From Michael
All Baptist churches cherish their autonomy and democracy. By autonomy I mean that each Baptist church is its own boss, selecting its own pastors, electing its own committees, and spending money as it sees fit. By democracy I am referring to the principle of every church member being an equal stock holder, from the back pugh all the way to the pulpit. In theory, every major decision is made by the entire congregation through a popular vote. Because we are American, we have been taught to cherish our freedom to choose our fate and have a voice in the political process, so it just seems right that church should work the same way.
The decision making process at DBC works a lot like our Federal government. There are several committees and ministers that share power in a checks-and-balances arrangement. This is done for the same reasons our founding fathers designed it into the Constitution: power corrupts and we don’t trust people with too much power. If we were to accidentally call Satan to be our pastor, well… he couldn’t do too much damage.
The flip side of this is that if we hired the Apostle Paul as our missions pastor, he couldn’t do much either. The system is intended to be slow and difficult to change, protecting it from ego maniacs, but also making it painful to do something as critical as hire a new youth minister. When everyone has an oar in their hand, it takes a lot of management and communication to get the boat turned around. More often than not, it just looks like a lot of splashing and floating.
If I asked you to name the 3 or 4 most influential churches in this country, odds are that not one of them is democratic. They are probably all first generation churches that were founded by their current pastor/ leadership team, and that person/team is king. Despite the poor reputation of monarchies in this country, kings have the power to make dramatic things happen quickly. Just look at the lightning quick development of
I imagine that if Bill Hybels wanted to move Sunday morning worship at Willow Creek to Tuesday mornings, he could make it happen in about two months. He can do that because when you join Willow Creek, you put in a permanent vote for Hybels and his vision. If you ever have a problem with that vision, you don’t voice your grievance at a business meeting, you go somewhere else. You vote with your attendance and your money.
Does the next generation of DBC leadership vote any differently? Do they go to business meetings, or worry about decisions being made by a nominating committee (a committee that selects the members of other committees, and yes, we have one… and yes, I was on it)? No, they go to another church when they don’t like what is happening here, or, as in the letter posted below, they withhold money until they see the right kinds of decisions being made. You can see the eventual collision of the unstoppable force and the immovable object. If your entire church body is made up of people who will simply go elsewhere or disengage if things get too bad, and your church government assumes vigorous member participation in the decision making process, the whole thing has the potential to implode.
Are we near the end of the democratic church institution? Let me know your thoughts.
Michael
4 comments:
I would love to be in a church that had indoor skiing! What committee oversees that? I'm going to start a church in Dubai.
Seriously, I agree with you that more and more people are less and less interested in church polity. Could that be because more people have no background in church? They are coming to Christ in "monarchical" churches and so assume that's how it is everywhere? Could it be that they don't see the connection between the church's mission and the way the church makes decisions? I know veteran church members who don't care what happens in business meetings because they don't see how it affects their ministry in life. Their purpose to make disciples will not be affected one way or the other. So, for them, there seems to be a disconnect somewhere.
Who knows really. We studied Baptist polity a lot in seminary. It's interesting that there is a vocal segment of Baptist life trying to hold onto the Baptist "distinctives" like autonomy and congregational government. They are doing this in large part in reaction to "fundamentalist" movements in the 80s and 90s to take control of Baptist life - to lead by decree from the top down, limiting discussion and input. That's how I saw it at least in seminary.
I do think there will always be a vestige of congregational churches in place. Perhaps what you observe is a pendulum swing for the foreseeable future.
So, how should we respond to how people actually participate in church? Get rid of business meetings? Reduce the number of committees? Teach people to value congregational church government?
What does our form of church government say about the values of the institution? There will always be some form of leadership and decision making, whether a big church or even a small group. The question is, what helps us accomplish the mission? Seems to me if you keep the mission simple, then you really don't have a need for a lot of input, committees, leadership etc reserved for the few.
Our church polity says a lot about what we view as the purpose of church. If we are an agency/institution, then we will be organized as such. If we organize for a movement, however, the leadership, decision making, and communication will look very different. Perhaps we don't know how to organize for a movement anymore, but keep trying to organize for an institution in an increasingly "anti-institutional" environment.
This probably goes without saying...but I'll say it anyway. The goal is not getting a lot of people to have their say in the business of the church. The goal is to get a lot of people engaged in the mission of the church.
So, what do you suggest DBC should do in light of your observations? I look forward to the comments.
Jeff, you know what I think- place a bomb under it and blow the whole institutional model up. Nothing but house churches, so the whole leadership method discussion becomes moot. No wasting money because there isn't much to spend money on other than giving to direct needs. Every decision making meeting has a significant impact on your church experience, so everyone is invested. Its like being one of 10 people on an island. You would probably care what decisions the other 9 people were making when you weren't around. In this vision of things we don't have business meetings, we have tribal councils.
The funny thing about the Willow Creeks of the world is that they will start having problems with polity once the 2nd generation of leadership takes over. The moment the "next guy" suggests something completely different, all the old timers are going to say "that's not how Bill did it". So I prefer the chaos of a million little churches over even the visionary mega church.
But since I'm not going to turn the Titanic 180 degrees in the foreseeable future, what should we do with what we have? If I was going to "tweak" the Baptist model I would come up with some system to determine who the 10 most invested church members were and combine them with the current staff to make a Jedi Council of sorts. A member's "investment" would be determined by giving, time, maturity and influence. It would be a council for life, or until someone had reason to step down and the council would select new members through an interview process. That would be the only active government in the church and all decisions would start and stop there. Could it be corrupted? Sure, but then the church would fall apart. We would all find places to worship and God's kingdom would escape unscathed. I also don't think this would compromise the individual members investment in ministry. Let's face it, in our current congregational government, what goes on in committees already has nothing to do with the individual's discipleship. We lose nothing that we currently cherish and at least we gain aggressive decision making.
I just thought of a way to determine who is on the first council. Announce a 5 day prayer-a-thon for the church with no other activities but hard core, on your knees praying. Whoever the last 10 people praying are, that's your council.
I’ve always had a hard time with business meetings. I tend to dislike conflict, and I’ve been member of at least one church that split (twice). It seems that, at many meetings, there is one person who just wants to argue. I think that this puts a lot of people off. They just take the attitude of “why bother.”
On another note, I have never been to a meeting outside of Sunday morning where we had a quorum. How binding would any decisions made there be?
Another concern is that a democratic system requires an educated membership. By this, I don’t mean a college degree or higher. I am referring to an educated understanding of Scripture and the Christian worldview. Biblical illiteracy is quite prevalent in our churches. Should we be trusted with the running of our little part of God’s kingdom if we have not applied ourselves to seriously study the Bible and sound docrtine? How often, when called upon to do the work of the Lord, do we just shoot from the hip instead of drawing from a rich understanding of Scripture? How many times have we said, “I think” instead of “the Bible says here that…” It seems that if we want to save our style of church government, we should first pursue a rigorous commitment to discipleship.
r.l. gillert
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