First among equals. In the panoply of church polity, this phrase — derived from the Latin primus inter pares and used to describe a local church’s lead or senior pastor — pokes a tender spot. After all, if someone is first, then we’re certainly not equal. Or are we? It just feels so out of step with our current climate, like lead pastors are going to wake up one morning on the wrong side of history.

But what if I told you that this role reflects a principle that can mark the difference between duty and delight for a church leadership team? For church leadership to flourish, the elder plurality must be led.

Elders Need a Leader

Throughout the Bible, when God chooses to execute his will upon the earth — when he reveals his redemptive purposes, forecasts the future, or frees his people from bondage — he begins with a leader. The Old Testament offers a gallery of names that remind us of God’s regular pattern of using one to influence many — Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, just to name a few.

In New Testament times, we’re told Christ chose the twelve (Luke 6:12–16), but Peter functioned as the leader among them. The early church enjoyed a similar plurality of leadership, yet it appears James exerted a unique role and influence as the key leader of the Jerusalem congregation (Acts 15:13; 21:18; 1 Corinthians 15:7; Galatians 1:19; 2:12). The same is true in the church today. An eldership, as a body, needs a leader.

“For church leadership to flourish, the elder plurality must be led.”

Now, I can almost hear you saying, “Where is there any reference to a lead or senior pastor in the Bible?” You’re right. There is no single, airtight Bible verse that decisively proves that pluralities should assign a lead pastor. But there is a broad pattern of order — a beautiful tapestry of leadership — that appears from the opening pages of Scripture to the final words in Revelation.

The necessity of a first among coequals in human economies is resonant with (though not equivalent to) the way the Son submits to his Father in the incarnation (Philippians 2:5–11), as well as in the order God ordains in the home (Ephesians 5:21–33). Leadership is not a consequence of the fall, but represents God’s good design for human flourishing in a well-ordered world.

Nineteenth-Century Perspective

Back in the mid-nineteenth century, Southern Baptist professor William Williams (1804–1885) offered a short historical survey on how the “first among equals” role developed (with quotes from historian Edward Gibbon):

“The want of united action among the different presbyters [elders] of the same church when they were all of equal authority,” and the order of public deliberations requiring that there should be someone “invested at least with the authority of collecting the sentiments and executing the resolutions” . . . of the church, led to the appointment of one of their number a permanent president or moderator. The title bishop, which was applied to all the elders, came after a while to be applied exclusively to the president — elder, as Justin in the middle of the second century still calls him, merely to distinguish him from his equal co-elders. He was not superior to them, but only “first among equals.” (Polity, 532; emphasis mine)

Williams gives us several gems in this little paragraph. He tells us both what a primus inter pares (“first among equals”) is not, and what it is.

He is not a command-and-control guy.

These days, Christian leaders often draw their model of leadership from sources outside of the Bible. Don’t get me wrong — it’s good to read broadly. You must read to lead. But church leadership literature and practice often draws heavily from the business world, which in turn borrows freely from the military.

In the military, particularly during warfare, command and control are a necessity. It’s never good to stop and question your commander when you’re taking fire. My son had six deployments in the Army, several of them in hot zones. When he was there, I wouldn’t have wanted his superior officer to stop and convene the group for some mid-assault collaboration. When you’re taking a hill, having a top-down, centralized authority structure is necessary. In wartime, you need a commander who compels compliance and disciplines anything less than complete obedience. Pity the poor platoon with a leader just “collecting the sentiments and executing the resolutions” of the group.

But we can’t import a command-and-control leadership model into a local church eldership, where the culture (as well as the means of doing ministry) should be defined by Scripture and the fruit of the Spirit. Whatever “first among equals” means, it does not mean absolute ruler over the team. As Williams says, “he was not superior to them.”

“Whatever ‘first among equals’ means, it does not mean absolute ruler over the team.”

