Aldersgate Experience 1
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Experience
On Saturday, May 18th, the Administrative Board, Council on Ministries, and Staff of the church met at the Trent Semans Center on the campus of Duke University for a day apart to discuss effective church governance. Gray Southern, the former Durham District Superintendent and current Senior Pastor at Apex UMC was brought in to facilitate discussion. Here’s a brief look at what happened on that day. Gray began our time together by looking at scripture and reminding us of 1 Corinthians 12 which reads that all of us are an important part of the body of Christ. We split into groups of five and were asked to go around our circle and share with each other what aspects of their leadership style and spiritual gifts we really appreciated. This was a great way to start the day, because it certainly put everyone in a good mood to hear compliments from their sisters and brothers in Christ, but, it also helped to build goodwill and trust right at the beginning of our time together. We then spent some time looking at reasons and goals for church governance. Gray ranked in order by priority the following things that churches try to accomplish through their governing structure. They try to meet the following needs, in order: Mission, Coherence, Function, Programmatic, Relational, Assimilation. Gray pointed out that setting and upholding the mission is the number one thing church governance should be trying to accomplish and that brings some
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coherence of the many different groups under the mission was the second need for a governing structure. I also took away from our time together that churches often try to relate to one another and even assimilate people into the life of the church through governance, but those purposes weren’t really important functions of governance. Instead, those goals should be met in other ways, like small groups, choirs, youth groups, mission teams, Sunday School classes, etc. Relational goals and assimilation are important aspects of church life, but we shouldn’t ask someone to be on Trustees in an attempt to get them more involved at church. Rather, we should ask them to our small group. I would argue that Aldersgate uses its governance structure to accomplish all of those things, although we are stronger in some areas than others. However, our structure should exist to accomplish the goals associated closest to the top of the list. This is why our Administrative Board should exist, for instance – to set, drive, and carry out the mission of the church. We were then asked to turn once again to our small groups of five. This time we were asked what were the strengths and what were the concerns of our current governing model. Many things were listed in each column. Noteworthy were comments such as having strong lay leadership, a diversity of gifts and experiences in leadership, and having lots of possibilities for leadership and service here at Aldersgate. Continued on page 2