Faith & Spirit Quote by John Nelson Darby

Darby’s sentence has the calm, legalistic snap of someone building a case, not offering a meditation. “I go farther” signals escalation: he’s not merely advising; he’s tightening the moral screws. What follows is a strategic shift from preference to obligation. “Plainly our duty” turns a church-structure argument into a conscience issue, the kind of move that forces agreement to look like faithfulness and dissent to look like negligence.

The key verb is “desire.” Darby doesn’t say “elect” or “appoint” pastors and teachers; he says believers should want them to “take the care” of congregations. That phrasing keeps the power dynamic ambiguous on purpose. It implies leadership as service and burden rather than status, while still insisting leadership is necessary and divinely intended. It’s an argument for order that tries to avoid sounding like a grasp for control.

Then comes the clincher: “God did raise up such in the church as we see it in the word.” Darby anchors the whole claim in restorationist logic: the Bible isn’t just inspiration; it’s a blueprint. He invokes scripture as an observable pattern (“as we see it”), implying that proper church life is something recoverable, almost technical, if you read correctly. The subtext is polemical: contemporary arrangements are being measured against an early-church ideal, and anything that doesn’t match looks like drift.

Context matters. Darby, a major figure in the Plymouth Brethren movement, is often associated with suspicion of ecclesiastical hierarchies. This line shows the balancing act: resisting institutional clergy while still insisting that real spiritual care requires recognized, scripturally warranted teachers. It’s not anti-leadership; it’s leadership by divine warrant rather than denominational machinery.