Elders in Congregational Life (Newton)

This is a very good book on developing a plurality of elders in churches. The author is a baptist pastor and some of the chapters assume a Baptist type church. But the principles laid out can be easily applied to any church that seeks to recover the biblical model. The book is divided into 9 chapters. The first three chapters provide a general overview of a plurality of elders in the history of Southern Baptist Churches (chap 1) and then offers a biblical defense of plural elders as the basic pattern for church governance presented in the NT (chaps 2-3). In the following three chapters one key text dealing with elders is analyzed per chapter (chaps 4-6). The last three chapters give some very practical advice on "how-to" questions. In other words, once a person is convinced that a plurality of elders is the biblical model, then how does one go about implementing it in churches where such is not the case? These last three chapters offer wise counsel on this very important matter. One of the highlights of the last three chapters is there are three testimonies of pastors who led the church where they serve to move to a plural elder form of governance.