Church Administration

By Marshall Fant III

As ministers of the Gospel, it’s natural that we would want to preserve and revitalize the institutions that have accomplished God’s work in the past. But what do we do when we realize that a church has lost its effectiveness, and efforts to revitalize have failed? Should a church like that be kept alive at all cost?

This is an adaptation of a sermon I preached this past Sunday. Like many churches, ours struggles with feelings of “failure” because we aren’t a large church. I often preach a sermon like this every year or so to remind the congregation about biblical metrcis for understanding what a “healthy church” really is.

Read the series.

I mentioned Gary Blessman in the first article in this series. Gary is the Vice President of Institutional Finances¹ at Central Seminary and the Business Administrator² at Fourth Baptist Church and Christian Schools.

Read Part 1.

I’m somewhat familiar with “where Minnesota golf was born,“ because the Minnesota Mayflower Society where I serve as a board member has our annual Thanksgiving banquet at the storied Town and Country Club in Saint Paul.

Through an unusual set of circumstances, I am now the treasurer of a church that I was barely acquainted with one year ago.

A year ago, I was 2 months past 39 radiation treatments for cancer and my cancer doctor gave me the news that the regimen was apparently successful. As an aside, doctors never commit to the word “cured.” But so far so good! My pastor commented to me, “I guess God is not finished with you yet!”

My wife and I began to pray, what would God have me to do with my retirement time?

Reposted, with permission, from Theologically Driven.

One of the more interesting discoveries I made when researching Baptist polity a few years ago was the lost practice of “recognition councils.” Most Baptists are familiar with ordination councils, in which a local church calls together a group of elders and messengers from like-minded area churches to examine an aspiring minister’s fitness for ministry, and thereafter to advise the church either to pursue ordination, to delay ordination until the examinee is more fit for the ministry, or to deny ordination entirely. Recognition councils occur when a new assembly calls together a group of elders from like-minded area churches to examine its governing documents, and thereafter to advise the assembly to pursue chartering, to delay chartering until its documents are in order, or even to abandon entirely its plan for a new church.

Typically, recognition councils examined a prospective church’s constitution and bylaws, doctrinal statement, and covenant. But there are a great many other documents that may also be subjected to examination: mission statements, philosophies of ministry, employee job descriptions, teacher policies, nursery policies, facilities-usage policies, etc. What I’d like to suggest in this post is that the lost practice of recognition councils be formally revived, or, at the very least, that churches informally pool their collective minds to assist one another in creating ecclesiastical documents that are orthodox, orthoprax, and in our litigious society, as litigation-proof as is possible.