You Never Sausage A Messy Church!

Laws are like sausages — it is best not to see them being made.
Otto von Bismarck, first Chancellor of Germany

 

Bismarck’s quote from the 19th century is even more true today than it was in his day.

Whether it’s Washington County’s commissioners wrestling with capital improvements, delegates in Annapolis wrangling over tuition rates for state universities, or Congress arguing over debt ceilings and entitlement programs and the budget, governing is a messy affair.

That’s no less true for church governance than in the larger society. Session elders regularly have to deal with the messy bits tangentially-related (or sometimes unrelated) to the ministry of the church. Gatherings of the entire presbytery can be both uplifting and a grinding burden as we revisit the same issues over and over and over with no progress let alone resolution. Many Presbyterians have no idea what General Assembly is, when it meets, or what goes on there. (Hint: it’s the bi-annual national convening of representatives from every presbytery.)

Now, stay with me, as this might seem dry and boring at first and you might be tempted to roll your eyes and think, “Oh, jeez, not this stuff”, but we’re going somewhere good here I promise.

The constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA) is composed of two parts: the Book of Confessions, which is composed of the great and significant credal statements throughout the history of the Church, and the Book of Order, which provides the organizational and operational framework of our denomination.

Neither is static, cast in stone. The Book of Confessions has seen additions as recently as 1983, with the “Brief Statement of Faith” that resulted from the reunification of the northern and southern Presbyterian denominations. The Book of Order is so regularly amended, added-to, revised, tweaked and otherwise tinkered with over the past 28 years as to make it like Bismarck’s sausages.

Last year the General Assembly sent to the presbyteries a few items to vote on to “fix” the Book of Order, the second part of our denomination’s constitution, which provides the organizational and operational structure of our denomination. The Book of Order is so regularly amended, added-to, revised, tweaked and otherwise tinkered with over the past 28 years as to make it like Bismarck’s sausages. In trying to fix what’s broken we just break it more.

One such example is the so-called “Fidelity and Chastity amendment”, an addition to the Book of Order in 1997 which very specifically addresses sexuality and ordination standards. It’s bad government, in part because it’s largely ignored by those churches who want to ordain people who are gay or lesbian, and in part because it’s not enforced by churches that do want to uphold the standard. But more importantly, it is so poorly worded that my congregation is technically in violation of it because we have art in our worship space—graphics in our PowerPoint and images in our stained glass windows. So one of those “fixes” we as a denomination had to vote on was whether or not to remove this section from the Book of Order.

It is things like this that gave impetus to Presbyterian polity wonks to seek to completely revamp the Form of Government section of the Book of Order. After 28 years it’s a bit of a mess. In my opinion the problem has been that the changes to the Book of Order have focused on micromanaging doctrine, fixated on the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law. But, in my opinion, once again in a good-hearted effort to fix what’s broken, we’ve just replaced one broken thing with another.

One of the clearest examples we have of Jesus’ own position on such things as polity and governance is from the 12th chapter of Matthew’s gospel. As happened so many times, the religious leaders protest that Jesus and his disciples are violating laws governing the Sabbath and Jesus responds, “…it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath”.

Whether it is the Book of Order or Robert’s Rules of Order or the old Presbyterian saw about “doing things decently and in order”, the highest standard is not whether we are following the rules, doing the proscribed steps, adhering to the letter of the law. The highest standard is to always, always, ALWAYS measure our thoughts, our decisions, our actions by the following questions:

How does this advance the Kingdom, the living embodiment of the Good News of Jesus in the world through us, right here, right now?
Do we believe this is pleasing to God?

Act on the answers to those questions, and we will never go wrong.