In fact, it’s hazardous when pastors organize their vision of leadership around the word first in “first among equals” — when the lead pastor’s opinion is first, his preferences first, his sensitivities first, his entitlements first. A primus-driven team culture often incubates celebrity entitlements and leadership ecosystems grounded in power and authority. For the plurality, the church staff, or the congregation, this plays like a karaoke machine at a funeral — seriously misguided and hopelessly out of place.

Primus-driven leaders can be tempted to relegate godly character and humble service to the margins, sentencing fellow team members to a fear-based and unsafe culture. When that happens, guys know they serve at the pleasure of the senior leader, whose agenda defines direction and whose perspective dictates reality. No wonder staff turnover is common; team members leave because the senior leadership is no longer tolerable. Or worse, no longer respected.

He is not merely a moderator.

In our cynical culture, plurality is much easier to support than the guy who feels called to lead one. People love the democracy, co-equality, interchangeableness, and accountability implied in plurality. This pares-driven model feels extremely enlightened, remarkably fair. Suspicions are stirred by the misguided man who feels a distinct call to exercise the gift of leadership (Romans 12:8). It feels like a power-grabbing conspiracy against the laity. To center preaching and leadership in one is to diminish the strength of all.

I’ve known churches where the elderships were unadorned with senior leaders. Where you see this model working well, it’s typically due to some remarkably humble elders seeking to uphold a principled vision. But I believe it works against an order outlined in Scripture and applied throughout church history and human civilization. Where the leaderless-equals model seems to be working, chances are that someone is, in fact, the consistent initiator and buckstopper, the collector of sentiments, and the executor of the group’s resolutions. It’s just undercover — influence without a title.

For most elder teams, however, it actually prevents confusion and helps avoid misuses of authority to identify the real sources of leadership and power. And honestly, in many cases, the absence of this order brings the presence of chaos as conflicting visions, the want of elder care, and alignment complexities consistently tempt the unity of elder teams. In fact, Williams tells us that the “first among equals” role arose because of “want of united action.” At the end of the day, disunited action often has a dividing effect.

He is a leader from among.

These two errors — the error of overbearing primus-driven ministry and the error of egalitarian pares-driven ministry — highlight the truth that to be healthy, both the eldership and the senior leader must operate within a humility-empowered tension.

On the one side, the lead pastor advocates for the opinions and involvement of the team as a whole. As Williams observes, he must “collect the sentiments” of the elders, which requires listening well as he solicits their counsel, understands their thinking, and leans on their gifts.

On the other side, the plurality of elders creates space for the senior role to actually use his gifts to lead. Once again Williams is clear. He tells us that the “first among equals” is invested with authority to “execute the resolutions of the church.” This means the elders grant the senior leader latitude and followership to order and direct their efforts.

But don’t think battalion commander or CEO. As Andy Crouch once said, “Think of a symphony conductor!” The senior pastor’s leadership does not coerce toward action, but directs skillful people whose gifts need to be organized, prioritized, and united to produce magnificent music. The result is a beautiful blending of leadership and teamwork, where the elders remain jealous to be conducted by the senior leader, and the lead pastor knows he needs the gifts and unity of the whole team for the church to flourish. Why is this so crucial? For church leadership to flourish, the elder plurality must be led.

Call for Gospel Guts

A healthy plurality led by a humble leader is not accidental. It happens where men have the guts to apply the gospel. In a self-emptying display of humility (Philippians 2:5–11), the elders subordinate themselves and appoint a leader as “first among equals.” Through self-crucifying displays of love, the lead pastor embodies Christ’s application of “first” — among them as one who serves (Matthew 20:26–27). And within the exquisite torture of this tension between “first” and “equals,” the gospel grows more precious, and the humble leadership of one enhances the ministry joy for many.

Audio Transcript

Well, last Wednesday we looked at what makes Pastor John tick. There he gave us a glimpse into his ministry and his aims. That was APJ 1769. In today’s clip, I return to that same sermon, because he goes from that point to talking about how God makes much of us, his children, and why he makes much of us.

