Two cheers for polity
A few thoughts about why systems & structures & polity are worth considering
Let me admit a personal interest here.
For a variety of reasons, some of which has to be put down to the ineffable grace of God because it’s not something I ever set out to do, I’ve taught “Disciples of Christ history and polity” for some twenty-five years.
To seminarians and commissioned ministry candidates, UCC pastors seeking ordained ministerial partner status, and lay leaders in our local churches, I’ve taught dozens of sessions from a long morning to a three credit class to hundreds of people, including a delightful eighty-some people including my dad in a two part, seven hour section at a General Assembly.
I’m by training and inclination a history guy (they could carve that on my tombstone, “Jeff, a history guy”) but the expectation has always been “history and polity” and that’s what I’ve tried to fulfill: the instruction, sometimes of people with only the barest knowledge of who the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) are, on who we are, how we got to be the way we are, and necessarily how our means and model of Christian community functions (or doesn’t, sometimes). That last is polity, sometimes called governance, more elliptically “how to navigate the structures of our church.”
Polity is a funny weird word that no one is that interested in until they have to be, such as when your regional Commission on Ministry says “hey, you need to take a polity class” to get standing. I have done one-on-one training by email and a phone call or two, and classes of eighty, but the common feature is that there’s usually a bit of coercion involved, and the person I’m teaching “has to" take it.
My dearly beloved did her Ph.D. work on non-formal education and natural resource interpretation, which is the kind of learning that happens when people choose to show up, say, at a ranger campfire talk, or go on a nature hike. It’s a different incentive structure, a very different model of reinforcement (imagine grading people as they leave a visitor’s center on what they learned? nope), and you can work in a different way with people who have chosen to spend their leisure time learning with you. I do some of that sort of non-formal education myself in archaeology and the natural landscape.
Polity? It’s almost always something you’ve been forced to learn, even if there’s an acknowledgment that you’ll benefit as a learner from the material you will master. But it’s different when the incentive structure brought you in that way, by compulsion.
So I’m pretty philosophical about how people don’t love polity. I worry, though, when the discussions get too dismissive, and outright hostile, about the very existence of polity, let alone the expectation that a candidate for ministry in any form should have to learn about “history and polity” . . . or worse yet, “historyandpolity” as a run-together term for boring, outdated, and unnecessary stuff which should probably be dispensed with. I hear this sometimes from people who are forced to take one of the classes I teach, and I pick up some similar sentiments on social media.
Now, let me say right away that the currently popular post thundering around Disciples of Christ social media is, in the main, a statement I can sign onto with a good will, an excellent reflection on our Disciples presence in Christianity standing at the complex and busy intersection of unity and openness. Yes, that’s who we are, although I think it worth considering how we came to be standing at that intersection while other Christians are running around on different streets and boulevards . . .
But it’s not what Douglas Skinner was trying to say in general that made me take up my keyboard, it’s the reactions I’ve seen to what I believe is more of a stage-setting, throat-clearing opening, than the heart of what he was trying to get at. I could be wrong, but I really don’t think his statement that he “couldn’t care less about denominational systems and structures [nor is] passionate about our polity” was meant to dismiss all talk of such matters. Some of the re-postings and affirmations, though, have made me wince. Again, I’m a designated “polity guy” so you can argue I’m defending my specialty, so to speak, but let me explain in some examples:
Example one: someone dies and leaves the church a substantial sum of money, with the proviso (unbeknownst to anyone in current leadership) that part of the bequest be used to erect a forty foot neon lit cross atop the tower of the church building. If said neon cross is not built, the entire estate goes to a home for indigent cats. What does the church do?
Example two: a capital campaign begins, and as it starts, a member dies and the estate share that goes to the church is nearly the amount of the capital campaign, but is entirely undesignated. Just as the governance team starts to consider their options, someone comes forward with minutes from a board meeting eighteen years ago where a motion was made and passed that half of any undesignated estate gift will go to missions. How does the church sort out the path forward for the disposition of the estate and the conduct of the capital campaign?
Example three: an individual comes forward with a desire to make a significant gift to install a pipe organ in the church, replacing the electronic organ and speaker system now there and about thirty years old, with parts increasingly hard to replace. An initial attempt to suggest a different path forward for this proposed gift was met with a fairly indignant “if you don’t want my money there are other places I can give it.”
Example four (and some of you are still reading just to get to this one): a longtime member and notably cantankerous party comes to the leadership of the church with spouse in tow, and a letter signed by three other couples this person is known to be close to, saying it’s time for the minister to go, and asking that plans be put in motion for the preacher to move on.
