Team leadership of a church has some utterly unique dynamics. In this chapter, we will explore how a group of elders leads the church together. We will think about how the team operates, consider the relationship between the elders and the pastor or pastors, and observe the distinct differences between a shepherd- leader model and a corporate- governance model of leadership. Our aim will be to map an overall framework for understanding team leadership of the local church.
 
The Elder-Led Church: How an Eldership Team Shepherds a Healthy Flock by Murray Capill
A well-known proverb of unknown origin declares: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
In many ways, that proverb sums up church leadership. There are plenty of churches with a sole leader who is able to go quickly. He is free to make the big decisions, set the agenda, cast his vision, and inspire the crowds. Next to such an innovative, agile, charismatic leadership style, other churches look clunky and the wheels seem to turn so slowly. But the saying suggests a limitation to leading alone. You might be able to go fast, but it is better to go far.
Decision-making will be slower when a church is led by a body of elders, but it will benefit from the wisdom of many. Plural leadership provides a range of checks and balances to help avoid folly and rein in the potential for a sole leader to amass more influence than he can handle. The track record of high-profile, celebrity evangelical pastors who have had insufficient accountability is a sober warning to us all.
Many books on leadership largely assume a sole-leadership model and imply that the pastor is the main leader of the church. The elders might be some kind of accountability body, but they are not really the leaders of the church. But the Bible simply does not know a model of sole leadership in the local church. We saw in the Bible’s narrative that the elders are a body or council of men who are respected senior members of the community of God’s people, giving wise counsel and direction to the people, speaking for them, and bearing responsibility for their spiritual well-being. Together they are shepherds, overseers, leaders, and stewards. Their specific ministry, as a body, is the ministry of providing clear leadership.
Leading as a Team
As we saw in chapter 2, leadership is about taking people on a journey. Leaders have a clear sense of what God wants, they make plans for how to move toward that end, and they lovingly and clearly help people go there. They know that the goal is maturity in Christ, and they work out what is needed to help move the church community toward that goal. It involves setting direction, planning, decision-making, resourcing, training and equipping, and supporting people all the way. This ministry of leadership is essential to church health. It is this kind of leadership that clears the fog and provides clarity.
Providing such leadership is demanding, which is precisely why it is such a blessing that the responsibility never rests on the shoulders of just one person. The ministry of leadership is a team ministry. But how does plural leadership actually work? How does a group lead a church?
When my sons were young, I spent Saturday mornings watching them play junior soccer. At five and six years old, most of the boys had no idea about positional play. They moved as a mob to wherever the ball was. Some were out in the front, quickly moving onto the ball. Others held back on the edges, secretly hoping that the ball didn’t come anywhere near them. Only in time did they learn that there is great merit in spreading out across the field, with forwards and backs, wings and centers. That would allow them to play to their strengths, develop a game plan, and save a lot of energy, since they wouldn’t all have to be everywhere all the time.
Some eldership teams operate like junior boys’ soccer teams. Each elder is basically expected to do the same thing as all the others: the same number of pastoral visits, the same up- front roles, the same time investment. But their overall game will be far better if they learn some positional play, both when they meet together and when they engage in church life.
When meeting together, the elders gather as a group of men with leadership capacity. As they discuss an issue, different voices come into play. One has an enormous heart of care and compassion for people, and though they all have a pastor’s heart, this man understands people and human needs in a unique way. Another has a sharply strategic mind. Another is a detail person, while someone else is a Bible giant. Of course, they all know their Bibles well, but this person brings greater scriptural perspective to bear than the others. Part of the dynamic of team leadership is learning to benefit from the varying perspectives of different people.
As they move from meeting together to ministering in the body, they again do so while recognizing their distinct giftings. Those who are gifted public speakers are called on to speak from the front of the church, while elders with greater people skills are drawn into more complicated pastoral situations. Some have more time to engage in ministry, while the young father with small children at home is encouraged not to overcommit. One might make very few pastoral visits because he is heavily involved with the youth ministry. Another, who really is a born leader, is asked to step back from the care ministry he greatly enjoys in order to develop some specific plans for growing an area of ministry.
