Baptist church meetings aren’t for the feint hearted. They are meant to discern the ‘mind of Christ’, but often they serve as an indicator of the carnality of certain congregation members and the exercise of power.”

It’s no accident that Baptist church meetings are called ‘business’ meetings. Ideally, they should serve as an extension of church worship, but all too often operate in a dualistic fashion as the ‘ying’ to the worship ‘yang’.

Shelley (1989) writes that:

In the ‘managerial age’, pressure mounted on the local pastor and his people to think of the church as ‘God’s business’ and the minister as a church manager … the ‘business mentality’ seemed to fit the congregation. The minister is the chief executive officer, the board established policy; the body adopts the budget; and the members are mobilized for church growth or social service.

The first book I ever bought as a Baptist pastor wasn’t a commentary or theological tome, it was a handy little book from Dymocks on formal business meeting procedure. It was the only way around the wily church secretary who, unlike the average congregant, knew his way around the labyrinthian and esoteric ways of formal business meeting procedure (FBMP). I’ll never forget one church meeting when a member of our young adults group stood up during a tense church meeting to contribute. “Are you addressing the motion on the floor?!!!” bellowed an irate church member. The young man, unsure of what that even meant stood frozen in silence, and then sat down, defeated.

“Dedicated as a holy activity, then, congregational discernment and decision making is taken up by the Spirit and transformed into something greater than it can be as simply a human process. Through submission, attentiveness, and obedience, congregational politics becomes what may be called sacramental democracy.”

C. Shelin

I memorised that little book and consulted it before every church meeting so that I could play the secretary at his own game. (FBMP) presents a range of challenges for churches when they seek to have a meeting of minds:

1. Frontloading

FBMP frontloads the solution to issues by requiring the end decision to be put first. Once that is seconded and is “on the floor”, it’s up to the members in the meeting to either accept it, amend it (a complicated procedure), or defeat it.

• Adversarial

It is adversarial in nature, requiring motions to be changed or defeated, and for a show of hands or a ballot on every issue. It isn’t necessarily a consensus driven process, its binary. You either support the motion or you don’t.

• Esoteric

Only a small percentage of every congregation understand the concept of FBMP. I have never in my 38 years of being a Baptist, seen or heard of a resource available in churches to help educate members in how to navigate the complexities of FBMP. This means that power in church meetings resides in the few who understand the esoteric methodology. It also means that even a single person can use the system to create maximum disruption to the meeting.

“Dedicated as a holy activity, then, congregational discernment and decision making is taken up by the Spirit and transformed into something greater than it can be as simply a human process. Through submission, attentiveness, and obedience, congregational politics becomes what may be called sacramental democracy.”

C. Shelin

The result is that the primary means by which we make decisions as Baptists is a system which is poorly understood and poorly executed. It’s also one of the primary sources of trauma, and a source ground of moral injury due to the consequences that flow from processes that are handled poorly. I had a practise of never going home straight after a church meeting. I would gather first with my associate pastor to analyse proceedings, lick my wounds where necessary and decompress before heading home to my family.

Going back to the origins of Baptists as a movement, the idea of the church meeting is rooted in foundational Baptist conviction held by John Smyth that the essence of a church, or the ‘ecclesial minimum’, is the promise of Christ to be present ‘where two or three are gathered’ in his name (Matt 18:20). (Freeman, 2004)

Ideally, we should reflect the imagery of 1 Corinthians 12:

12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. … 27 Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

Schelin argues for church meetings to be seen as ‘sacramental democracy’:

“Dedicated as a holy activity, then, congregational discernment and decision making is taken up by the Spirit and transformed into something greater than it can be as simply a human process. Through submission, attentiveness, and obedience, congregational politics becomes what may be called sacramental democracy.”

I tried in vain on many occasions before church meetings to instil in congregations the gravity of the challenge ahead: that we must be able to leave the church at the end of the and honestly say that we have “discerned the mind of Christ”. That is a big claim to make, and not one that we should make lightly.

State Unions can lean on the technicality that each church is an autonomous entity – to escape any responsibility for developing and evolving a body of policy that helps churches with governance and human resource policy

Amateurism – the bedfellow of autonomy.

Due the autonomous nature of our Baptist identity, we consist of individual churches who belong voluntarily to the Union of Baptist Churches. We’ve since moved on and renamed our respective Union’s but we are in essence still a voluntary Union of churches. We don’t have the benefit of an evolved and continually refined body of policy and practise since we are individual entities and the fact that although our respective Union’s could have been hard at work developing resources and training (such as lay leader training, church meeting how-to guides, etc), we are on our own most of the time.

State Unions can lean on the technicality that each church is an autonomous entity – to escape any responsibility for developing and evolving a body of policy that helps churches with governance and human resource policy, to mention just some important issues. One of my State reps has tried to debunk this by pointing to the fact that there are some PDFs on the website that I can download. I’m underwhelmed to say the least.

