We dreaded the meeting but attended once a month anyway. It always ran long. We usually went home frustrated. None of us, if we were honest, could say we enjoyed the meetings of our governing board.
One night the issue was how to revitalize our worship services, which we all agreed were flat. Someone had argued at a previous session that the elders should “exercise some responsibility.”
The solution: we organized a committee and assigned an elder to be in charge. What happened? Nothing. Month after month, no report, no report, no report. The tension and pressure kept rising.
Each meeting began to follow a pattern: After prayer we’d go directly into committee reports. Although scheduled, we’d get to old or new business only rarely. We would rehash each committee’s report or, in the case of the worship committee, the nonreport.
Bob, the chairman of the board, would make a speech lamenting comments gathered from parishioners who took him into their confidence that month. He’d report “some people” about to leave the church.
Jim, the music director, would respond defensively, saying he receives only positive comments and is still waiting guidance from the worship committee.
Bill, the worship committee chairman, would invariably have another explanation for why the committee was unable to meet or still wasn’t ready to offer recommendations.
Speeches would get louder and less subtle. And all this over how to worship the God of love.
One night, as I pulled into the parking lot, I couldn’t help but wonder, If we leaders of the church don’t know how to be the church to each other as we do church business, where will we ever be the church?
The Other Extreme
Some people react to the distasteful side of working within a church structure by avoiding the institutional responsibilities. Their involvement in church extends no further than worship and home Bible studies or support groups.
Many people attracted to these relational groups want little to do with filling traditional roles in the church. They expect Sunday school and child care during the worship services. They enjoy hearing a choir and quality music. They’ll participate in the church programs. But they don’t want to get into the structure themselves. That doesn’t “meet their needs.”
If a committee workhorse talked honestly with one of the relational types, the conversation might sound something like this:
Charlie (the committee worker): I helped found this church and served as its chairman for ten years. I’ve seen Bible studies and young couples come and go. But the church and its programs continue. Frankly, I’m tired of people coming and taking, enjoying the benefits of the program, and never contributing.
Ron (the relational person): Committees and bureaucratic offices leave me cold. I want to be in a group that shares needs and relates the Bible to what’s going on in the real world. Hasn’t the church grown since we’ve started so many small groups?
Charlie: If the church has grown, why are we struggling to keep its programs afloat? Why aren’t we meeting our missions budget? Why the shortage of Sunday school teachers? Why are Sunday evening and midweek services so poorly attended? It seems your relational-ministry people don’t really care about the church.
Ron: But don’t you see? We are the church!
Charlie: Well then, maybe we should start passing the offering plate at these groups to support the missions program. Maybe you should cancel your home Bible study the week we have a revival scheduled. Maybe your people should take responsibility for the church by filling more positions. To be honest, I’m getting burned out from giving and giving and never getting my own needs met.
Ron: But that’s what our groups are all about-meeting needs!
Charlie: Then why don’t they start meeting some of the church’s needs by relieving some of us who shoulder the administrative load for the rest of you?
Why the Expectation Gap?
To some extent these different perspectives reflect a generation gap. Often the younger church members (twenties and thirties) are more attracted to the relational approach. They prefer relationships defined more by quality than by formal titles. They come to a church and ask, “How can I use my gifts?” If the answer is, “Join a committee,” they say, “That isn’t what I asked.”
Relational people aren’t motivated by tradition or denominational loyalty. They want to know, Will this activity give me a meaningful, authentic, significant experience? They want to feel they count as individuals. They want their personal concerns recognized. A task-oriented committee usually feels, to them, cold and impersonal.
Program-oriented people, on the other hand, tend to hold an older view that sees talking about yourself and your problems as boorish and impolite. If you have tension in your family, telling people not related by blood or marriage violates a basic taboo:
“We are loyal within our family; we do not tell outsiders what is wrong with us.” The way to handle a bad day, they feel, is to put on a good face, do what has to be done, and move forward without griping about it. Anything else is bad form.
The relational person reacts: “If we can’t talk about real stuff and real life—if I have to sit here and play phony games—I don’t have the time, energy, or interest. I’ll add another involvement only if the situation enables me to satisfy those needs that go unmet in the world. Everywhere else, I have to pretend I’m competent, pretend I’m in control. I don’t want to come to church to pretend.”