For an eldership team to operate like this, the elders need to spend honest and vulnerable time getting to know one another. I am proposing not painful team-building games but conversations about their passions, gifts, dreams, fears, sweet spots, and nightmares. They will need to encourage one another, pointing out strengths that someone doesn’t see in himself. They will also need to gently suggest that someone is not best suited to a particular role, even though he would love to have it. This is simply Paul’s teaching on spiritual gifts in the body applied to the body of elders. Are all ears? Are all hands? Absolutely not. But all need one another.
This sharing of the leadership load is one of the great benefits of team leadership. Just as Moses complained that the burden of leading God’s people was too great (Num. 11:11–15), so a sole pastor, while far from being in the position of mediator for all of God’s people, will often be overwhelmed by the weight of expectation, the burden of difficulties, and the ceaseless demands of care. The Lord raised up seventy Spirit- filled elders to assist Moses, and today, he has raised up godly men in every church to share the leadership load. The pastor will feel great relief when he can talk over every problem with other wise men, no major decision ever resting solely on him, and care for the flock a shared responsibility.
Not only does team leadership provide essential support, it also reins in individual pride and arrogance. No one person can call the shots. Any idea must have enough merit to win the approval of the team as a whole. Pastors have built-in accountability, and team members must listen to voices other than their own, consider ideas that they would never have come up with themselves, and defer to the group as a whole when personally they would have made a different choice.
The Team Captain
Eventually a junior boys’ soccer team discovers the importance of having a captain. You can’t have all eleven boys on the team calling the shots on the field. Someone has to take charge. In the context of eldership, this means that although leadership is given by the team, the team needs a leader.
It is common to speak of the leader as “first among equals” or, in a famous Latin phrase, primus inter pares. The leader is not more important than the others and his vote is not worth more, but it is recognized that he is a leader of leaders. “Although elders act jointly as a council and share equal authority and responsibility for the leadership of the church, all are not equal in their giftedness, biblical knowledge, leadership ability, experience, or dedication.”1 Dave Harvey notes that if there is no appointed leader, someone will inevitably emerge as the leader, and the risk is that it may be the person with the loudest voice rather than the greatest wisdom.2
Arguably, Peter was “first among equals” in the apostolic team. He was the spokesman who was often the first to speak and most readily up front.3 Similarly, Paul was clearly a leader among leaders. While we must be careful in drawing lessons from an apostle such as Paul, it seems sound to at least observe that not all New Testament church leaders had the same roles. Paul clearly oversaw other leaders such as Timothy and Titus, and they evidently had prominent leadership roles in churches that had several elders.4 He was also frequently the leader when he and Barnabas were on mission together. Alexander Strauch adds other examples, including Peter, James, and John, who are called “pillars” of the church (Gal. 2:9).5
In the local-church context, a full- time pastor or senior pastor will typically act as the eldership team captain. As a full- time worker, and in many churches the only full- timer, he has his eye on the game more constantly. As the preacher, he has the greatest amount of up- front leadership time in the life of the church. As the elder who has usually had the advantage of more extensive theological training, he is well placed to bring theological discernment and perspective to leadership issues. The pastor or senior pastor is most naturally positioned to be the team captain. So as Harvey observes, “Though the authority for the church inheres in the entire eldership, a wise elder team will look for one among them with humble character, leadership gifts, and public ministry skills to fulfill the role of senior pastor.”6
While it is most common for the pastor or senior pastor to take up this role, it is plausible that an elder other than the pastor is best suited to be the team captain. Some who are gifted to teach and preach, and are therefore supported by the church to do so full time, may not be the most naturally gifted leaders on the team. There may be others on the eldership team who more readily think strategically, foresee what lies ahead, take a lead in making plans or setting direction, or have greater skills in leading a team. The eldership team will need to engage in an honest conversation about who should be the captain. This does not mean who will chair their meetings; that is another role again, although the two can go well together. Nor is it about who has the best ideas. There may be several elders who are capable of thinking strategically, bringing fresh ideas, keeping the big picture before the whole team, initiating new areas of ministry, or addressing key theological issues. Such depth of leadership talent is a great blessing, but the team still needs a leader of leaders.
