Be suspicious of guys in pointed hats
Truly, not all white hat people are worthy of your trust. But neither condemn them too quickly. Protestant churches are also filled with Popery.
By Popery, I am referring to priestcraft. By priestcraft, I am referring to any person coming between man and God. An example - and there are many - would be a church not celebrating the Lord's Supper unless an ordained clergy-person were there to "assist and administer."
And this all Christians ought to know, that the title of clergy St. Peter gave to all God's people, till Pope Higinus and the succeeding prelates took it from them, appropriating that name to themselves and their priests only; and condemning the rest of God's inheritance to an injurious and alienate condition of laity, they separated from them by local partitions in churches, through their gross ignorance and pride imitating the old temple, and excluded the members of Christ...
From John Milton's The Reason of Church Government, 1642. An English poet and scholar who is best known for the epic poem Paradise Lost (1667).
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Remember the Coneheads from Saturday Night Live? :-)
I couldn't agree more that Popery lives on in the Protestant church. When I was struggling to be heard by the leadership of the last institutional church that I attended, I would ask a simple question, "where is what you are telling me can be found in Scripture?" The answer was often (in my own words) "you don't need to worry about that because we are the clergy" or "you have vowed to obey us so do what we say" or some other such nonsense. It is completely unBiblical, but they don't really care. As soon as you push back then you become "dangerous" to their power structures and money and control. I can see why so many saints were martyred by the church that Jesus created to serve them
My advice to anyone reading my words is simply this... any time a church leader asserts "authority" over you, flee their presence immediately. While the role of an elder is certainly Biblical, any elder that claims to "rule" is not. Their role is that of an undershepherd. They are there to gently guide the sheep toward the Chief Shepherd and help protect them from danger, not to determine their own path. And what little Bible knowledge that they have is limited to verses like Hebrews 13:17 which tells us (in English) to "obey". Yet in the context of that verse and in reading the Greek, it seems more plausible that we are to be "convinced by" them. We bow the knee not to the elders (mini-Popes), but to Christ Himself. "My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me" - John 10:27