Each congregation is at the whim of its own power base and whatever policies and practises the church has developed (or not developed) over the years is potluck. Pastors may land at a church that will handle them professionally and with the ethics and fairness you would expect from a church, but that is never a given. There are plenty of ex-pastors, and plenty of current pastors who have been monstered by a local church. The most functional governance models come from the few large churches in our denomination.

Here in Queensland 80% of Baptists attend just 4 churches, all of whom are in southeast Queensland. They operate with the benefit of more professional systems and the protection of a Carvers policy governance model (Carver, 2006), which provides more protection for pastors and staff. As a result of being large churches with a critical mass, they attract a greater degree of people who operate in executive environments and have boards that are full of experience across a range of sectors and disciplines. Pastoral staff and church members are less likely to be exposed to traumatic events due to the high level of control and greater prevalence of professional systems and culture. This is reflected in their satellite church plants. This makes for some positive arguments for large Baptist super churches.

That is encouraging, however that accounts for 4 large churches (and their satellites), what about the rest? Most of the rest operate on a congregational governance model and all the risks and pitfalls that go along with that. It is this ecclesiastical wild west that leads to so much conflict and trauma in the life of the church. As a denomination we know it well. Ask the church health consultant from any of our State unions to tell you about what church turmoil is going on this week and they can keep going for hours.

No King Canute’s

It’s no use thinking like King Canute, that we can somehow hold back the tide. Meaningful cultural change takes a long time, especially when it isn’t led from the top down. The healthy changes to our church culture needs to come from the ground up. It would be helpful if it also came from the top down, but I’ve been around the traps long enough to know that isn’t going to happen.

Each church needs to understand the capacity for aspects of its life to hurt people, and to have a plan in place to respond to events where people are hurt. Recognising that from time to time hurt arises from conflict isn’t letting the side down. It is being mature and realistic about the frailty of humans, even redeemed humans.

We need to recognise that from time-to-time people’s experience of the church cuts across their deeply held beliefs, ethics, morals and expectations – to the degree that it causes a deep wound to the soul and a significant stumbling block to their faith. Through church conflict, people are exposed to something that fractures their moral code and theological expectations.

Facilitating healing

One of the churches that I have pastored was a plant from a mother church. The circumstances under which the church established its own independent identity were fraught and it ended in a split. Almost 30 years later representatives of the mother church approached us to say that because of a review into the circumstances of the split, an apology from them to us was warranted. We conducted a special service where the two churches reconciled and put the historical matter to bed. It brought great healing to those who had carried wounds from that traumatic time, and it served as a great witness to the members of both churches. The leadership of the planting church sensed God prodding them to seek reconciliation

On a few memorable occasions in my life as a pastor I received requests from people who had left the church under a cloud, and in some instances had caused a fair deal of trauma. I was always cautious about meeting, not wanting to open old wounds. But the purpose behind these meetings was reconciliation. In their dealings with God, these men became convicted of their behaviour and God clearly told them that to move forwards they needed to make amends about issues in their past. I was on the list and as a result found myself in meetings that I never thought I would have, hearing things I never thought I would.

Trauma audit

It is well worth a church leadership conducting a ‘trauma audit’, to analyse whether events in the life of the church may have had potential to cause trauma and/or moral injury. If any are determined, then it is worth following people up and offering care. Often, simply recognising people brings healing, as being seen matters a great deal. To the congregation, having a cognisance of how church is often not a safe place, helps drive a culture of care about not facilitating traumatic events or allowing abusive behaviour.

An analysis of a fractious church meeting may result in a few phone calls to enquire about people’s well-being. Too many Christians have left a church broken, never to put the pieces back together again.

Check-in on your pastoral staff after traumatic events to ensure they are in a good place and have access to care if they need it.

Analyse how you can trauma-proof your church meetings by setting stringent standards and expectations of behaviour.

Find a well-qualified and trusted psychologist or registered counsellor that your church can use to provide effective care. Simply praying or proclaiming the name of Jesus over someone’s trauma or wounding does not constitute effective care. God can bring healing though prayer sure enough, but our duty of care extends beyond “thoughts and prayers”.

Look for opportunities for mediation, reconciliation, repentance and forgiveness. It’s a given that people will always get hurt in churches when things go wrong, but this can serve as opportunities for healing and redemption, helping people overcome hurt and restore trust.

References:

Freeman, C. W. (2004). Where two or three are gathered: Communion ecclesiology in the free church. Perspectives in Religious Studies, 31(3), 259-272.

Yoder, J. H. (2001). Body politics: five practices of the Christian community before the watching world. MennoMedia, Inc..

Shelley, B. L. (1989). Congregationalism and American culture. Fides et historia, 21(2), 38-38.

Schelin, C., 2012, ‘In a congregational way: The Baptist possibility of sacramental and radical democracy’, Journal of European Baptist Studies 10(3), 22-36. 

Carver, J. (2006). Boards that make a difference: A new design for leadership in nonprofit and public organizations (Vol. 6). John Wiley & Sons.