If this is not the pastor, there will be some interesting dynamics to negotiate. The pastor will need both humility and security to be able to focus on teaching, preaching, and equipping the saints, while allowing someone else to take the lead on the eldership team. High levels of communication and synergy will be needed between the pastor and the lead elder. There must be great clarity on who has what role, and how the two will relate to each other as well as to the wider eldership team. A lack of clarity will invite future conflict.
Similarly, if there are multiple pastors in a church, it will generally be best if one is designated the lead pastor. It’s not that he is more important or more capable than the others, but the staff team, like the eldership team, needs a captain. The most common scenario will be that the main preacher is both the lead pastor and the eldership team captain. If he has the gifts for that, it will be the most natural approach.
So what is the role of the team captain or lead pastor? He is the person to whom the others look to help the team stay together, stay focused, stay sharp. He is a pastor to the pastors, an elder of the elders, with “a unique call to care for the plurality as a whole.”7 He will be a key initiator of conversations that need to take place, reviews that should be undertaken, and new ideas to be considered. He will be the one who lands an issue.8
But while the leader of leaders is an initiator, he is not a lone ranger. Decisions are made by the body of elders. “Senior pastors do not exercise headship over an eldership team, nor do they possess the right to elevate themselves. They should neither act independently nor create a subtle culture where hyper- deference to their wishes is the norm. The senior pastor is called to build a team, not a personal ministry. His effectiveness should be measured by the maturity of his plurality, not his social media following.”9
Over the years, I have repeatedly found myself in the role of team captain, wanting to rethink, sharpen, change, or initiate something. So I usually end up writing a short paper. Having thought through an issue over some time, I put my ideas down on paper and bring it to the elders. What happens next is always fascinating. Sometimes, but not often, the elders look at the idea and say: “That’s wonderful. Let’s go for it!” More often, one of the elders will immediately say, “But what about X?” And to my shock, I realize that despite endless thought, prayer, and effort, I have completely overlooked something basic. At other times, the idea goes down like a lead balloon and, to mix my metaphors, I have to eat humble pie on the way home. But then, occasionally, the balloon is reinflated sometime later. Someone else comes up with the idea and everyone thinks it is great. More humble pie. Time was needed for the idea to gain traction, or maybe the first timing was just not right. Most frequently, the idea is subjected to prolonged thought, revision, development, and eventual adoption. Here is the benefit of team leadership with a leader among the leaders. The result is better than the eldership team with no leader, and better than a sole leader whose ideas are not subject to the scrutiny or input of others.

Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: An Urgent Call to Restore Biblical Church Leadership, 3rd ed. (Littleton, CO: Lewis and Roth, 1995), 45.
David T. Harvey, The Plurality Principle: How to Build and Maintain a Thriving Church Leadership Team (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 45.
In fact, it seems that there was some internal structure to the apostolic band. Four times in the New Testament, the list of the apostles is given (Matt. 10:2–4; Mark 3:16–19; Luke 6:14–16; Acts 1:13–14), and each time not only does Peter’s name come first, but the first four names are the same, though the order of names two to four changes. Similarly, the next four names are always the same, though the order changes, and the final four names are the same, with the order changing, except that Judas Iscariot is always last. See Alexander Balmain Bruce, The Training of the Twelve, 4th ed. (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1971).
See Gene A. Getz, Elders and Leaders: God’s Plan for Leading the Church: A Biblical, Historical, and Cultural Perspective (Chicago: Moody, 2003), 217–23; Strauch, Biblical Eldership, 45–47.
Strauch, Biblical Eldership, 45–47.
Harvey, Plurality Principle, 41.
Harvey, 57.
Harvey proposes that a senior pastor is custodian of the team, catalyst for action, curator of culture, captain of communication, and liaison for partnerships. See Harvey, 56–67
Harvey, 65.

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A church that genuinely, faithfully worships Jesus together each week is all the more prepared to live as the church each hour, and a church that lives as the church all week enjoys the sweetest worship together each Sunday.

At best, most Christians spend about one percent of our waking hours in corporate worship.
Here’s the math: If you sleep each night about seven hours (which most adults need, at minimum), and the weekly gathering of your local church is about 75 minutes —and you attend faithfully, essentially every Sunday—that makes for roughly one percent of your 120 waking hours each week.