First, the point: God makes much of us. He does. And he does so beyond our wildest imagination! In fact, we will see that point next week in greater detail — how God makes much of us. So hold that thought for now, because here, in this Wednesday sermon clip, I want you to see that, yes, God makes much of us, but his plan aims at something far greater than merely making us feel loved for the sake of us feeling loved. You’ll see why here in just a moment.

Again, as we dive into this sermon clip, for context, this comes from a sermon preached two weeks out from John Piper’s eight-month leave of absence from his church in 2010. These are part of his parting words, so to speak, to his church. And in them, here’s Pastor John to explain how God makes much of us — and why he does it that way. Here’s Pastor John.

My shorthand way of trying to help the nominal Christian wake up to their real condition and then plead for regeneration, plead for an awakening, so that at the bottom of their souls is Jesus and not self, is to say, Do you feel more loved by God when he makes much of you, or do you feel more loved by God when, at great cost to his Son, he frees you from that horrible bondage to self in order to enjoy making much of him forever, so that the peak of your joy is to see him, savor him, show him?

He Loves Us for His Sake

Now, all that’s introduction. Today, I am really jealous that this concern of mine that I just described does not undermine the immeasurable way that God loves you, including his making much of you. He makes more of you, Christian — true, born-again, struggling Christian — than you ever dreamed he could or would.

“God makes more of you when he makes much of you for his sake than if he were to make much of you only for your sake.”

I want you to see and feel that you are more loved by God when he loves you that way than any other way. He makes more of you when he makes much of you for his sake than if he were to make much of you only for your sake. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t preach this sermon. God is making more of you when he makes much of you for his sake than if he only made much of you for your sake. More is being made of you, and I hope to show you that.

I said that God reveals himself relentlessly in the Bible as loving you for his name’s sake. I’m going to give you just a few examples so that those of you who may not be as familiar with this as others will get on board with me. You’ll know, “What are you saying? What do you mean by that?” I’m going to give you four or five examples.

1. God adopted us for his glory.

God shows his love for us by predestining us for adoption into his family. Every one of these feels like the greatest act of love to me. I want to say this is the greatest. Well, I want to reserve that for the cross, I think, but man, this is big. That God, in eternity, looked upon me — foreseeing my fallenness, my pride, my sin — and said, “I want that man in my family. I’ll do anything to get him in my family. I will pay for him to be in my family with my Son’s life.” That’s love, folks. That is mega, off-the-charts love.

And the verse is Ephesians 1:5–6. “He predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ.” Get that: he predestined us for adoption into the divine, universe-ruling family “according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace.” Does that ruin it? Does that ruin it? No. He did it. He said, “I’m going to have John Piper. I’m going to have you in my family. I’ve decided this before the world is created. I’m having you to the praise of the glory of my grace.” I hope that doesn’t ruin it for you. I want it to make it more — more, not less — that he did it for his glory.

2. God created us for his glory.

God shows his love for us by creating us. If we didn’t have existence, we couldn’t enjoy him or anything else. So, he loved us into being. Why? Isaiah 43:6–7: “Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory.” Don’t let that diminish the love of God for you in your creation that you came into being for his glory.

3. God sent Christ for his glory.

God shows his love for us by sending us a savior. The angels say,

“Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find the baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest.” (Luke 2:11–14)

“We get the Savior, he gets the glory. We get the great joy, he gets the honor.”

A Savior has come. Does that bother you that they would sing that way instead of saying, “Glory to the men for whom he’s dying; glory to the women for whom he’s dying”? Instead, they sing, “Glory to God. A Savior came to rescue sinners. God, God, God — what a God!” I just want you to get inside this so bad. We get the Savior, he gets the glory. We get the great joy, he gets the honor. Is that okay? Goodnight, it’s okay. It can’t be any other way if there’s a God and a sinner like me. It can’t be any other way. This is the greatest news in all the world. A Savior has come for me, and the angels are praising God.

