So I'm working on a lesson on polity for church tomorrow, specifically on how individuals in the congregation have the right and responsibility to be involved, and I came across a posting from August of 2009 that has been bugging me. The gist of it is that the Acts 29 documents and the BFM documents church planters sign are mutually exclusive because Acts 29 indicates an elder "governed" model while the BFM indicates the use of "democratic processes", and therefore it is inconsistent to sign both.
To be clear, I am not a church planter and I have not signed either, though I do support the BFM. I don't dislike Acts 29 either, it's just not relevant in my current ministry context. That said, I have struggled with this idea that "democracy" and "elder governance" are mutually exclusive, philosophically or otherwise.
As a bit of background, the Episcopal Church, in simplest terms, is set up almost completely like the American system of government. There is a bicameral house, there are representatives in those houses chosen by the regional representatives, and the regional representatives are chosen by the individual congregations through a voting process. They even have a 9-year term "Executive Branch" in the Presiding Bishop or Primate. The founders of the USA were also largely involved in the development of the Episcopal Church, crafting a framework for their religious views that maintained all that is Anglican without the ties to England. Therefore the similarities are not only expected but remarkably apparent (which is why I am surprised it took me this long to figure that out!).
Everyone would readily agree, upon consideration, that American politics use a democratic process. Sure, it's a representative democracy, not a "pure" democracy, but anyone can see that the daily running of a nation could not function in a "pure" democracy either. What troubles me is that Southern Baptists can agree that the US is a democracy, but that "democratic processes", as the BFM stipulates can only be a pure democracy, as the writer of the aforementioned blog post seemed to be saying.
I am not arguing that we adopt Episcopal-style representative polity that is also democratic. I am arguing that we should be careful what we say "democratic processes" means. Does the BFM state "pure" democracy only? No. Does it mean that? I have no idea, but I doubt it. If that is what was meant, many SBC churches could not in good conscience agree. I would suppose that the wisest and safest interpretation is that which allows "democratic processes" to truly be "processes", that is, there is a recognition that there may be more than one sort of democratic process that is biblically consistent and there is no distinction made in the BFM itself what the specifics of such a multiplicity of processes actually are.
If that is the case, then an Elder-led (or governed, providing the Elders are elected by the congregation) model is perfectly consistent with the BFM. Let's give each other a bit of grace and flexibility when we start pointing out what is "consistent" and what isn't, what do you say?
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