Example five (though I should stop with four): one of the members of the property committee repaints the bathrooms. There is an outcry in the church over the colors used, and a push to have to trustees tell the custodian to repaint them, to which the initial painter says if that happens they and their family are leaving.
Or more grimly example six: a congregation is coming to the conclusion that, with eight on average in worship, and multiple roof leaks in a building that hasn’t had meaningful maintenance done for over fifty years, it’s time to end the public ministry there . . . and one of the three trustees says they should sell the property & building, and give the proceeds to [Blank], a parachurch ministry they have sent money to annually for a long time, and where they have a grandchild working overseas.
Heard enough? Okay, the first reaction is the reason, I think, it’s so easy to dismiss polity as a “thing” in our lives as Christian communities: these examples are mostly about money and “stuff.” Yes, there’s number four, where the minister is feeling like this is more about their life than about money, but there’s often a monetary factor rattling in the closet around either how the maneuver is executed, or even why this has come up (three years of deficits year end, the compensation package 60% of the total church budget, so the bright idea is to find a more cost effective preacher — though I totally understand that there are usually other issues at play).
Yes, these are mostly money/budget/finance type issues from one angle, but here’s my counter to that: individual pot-stirrers or small factions of (um) troublemakers usually figure out how to use the fiscal mechanisms of a church to get their way. And the real problem here, spiritually speaking, is the desire of a small number of people — even sometimes one person, and that one dead — to control the lives of the majority.
If your response is “a spiritually healthy church won’t get caught up in such shenanigans” I’m not going to argue the point, but would you, for the sake of argument, admit that many ministers and new leaders start out with a church the way they find it? It is, as they say, what it is. Let’s work on promoting spiritual health and wholeness . . . but you can’t do that purely on a Bible study and prayer and advocacy oriented basis. You need to get your governance squared away, because I can pretty much guarantee you that at any church in any given season you will have someone trying to grab at the steering wheel to turn the bus down the primrose path of their choice. How do you keep things on the road, between the ditches?
You need a healthy polity, too. With all due respect to Prince Kropotkin, Christian anarchy is tough way to run a local church or regional body. You need a clearly understood, commonly accepted set of operating procedures that everyone can get behind, even when — especially when! — your viewpoint does not prevail.
This also gets into why history and polity tend to get taught in tandem. When you look at our frontier history of autonomous congregations, and our tendency to have “editors, not bishops,” with all our missions giving done on a voluntary basis, not by apportionments or per capital, you start to see how we do things a little more clearly.
I’ll speak here very directly out of my teaching experience. The majority of the people I’ve taught are commissioned ministers in smaller churches. Often their time with me is very near the earliest years of their time in ministerial leadership. I’ll get in group discussions, or in private appeals for advice, a question of how to handle a situation as a minister, such as: a very elderly elder pulled me aside after church last Sunday and said in our church, everyone who joins must be baptized by immersion the next Sunday. Is that what we do as Disciples?
I can hear a great disturbance in the force, Disciples-wise: “NOOOOOOooooo…..!!!!”
Well, that’s true, such an approach is not our core practice, and since 1968 it’s a normative expectation that Disciples of Christ churches don’t rebaptize people who were sprinkled . . . but my home church, a very strongly Disciples church since well before Restructure, didn’t change the immersion requirement for membership until well into the 1980s, something I know well because my dad swore, on grudgingly going through rebaptism in 1963 (he grew up Congregational, sprinkled as an infant) that he would see it changed, and did steer things that way but it took him twenty years. It took another two for them to admit women into the eldership.
Yes, but it’s 2023. Can we, or can I as an advisor, tell this new minister to tell the life member and esteemed elder, “you are wrong, we don’t do it that way”? Nope. I told this person “first, check your church constitution and/or bylaws.” And sure enough, the change HAD been made, some twenty years ago, and this older pillar never liked the change, and hoped to arm twist the new parson into returning to the old ways. But when they went back and explained the church constitution said this person could join by transfer, opposition ceased.
If the constitution still said “any applicant for membership who has not been baptized by immersion must be baptized in that form before they can be placed on the membership rolls” then I would have instructed that person on how to navigate the choppy waters of getting that provision changed — but in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), there’s no general church policy or discipline or guideline which overrules the local church governance documents.
That’s polity. It can be inconvenient.
Polity can also save your bacon. I will freely admit I’ve told many friends, acquaintances, and students: if you are going to be called as minister of a church, you need to figure out as quickly as possible how you can be fired. Because people who take a dislike to you often will try to use devices that worked in other associations they’ve pulled off power plays in, and it can work quite well to stymie a revolution if the rules as written are not being followed. (There is a whole long aside I could offer about employment law and potential legal protections here for an unjustly terminated ministry position, but I’m just not gonna right now — it’s better if you can prevent it from happening in the first place, but there is good counsel out there if a few hard cases keep coming at you, this just isn’t that place.)
