God’s Design for Church Leadership #7 - Bringing It All Together: God’s Good Design for Church Leadership

To conclude this series on church leadership according to God’s design, I want to highlight the blessing of living in line with Scripture. One of the problems in our modern Western mindset is that we often view rules as oppression and order as the enemy of freedom. You see this when Christians think liturgy stifles the Holy Spirit, or when they treat creeds, confessions, and tradition as chains that paralyze the church. Many assume order is human and chaos is divine.

The Bible teaches the opposite. God is a God of order; sin is the agent of chaos. From creation in Genesis, to the temple worship of Israel, to the New Jerusalem of Revelation, we see precision, purity, and beauty as expressions of God’s holiness. Order, tradition, and structure are not bad in themselves—only their corrupted versions are, when man-made traditions rebel against God’s rule.

God’s commands and structures are not arbitrary. They reflect the way He has wired reality, so that all creation might flourish. Think of a fish—if Scripture says it must live in water, that is not a restriction but the revelation of how God made it to thrive. In the same way, when God appoints men to lead in the church and in the home, it’s not because men and women are interchangeable and God simply made a preference. It’s because He designed them with different, complementary roles—both essential, both good, both rooted in creation, not the fall. When we honour these roles, the whole body flourishes.

This applies to every area of leadership we’ve covered: the need for biblically qualified men, the necessity of plural eldership, the role of deacons, the importance of godly wives, and so on.

Does this mean Knox, or our tradition, has it all perfectly figured out? No. The point is directional—it’s about seeking to understand God’s design, repenting where we fall short, and conforming ourselves daily to Scripture. It’s about living out the Reformation motto: The church reformed, always reforming. It’s about asking the Holy Spirit to enlighten the Word, soften our hearts to obey, and strengthen us to go against the grain of the culture—so that our lives and churches glorify God.

"To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen." (Ephesians 3:21)

Nino Marques