June 08, 2009
The Committeee
Hilary Clinton said that it takes a village to raise a child. In the church we’ve gotten into the pattern of thinking that says it takes a committee to do anything. Actually I think we use the committee system because there’s a measure of protection. It’s much more difficult to find fault with a group of people than it is with just one or two. As we clean and refurbish our new church facility, we’ve been hearing behind the scene questions of, “So who is it that’s making all the decisions?” Speaking from the voice of experience…It doesn’t take a committee to clean the urinals.
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Gail;
-----This life is full of half-traveled roads, because part way down them there always seems to be an appropriate turn-off. The committee in the church is one of those turn-offs. God made the acknowledgement of each member of the body to be what makes it a body. Each member counts on the grounds of simply being a member, and his particular expertise (or gift, as Scripturally termed) is further respected in its own area of usefulness. So the spiritually healthy church operates through everyone’s respect and honor for everyone else. It is not a system in which its purposes, directions, and missions are determined by one or a few men, but rather a system in which those have emerged from who its members are and what their gifts are.
-----The church’s ownership of property is like introducing a misalignment in the steering. The physical nature of the property rather lends it to only one use or another, Although that use can emerge from the character of the body’s members, it can limit the diversity the body could otherwise enjoy. It necessitates someone making decisions about it, thus boiling the collective regard for one another down into a governing committee. And if painstaking patience is not used to acknowledge the whole body in making those decisions, the pull in the steering can easily lead to a side-road where the body becomes a servant to the property directed by the decisions of the committee.
-----Committees start on the right road, they offer an accumulation of expertise and a sharing of the burden of responsibility, but they easily veer into the realm of governance rather than liaison. The need is to find the best fit of the property to the members of the body. The committee must be as knowledgeable and respectful of the interests of every member of the body as it is of the possibilities of the property. It must steer the planning and decisions regarding the property into those interests so that the property will best serve the talents and gifts God has given to all the members. Otherwise, the fatal error may occur where the talents and gifts of the members are steered into the service of the property by the governance of a committee.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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