There is an old illustration about the Reformation, and concerning the Episcopal Churches, the Church of England and others, and it runs something like this: at the time of the Reformation it was as though the Reformers found a tremendous, very ornate, elaborate cathedral, and there it was with its soaring arches, its long naves, its stained-glass windows, and its stonework and statues and images of Mary and others. When they got into that great ornate cathedral – this is just an illustration – they tore everything out, and they removed all the images; they took away the altar with its ascending steps and brought it down into the body of the cathedral to turn it into a simple communion table. They set up a pulpit from which would come the word of God; that would be central to them. But, says the illustration, that is as far as they got initially at the time of the Reformation. They took out all the Roman myths, and the nonsense of Catholicism and its traditions – which added to the Bible and completely subverted the Bible – and they put in the word of God and the gospel. But they never thought of pulling down the cathedral itself. So the building, the shell, remained. That stayed in place. And the illustration means this: yes, we thank God for the Reformers, because under God, they did a tremendous work. They changed the teaching; they brought back the gospel; that is what matters. They did all that, but they didn't do very much about church government and the ordering of the church. They left the ornate cathedral untouched; the reform of that came later. This is something of an oversimplification and exaggeration. We often say, the Church of England, for example, is half reformed, or it was in those days. Of course it has grown even worse since the Reformation and gone downhill in so many respects. But at the time of the Reformation, the gospel came in, and the truth, and simplicity. And yet the three pillars of the Reformation were never entirely accomplished because of the death of Edward VI and the coming to the throne of Mary. The structure of its government was not much changed, so in the Church of England you have got hierarchical government. You have got curates and priests, vicars and rectors. Then you have got to deans and deacons, and archdeacons and bishops, and eventually the archbishop. It is all hierarchical. You don't find that here in the Bible. I am leaving you behind, says Paul to Titus, to give each community its own elders. There will be no controlling central influence, central funding: nothing like that. It will be simple autonomous churches. Sometimes people say, ‘Well, surely that's not very secure. What is going to happen? These are small churches in each community. Some may be larger, but they are independent. Isn’t that a fragile arrangement? The amazing thing is it the most stable arrangement of all. It is denominations that collapse doctrinally in no time at all. Satan finds it easy to pollute a denomination. He just pollutes the top and then he has got the whole thing.
There is a fine illustration provided of this by the persecuted Russian Christians up until 1990. In 1990 we had a visit from one of the leading pastors, and he brought with him one of the printing machines that they used, made out of washing machine parts, and they had at that time 18 secret underground presses with small machines in different regions, and nobody knew where they all were. Every now and then the authorities would find one and arrest the printers and send them to prison for 5 to 8 years in terrible circumstances. But they never brought that printing programme – printing the word of God and booklets and tracts and so on – to a close, because they were all independent printing units. They didn't even know about each other, working in hidden places and forests. It is rather like that with churches. God wonderfully preserves independent churches. Denominations all collapse and bring down all the churches with it. But if an independent church should go rotten, and take on board false doctrine, and enfeebled itself – no gospel, people no longer converted, facing a period of liberalism – eventually, what happens to it? It self-destructs, and it is gone. A denomination has a power structure and a financial structure. It keeps itself alive somehow for centuries very often in false doctrine and rottenness. In the Bible, you get autonomous churches in communities with their own elders, directly accountable to God and responsive to the word. And that is found here, as in all the pastorals, as throughout the New Testament.