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The democratic political movement of modern times was birthed in America. The rule of kings was replaced with the rule of the people. Though America is not strictly a democracy; it is a democratic republic, which is a democracy under the rule of law, the emphasis is still on the rule of the people. The Declaration of Independence championed “the right of the people,” while the United States Constitution begins with the words, “We the people.” President Abraham Lincoln described the U.S. government as one “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
Multitudes of people flocked to America in search of people’s rights.
In a great many ways democracy has been a great blessing, primarily in the areas of liberty and economic prosperity. It liberated men from the dictates of autocratic kings and state churches. It created a climate in which churches multiplied and world evangelism prospered. It was the search for liberty and economic prosperity that brought the masses to America’s shores and that spread American democracy to many nations.
A danger of this is in transferring the philosophy and attitude of “people’s power” from the political realm into the church. The church is not a democracy. It is not “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” The believer in Christ is spiritually translated into Christ’s kingdom (Col. 1:13), and the church is an outpost of Christ’s coming kingdom, and it is obligated to live under His Headship. The church is a theocracy ruled by Christ and His Word. Christ appoints governors, who are called pastors, elders, and bishops, and they have the rule over the church under Christ (Heb. 13:17; 1 Pe. 5:1-2). They don’t have have legislative power, because the church’s laws are already settled in the canon of Scripture. Rather they have executive and judicial powers.
In the New Testament, we see the congregation participating in decisions, particularly in the selection of deacons (Acts 6:1-6). But this is not “people’s power” in that it was done under the direction of and in coordination with the leaders.
What has happened in American churches, in particular, and in churches influenced by them, is the intrusion of the attitude of people’s power. Too often, an attitude of “we are the people, and we will decide what we do” has replaced that of “we are the Lord’s people and we will live strictly by His will.”
This can best be seen by comparing churches today with those of former times.
Consider the following description of church discipline 150 years ago:
“The oversight of the members was minute and persistent. Their general conduct, their domestic life, their business, their connections in civil society, their recreations, and even their dress, were all deemed legitimate subjects for the strictest supervision” (J.J. Goadby, Discipline in Early Baptist Churches, 1871).
This was a perfectly biblical position, and people in that day commonly submitted to such discipline. The level of democracy and the modern focus on self had not yet ruined church discipline.
But today the attitude on the part of vast numbers of church members is that these things are not the business of the church. The attitude is more alongs the line of, “You can’t tell me what I can or cannot do, how I dress, what music I listen to, how I conduct my family life and business, whom I associate with. Who do the pastors think they are?”
This thinking is evident in the way that so many churches “hire and fire” preachers, not on the basis of biblical truth and righteousness, but on the basis of the whims of the people, as if pastors exist to do the bidding of the people and to please them. I think of a Baptist church in Tennessee that fired the preacher nearly every year and got a new one. Typically, it took a new preacher about a year to offend the main families in the church!
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