4. Christ died for us for his glory.

God shows his love for us when Christ died. This is probably the biggest — isn’t it? — in the Bible. The death of Christ is the biggest display of the love of God. Let me give you just one verse. This is 2 Corinthians 5:14–15:

The love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all [here comes the purpose clause] that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

Christ died for me. He put himself between me and the bullet, me and the sword, me and the flames, and he took it, though I deserved it and he didn’t. He took it, and he did that so that I might no longer live for my “magnificent” self and would now die and enjoy living for him forever. That’s why he did it. That’s love. It’s a bigger love than if he hadn’t done it that way.

5. God saves us for his glory.

This is Psalm 79:9: “Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of your name; deliver us, and atone for our sins, for your name’s sake.” Born-again people pray like that. “Save me for your name’s sake. Deliver me, atone for my sin, for your name’s sake.”

That’s the way born-again people think. “It’s all going back; every grace that comes to me is being reflected back. And I love it — I love it. That’s why I’m alive.” This is the greatest thing in all the world: that I would be rescued from immersion in Piper — yuck! — to be freed a little bit, a little bit, to just know him and love him and give it all back and let him be God for me.

As a small index to how much our society’s attitude to Christianity has changed in the past half-century, in 1941 a Princeton University English professor published a book with Princeton University Press addressed specifically to Christian ministers. I have referenced this book throughout my half-century career as a teacher and writer, even using adaptations of its title, Poetry as a Means of Grace, to good effect.

In his opening chapter, the author offered a piece of advice for ministers (and by implication all church leaders and literary laypeople) that makes total sense: we should claim one author as our own, specializing in that author the way a literary scholar might. I would extend this bit of practical advice to include the possibility of choosing a single masterwork for detailed attention over a lifetime (though I do not thereby discourage wide reading).

With this advice in mind, I commend Paradise Lost as a candidate for lifelong acquaintance. Having written my dissertation on Paradise Lost, having taught Paradise Lost as many as two hundred times, having written articles and books on Milton, and having attended and spoken at Milton conferences, I love Milton’s masterpiece more now than ever. And it is a love I wish to share.

From Pulpit to Poetry

Paradise Lost was written by John Milton in the middle of the seventeenth century. From childhood, Milton was theoretically destined to become a minister. In anticipation of that, Milton stayed on at Cambridge University to earn a master’s degree. But then an obstacle derailed his intended clerical calling.

Milton was a Puritan by conviction, and as such he was not welcome as a pastoral candidate in the state church. Milton himself spoke of having been “church outed by the prelates,” meaning rejected for parish ministry by the governing Anglican hierarchy.

Milton scholars have long debated the question of when Milton abandoned his intention to become a minister, and the best conclusion is that he never did abandon his ministerial calling. As Jameela Lares argues effectively in her book Milton and the Preaching Arts, he simply changed its venue from the pulpit to poetry. In a prose passage where Milton discusses this, he places the vocation of the Christian poet “beside the office of the pulpit.”

And he bore some fruit of the pulpit. Out of the mass of commentary on Milton that I have read, my favorite sentence comes from the testimony of someone joining Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia who began his testimony with the statement, “I was led to the Lord by John Milton.” Paradise Lost was the work that had been instrumental in this person’s conversion.

Higher Than Real Life

Before I discuss the content of Paradise Lost, I need to begin where C.S. Lewis began his landmark book A Preface to Paradise Lost. The necessary starting point is the genre to which the poem belongs. That genre is the epic.

Epic was considered the most important literary genre from antiquity through the seventeenth century. It was an exercise in grandeur — a long narrative poem having the stature of a book. Its aim was scope — so much so that literary scholar Northop Frye dubbed epic “the story of all things” (The Return of Eden, 3). Similarly, C.S. Lewis claimed that an epic sums up what a whole age wants to say (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama), 339).