Perhaps it’s striking to you, as it has been for me, to realize that most of us spend only one percent of our waking lives in the church’s weekly gathering. What a surprisingly small percentage this is (especially if we presume that church life essentially amounts to Sunday mornings). Not to mention what we give our lives to—and how much time—the rest of the week. Last year, according to one survey, the average American spent almost eight hours each day on new and traditional media. That adds up to more than fifty hours per week on our screens.
The gathering of our local churches is but a tiny sliver of our waking lives—ives now filled less and less with undistracted, productive labor, and more and more with consuming content through our devices. What do we need to remember about this surprisingly tiny and absolutely vital one percent called corporate worship?
Just One Hour
First, consider what a relatively small part of church life the weekly gathering is. However large Sunday morning looms in our conception of what the church is (which, as we’ll see below, can be for good reasons), we do well to realize that being the church is not a 60-to-75-minute weekly event. We are not only the church when we gather; we are the church as we scatter to our homes, schools, workplaces, and throughout town. We are the church, waking or sleeping, 168 hours per week.
One sad aspect of modern life in our unbundled, disbursed existences, spread apart by automobiles, is we tend to think of church as a single event each week, rather than an all-week, all-of-life reality. If we are in Christ, we are members of his body, 24/7/365. Church is not a weekly service; church is Christ’s people, called to daily lives of service, love, and worship, not just in the sanctuary but on our streets and all through our towns.
If being the church is just a single gathering, and not all week, how much can we really bless and be blessed by one another? When will we practice our precious New Testament one-anothers? A few quick minutes before and after the service will be woefully inadequate for the portrait the apostles paint of our life together.
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Critical thinking about medicine or any topic requires weighing multiple sources against one another and distinguishing between degrees of certainty, not ruling out all sources of evidence but one and equating “unproven” with “false.” The approach to health information increasingly taken by public officials, reporters, and social media—under which any statement is “unproven” and must be assumed harmful, barring some definitive pronouncement by public health authorities to the contrary—is thus not only authoritarian but also damaging to public health and science as a whole.

Imperial County, California, a poor, largely Hispanic agricultural region in the southeastern corner of the state, has been hit hard by Covid-19. By the end of January, according to the New York Times’s Covid-19 database, Imperial County had suffered 845 Covid deaths, or 4.7 per thousand inhabitants—a rate almost 80 percent higher than the U.S. average. The case fatality rate in Imperial County is 1.44 percent, the second-highest in California—and was significantly higher, 2.10 percent, at the end of October 2021 before the Omicron wave.
Two doctors in Imperial County, though—George Fareed and Brian Tyson, who run the All Valley Urgent Care network of medical centers—claim to have done far better with their Covid-19 patients. In fact, they claim near-perfect success: in a book that they published last January, they claim to have seen more than 7,000 patients and had only three deaths, all among patients who began treatment in later disease stages. A statistical analysis of part of their results by the statistician Mathew Crawford, included in their book, counts only seven hospitalizations and three deaths among 4,376 patients seen up through March 13, 2021—a reduction in hospitalization risk of well over 90 percent from the county average, even after (admittedly imperfect) statistical adjustments for differences in age between Fareed and Tyson’s patients and the general population.
According to prevailing medical views, Fareed and Tyson’s claimed results should be impossible. The doctors’ first protocol was based around hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a repurposed anti-malarial drug, with other drugs such as ivermectin as more recent additions. Received opinion on the drugs is that ivermectin is at best unproven in treating Covid-19 (the Food and Drug Administration maintains an official webpage warning against using it as a treatment for the virus), and that HCQ has been actively disproved: early optimism from laboratory experiments and small clinical studies did not hold up in larger, more rigorous trials.
Such opinions have influenced not just news coverage but also the moderation policies of social media platforms, which have imposed ever-stricter rules against “misinformation” (meaning, in practice, contradicting American public health authorities). After Fareed and Tyson spoke by invitation at a meeting of the Imperial County Board of Supervisors, the Los Angeles Times ran an article noting that the Imperial County Medical Society “had urged supervisors to ‘not contribute to the dissemination of false or misleading information by legitimizing unproven treatments.’” The paper also quoted an executive at an Imperial County hospital, saying, “We need to stick with what we know is approved by the FDA for COVID-19 treatments. . . . Misinformation itself ought to be stopped.” In December, Twitter also suspended Tyson’s account for breaking its policies against Covid misinformation.