Institutionalists see themselves not as pretending but as selflessly getting things done. To them, the bottom line for a committee: What have we accomplished and how much did it cost?
Can Relaters and Workers Pull Together?
When one group finds fulfillment through relationships and the other through the exercise of power, tension between the two is inevitable. The people trying to keep the institution on course will become increasingly discouraged about not having enough money, resources, or support for what they are doing.
The relational people will build small-group networks and attract people who find these groups meaningful. But as the church begins to grow (and with it, demands on the program), the institutional people will ask why the relational people don’t “get with the program.”
A turning point for me came when I asked myself, “How does ministry happen?” I realized I had a whole group of people committed to ministry. They were the people in the structure. Yet they needed more than they were getting.
They experienced church in two places: the worship service and committees. They had an unspoken assumption that in a committee you no longer live under biblical guidelines; you live by Robert’s Rules of Order. It was almost as if Jesus said, “Love one another—unless you’re in a committee meeting. In that case, love takes a back seat to getting your point across.”
Several years ago, when I was on a pastoral staff and involved in numerous committees, I made an appointment with an elder. We had lunch, and then he said, “Okay, now tell me what you want.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I’ve never been to lunch with someone in leadership who didn’t want me to do something.” It took me the rest of our time together to convince him I only wanted to get acquainted, to find out how his life was going and how I might better pray for him. I had no hidden agenda.
The program-oriented person isn’t used to being nourished as a person rather than a producer. But concern for the personal side is necessary to sustain anyone in a ministry. Even institutional people, who work with a deep sense of loyalty, commitment, and duty, will end up getting burned out or cynical if they try to make the church work without receiving personal care.
One sign of this: Whenever I meet elders and board members from other churches, I ask how they’ll feel the day their term is up. The overwhelming response is, “Relieved! I’m not really satisfied in this. I am doing it because it needs to be done.”
This fatally flawed perspective fails to see roles as ministries carried out in the context of community. Unless leaders catch this vision, the church can never be anything more than an institution.
I obviously reject both the impersonal committee approach and the ingrown, feel-good group approach. We need a new understanding of how we minister together. I’ve called this new approach a “mission-focused community.”
The Mission-Focused Community
Committees traditionally fall short of being true mission-focused communities in a number of areas.
Commitment. For the average committee member, commitment means “I come to meetings and respond to anything I’m supposed to vote on. If something doesn’t happen, it isn’t my fault; I’m not responsible for taking initiative unless it’s on the agenda.”
In addition, the traditional time commitment is usually inadequate. Most committees assume a handful of people meeting once a month can renew a church in areas like worship or Christian education or discipleship. What often happens is this: We take a month to recruit people. We don’t meet in August or between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The flu wipes out February. By year’s end, we’ve met eight or nine times, usually starting late or with latecomers yet to arrive, and sometimes ending three hours earlier. On an average night maybe two hours actually were productive.
Two hours times nine is supposed to revitalize our church in adult education? It wouldn’t even provide minimal maintenance. Actually, we have programmed ourselves for nongrowth and noncreativity.
Frequency. A committee usually meets according to a set calendar. A mission-focused community, on the other hand, meets as often as is necessary to get the task done.
In one church the evangelism committee met each month and issued a report on how somebody else should do something about evangelism:
“The pastor should give more invitations.”
“The congregation should get out and win neighbors to Christ.”
As far as I know, not a single person came to church or accepted Christ as a result of that committee, but it met faithfully and cranked out resolutions.
Finally a new chairman announced he would quit unless the committee took the lead and became active in evangelism personally. The group accepted the challenge and became a mission community. Sometimes they met for a whole day at a time. Sometimes months passed without a meeting, because they had no need to meet, but they always kept in touch. Each person grasped what needed to be done and did it. By the end of the year, more than one hundred people had professed Christ as a direct outcome of that committee’s ministry.
Calling. “Please tell people,” my banker friends plead, “that bankers don’t necessarily want to serve on the finance committee.” One accountant friend says, “I keep ending up as finance committee chairman, but that’s what I do all day! I really want to work with kids, but nobody asks me because they assume my life’s vocation indicates my church calling. Well, it just ain’t so.”
In the traditional system, a nominating committee would have put Saul, the tent maker from Tarsus, on the maintenance committee. Men like Saul will cheerfully do this work, but they need a way to discover other gifts.
