Do congregations make good decisions?   Rick Warren says, no, we’ve just imposed American democracy on church:

“what do the words committees, elections, majority rule, boards, board members, parliamentary procedures, voting, and vote have in common?  None of these words are found in the New Testament! We have imposed an American form of government on the church and, as a result, most churches are as bogged down in bureaucracy as our government is.”

Maybe you’d respond like Winston Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”  But political democracy isn’t all that encouraging, is it?

In his book, the Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan argues that systematic bias means democracies have little hope of making “optimal” or wise decisions.  Popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, emotions, and personal biases combine to make voters consistently wrong about some issues, and they elect leaders who share those views.  So democracy will do what voters want, but when the question involves biases, the bias will win out over wisdom.

If congregationalism is just “church democracy,” and if democracy makes the wrong decisions, why do we hold to congregationalism?

Toward a Great Commission Resurgence identifies six “distinctives” of Baptist churches :  regenerate church membership, believer’s baptism by immersion, the priesthood of all believers, congregational church polity, local church autonomy, and liberty of conscience.

One of these, I note, is almost never debated in Convention life.   “Your church membership is unregenerate” is a real insult.  The lines of “autonomy” and “liberty of conscience” are hot topics.  “Your church lacks congregational polity” seems to be the reason Dr. Mohler allows for more levels of theological triage; truly tertiary topics are cheapened by the comparison.

But let’s stop and think about the basic idea.  “Congregational polity” implies that a congregation makes decisions.   And by elevating it to “distinctive,” Baptists appear to say that a congregation makes better decisions.

But is that true? Do congregations make better decisions?  Do they even make good decisions?