On the other hand, I’ve had a sort of grim satisfaction in knowing in advance in a few situations that there’s a way to give me notice that no one has figured out, but I’m aware of that route if someone shows signs of heading in that direction. One church I served had oddly worded mismatched statements that ended up indicating that I could be given my two weeks’s notice by a majority vote of the trustees, who were five in number, but three was a quorum, so if two trustees were unhappy with me, I could be perfectly legally terminated. I’d say that’s bad polity, and worth getting fixed, but you need to be in a fairly secure position to be willing to bring it up.
All of this also tangles up with the history/polity nexus of our nearby and similar church neighbors, usually the Methodists and Presbyterians, but more and more often nowadays the Baptists and Non-denominationals. Our lay leaders have associations and family and friends who are serving officers in those churches, and they can come back to our congregations with some peculiar ideas about what could happen, let alone what should happen. Strange ideas like the region moving ministers around without our consent, or the ol’ “they’ll take our property from us” claim which has a surprising half-life since the early 1960s, when the independent argument against Restructure and The Design was “they’ll take your property from you!” which wasn’t and still isn’t true, but has yet to fade into the background noise.
Which brings us to regional and general polity. At the risk of going off down some deep and troubling rabbit holes, let me just say that there are a number of regions I’m aware of where a better attention to the basic governance documents could have prevented some unfortunate outcomes for the mission and ministry of the regional church.
And more even than my frequent forays into advising nervous ministers on how to handle internal congregational polity issues, it’s that problem which has pushed me to keep working on this tangential response, across a number of days of major distractions — so I hope in the end this holds together, because I think it’s important.
In my own region over the last six years, and in conversations with board or council members of other regions, along with a few clergy colleagues just watching uneasily from the cheap seats, it’s become clear to me that there is a bit of a surge towards “screw the rules, let’s just put people in a room and work by consensus.” An open floor, and inclusive decision making: it all sounds good until it doesn’t. Y’all come is our standard approach to communion; if you’re reading this far in and thinking “Jeff, if it works for communion, why not for governance?” I am interested in that conversation. And I’m not even entirely against more open models, but . . .
There’s a long standing legend among older Disciples (which remarkably now includes me, I guess) about the Tulsa General Assembly of 1991. It was late October, back when we still alternated GAs with October vs. July/summer meetings. It was where we elected Michael Kinnamon our General Minister and President . . . not.
The Design called for a two-thirds vote to affirm a nominee for GMP, and Michael’s candidacy failed by less than a percentage point. We went on to the semi-interim of Bill Nichols, God rest his warm and caring heart, and Michael went on to continue teaching and preaching. His thoughts in 2015 I would append in this link:
https://disciplesallianceq.org/2015_07_28/reinterpreting-tulsa-2/
With him, I would offer two thoughts. First, the legend I refer to is that there were busloads of “no” voters brought in, because hey, we’re a y’all come assembly. Look, I was there. I do think many conservative congregations within driving distance made a point of getting to the business session just to vote “no” on Kinnamon’s candidacy, and then left. Maybe a few church vans were involved, but there weren’t busloads of “no” voters because you couldn’t vote unless you had proper standing which the ushers and floor staff were checking with great care. Clergy with standing and congregational representatives as registered could vote, but a bus or van load from Empire Falls, Oklahoma couldn’t just show up, run in, and all vote. Didn’t happen.
As Michael explains in that link: hey, I lost. Period. And that loss made a statement which different factions were free to interpret and act on in subsequent years. Elections have consequences, as they say. Voting down the Kinnamon candidacy was a stage in the process, where now we have affirmation of LGBTQ+ persons.
On the other hand, if we DID allow van and bus and truck loads of people to shuffle in and vote, that could be used to manipulate outcomes, or at least put a thumb on the scale. Not certifying voters has consequences, too.
And I’ll note a peculiarity of our polity, having to do with our lack of a formal “Order of Ministry” even as we assume the existence of one in things like, well, allowing all clergy with standing to vote at GAs and most regional assemblies. I am coming up on my third Christmas season attending 30 Sundays a year at a church down the road from where my father-in-law lives, and where I’m caregiving as his decline continues and hastens. At this church, I’ve given blood, left offerings, take communion, showed up at a few congregational programs and events.
