Dan Phillips writes about church membership covenants at Pyromaniacs.
As he considers the contrast between what could be termed low expectation and high expectation covenants he also notes a missing aspect of the whole issue: what the church leaders should be covenanting with the membership.
He asks:
Where is the elder-board’s (or whoever’s) list of commitments to the applicant, initialed by each one of them? You know, such specifics as
- I promise to avoid multiplying rules on the church that don’t directly derive from Scripture
- I promise to treat the time of church attenders with respect
- I promise not to become lazy, self-indulgent and undisciplined in how I conduct public meetings
- I promise not to go off on personal hobby-horses
- I promise always to put people over programs
- I promise never to take faithful long-timers for granted, in preference to seeking and cultivating exciting newcomers
- I promise not to view members in terms of what they can do for me and my ministry, but in terms of how I can serve them for God’s glory
- Thus, I promise not to neglect members when they enter their twilight years
- I promise to lean equally on each word in the phrase “servant leadership”
- I promise never to become incapable of accepting criticism humbly and graciously
- I promise to remember that I am the only one who gets paid to do church-work fulltime, and that almost everyone else in the church has jobs, responsibilities, and commitments
…stuff like that.
As I’ve been thinking about my pastoral calling these past eleven weeks these are the issues that have most absorbed me.
I want to be a more Christlike servant of God’s people and want to overcome the self-centeredness, laziness and insecurity which besets.
Letting the membership know these truths empowers them to call me out when I start to slip on who I should be is an important aspect of our partnership.
So is remembering that I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.
(And yeah, a version of this will be going in the next church newsletter.)
You can read the rest of Dan Phillip’s post here.
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