Thoughts About Policies and Procedures

Policies and Procedures are our friends. Yes, the Spirit moves in fresh and creative ways, and yet rules protect us. (I had a seminary friend who was literally fired after his first Easter sermon because there was no policy in his denomination/congregation that you couldn’t just fire the Pastor anytime you felt like it and his sermon was apparently underwhelming.)

I have some thoughts about rules – especially for these days of shattered norms drenched in disorienting misinformation and unrelenting turbulence.

• Thought 1 – Healthy congregations value relationships over rules. Yes, we have a No-Pet policy in the church office, but the administrative assistant’s pit bull is being put down at 4 this afternoon and she needs him to be here today.
• Thought 2 – Sometimes it’s okay to make exceptions for the sake of a congregation’s well-being. There’s a rule in my denomination about an Associate Pastor not being eligible to become the next Senior Pastor. But I know a church that was struggling financially to the point that they were considering going to a one-pastor staffing model. One day, their Pastor died suddenly on a handball court and the Presbytery decided that it was healthy and pastoral to make an exception. The Associate Pastor became the Pastor and it was a comfort to everybody.
• Thought 3 – Sometimes the rule must stand firm, again for the health of the congregation. We have a rule in my denomination that our churches can only call pastors who are members of our denomination or in good standing in denominations with whom we have a formal relationship. (On a regular basis, I have to tell church friends that, “No, the Baptist preacher who never went to seminary cannot be your Pastor.”) This rule ensures our leaders align with our theology. It’s possible that the ineligible but charismatic preacher you met at the funeral home might preach that “women are not called by God to be leaders” or that “God hates LGBTQAI+ people” or that the modern state of Israel is the same as the Israelites of the Hebrew Scriptures. None of those things are true according to the interpretation of Scripture in my denomination. Bad theology hurts people.
• Thought 4 – The fewer the rules, the better. Church policies and denominational constitutions should not be the size of the OED. Speaking of a no pet policy (Thought 1) I was once on a committee writing the personnel policy for a church and someone at the table wanted to spell out exactly which pets would be okay (fish) and which would not be okay (dogs, cats, ferrets, snakes, hamsters, Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs). No. Give people some credit. Nobody’s bringing their pony to church.

Flexibility can be a holy thing. When we consider the people more than the rules, we are allowing the Spirit to move for the situation at hand. Jesus was about loving the people. The rules were about protecting the people but exceptions were made. Here are some Biblical examples.