If I joined this church, they’d welcome me with open arms — and I’d lose my standing in the Ohio Region, because that’s how the governance documents, aka polity, is written. I must have membership with a Disciples congregation in Ohio. Okay, fair enough. When I was in active ministry, I had a friend overseas ask if I would take him in as a member because his home church was closing, so I asked him the Good Confession question, received his affirmation, and filled out a membership card for him the next day, so he could continue with standing in Ohio (I never did get around to sending him offering envelopes, my mistake). That’s just a quirk of the rules, and I get it, but I think we need a different polity model for how clergy hold and maintain their standing — now, there are a number of us with membership in churches we never or hardly ever visit, which puts us in good standing with the region while moving our membership to where we are actually visible and somewhat under ministerial supervision would remove it.
Yet I keep getting asked by people in a number of regions about the role of persons in regional leadership who have membership in no Disciples church. Or so I’m told. On being asked about it, if you recall my counsel to a minister about a baptismal question, I say the same thing: what do the governance documents say? If there’s a clear statement of how members of a regional board or commission must (not “may,” mind you) have membership in a local church, that’s theoretically enforceable, but if there’s no statement, I tell folks “you would need to create a basis for your concern, which I hear, but in terms of polity, it doesn’t exist until there’s a formal guideline.” And yeah, sometimes smart, experienced long-time Disciples say then: “isn’t there a general church guideline for this?” But if you’ve been reading, you know the answer.
Should all persons in leadership in a region or area be members of a local congregation? It would make sense, but again, it would have to be a stated expectation in the governance documents, and if it’s not there, someone would have to propose an amendment (for which there are steps and processes); maybe even more problematic, if there is a stated qualification there, someone would have to speak up to an officer or at a meeting on the issue, and the body involved would need to address it.
Which is to say: polity is NOT just governance documents, it’s people. Maybe more to the point, polity is in large part a culture of process that the people in a system choose to live by. You can have a polity on paper, but if the culture of the system has long been an authoritarian one, you’ll find most people in it working to authoritarian norms; if the culture is more consensus based, you’ll find people tending towards a consensus based approach. Often at the core of polity is something called “parliamentary procedure,” which is simply a set of rules to not just let the loudest people in the room win all the arguments. Parliamentary procedure is neither authoritarian nor consensual; a moderator or chair can use Robert’s Rules of Order to impose an authoritarian control, or to promote community consensus. It’s simply a tool, as most polity is; the question of how we govern ourselves is more one of culture, frankly.
As you may have heard, there are some current trends in the wider culture that are sloshing over into church culture, from the congregational to the regional to the general. The culture of self-governance has taken a surprising turn to a populist norm, and we’re far from seeing an end to it.
To take a safe non-Disciples example to start, the Southern Baptist Convention is a body of some ten-plus million members and 45,000 churches. They meet for their “general” governance every year, as Methodists have had an every four year cycle, and we Disciples are planning to move to a three year approach with intermediate meeting options still being worked out. But the SBC meets every blessed summer.
They’re in Indianapolis in 2024 which will be interesting for us Indy-based Disciples to watch; they were in New Orleans this past June, and according to their press release: “In total, 4,423 churches sent 12,737 messengers, who formed the bulk of the 18,901 total attendees to the meeting.” Yeah, that’s big. We had about 3,000 in Louisville last July.
You’ll note of course that not even ten percent of SBC churches are represented at their annual convention. Do clergy vote? Well, they can, but only if the church selects them as one of their messengers. Do churches get more than one messenger? Well, the SBC Constitution has a very forthright way of explaining how many, up to twelve maximum, each church gets:
“(1) One additional messenger for each full percent of the church’s undesignated receipts which the church contributed during the fiscal year preceding through the Cooperative Program, and/or through the Convention’s Executive Committee for Convention causes, and/or to any Convention entity; or
(2) One additional messenger for each $6,000 which the church contributed during the fiscal year preceding through the Cooperative Program, and/or through the Convention’s Executive Committee for Convention causes, and/or to any Convention entity.
The messengers shall be appointed and certified by their church to the Convention, but the Convention will not recognize more than twelve (12) from any cooperating church.”
Got that? You pay, you get votes. Does that influence who shows up, who’s voting, and how those votes turn out? You betcha. Is it a bad way to set up a polity? Well, I guess it depends on what you want your polity to do.
The biggest single polity change we Disciples made in Louisville, whose impact is still being worked out — and I’m still working on how or where I’m adjusting my syllabus for teaching Disciples history & polity to reflect it! — is that we had a provision where congregations got votes based on their reported membership total to the Yearbook, and it was changed to every congregation, regardless of size, gets three representatives. And the goal is ultimately they would be on a rotation each year, so after a few years, a new GA representative would be voted on by the congregation every years, and each one would in their three year term have one chance to attend an in-person GA, but there is now provision for possibly having an online/virtual GA each of the two years in between, or even more often in circumstances require it and the formal provision for notice is given. In other words, we’ve created a potential GA governance body of voting delegates including potentially 9,000 congregational delegates, plus the voting clergy who are another 6,000 plus.
