord wanted to work by way of bureaucracy, then He would not have brought a Reformation into the Church.

At the time of the Reformation the Roman Catholic Church was, as it still is, one massive bureaucracy. The bureaucrats held all the power; the people paid all the bills. And anyone who dared to question that arrangement stood a good chance of cooking at the stake. But the Body of Christ languished in the world, to become a powerful instrument of justice and progress only through Reformation, that is through being re-formed according to God’s Word.

And, in terms of Church government, what re-formation was made?

In this re-formation, one of the most important in Western history, the power of bureaucracy was destroyed, and government in the Church came into the hands of those designated by the Lord to exercise it, namely the eldership elected to consistories in local congregations. Thus the Church not only entered upon a new era of strength and vitality, but set the pattern for the freedom that brought immense political and material progress.

It is the Reformed tradition which more than any other transferred the seat of authority in the Church from a bureaucracy to the people. That is a heritage jealously to be preserved. It was the famo us Consistory of Geneva which became a model for both ecclesiastical and political structures in the Western world. That is a model which the world still needs.

Reformed polity perceives the unifying stream of divinely ordained authority as entering the Church, so to say, from the bottom up, not by way of bureaucracy operating from the top down. The point is important: authority rightly exercised is a unifying force. Abused by bureaucracy, authority is stripped by the Lord of its unifying power. Illustration of this is all about us.

What, then, was precisely the Church government issue fought out to displace bureaucracy? At issue was—and still is—how the Lord chooses to rule His Church.

The Lord wills to rule His Church, Calvin was fond of saying, with the scepter of His Word. That scepter invalidates Catholic polity because the Word in no way endorses bureaucracy as the appointed means for getting the Church’s work done. There is no office of bureaucrat designated by the Word.

Rather the Word points to the consistory, the body of the ruling eldership, as the divinely designated seat of the Lord’s authority in His Church.

That is not an idle or theoretical principle.

In the consistory of the local congregation, as composed of the ruling eldership elected to office by the membership , the Lord lodges both the authority and the responsibility—they are correlative—for all that the Church does in Christ’s name, and thus with anticipation of His blessing.

Precisely, then, what did the Reformation, especially the Calvinist wing of the Reformation, effect in Church polity?

Just this: the lay consistory, elected by each congregation, is required to assume full responsibility for what the Church says and does, and is given authority commensurate with that awesome obligation.

This principle invalidates bureaucracy.

Why?

Because whatever is done by the Church must be done under the jurisdiction of the local consistory. What avoids or evades such scrutiny and supervision, as bureaucracy does, cannot be the doing of the Church.

This is a principle that Rome understands right well, however misapplied by the Catholic bureaucracy. What is done by the Roman Catholic Church is done by authority and under the supervision of the hierarchy—else it is not ecclesiastical. All authority, and thus all responsibility, belongs finally with the Pope, who expressly thinks of himself as “Christ’s vicar” (Christ as present) in history.

The Reformation retained the principle, but took from the Bible a very different content.

In Reformed polity what is done by the Church, as Church, must be done by authority and under the supervision of the local consistory. Else ‘tis not done by the Church of Jesus Christ.

This, of course, is what Reverend Van Dellen means when he warns that Boards operating outside the scope of consistorial supervision violate Reformed polity. Bureaucracy seeks support as if it were the Church in action while declining the consistorial supervision which alone validates such a claim.

Itfollows that bureaucracies may be very busy, and may spend lots of money, even throw considerable weight around, but the more they evade consistorial jurisdiction the less they act as the Church! This was at issue in the Reformation.

This is what is fundamentally wrong with bureaucracy. And there is more.

In a time of bureaucracy it is easily forgotten that there are two kinds of authority, original and delegated authority. The distinction is decisive.

Each local consistory is endowed by our Lord with original, or inherent, authority. The consistory is the seat of the authority in the Church, as the Reformation understands the Bible, just as the Pope is the seat of authority in the Roman Catholic Church as that bureaucracy understands tradition.

Both Catholic and Reformed polity perceive that divinely given authority is inalienable. This underlies Van Dellen’s criticism of a grasping for power by a denominational board.

What does “inalienable” mean?

Quite simply, it means that what God has given, no one can either give or take away. What God joins let none sunder. God will frustrate those who try, and that is why bureaucracy sows confusion in the Church.

Recall for a moment that the American Declaration of Independence speaks of God’s endowing men with “inalienable rights.” What were those learned men thinking of?

They meant two things, really. What God gives, 1) the recipient cannot give away; and 2) another cannot take away. An effort to do either can only counterfeit the gift and surely encounters divine displeasure.

So it is, as Reformed polity understands the Bible, with the authority lodged by the Lord in the local consistory. It cannot be given away; it may not be usurped. None may presume to act with consistorial authority.

   

Consistories may, indeed, shortchange the Lord. They may abdicate responsibility for what is done in the name of the Church—and into such vacuums bureaucracies make their way. A consistory may be tricked or threatened into yielding a spurious authority to other bodies. But nothing changes the essence of the polity reaffirmed by the Reformation: Christ works through the local consistory in exercising His authority in the Church. I need hardly remind you though I am fond of recalling it—that so long as this view governed ecclesiastical behavior, the Reformed churches were powerful forces in the world.

Bureaucracy has its own way of avoiding an accounting to local consistories. It turns to the “higher” bodies as easier to manipulate.

So we must ask, briefly, what then of the authority alloted to so-called “higher” (the term should always be “broader”—the highest body in the Church is, obviously, the local consistory) bodies, like classes and synods?

Classes and synods have no original authority. This is illustrated by the fact that classes and synods come and go.

Theirs is but a “delegated” authority usually spelled out in the Church Order. That is, consistories may delegate specifically limited powers to broader bodies, such as classes and synods, but cannot give away original authority. This means that consistories cannot devolve upon classes or synods, and these may not try to exercise, the right to command consistorial obedience. Consistories may not, as Van Dellen implies, be made the tools of other interests, neither classical, nor synodical, nor bureaucratic. It is important to remember this as bureaucracy makes increasing use of broader bodies to try to mandate quota and other demands upon local churches.

Bear in mind, then, whenever bureaucracy is discussed, the mistake of thinking of classes or synods as “higher” bodies. They are bodies of limited authority, delegated to them by local consistories for specific purposes. Classes and synods are by design, as noted just above, bodies of limited duration. Each classis or synod is a new classis or synod, a system intended to prevent the creation of a ruling hierarchy. And when, incidentally, we try to build some kind of bridge between synods by the creation of a synodical interim committee we do obvious bureaucratic violence to our own polity and tradition. Just as when the structure of a forthcoming synod is manipulated by unelected persons, or influenced by unelected advisors.

As Reverend Van Dellen implies, original authority cannot take two or more forms in the same community, lest there be inevitable confusion. And if the Reformation was sure of anything in this matter of church polity, it was sure that God is not a God who promotes, or endures, confusion.

But over the centuries prior to the Reformation an elitist priesthood usurped the elders’ guardianship so effectively that it required a Reformation to get at least some of the bureaucracy off some of the people’s backs:

We have come in the CRC to where we, too, must move ahead to a similar re-formation. How we might at least try to do so will occupy us next time.

Happily we have the historical Reformation in OH · genes, and the future open before us.

Lester DeKoster, a former Calvin College professor and editor of The Banner, lives at Grand Rapids, Michigan.