A Pilgrimage Of Faith, J.B. Toews, 1993

tenure of membership was limited to specific terms-one, two or three years.8 By virtue of its com- position, functional character and brevity of tenure, the church council form of governance had less authority than the Board of Elders form. The process of church leadership be- came more democratic, and authority shifted to the pastor. Collective responsibility for the spiritual nurture, watchcare and leadership gradually declined. The pastor became the center of all of these responsibilities, This was a pragmatic concession to the dominant cultural milieu during the second half of the twentieth century. Growing numbers of churches have begun to sense that something important has been lost in the way leadership is selected. In their search to recapture responsible, authorita- tive leadership, some have returned to the board of elders model. In the absence of established organic processes to draw leaders from within the churchly community, various approaches have been used to reestablish the eldership pat- tern. It is becoming increasingly clear that there is an urgent need to change from church council (democratic) leadership to a more biblical model. The switch from the bivocational ministry to paid pastors and ministers did not imply a retreat from traditional princi- ples of polity and ministry. But it did raise new issues. At the 1951 General Conference sessions the Board of Reference and Counsel addressed a series of these polity issues in a docu- ment titled "A Frank Analysis of our Spiritual Status," It fo- cused on four issues: (1) A lack of clear guidelines to help ministers, local churches and the conference deal uniformly with scriptural interpretation related to life and polity. (2) In- 222 HOW SHALL WE THEN BE LED? creasing differences and uncertainty among ministers in rela- tion to critical sections of the Confession of Faith. (3) An ab- sence of unity in policies of local church administration and practice within the conference. (4) A hesitancy to accept conference decisions on social, ethical and spiritual matters.9 The first two points indicated a weakening of community hermeneutics as more leaders came into the churches from "outside", and as increasing numbers of aspiring ministers were trained in Bible schools and seminaries of varied theo- logical persuasions. Moreover, the anti-German sentiment of the war years hastened the switch from German to English, and some senior leaders were handicapped by lack of fluency in the new language. Many younger pastors did not have the benefit of apprenticing under senior ministers as had