BLOG 1/21/17. “HOW CAN I SUBMIT MYSELF TO ELDERS WHO DON’T EVEN KNOW MY NAME?

I loved Linda Spencer though she was one remarkable and demanding personality. Linda was a gifted, even brilliant musician, vocalist, and composer. She had come into our Christian congregation because of the mentor who had brought her to faith in Jesus Christ, who was part of our community. I gather that Linda’s college career had been one in which she had been in engaged in some difficult seasons. Linda died some months back after a long and fruituful ministry of teaching music and blessing generations at French Camp Academy in Mississippi.  Getting the notice of her death brought back all kinds of memories. One thing about Linda: you never doubted what she thought or what she was requiring of you. She was confrontational, but not in a destructive way, but rather in a very insistent and inescapable way. She would land in our church sanctuary early on a Sunday morning and insist that she had written a new song and wanted to sing it during the worship service. I learned early on that there was no sense in trying to explain to her that the service was planned and was already complete. She always got her way.

That background brings me to a question from her that needs to be raised and grappled with in any Christian community of any size. It was one of those Sunday mornings in our proper Presbyterian Church, and I was all vested in my Geneva gown and on the way through the side door into the pulpit when Linda blocked the way and blurted out: “How can I submit myself to Elders who don’t even know my name?” The background for that was that in our Presbyterian Church’s guide to its organization and government there is an overseeing body of elected Ruling Elders, one of whose responsibilities is to receive members. In the constitutional questions, in addition to acknowledgement of one’s sinfulness and need of a Savior, and one’s whole-hearted embrace of Jesus Christ by faith, etc. … is the question: “Do you submit yourself to the government and discipline of this church?” which question involves submitting oneself to the oversight of the Elders.

Linda was no ‘knee-jerk’ respondent. She wanted to know what were the implications of such a submission, which brought her to the conclusion that most of the Elders to whom she was being asked to submit herself didn’t even know her name, … other than perfunctorily from their formal encounter with her as she came seeking membership in the church.

I have never been able to escape that question and it has haunted me in all the years that have intervened. Is it acceptable to have anonymous members of a church, who formally have agreed to be subject to its leadership, but for whom that person may not have a name, be one of those anonymous members whose name is on the church’s roster, but whose name you cannot retrieve, and certainly are not in a position to have them in any way subject or submissive? Do any of those elders sensitively care about my walk of faith?

The source of that vow, of course is quite Biblical. The New Testament church communities seem to have been house churches, or small colonies, in which the more mature and wise and nurturing had been chosen as Elders or Overseers by the rest of the community. But they also were evidently small and intensely interactive and intimate. So, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews will make such a statement as: “Obey your leaders and submit to them for they are keeping watch over your souls” (Hebrews 13:17). There were those who were the models of faith and practice who were mutually agreed upon leaders, or father-figures to the rest. But they were not an impersonal board of directors. They were models of God to the community. The Good Shepherd calls his sheep by name. They are never anonymous. The leadership of the larger and more formal/traditional church institutions need to come to grips with Linda’s question. It is insistent and requires rethinking the whole dynamics of our communal life as the colonies of Jesus’ New Humanity. It is always heartening to have someone who genuinely cares about my walk of faith and who senses a responsibility to be my knowledgeable encourager in that walk, who knows my name and cares.

Thank you, Linda Spencer.