Welcome to Mortification of Spin, a casual conversation about things that count.

With Carl Truman, Todd Pruitt, and Amy Bird.

Mortification of Spin is a weekly podcast from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

Who is the church CEO?

A, the biggest tither, B, the senior pastor, or C, the hip young elder.

Carl, Amy, and Todd are here to clear up the confusion about the church offices with particular focus on the elder and what happens when conflict rises between them.

This and more on this week's mortification of spin.

Well, on this week's Mortification of Spin. Welcome to Mortification of Spin.

Today we want to talk about a topic that I think will become more and more important as the years go by.

I've said before that the days of the big conservative churches with a large, well-paid staff and a couple of full-time pastors are probably coming to an end.

It came to an end in Western Europe, I think, many moons ago, starting to come to an end in the United States.

And one of the things that that is going to

require is a certain rethinking of biblical church governance, not a rethinking of the basic

biblical principles of church governance, but a rethinking of the roles or the tasks that are

ascribed to different church officers.

Specifically, I'm thinking in this context of the elders who are also those who preach.

If you're a two-office person, we see them as an elder who has a teaching task,

or if you're a three-office person, the minister of the word,

how the task of the elder in charge of preaching lines up with the

task of the elder who is primarily, we would now describe, I suppose, as non-stipendary elder,

what has typically been sometimes wrongly described as a lay elder, of course, elders are ordained, how the

elder's position is likely to change in the coming generation, and what that means for the

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