Church Government: Breakthrough

I've never heard of Mark Ashton until I read this story.

When Elders Say No.

It's great. It's short and easy to read. You will find excellent examples of a godly pastor and a church there.

After reading it, I went back to skim it through and googled around a little to find the St. Andrew the Great church in Cambridge where Mark Ashton was the pastor. And then, I was joyfully surprised that this story of submission to the church elders was actually from an Anglican church! So, an Anglican church can have "elders" in the form of church wardens! This is a breakthrough for me!

As I've expressed before, my biggest concern regarding the Anglican church structure was the absence of plural eldership in a local church. Since I'm ok with the existence of bishops in churches, and I must have mistaken to think a local Anglican church cannot have an official body of "elders" (although the term used is still not the biblical term, elder/presbyter), I should no longer have any issues with the Anglican church system. Of course there may still be things to improve upon and minor tweaking to do in a church since no church structure is perfect and all churches need continually be reformed, but I don't think I can have any more issues with the Anglican church structure itself.

Now, I will continue to read the book, Who Runs the Church to know more and learn from it and will finally, with God's help, come to my final conclusion.

This wonderful man of God, Mark Ashton had passed away few years ago, but a blog post pointed me to this short video of him talking about the gospel using his terminal illness as a platform. I'm struck with his joy in impending death, and it makes me want to know the greatness of Jesus as well as this man did.