Just as the priests of ancient Israel regulated membership in the people of God and their ability to approach the temple through sacrifices, so the whole congregation, together with its pastors, acts as priests and temple. We exercise our priestly function by teaching God’s word and by guarding the membership through the ordinances.

What Kind of Authority Is Church Authority?

Christians have long said the church’s authority is declarative, by which they mean to distinguish it from the state’s authority, which is coercive. That’s true so far as it goes, but what kind of declaration is it? There are many kinds of declarations: romantic declarations; friendship declarations; the declaration of the Olympic official who says every four years, “Let the games begin”; a pastor’s declaration when he says, “I now pronounce you man and wife”; or a judge’s declaration when he says, “Not guilty.” The church’s declaration is most like the last two examples. It accomplishes something public and legal, though “legal” from the perspective of Christ’s kingdom.

Think about a judge’s declaration when saying “guilty” or “not guilty.” The declaration doesn’t actually make the law what the law is. Nor does it make the person actually innocent or guilty. But the judge’s declaration functions on behalf of the legal system to render a particular interpretation of the law as the binding interpretation, and it functions on behalf of the legal system to render a person innocent or guilty. Once the gavel hits the desk, the courtroom bailiff will either let the defendant go free or escort the defendant to a jail cell. Publicly, the judge’s declaration accomplishes something. It binds or looses the defendant on behalf of the legal system.

So with the congregation’s use of the keys. It represents a church’s way of publicly saying, “This is the gospel we believe in,” and “These are the people we recognize as gospel believers and citizens of the kingdom of heaven.” If a judge speaks on behalf of a nation’s legal system, the church speaks on behalf of another legal system—the kingdom of heaven.

In that sense there’s a difference between you sharing the gospel with your next-door neighbor, and the preacher sharing the gospel from the pulpit on Sunday, even if he uses the exact same words. Both of you are speaking with the authority of the Bible. But when he speaks the gospel on behalf of the church, he’s also speaking with the authority of the church. It’s how the church says, “This is the gospel we believe in and that binds us together as a congregation.”

Why Church Authority?

Christians today tend to give little attention to the idea of church authority, just like we give little attention to church membership and discipline. Many churches don’t practice these things. After all, can they really be that important?

(1) Church authority is important because it tells us who and what on planet Earth represents King Jesus and his kingdom. It shows us where to go to start looking for God’s new creation.

Think about it. With the nation of ancient Israel, you could recognize the nation in all the typical ways you might recognize a nation and its citizens: a land, a king, an army, and all that. Yet these people disobeyed God, and so God said he would remake them as a new Israel by forgiving their sins and by placing his Spirit within them so that they wanted to obey God’s law. Christ then came and united that new Israel to himself by the new covenant in his blood.

The trouble is, the work of forgiveness and God’s Holy Spirit is invisible. How do we know who belongs to this new heavenly kingdom? Do I belong? Do you belong? Do we or our non-Christian neighbors recognize us as belonging?

Answering those questions is why church authority exists. Church authority is necessary for making the invisible universal church visible and local. It’s necessary for saying who on earth represents King Jesus. Someone has to say, “Yes, this is one of the members,” and “That right there is the doctrine we believe in.”

As I said a moment ago, different denominations recognize different people as possessing the authority to do that. Some say the pastors or elders; some the presbytery; some the bishop; and some, like me, the whole congregation. But the point is, every denomination agrees that somebody has to exercise this declarative authority. Somebody holds the keys, even if we disagree on who.

(2) Church authority creates the local church. Really, this is another way of making the last point, but it’s worth highlighting on its own. Protestant churches are formed in two steps:

• Step 1: someone preaches the gospel so that people hear, repent, and are saved.
• Step 2: those Christians then organize by coming together and declaring themselves a church through baptism and the Lord’s Supper. They “gather” and “agree” with one another, two ingredients that Jesus says are essential to making a church a church (Matt. 18:19–20). For several centuries, many Christians have called this agreement a church covenant.

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