It's a sad, sad thing, but in church history, when you have great periods of decline – a doctrinal decline, error in doctrine, error in practice, a deviation from the blueprints of the New Testament – it always starts with the leadership. They always start the problem, and its well-entrenched first in them. In our country the history of the startling decline of the historic mainline denominations, that were all once so sound, began in leadership councils, in seminaries, in colleges; the decay started at the top. That's one of the reasons why the New Testament gives us only one form of church government, and that is congregational independency. Because it's the safest; remarkably, it is the safest. Human reasoning says, surely not! Surely it would be much safer for all churches that believe the same things, believed in the Scripture, the inspired word, the doctrines of the gospel; surely it would be safer if they all got together and they moved together! Surely there’s strength in numbers! That’s how the world thinks. Surely if there is a strong leader and a council of leadership – call it a synod, a presbytery, anything you like – there is strength. Then if somebody goes wrong here, he can be corrected. If somebody goes wrong there, an individual congregation, it can be corrected. There’s one big trouble with that thinking, the worldly model of organisation and government; the decline always starts at the top, in the leadership. Well, of course it does, because we have a spiritual enemy.
Why should Satan attack a thousand individual churches when it's much easier for him to corrupt the top? Then he has got them all; they will all fall in due course. So he will go for the leadership, the colleges, and the seminaries. Satan is no fool. It's really perfectly obvious when you think about it. That is why you don't have such a construction in the New Testament for the church. Denominations, and synods, and leaderships, and popes, and archbishops, and church councils; they are all human devices, and they mean well when they start and they may do well for a time, but they all collapse. Satan is already training the men who will get to the top, and he picks somebody who is probably not even a true convert, but is very clever, and he can learn the doctrine, and he can excel in theology, and he can climb up the ranks, but he is a very ambitious man, and a man who loves to control and to organise. So Satan's got his career charted till he becomes the head of that denomination, and then you can write it off. You see this reflected even here in the book of Ezra; the rot starts at the top. So the genius of New Testament government is that there isn’t a top. There is only Christ and his word, and every congregation is autonomous. Of course, we can fellowship together and assist each other, but we don't want to be in the same organisation, because immediately it will start to rot, and it usually takes a good group about fifty to seventy years to fall, sometimes faster.
There is another advantage in Independency. If an individual church loses touch with the Saviour, loses touch with the doctrines of the Bible, and people are no longer converted, so that the membership's sags and sags, what happens to it? If it is an independent church, it self-destructs, it disappears. But if it's a Church of England church, the denomination holds it up, and keeps it going in its corruption and its failure, and similarly with most of the denominations. The autonomy of the local church and independency, even has its own self-destruct system for those that do go wrong.