The Church We Forgot: Pt 2 - Shared Elders vs. Solo Pastor

Sunday morning, 10:00 AM. The service is about to start. One person has prepared the sermon. One person will deliver it. One person set the vision for the church, planned the series, designed the worship flow, approved the budget, led the staff meeting on Tuesday, counseled a struggling couple on Thursday, and still managed to finish the manuscript by Saturday night.

That person is the pastor. And if you asked most American churchgoers who leads their church, they’d point to that one person without hesitation.

But it wasn’t always this way.

(This is Post 2 of The Church We Forgot, an eight-part series examining what first- and second-century church life looked like and what we might recover from it. If you haven’t read Post 1 on ekklesia and what “church” actually meant, start there. I also explored the pastor-as-CEO pattern in an earlier post, Roman Roads, Printing Presses, and AI. This post goes deeper into the historical transition.)

Then: A Body of Elders, Not a Solo Leader

The New Testament pattern for church leadership is remarkably consistent: it’s plural.

Paul and Barnabas appointed “elders” — the Greek word is always plural — in every city where they planted churches (Acts 14:23). Paul instructed Titus to “appoint elders in every town” (Titus 1:5). When Paul was passing through Miletus on his final journey to Jerusalem, he sent for the “elders” of the church in Ephesus — plural — and told them that the Holy Spirit had made them “overseers” to shepherd the church of God (Acts 20:17, 28). Peter addressed “the elders among you” and urged them to “shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight” (1 Peter 5:1–2).

Notice what’s happening in that language. The words “elder,” “overseer” (bishop), and “shepherd” (pastor) are being used to describe the same group of people doing the same work. These aren’t three separate offices. They’re three descriptions of one shared role: a body of mature believers who collectively lead, teach, and care for the local church.

And the word “pastor” itself? As a title for church leadership, it appears exactly once in the entire New Testament — Ephesians 4:11. The Greek word poimēn (shepherd) is used far more often for God and for Christ than it is for church leaders. A study of the Apostolic Fathers — the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, dating from roughly 67 to 180 AD — found that poimēn as a term for church leadership barely registers. Meanwhile, “bishop” appears over eighty times, “elder” over thirty, and “deacon” over thirty.

The first-century church was led by teams, not by a single figure. The shepherding was the function. It was shared. And it was never concentrated in one person.

The Shift: How One Among Equals Became One Above All

So how did we get from a body of elders to a solo pastor?

The transition didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen everywhere at the same pace. But the historical record gives us a surprisingly clear picture of how it unfolded.

The earliest post-New Testament writings — 1 Clement (written around 96 AD from Rome) and the Didache (late first century) — still reflect the plural-elder model. Clement writes about “presbyters” in the plural and describes leadership as a collective function. The Shepherd of Hermas, another early Roman text, references “presbyters who preside over the church.” Scholar Michael Kruger has documented from these sources that a plurality of elders leading a local church was the most common pattern in the first century.

The first significant voice to advocate for something different was Ignatius of Antioch. Writing around 107–115 AD while being transported to Rome for martyrdom, Ignatius penned seven letters to churches in Asia Minor that describe a three-tiered ministry: one bishop, a body of presbyters (elders), and deacons. In Ignatius’s vision, the bishop presides in the place of God, the presbyters represent the apostolic council, and the deacons serve under both.

This was a departure. Ignatius was the first known Christian writer to argue for a single bishop as the central authority in a local church. His motivation was understandable — he was deeply concerned about heresy and division, and he believed that concentrating authority in one leader would preserve unity. But scholars have noted that even Ignatius’s model was still genuinely collegial. The bishop worked alongside elders and deacons. He was first among equals, not a solitary ruler. And the bishops Ignatius addressed by name were local, congregational leaders — not regional authorities overseeing multiple churches.

What happened over the next two centuries was a gradual elevation. The first-among-equals model slowly became a first-above-all model. By the third century, the bishop had become a regional figure. By the fourth century, with the legalization of Christianity under Constantine and the construction of the first church buildings, the institutional infrastructure was in place for a hierarchical model that the New Testament authors would not have recognized.

Jerome, writing in the fourth century, was remarkably candid about this. He noted that before factions arose, churches were governed by a collective body of presbyters. The distinction between “bishop” and “elder,” he wrote, was a product of later development, not apostolic design.

In other words: the historical record shows a clear trajectory from shared leadership (New Testament) to first-among-equals (Ignatius) to hierarchical authority (post-Constantine). Each step had its reasons. None of them was inevitable. And the starting point was unmistakably plural.

