The ICC teaches centralised leadership

One of the 5 Core Convictions of the International Christian Church is “strong central leadership and godly central leader”.

According to the Sold-Out Discipling Movement website, usd21.org:

Throughout God’s Word, when His people were unified, there was a strong central leadership and godly central leader. (Examples: Moses, Joshua, David and of course Jesus and the Apostles.) 1 Corinthians 4:15-17 and Titus 1:5 teaches that local congregations had an overseeing evangelist, who unified the disciples “everywhere in every church.” In the first century, congregations were a collective movement — not autonomous, not self-governing.)

usd21.org

In another ICC resource titled “Living in the Book of Acts (An Apology for the SoldOut Movement’s Five Core Convictions)”, the idea of centralised leadership gets expanded further:

Living in the time the book of Acts was written would reveal to us that the churches worked together and were not locally autonomous (self-governing) congregations. They clearly shared money to support staff (Acts 18:5) and meet benevolent needs (Acts 11:29-30). Acts 15 clearly reveals a central leadership that governed and preserved unity in the world-wide church. 

Based on this core belief, the ICC perceives and justifies their founder Kip McKean to be their “godly central leader” in a top-down hierarchical and pyramid structure. Beneath McKean are the World Sector Leaders and Crown of Thorns Council.

Interestingly, according to McKean, this model of church governance was one of the contentious reasons behind the severing of ties between himself and the International Churches of Christ (ICOC), an earlier church movement which he founded. McKean even claimed that the ICOC labelled him “divisive” for insisting that his church model was the only truly biblical model, thereby rejecting ICOC’s autonomous church governance model as unbiblical and even “sinful”.

What does the Bible teach?

Leadership in the Old Testament

The ICC is correct to point out that the leadership model in the OT is somewhat like a pyramid structure.

During the Exodus period, Moses was the leader that God commissioned to lead Israel out of Egypt (Exodus 3:10) and, under the wise counsel of his father-in-law Jethro, Moses even oversaw the appointment of other leaders to serve under him (Exodus 18:24-26). After Moses died, Joshua then took over the reigns as Moses’ successor and led Israel into the Promised Land.

Furthermore, the period of the Judges saw much confusion in Israel. The book of Judges concludes by sadly remarking, “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.” (Judges 21:25).

It is also undeniable that one of the highest points of Israel’s history in the OT was God’s appointment of David, a man after God’s own heart (1 Sam 13:14), as king.

However, it would be too hasty to conclude, simply based on the OT that the NT church should therefore appoint (under God) a single human leader to oversee every church in the world.

Jesus is the new and greater Moses who comes after him (Deut 18:15; Heb 3:1-5).

Jesus is also the new and greater Joshua (in fact, “Jesus” is the Greek version of the Hebrew name “Joshua”) who leads His people into the greater Promised Land – God’s eternal kingdom.

Jesus is also the new and greater David (Matt 22:41-46) who, upon his death, resurrection and ascension, now sits enthroned in glory with all authority in heaven and on earth given to Him (Matt 28:18; Phil 2:9-11; Heb 1:3).

Therefore for anyone else other than Jesus, including Kip McKean, to be regarded as God’s anointed human leader over God’s church is blasphemy in the highest order.

What about vice-regency?

However, are there biblical grounds in support of a central leader (or a group of leaders) acting as “vice-regents” of Christ for the universal church?

The NT does not at all lend any support for vice-regency or prescribe global central leadership, despite ICC’s insistence that it does.

The Council of Jerusalem story in Acts 15 is used by the ICC as an example of central leadership that must be followed by the Christian church today. However, using this story as a guiding principle to formulate a core doctrine is problematic. The two key reasons are:

1. The “description vs prescription” problem. The problem with using NT narratives in the Bible to formulate doctrine is that narratives merely “describe” what the first century church did, rather than what Christians are commanded or “prescribed” to do. Therefore, just because the Jerusalem church was described to be an authoritative church (for argument’s sake, let’s suppose that it is), it does not necessarily mean that the NT prescribes that there ought to be a central authoritative church/leadership body in the church today.
   
2. The context of Acts 15 is ignored. In the story of Acts 15, a difficult theological problem was raised in regards to the necessity of circumcision for non-Jewish converts to Christianity. Therefore, the missionary workers to Antioch (ie. Paul and Barnabas) had to find a resolution by going to the Jerusalem church to seek their judgement on the matter. Going to Jerusalem was important not only because it was the original mother church that spawned the church in Antioch in Acts 11, but more so because the circumcision issue arose from Jews who came from there. So to prevent this divisive issue from happening again in the future as the gospel continues going out to the Gentiles, it was important that they deal with thoroughly within the Jerusalem church first. Therefore, if you take into account the context, this story does not remotely suggest that central leadership is mandatory in the NT.

If it’s true, why is the NT so silent about it?

If the NT indeed requires every generation of churches to have global “central leadership with a central leader”, you would expect more explicitness from the writings of Paul, Peter or even James that speak clearly about the requirements for people who take on such HUGE responsibilities. And yet they are all silent on this matter. Why?

In contrast, Paul and Peter gives really clear instructions on the requirements of the local church elder (eg. Titus 1:5-9; 1 Tim 3:1-7; 1 Peter 5:1-4).

So it begs the question of why the NT is silent on such important matters if it were indeed true.

Conclusion

Despite ICC’s best attempts to persuade you that the NT demands “strong central leadership with a central leader” (lest you sin against God!), a brief analysis of Scripture tells us otherwise.