Ministers and elders of the Church of Scotland

A Church of Scotland congregation is led by its minister and elders. Both of these terms are also used in other Christian denominations: see Minister (Christianity) and Elder (Christianity). This article discusses the specific understanding of their roles and functions in the Scottish Church.

The Greek term πρεσβύτερος [presbyteros], used in the New Testament as a designation for the leaders of the Early Church (e.g. Acts 11.30), has three different reflexes in English: elder, presbyter and priest. Priest is the oldest, a borrowing into Old English via Latin, elder (first attested 1526) is a translation of the underlying meaning of the Greek word, and presbyter (1597) is learned correction of the loan-word. However, the semantics of priest are complicated by the fact that it is traditionally used also as the translation of a different New Testament Greek word, ἱερεύς [hierefs], which refers to those who perform sacrificial rites in the Jerusalem temple and in pagan temples, but also appears as a title for Jesus (Heb 7.26). Consequently, the word priest was rejected by the reformed and puritan traditions as a term for Christian leadership, as part of the more general rejection of sacrificial elements in the Catholic understanding of the mass. Elder and presbyter remain theoretically as synonyms in Church of Scotland usage, but in practice presbyter is often reserved for those elders who are members of Presbytery, one of the higher courts of the Church.

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