Feature Article: Spring 2007
A lot of churches have structures like a car described in a Johnny Cash song. In “One Piece at a Time,” Cash describes trying to build a car out of General Motors parts from a series of years. The transmission is from 1953, the motor is from 1973, and the car ends up with one tailfin. It’s like a church constitution that’s been amended multiple times.
At First Mennonite Church of Berne, Indiana, said Pastor Craig Maven, the former structure was like a 1940s Ford whose pieces had been added and taken away over the years, but that was at its heart an old car.
Now, after years of working at change, First Mennonite has a structure that is simple enough to be described with a short abbreviation. “We call it WWCD,” said Pastor Maven, describing the four parts that harmonize to fulfill the church’s mission: worship, witness, care, and discipling.
The structure is simple. Getting there wasn’t.
In the late 1990s, Maven and others realized that the church’s structure wasn’t aiding its ministry. The church was good at running programs even when it no longer had reasons to run them. “There was something wrong and we weren’t quite sure what it was,” Maven explained.
A committee appointed to update the church constitution, which was more than 50 years old, struggled with the task. “The more they worked at it,” Maven said, “the more they realized that there were such significant discrepancies that they couldn’t fix it.”
This small-town church with 1,100 members and about 600 people attending on a Sunday morning had what a lot of churches have—a leadership model in which command and control are clear.
First Mennonite had three church boards that held most of the power and made most of the decisions. Though the nine deacons regularly had three-hour meetings, there wasn’t time to process new ideas for ministries and programs. “Finally the board of deacons and I realized that what we needed to do was to refocus the mission of the church, to ask why we are really here,” Maven said.
At a seminar for pastors of large churches at the Amigo Centre in Michigan, former Indiana- Michigan Conference pastor Del Glick gave a presentation on church structure. Now Maven knew what to change. But at first he didn’t know how to change it.
Maven and other church leaders wandered for a bit at the beginning of their journey of restructuring. When Glick preached a Sunday morning sermon, “He told us it would take seven years to completely change,” said Maven. “He was right. I think it actually took us eight years.”
In 1998 a task force worked on a new organizational philosophy, one that would allow older programs to die and new ones to grow. The group came up with the metaphor of a spider plant: new ideas could hit the ground and take root. The spider plant was also a living model rather than a mechanical one, said Maven.
Another task force started working on structural models in 1999 but realized that they didn’t know what to organize around. So the board of deacons began to work on rewriting the mission statement.
The new mission statement is:
Worship God in spirit and truth.
Care for all as God cares for us. Care for the wounded, the brokenhearted, the downtrodden and discouraged. Care for each other, showing grace and love in all things.
Witness to all in word and deed the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ, and call them to repent from sin and turn to God for forgiveness and new life.
Disciple all to follow Jesus as Lord.
Though attitudes in the congregation were good and consensus was reached at every step, Maven said, coming up with a new structure from scratch was difficult.
At each stage, ideas were tested in smaller group settings, and congregational meetings kept people informed. The response along the way was mostly positive, Maven said.
For decades, a group of nine men had made many of the decisions at First Mennonite. Some people questioned getting rid of the group, which they considered a security blanket for many, and particularly for older members.
On the other hand, though the church wanted leadership, it did not want groups with power flowing to them like the deacons had, so, Maven said, “We eliminated the board of deacons altogether and created a spiritual guidance cabinet.” Members look after the spiritual welfare of the congregation primarily by looking after the spiritual, physical and emotional health of the church staff. The board of deacons, who had worked themselves out of a job, “were very gracious and wanted to make sure others were involved,” Maven said.
Maven’s role changed too. Under the old structure, he was a hub. “All the lines used to come right into my office,” he said. “Now that decision making has been pushed out much farther into the structure.”
And that was the goal of the process: to push decisions as far as possible into the congregation, to empower members to be involved in creating programs that impacted their lives and the lives of those around them.
A third task force designed the new commissions to oversee worship, congregational care, witness, and discipleship. Representatives from the commissions serve on the ministries council.
The congregation didn’t choose the term elder for people serving on commissions; they use member of the cabinet instead. It’s a mouthful by design: people won’t confuse the role with past offices.
All offices are open to women. Officers are affirmed rather than elected. Initially affirmation was given by those involved in the work of each commission. Choir members were eligible to affirm worship commission members, for example. “It’s turned out to be very confusing. We are in the process of changing that,” Maven said, noting that the affirmation process will be shifted to the entire congregation.
Since the structure has changed, new programs are being created, more people are now involved in congregational life, and people have been empowered to be involved in new ways.
The witness commission established mission support teams for the church’s missionaries. The commission is also talking about cell groups, which had been discussed for years under the old structure, when the deacons were busy and no one had time to shepherd the idea, Maven said.
The discipling commission reorganized Sunday school. Where before there were disconnected departments that acted independently, now there is a children’s ministry using unified materials. “Families can discuss Sunday school with their kids,” Maven said. The commission is working on developing learning goals to establish what every child at First Mennonite should know by the time they get through the Sunday school program.
Though membership hasn’t grown much yet, Maven said that he expects to “continue to see a slow, steady influx of families as our program switches from being program for the sake of doing something, to being program that has direction, meaning and goals.”
Marshall V. King is a writer for The Truth newspaper in Elkhart, Indiana. He resides on a small farm in Goshen, Indiana, and is a member of Assembly Mennonite Church.