Dan Hotchkiss,
the Alban Institute consultant, has a new book about church governance. He shared
some of his insights with Edmonton and Yellowhead Presbyteries. Dan Hotchkiss,
the Alban Institute consultant, has a new book about church governance. He shared
some of his insights with Edmonton and Yellowhead Presbyteries.
Dan made the point that a governance structure is like a furnace. "If you have it well maintained, you don't have to worry about it. If you don't have it well maintained, you can have problems."
He began his presentation by asking, "Who owns the church?" People had all kinds of suggestions: members, the national church, God, or the congregation. Dan make the point that the clue to the ownership of the church lies in its mission. What a congregation or a court of the church does is determined by its mission. What is important is to be clear about that mission and ensure that it truly names what the congregation needs to be about.
Delegation
A lot of our current structure in the church "is redundant, labour intensive, and needlessly resistant to innovation." Partly this is because people naturally prefer what they have become used to, and that means no change. Another reason is the lack of trust when authority is delegated in the church.
The process of giving a committee a task and then making sure they have to come back for approval is not delegation. A great deal of time is wasted that way. When you delegate, you say in advance what you are looking for, then when the work is done give feedback so the group can do an even more effective job next time.
Effective Structure
Dan
shared a generalization that was articulated by Lyle Schaller some years ago:
"Church groups that are flexible about theology tend to be rigid about
organizational structure and behavior. And churches that are rigid about theology
tend to be more flexible about structure." What that means is if you are
clear about your theology, and conservatives are quite clear, you can be flexible
about the ways of achieving that. Being flexible in theology as main-line congregation
tend to be, there is a natural tendency to cling to the way they do things organizationally.
Dan outlined what he feels is an effective structure for a Presbytery or a congregation. On one hand there is the Board who give guidance and periodically evaluate how well the church body is doing. On the other hand, an Operations Team carries out the work that needs to be done, delegating aspects of the work to sub-teams.
Presbyteries waste a great deal of time when the whole meeting has to deal with every issue brought by Committees. Time is a precious commodity. One important function of the Board - which in this case would be the Presbytery Executive - is to decide on the two or at most three issues which would benefit from having the input of Presbytery delegates. All other work would be assigned to Operations Teams to just do.
Governance, Hotchkiss maintains, has an impact on church growth. In the preface to his book, he writes:
As an Alban Institute consultant, I have worked with congregations that grew rapidly while streamlining their decision-making process, and with others that tried to maintain scores of committees while their membership declined from thousands to hundreds to scant dozens. In time, I started to suspect that outdated, overly complex and inward-focused structures might be one cause of decline in congregations. As I watched more systematically, I came to believe that often-mentioned trends like "the decline of the Protestant mainline" might have as much to do with governance as with theology.
Governance and Ministry: Rethinking Board Leadership by Dan Hotchkiss. The Alban Institute, Alban No. AL370. 2009
ISBN# 978-1-56699-370-8
Congregational News Nov. 2009 Vol. 16 No. 2