An epic tells a story (and in fact many stories), but its way of telling a story is different from what modern readers are accustomed to. The successor to the epic as a species of long narrative was the novel, and what was particularly new about the novel was its realism. The novel gives us a slice of life in the everyday world. Epic, by contrast, is myth — a story of supernatural characters, events, and places. So the first thing we need to expect as we come to read an epic is myth rather than realism.

One further way in which epic springs a surprise on us is that it is poetry. We expect long fictional stories to be written in everyday prose. In the history of literature, that is a recent development, coming on the scene with the rise of a middle-class reading public in the middle of the eighteenth century. Epic is a hybrid of poetry and story, and we need to give equal attention to both.

Milton’s Theological Story

In keeping with epic scope, the story that Milton tells is the entire span of history from eternity past to eternity future. The first main event is the war in heaven and the expulsion of Satan and his followers. This is followed by God’s creation of the world, Adam and Eve’s life in paradise, their fall from innocence, a survey of fallen human history, redemption in Christ as the means of reversing the destruction ushered in by the fall, and the eschaton. All of that looks familiar, of course, because it is the story of universal history as the Bible presents it.

“The story that Milton tells is the entire span of history from eternity past to eternity future.”

The first time I taught Paradise Lost, a student handed me a paperback copy of the Puritan Thomas Boston’s Human Nature in Its Fourfold State. He offered no explanation, apparently assuming that the relevance of Boston’s book would be evident to me. It was. Boston’s paradigm of human nature in its perfection, fallenness, redemption in Christ, and glorification in heaven gives shape to Milton’s story.

Milton famously said that he intended his epic to be “doctrinal and exemplary to a nation.” There is edification as well as enjoyment in reading Paradise Lost. The big ideas with which Milton’s imagination worked are as follows: the centrality and sovereignty of God; the great conflict between good and evil in both cosmic and human spheres; the necessity that all creatures choose between good and evil; humanity’s unavoidable dealings with God; obedience to God as the great requirement in life, with disobedience being the essential nature of sin; and the fact of human sinfulness and the atonement of Christ as the antidote to the fallen condition.

Those are the big ideas, but there are many localized ideas as well, such as the nature of the good life as pictured in Adam and Eve’s life in paradise.

Come and See

Many added helps for engaging this poem could be given.

I could tell you Paradise Lost is what literary scholars call an encyclopedic form — a collection of discrete units within a superstructure — and so it doesn’t need to be read straight through. Or, I could warn against discouragement from the poem’s abundant allusions to both the Bible and classical mythology, which the first-time reader may not (and need not) understand.

But my intention in this article has been to open a door and entice you to an in-depth encounter with Paradise Lost. And perhaps the final note to strike is that Paradise Lost is a world with beauty and horror to be seen.

“The literary impulse is to show rather than tell — to incarnate and embody rather than discuss abstractly.”

Milton’s epic deals with many theological ideas, as discussed above, but the literary impulse is to show rather than tell — to incarnate and embody rather than discuss abstractly. Theologian H. Richard Niebuhr correctly claimed that “we are far more image-making and image-using creatures than we usually think ourselves to be, . . . and are guided and formed by images in our minds” (The Responsible Self, 151).

This is how we need to read Paradise Lost — not as a collection of ideas but as a story with characters, settings, and events, and as poetry comprised of images, symbols, and metaphors to be seen and enjoyed. He did not expect us to read his epic in the same way we read the more than twenty volumes of expository prose (including a systematic theology) that he wrote. There is a “value added” aesthetic element to literary writing, and we need to relish it.

So will you take the effort to read it? If you do, you may share the sentiment of the towering literary scholar Frank Kermode. He wrote some fifty books on the major movements and authors (including Shakespeare) of English literature, yet reserved his highest praise for Paradise Lost, calling it “the most perfect achievement of English poetry, perhaps the richest and most intricately beautiful poem in the world” (Romantic Image, 196).