Presbyterian church governance

Presbyterians and Reformed Christians affirm presbyterian church government: rule by presbyters, or elders, acting together in a series of graded assemblies rather than by individual bishops or independent congregations. Each congregation is governed by a body of elders (a session or consistory), and these are bound together in wider courts (presbytery, synod, and general assembly), so that authority is shared and appealable. The pattern is held to reflect the New Testament use of elders and the principle that Christ alone is head of the church, exercised through the collective judgement of ordained office-bearers.

John Knox and his fellow reformers set out the new church's governance in the First Book of Discipline of 1560, establishing kirk sessions, presbyteries, and a general assembly for the newly reformed Church of Scotland; the polity was not settled without conflict, since subsequent Stuart monarchs, James VI and I and Charles I among them, repeatedly tried to impose episcopal government on Scotland against fierce Presbyterian resistance, a struggle that culminated in the Bishops' Wars of 1639-40 and fed directly into the wider British civil wars of the following decade, after which Presbyterian church government was decisively secured as the polity of the national Church of Scotland.

Presbyterian polity occupies a middle position between episcopal government by bishops and congregational independency, combining local eldership with connectional accountability. It is the characteristic order of the churches in the Reformed and Presbyterian family, worked out especially in the tradition of Calvin and the Scottish Reformation. The affirmation is not merely administrative but is held to be grounded in scripture, expressing a conviction that the church should be governed by shared, representative eldership under the sole headship of Christ.

The Westminster Assembly, convened by the English Parliament between 1643 and 1649 and attended by Scottish commissioners under the Solemn League and Covenant, produced the Westminster Confession of Faith and an accompanying Form of Presbyterial Church Government that became the definitive doctrinal and polity standard for Presbyterian churches far beyond Britain, carried by Scottish and Scots-Irish emigration into the Presbyterian churches of colonial and later independent America, where it remains, in revised forms, the confessional basis of most Presbyterian denominations descended from that tradition. The Assembly's own debates were not unanimous: the Erastian controversy, over whether church discipline belonged to church officers or to the civil magistrate, was keenly fought within Westminster itself, and it was the Scottish commissioners, insisting church government was a matter of scriptural right rather than parliamentary convenience, who most forcefully overturned the Erastian position.