Separation of Powers in a Local Church

This week, the Christian Century published an editorial by UCC pastor Liz Goodman speculating on the relationship between the unilateral authority that many evangelical pastors have within their own congregations and the authoritarian tendencies in our current American president. Evangelicals, she suggests, have been too willing to assign enormous power to one man, in both church and country.

By contrast, mainline Protestants have not, she argues. “In a mainline church, the pastor tends to have much less unilateral power,” Goodman says. “In my denomination, the United Church of Christ, and in my two congregations, which are both of the New England Congregational tradition, whatever power I have on any given day is conferred to me by the consent of the congregation. Whether it’s the hymn choices, the color of the carpeting, or the allocation of my time, I exercise my judgment in conversation with congregants each and all. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. Frustrating as it is sometimes, this separation of powers is always a good idea.”

Is Goodman right in saying that acceptance of unilateral pastoral authority is a feature of evangelicalism – and that mainline Protestants are virtually alone in resisting it? And furthermore, is this one of the sources of the political authoritarianism that is threatening our country? In short, is evangelicalism guilty as charged?

I had already been thinking about this matter for some time before reading Goodman’s article, so I was intrigued by her argument. Like Goodman, I believe that separation of powers in both government and church is a good thing. Indeed, I think it’s rooted in a Christian understanding of the pervasiveness of original sin. When we understand that sin is a deeply rooted, pervasive, internal problem for each one of us, we’ll realize that none of us can be trusted with sole authority, as much as we might crave it.

That’s not a lesson that has been personally easy for me to learn, because I am strongly tempted by the lure of sole (or final) decision-making power, and I can therefore easily understand why others are as well. But unilateral decision-making power without any checks and balances is dangerous – and it inevitably leads to authoritarianism and all of the problems that go with it.

And yet many churches that subscribe to the doctrine of original sin have seemingly been all too ready to hand over the reins of power to single individuals (that is, senior pastors), even though the instances of pastoral abuse of power and breaches of trust have been so numerous that they have almost become the norm rather than the exception.

So, there’s a lot of truth in Goodman’s argument. But I don’t think that this is a simple cause-and-effect relationship, as though evangelicalism was inherently inclined to defer to pastoral authority, whereas mainline Protestants were inherently inclined to insist on separation of powers in church governance. Evangelicalism could have taken a different course – and arguably did, in some places.

Theoretically, one might expect a suspicion of pastoral authority and a concomitant adherence to democratic governance to arise from the radical egalitarianism of historic evangelicalism. After all, the idea of the universal priesthood of the believer, the suspicion of established clerical traditions, the emphasis on salvation through a personal conversion that is unmediated through church or sacrament, and the doctrine of the perspicuity of scripture (combined with an expectation for each person to study the Bible for themselves) should not naturally lead to a strong emphasis on pastoral authority, one might think.

And indeed, a populist egalitarian suspicion of ecclesiastical leadership may have once been pervasive among some American evangelical (or evangelical adjacent) Protestant groups of the early nineteenth century, including Baptists, Quakers, and Disciples of Christ.

But it seems that a purely democratic form of governance cannot survive for long without structural procedures that sustain it. Unless there was a church constitution limiting a pastor’s authority – and unless there were strong members willing to uphold those norms – churches that theoretically were committed to a model of congregational governance easily ceded authority to a dynamic pastor, until finally that became the expected model, even though it was not historically rooted in the low-church evangelical tradition.

In general, evangelicals (with the exception of those in a minority wing of conservative Reformed evangelicalism) have been less committed to process, perhaps because of their emphasis on the leading of the Holy Spirit or perhaps because of a variety of other factors. Evangelicals have often prized results over procedure – whereas mainline denominations like the UCC have been willing to prioritize procedure, even at the expense of results. One of the two UCC congregations that Goodman pastors posts its church bylaws (as well as its annual reports) prominently on its publicly accessible website. How many evangelical churches do the same?

But there are also a few other factors that may explain why the UCC is more committed to separation of powers than most evangelical churches are. In general, mainline congregations – and especially New England congregations in the UCC – are much older than nearly any evangelical church. In a new church plant, it’s easy for a pastor to exercise unchecked authority. That’s much harder to do in a congregation that was established decades (or even centuries) before the pastor arrived.

One of the two UCC congregations that Goodman pastors in western Massachusetts was founded in 1769 and worships in a meetinghouse that was built in 1805. Many of the members of the congregation have probably been there for their entire lives. They were baptized in that church, as were their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. As a result, they may have a sense of ownership over the congregation that will tend to rein in the authority of a pastor.

Mainline denominations like the UCC also attract a more educated membership than the typical evangelical congregation – and educated members may be more likely to see the pastor as a peer than as a shepherd to whose leadership they must constantly defer.

But finally, I think that regional traditions play a part. New England Protestants have historically been more committed to democratic governance – and more suspicious of church hierarchy – than Christians in other areas of the country have been. The seventeenth-century New England Congregationalists insisted on congregational governance – not rule by bishops or even the Scottish-style rule by elders – as the only acceptable means of church government. They were radically anti-Catholic partly because of their deep suspicion of papal authority.

And because of this anti-authoritarian impulse, they were constantly fighting amongst themselves over how far to take this democratic egalitarianism. The political and ecclesiastical authorities in seventeenth-century Massachusetts moved swiftly to crush Anne Hutchison’s antinomianism, as well as the challenges posed by Quakers who believed in an inner light, but the fact that those challenges existed at all showed how difficult it was for Puritans who objected to episcopal authority and who believed in the perspicuity of scripture to contain the more radically egalitarian, democratic impulses that they had unleashed.

