Should churches vote on everything?

Keeping an inactive roll may be a way to bridge the divide on this issue. Active or inactive rolls are not found in scripture but that does not make them wrong. Keeping peace and unity is in scripture and this could very well do that.

 

Some of my thought are about the quality of membership. Does a church differentiate between mature and immature members? Who should vote. The mature wil think with a godly wisdom and the immature wil think thoughts that are not always wise and godly.

In the last church I pastored were two troublemakers. One was the son of a pastor. About two years later he wrote on his blog that god does not exist. This man had taught Sunday School for several years. When I came along I started making disciples and training others to do the same thing. I began to notice there was something wrong with this man when he tried to reach someone. It was as if he was trying to prove himself and what he did was in the flesh. He had never reached anyone in his entire life. The other troublemaker had gone to a Bible School but the more I listened and observed him the more I was convinced he was not a believer because I saw no fruit. when I began to ask some leaders if he was a believer I got the response that they had never considered that. Both of these men had preached quite a number of sermons. When I listened to some of their sermons it added to what I suspected. The sermons lacked passion and treated scripture as a book to be learned but I never heard anything about living it out.

 

The church saturneptune and I serve speaks mainly through its budget and its by-laws.

In one vote, it approves salaries, utilities, expenditures for Sunday School literature, transportation, kitchen expenses for fellowship meals, honorariums for guest preachers and singers, children's ministries, music ministry, allocations to associational ministries, SBC, Kentucky Baptist Convention ministries, benevolence, repairs and maintenance.

The people who lead our ministries are free to spend the budgeted funds (determined with their input). The pastor has overall oversight. The chairman of the Finance Committee monitors the budget like a hawk. If a ministry leader needs to spend more than budgeted, the church must approve.

Our church (and most churches, I suspect) operate most efficiently when it delegates responsibility (and commensurate authority). Bi-monthly treasurer's reports are submitted to the church business meetings reporting every expenditure.

There's nothing wrong with a church voting on everything. This is just the way we do it.

 

One more thing. The church selects its ministry leaders and other ministry personnel, but the Nominating Committee does the legwork and recruiting and presents a recommendation to the church business meeting each fall.

The Finance Committee prepares the budget (with input from ministry leaders, of course), and presents its recommendation to the church in the fall.

As Minister of Music, I presented a request for funds to the Finance Committee for inclusion in the budget proposal.

 

That reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with an elderly pastor who told of a time when they got ready to vote on some deacons and they took a break. During the break one of the wives told the pastor that her husband who was up for vote was having a homosexual affair with the other man up for vote. That shows how little a nominating committee may actually know.

 

There are two questions at play in many of our churches. The second one is less about congregational voting, but it does relate thereto in the sense that both congregational voting and the role of deacons both fall under ecclesiastical polity.

1- Where is the NT reference to having members vote on anything other than the selection of deacons? That question assumes that the designees in Acts are deacons, which of course it does not explicitly state. Do we see any other scriptural indication that members should vote on "business" matters? The practice seems to me a strange Americanism, inserted into our religious practice because we sorta practice democracy in this country.

2- And this one is more for deacon-run churches. Where do we find deacons charged with administering the local church? Is that not the responsibility of the elders/ overseers? Indeed, if we insist that Acts 6 refers to the appointment of deacons, why don't we also glean their duty description from the same passage?

 

The church is set up as a democracy, with a board that hires a hireling. That is not anything like the 5 fold that God put in place. It is backwards. The sheep decide who the Shepard is and what he teaches, rather than the Holy Spirit guiding through the mouth of the leader. Your frustration comes from these errors.

 

SmalltownPastor:

If by the term "everything" you mean having the church vote on absolutely every single minute detail of everything that a church (regardless of the size of its congregation), then I would think that this would be a pretty much a waste of time for the church's public business meetings.

Most of the churches with which I'm familiar usually allow whoever it is who actually signs the checks for that particular church to exercise a degree of discernment concerning whether or not that church's funds needs to be expended---usually at some pre-set dollar value.

These churches also maintain a detailed accounting of all of its expenditures, and such a list is open for any church member to examine if he or she has any questions as to why church funds were spent on that item.

This seems to me to be a much more reasonable system than having the church membership vote on whether or not it ought to spend its funds on every single thing that comes up in the day-to-day operations of a local church.

 

In post #7 Tom Butler explained how his church operates and how efficiently funds are dispersed and managed. It would appear that most would be faithful in attendance at a business meeting.

In your case, as you stated, you have only met half the members and don't even know where they live. If you had a business meeting many or most would not show up. What would happen if you were to have a business meeting of great importance involving the transaction of a large amount of money. Many of these "once in a blue moon" members just happen to show up for it. They swing the vote contrary to what the core members and the pastor think it should go.
What is happening?
You have people that are not regular attending, not giving, not supporting the work, but directing where the funds of the church are going in some important matters. IMO, this is very wrong. If for this reason alone, I see the necessity of having a "dual membership," voting and non-voting; active and inactive; however you want to set it up. It is the faithful members that need to guide the church--not the once-a-year attenders.