The dismissal of hydroxychloroquine as a possible Covid-19 treatment, however, was never based on solid science. The Los Angeles Times article reveals a fundamentally authoritarian worldview: medical claims are “unproven,” and dangerous for the public to discuss, until some official body endorses them—an approach that threatens public health and science alike.
Interest in hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment stretches back at least to 2005, when an in vitro study showed that chloroquine, a very similar compound, might protect against SARS infection. Based on laboratory studies and small clinical trials, medical authorities in China and South Korea recommended chloroquine as a Covid-19 treatment in February 2020.
Some doctors outside East Asia followed. Vladimir Zelenko, a doctor in a Hasidic community in New York, advocated a combination of HCQ, azithromycin (an antibiotic to guard against secondary infections), and a zinc supplement: HCQ increases the uptake of zinc ions into cells, a property that Zelenko surmised might provide antiviral effects. In an open letter in April 2020, Zelenko claimed to have treated about 1,450 patients, including 405 that he judged “high risk,” with only two deaths. Luigi Cavanna, a doctor in Piacenza, Italy, also claimed about the same time that thanks to an HCQ treatment protocol, none of his patients had died and only 5 percent were hospitalized—one-sixth the contemporaneous Italian hospitalization rate of over 30 percent. Many more systematic “observational” studies of HCQ—comparing patients in a hospital or elsewhere who received a drug (because of their own or a doctor’s choice) with those who did not—returned good results both as a treatment of Covid-19 cases (including one large study from the Henry Ford Health System in metropolitan Detroit) and for prevention of Covid-19 in individuals at high exposure risk. One especially striking example of the latter is a set of 11 “case-control” studies from India, where medical authorities recommended but did not mandate a weekly prophylactic dose of HCQ for medical workers. Most of these studies found that workers who took HCQ had reduced odds of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, with especially marked reductions for those who took six or more doses of the protocol.
Medical researchers tend to discount doctors’ reports and observational studies—which, granted, have many potential biases that can’t always be spotted or corrected. For instance, observational studies can underestimate the efficacy of a treatment that’s given more often to sicker patients—or overestimate it, if health-conscious patients are more likely to demand experimental treatments, or if doctors who give ineffective experimental drugs are also more likely to give effective experimental drugs (this latter point was a common and valid criticism of the Henry Ford study). So doctors generally consider randomized trials, which avoid these classes of bias, to be more reliable—though they have drawbacks, too, such as considerably greater expense and, therefore, typically smaller sample sizes.
And most analyses of randomized trials of HCQ—on the basis of which mainstream medical opinion decided that it doesn’t work for Covid-19—do draw negative conclusions. For instance, a February 2021 review by Cochrane, an organization that produces comprehensive reviews of randomized trials, concludes, “HCQ for people infected with COVID‐19 has little or no effect on the risk of death and probably no effect on progression to mechanical ventilation.” Another meta-analysis in Nature by Cathrine Axfors et al. estimates an 11 percent increase in risk of death on the basis of 26 randomized trials.
The results of both meta-analyses were essentially determined by two large, similar trials: the Solidarity trial run by the World Health Organization and the Recovery trial at the University of Oxford. These trials accounted together for over 97 percent of the statistical weight in Cochrane’s main analysis, and both claimed to rule out more than a tiny benefit of HCQ for hospitalized Covid-19 patients.
But neither trial disproves claims such as Fareed and Tyson’s. First and most importantly, both trials were on hospitalized patients and are not necessarily applicable to “outpatients” earlier in the disease course. Antiviral treatments work better earlier: for instance, oseltamivir (also known as Tamiflu), an antiviral influenza treatment, works well if started within two days of symptom onset, but not later. In Covid-19, viral load peaks soon after symptom onset, and viral replication has already ceased in most hospitalized patients, guaranteeing that antiviral treatments will have limited effect. One review in The Lancet found that dozens of studies consistently find that viral load in Covid-19 peaks in the first week of symptoms and that “No study detected live virus beyond day 9 of illness.”
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