Calling also influences the number and type of groups formed. In many churches, certain committees exist because they have always existed, whether currently needed or not, and needs may exist for which there are no committees. Mission communities, on the other hand, form in response to real needs and are staffed by people who have chosen that mission personally and whose gifts and calling determine their roles.
A prison ministry group, for instance, may form because some people feel called to that ministry. Other mission communities may develop that other churches in the denomination don’t have, but they uniquely fit this congregation’s situation and the people’s needs and sense of call.
For roles to be self-chosen, you may have to set needs and tasks before your people and ask, “Which do you feel called and committed to doing?” In one church I worked in for over ten years, we found people became more committed to their ministries when we gave them time to pray, talk about the needs, and choose their tasks themselves. They now owned the problem and the solution; they didn’t grudgingly accept an assignment. Energy levels rose because it was no longer “this job someone else stuck me with.”
Responsibility. In one church, a four-person elder board didn’t like how the Christian education office looked. They reasoned, “We are elders; we have the authority.” So, one Saturday they came in and rearranged it. When the women who ran the program—recruiting teachers, ordering supplies, and arranging the lessons—came in on Sunday, they were confused and dismayed. And they quit on the spot.
Traditional committees often separate authority from responsibility, and this is deadly. Committee members end up with a low sense of responsibility for their decisions, while those who do the work often lack authority needed to make responsible decisions.
Mission-focused communities, on the other hand, tend to keep responsibility and authority closer together.
Uninvited guests. There are always invited guests at a conventional committee meeting: our brains and our seats. We are supposed to bring ideas and information and sit as long the meeting runs.
The uninvited guests are our emotions, family problems, and personal concerns. Like little gremlins, they sneak in and mess up a meeting by discharging frustrations in speeches on topics totally unrelated to what is really bothering us.
When you hear anger in someone’s voice, probably this person is tired or stressed out, or somebody didn’t treat her right. She has all these feelings, but because feelings weren’t invited to the party, she can’t deal with them directly.
This harms more than the effectiveness of the committee. It fails the individual who came to a group of fellow believers, where help should be available.
One way of identifying all the guests is to have everyone answer a brief question—either for the whole group or in smaller groups of three or four. Some people feel uncomfortable with anything too personal. But if they feel the discussion is relevant to the ministry assignment, they’ll share. For instance, if we’re to discuss an evangelism report, I might ask, “What most influenced you to come to Christ?” Or before discussing worship, “What was your most meaningful worship experience?” The key is to ask questions related to the assignment while avoiding loaded questions and ones some cannot answer.
In a community, there are no uninvited guests. The whole person is invited. We take time to catch up with each other, pray for needs, and then go on to business. Before we do business, we need to know who is here—physically and emotionally—and what we have to work with.
Getting There
I began this article with our governing board’s dilemma—a worship committee that wasn’t reporting. The episode turned out nothing like I would have imagined. In fact, the actual events proved to be a major step toward community for our leaders and the church.
As it happened, we decided to spend the first fifteen minutes in groups of four or five to discuss three questions:
What has your week been like?
How can we pray for you?
What is one area of your ministry we can pray for?
The worship committee chairman shared last:
“Well, this week’s been like all my others. You know my wife is dying of cancer.” (We knew nothing of the sort!)
“I get home from work and cook the meals. I put the kids and Irene to bed, and it’s midnight. Then I drop into bed to do it all again seven hours later. As for ministry, I just can’t seem to get anything accomplished. Taking care of Irene takes every bit of energy I have. I wish you would pray for me.”
At that point all our ill feelings toward this man dissolved. Instead of being irritated, we were devastated. Not one of us had prayed for him during these months. We criticized him. We gossiped about him and wondered why he didn’t get off the dime.
“Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” I asked.
“Somehow it never seemed appropriate,” he said. “What was I to do, interrupt a discussion of the music director’s ideas to say, ‘By the way, things are bad at home’? Besides, I was afraid I might cry.
I resolved at that point never again to let committee business squeeze out the community essential to being the church. It doesn’t matter what problem or project we’re working on: prior to being performers, we’re people who have to care for each other. And that makes us work together even more effectively.
Roberta Hestenes is president of Eastern College in St. Davids, Pennsylvania.