I think that it’s not a coincidence that most of the denominational offshoots of New England Congregationalism retained the Congregationalists’ emphasis on democratic congregational governance even as they rejected other aspects of Congregationalist doctrine. The early nineteenth-century New England Unitarians who left Trinitarian Congregationalism may have rejected the Congregationalists’ Calvinist doctrinal orthodoxy, but they retained the congregationalist mode of church governance. The early nineteenth-century New England Baptists who converted from Congregationalism likewise rejected some of the Congregationalists’ doctrinal beliefs – especially when it came to baptism – but, like the Unitarians, they retained the Congregationalists’ emphasis on a model of congregational governance for their churches.

For many years, New England Protestants, whether evangelical or not, were unusually likely to believe in congregational governance and to be suspicious of clerical hierarchy or pastoral control. No pastor, no matter how renowned, was immune from a congregation’s authority. When Jonathan Edwards’s sermons offended his congregation in Northampton, Massachusetts, the church members fired him. That could not have happened in many other parts of the English-speaking Protestant world in 1750, but it could (and did) occur in Massachusetts, because there the congregation, not the pastor, was ultimately in control.

Congregational governance, of course, is not the only way to limit a pastor’s authority or insist on separation of powers. I would argue that a presbyterian system of church governance, when properly followed by a strong board of elders, can be even more effective than a congregational governance structure in maintaining a separation of powers. And one can make the case that it’s also more biblical – although to be fair, Christians have been able to make biblical cases for each of the various models of church governance that have been proposed, from episcopal to congregational. But in any case, there are elder-governed evangelical churches that arguably limit the authority of the pastor in the way that Goodman advocated.

And one can even find an occasional congregationally governed evangelical church that is committed to limiting pastoral authority. While rare, I think that when all of the elements that I’ve listed are present – that is, a commitment to procedure in a historic church, where a high percentage of the congregation is college-educated, and where members are committed to the New England regional tradition of congregational governance – one would expect an evangelical congregation to be just as likely to limit a pastor’s authority as a liberal mainline church would. In fact, I don’t have to speculate about this. I can cite a real-world example of this phenomenon: Park Street Church in Boston.

Park Street Church was established in 1809, and it meets in a historic, high-steepled, nineteenth-century building overlooking the Boston Commons. To the right of the church, only a few yards away, is an eighteenth-century cemetery that includes the graves of Declaration signers Samuel Adams and John Hancock.

Most 200-year-old Congregational churches in Boston adopted liberal theology and either joined the UCC or became Unitarian, but Park Street remained fiercely evangelical. In the mid-20^th century, Harold J. Ockenga, the first president of the National Association of Evangelicals and a founder of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, served as the church’s pastor. Billy Graham spoke from the church at his first crusade in Boston in 1950. Today the church proclaims a Reformed evangelical version of the gospel that is closely parallel to what one might hear in a northern urban PCA church such as Tenth Presbyterian in Philadelphia or Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City.

In its soteriology and view of scripture, Park Street is impeccably evangelical, but its defense of congregational governance and the separation of powers may be as strong as one might find in any theologically liberal UCC church. Its commitment to congregational governance was one of its historic cardinal statements of faith.

But as Christianity Today reported, in 2023-2024, Park Street Church experienced significant conflict with their recently hired pastor over church governance. Some of the members of the church charged that the pastor, who had been originally been ordained in the more hierarchical Anglican Church in North America, didn’t understand what Park Street’s historic covenantal commitment to congregational governance really meant in practice – and they accused him of ramrodding decisions through committees instead of allowing the congregation to express its opinion. One of the staff brought charges against the pastor that led to a congregational vote of confidence.

“The conflict raised questions about checks and balances and the durability of congregationalism amid escalating disagreements about leadership,” Christianity Today reported. “Critics proposed a set of amendments to the bylaws that they said would add much-needed limits on church leaders’ power and nominated an alternative slate of elder candidates.”

Two-thirds of the congregation voted to affirm the minister, so he was allowed to stay – but he told the congregation that he had learned his lesson. When the congregation pushed back against the pastor’s effort to cancel the Sunday afternoon service, the service was reinstated.

“While really difficult, allowing space in the meeting for both sides to be heard was an important step in resolving conflict and moving forward as a congregation united in our love for Jesus,” one member declared.

Though Park Street’s commitment to congregational shared decision-making was tested in the crisis, some were hopeful that the procedures of checks and balances that had meant so much to the congregation would continue. As one lay leader at Park Street said, they were attracted to the church because it was “not authoritarian. Not top-down. But something where we were a church family—the people help with the decision-making process and have more ownership.”

Park Street Church’s struggle to maintain its tradition of congregation-led checks and balances to limit a senior minister’s authority demonstrates the difficulty of upholding these principles in a contemporary evangelical culture of pastoral control. But it also demonstrates that the tradition remains alive – and that it can continue to be a part of evangelicalism. It demonstrates that if there is a general culture in modern evangelicalism of pastoral unilateral decision-making, that culture is not a necessary or intrinsic part of evangelicalism itself. It is possible to recover a different (and arguably more historic) model. One doesn’t have to go to the liberal mainline to do so.

But it’s not easy. Goodman was probably right in observing that in general, evangelical churches have ceded significant amounts of decision-making power to pastors and have failed to maintain the checks and balances that are necessary to maintain healthy limits on pastoral authority. She may have been right that this has implications for our national politics as well as our churches. If that’s the case, maybe we need to rethink the evangelical view of pastoral authority that has now become the default – and maybe we need to recover a different historic evangelical model of checks and balances in our churches.