Honestly, I don’t think we have 3,000 congregations. We have just over 1,500 congregations giving to DMF in any form at any amount; I’d guess we could justly claim about 1,700 congregations, with the other 1,300 Yearbook listed churches either already thinking they’ve left the Disciples, or have done so and just haven’t sent in a notarized letter. Few if any of those “other” 1,500 will change their minds and start contributing to and participating in our regional or general life.
But 1,500 times three is 4,500, plus (again, potentially) 6,000 clergy. How we sort out who votes, and on what, is still a matter for the General Board to sort out — and when I said “the biggest single polity change we Disciples made in Louisville” some of you thought I was going to talk about the changes in representation and size for the General Board and Administrative, now Executive Committee. Honestly, I don’t *think* how they operate will change that much, but it’s true that regions and general units may have less of a role in their decision making — but given that these persons (Regional Ministers and general unit heads) know how things work and what’s going on, I think their input is still going to be felt and even heeded.
Whether it’s how the General Assembly meets and votes, the General Board’s work in between GAs, or the Executive Committee working with the General Minister and President between board gatherings, it’s all polity, and it all has an impact and import for who and how we are a Christian community of congregations. Just as conservative voices have found a way to co-opt and control Southern Baptist polity — and if you missed it, they took a sharp swerve to the right in June, with final approval of the course “correction” this coming summer, again, in Indianapolis — we have seen a progressive perspective come through as normative for us as Disciples of Christ. I plan to write more about where that comes from, and what it means for us as a movement of churches in mission together.
But it all comes down to this: polity is people. Polity is not just about money or numbers or stuff, but the problem of polity is that people can be, well, problematic, and power-hungry people can create problems, especially using the pointy tools of money and numbers and stuff. Polity is both a way of fending off power-plays, and also to communicate and affirm consensus. I think we have a generation of leaders who have seen polity used so often to support and maintain power-hungry or entitled persons that they have developed an understandable aversion to polity altogether. Polity is to some a tool for authoritarianism, a symbol of oppression, and so worthy of demolition.
Yet that’s basically my point here. Polity is a tool. You can get new tools, you can change tools, we should tend and care for our tools, as my dad never tired of telling us kids. Tools are neutral things, except in how we care for them, and how we use them. You shouldn’t throw a hammer at your sister, and Dad never got comfortable watching people on Hee-Haw play saws. It just didn’t seem right to him, a craftsman at heart. And if he saw a box of rusty, jumbled tools, it pained him. How you care for your tools, he believed, said something about who you were.
Polity is a box of tools for being church together. Our polity as Disciples of Christ is different than that of other churches even when they look similar in certain external ways, just as the toolbox of a carpenter is quite different when you open it from that of an electrician. Both may have some of the same wrenches and screwdrivers, but then you see some very different equipment in each one’s kit. I can see where a person might think a Disciples congregation and a Baptist congregation look quite similar from a distance, but inside the tool boxes, under the hood even, things work quite differently.
Am I “passionate about our polity”? I guess in a sense I am. It has some notable failures to its discredit, but as Michael Kinnamon says in his piece linked above, it has some admirable self-correctives built into it. If he thinks so after 1991, that’s pretty indicative of something working well over time. And some regional problems of the last decade or so I would argue are the result not of bad polity, but of polity not being observed or followed or even referenced. Since polity is, in essence, people, if no one objects to stepping outside of our governance, that’s a polity decision made de facto, if not de jure. If we approve minutes with clear factual errors in them, the facts may remain, but the process says the lie becomes the truth . . . at least for a time.
No, I’m passionate about people, in the end, as a pastor, as a Christian, and as a teacher of people looking to lead communities of faith in a complicated and contentious world. Those larger cultural issues of polity and governance will keep sloshing into our own decision making processes. How to bail out the boat, how to steer a better course, away from the rocks, and how to find a path to safe harbors or new voyages: that takes team work and collaboration and consensus. Which happens best when we’re all on the same polity.
Hey, did I remember to mention I'm teaching Disciples of Christ history & polity again starting October 15th, in an eight-week online program through Phillips? Oh, you'd like a link? Sure!
https://ptstulsa.edu/prospective-students/programs-of-study/non-credit-programs/center-for-ministry-and-lay-training/
Polity can indeed save one’s bacon!!
I enjoy your reflections and am glad you have the privilege to teach DOC polity!