This Christian Life

Church Transition Committee

Tonight I and six others from our church met as the first of several months of discussion and planning on how to move our church from a pastorless situation to having a pastor (or pastors). We’re calling this committee the “Transition Guiding Group.” It is an extension of a “redreaming” committee that I was in previously. This committee is made up of 5 original members from the last committee, with two new people introduced.

The leader of the committee started us off in an administrative, organizational mode, but had the presence of mind to let things go into a free discussion about our church. We started to get somewhere when we talked about the real issues of our church. In the last committee, we had come up with a plan to “guide our church into a new era” by using very specific steps of self-analysis, prayer, workshops, and blah, blah, blah. One of the new members humbly asked the question, “Does our church value accountability?”

We all fought the idea of asking the question at first, but the more we talked about it, the more we realized that the answer is ‘no.’

That’s the problem with our church all these years! None of us is accountable to anyone. We aren’t accountable individually or corporately. If we aren’t accountable, then any plan, action steps, goals, vision, or whatever isn’t going to mean anything and we’re not going to get anywhere. What you’ve got is a bunch of people—misfits of all types, pHd’s and beggers, blacks and whites—who don’t want to be “locked in” to accountability. This turns out to be one of the common values of our church! (Don’t get me wrong… we ARE accountable in some ways, but it just isn’t the rule).

Man, I felt better after the meeting. We finally talked about (one of) the core problems at our church. NOW I feel like we can start to move forward!