Presbytery

Definition: a group or board of clergy,

“Presbyter” is an honorific title for a single Christian clergy. This comes from a Greek word for “old man.” It might be the root for the word “priest.”

A pastoral staff considered as a group is a “presbytery.”

The word is sometimes used for location: the home of a priest or a section of the church reserved for the Elders is sometimes called a “Presbytery.”

Why I Looked It Up

Douglas Wilson used the word in a blog post about church discipline:

If you discipline her, does she have any recourse? And I don’t mean through an appeal to presbytery. I mean through an appeal to gullible journalists with a long tale of abuse and woe.