Now: The Pastor Carries Everything

Fast-forward two thousand years.

In most American evangelical churches today, the senior pastor is the singular leader. He or she carries the vision, the preaching, the strategic direction, the institutional face, and often the lion’s share of pastoral care expectations. The elders, if they exist at all, frequently function as a board of directors — approving budgets, reviewing finances, and rubber-stamping the pastor’s plans.

The church growth movement of the late twentieth century accelerated this dramatically by importing corporate leadership frameworks. The pastor became the CEO. The church became an organization with a brand, a growth strategy, and measurable outcomes. Efficiency replaced collegiality. Vision-casting replaced collective discernment. And the weight of the entire enterprise landed on one pair of shoulders.

The data tells us how that’s going. Barna’s State of Pastors research found that one in three pastors wish they’d been better prepared to balance ministry and administration. Pastors reporting excellent mental and emotional well-being dropped from 39 percent in 2015 to 14 percent by 2023. Nearly two in five have considered quitting full-time ministry. And most sobering of all: nearly one in five Protestant senior pastors has contemplated self-harm or suicide within the past year.

The model isn’t just theologically questionable. It’s destroying the people inside it.

Why We Drifted

It’s worth pausing to acknowledge that the solo-pastor model didn’t emerge from malice. It emerged from a combination of cultural pressures and practical realities.

American culture prizes the individual leader. We celebrate the visionary founder, the charismatic communicator, the person with the plan. Our entire framework for leadership — in business, politics, and media — is built around the singular figure at the top. The church absorbed that framework because it was the water we were swimming in.

Practically, it’s also easier. Shared leadership is harder than solo leadership. It requires more communication, more compromise, more patience, and more willingness to move at the speed of consensus rather than the speed of one person’s vision. For pastors with strong gifts and clear direction, the plural model can feel like it slows them down. And for congregations that want decisive leadership, a team of elders can feel muddled.

But easier and better are not the same thing. And the New Testament never promised us efficient. It promised us faithful.

What Recovery Could Look Like

Here’s where I want to be careful, because recovering shared leadership is not the same as demoting the pastor.

The pastor doesn’t need to step back. The elders need to step up.

In a healthy shared-leadership model, the pastor still teaches. Still preaches. Still sets direction. But the weight is distributed. The elders aren’t a board of directors reviewing budget reports. They’re shepherds — people who know the flock, who visit the sick, who notice when someone hasn’t been at church in three weeks, who carry the pastoral care load alongside the pastor rather than delegating all of it to him.

This doesn’t mean every church needs to look the same. The New Testament gives us principles, not a detailed org chart. But the principle is clear: leadership was meant to be shared. The shepherd was never supposed to carry the flock alone.

What might this look like practically? A few possibilities:

Elders who are present in the life of the church, not just at meetings. If the leadership team is only visible on Sunday mornings and at board meetings, they’re governing an institution, not shepherding a community.

Pastoral care that is distributed, not centralized. When a member is in crisis, the response shouldn’t rest entirely on the pastor’s shoulders. A team of elders who know the people can respond faster, more personally, and more sustainably.

Decision-making that involves genuine deliberation, not rubber-stamping. If the elders exist to approve what the pastor has already decided, they’re not leading. They’re ratifying. Shared leadership means shared discernment.

A pastor freed to do what pastors do best. When the administrative, financial, and care-coordination burden is shared, the pastor can actually focus on the things that drew them to ministry: teaching, preaching, and walking with people through the deepest moments of their lives.

The Shepherd Who Doesn’t Have to Carry It Alone

The early church got something right that we’ve largely forgotten: no single human being was designed to carry an entire church on their shoulders. The model wasn’t built for that. The human frame wasn’t built for that. And the data confirms what the New Testament already told us — when we concentrate the weight of ministry in one person, that person breaks.

Recovering shared leadership doesn’t mean going backward. It means going deeper — into a model that predates the CEO framework, that predates the church growth movement, that predates even Ignatius’s well-intentioned consolidation. It means going all the way back to Acts 14:23 and Titus 1:5 and 1 Peter 5:1–2 and asking: what would it look like if we actually did this?

A pastor freed from carrying everything alone is a pastor who can actually shepherd. That’s not a demotion. That’s a restoration.

And it’s something worth recovering.

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This is Post 2 of The Church We Forgot, an eight-part series exploring what the early church looked like and what we can recover from it. Next up: Post 3 — Meals Together vs. Services Attended.

Appostolic is built around a distributed leadership philosophy — where the pastor sets direction and teachers work freely within it, each bringing their own context and voice to the teaching ministry.