Your Kommittees Could Be Killing Your Church

I’m not an anti-committee iconoclast.  I only know one committee joke:

Q – “What’s a camel?”

A – “A horse put together by a committee.”

That’s it, and now I have that out of my system.

Committees can actually be wonderful:

• I’ve seen pastoral search committees that served God well by helping their congregations locate pastors who fit their ministries like hand-tailored gloves.
• I’ve seen building and grounds committees that made their church’s property “sparkle.”
• I’ve been blessed to see several Vacation Bible School committees that carried the whole project, from choosing materials to the week-ending celebration, with competence, joy and enthusiasm.

But most of us local church “veterans” have also seen good committees that turned bad:

• The committee with a leader who functioned like an impossible-to-please dictator.
• A committee which insisted on eternal perpetuity when the group’s usefulness was long expired.
• A committee which majored on criticizing the remainder of the church, which didn’t share its pet passion.

As difficult as these problems can be, these aren’t the issue that I’m writing about today.

The biggest problem with committees, the way in which they are most likely to hurt, rather than bless their churches, is this:  Too many committees – especially “standing” committees – detract from, rather than serving, the God-given mission of their churches, siphoning off energy which is needed elsewhere while confusing the hearts and minds of their committee members. In too many churches, committees are siloes, and there are more siloes on the property than a corporate farm.

 Let’s go back for a moment to what committees should do: they should help their churches to fulfill their God-given mission of glorifying God (Ephesians one) by making disciples (Matthew 28:18-20).  So:

• A good pastoral search committee finds the new pastor who is the best possible fit for the universal mission of making disciples and the congregation’s unique vision of what that should look like in its own community.
• A good building and grounds committee cares for the church’s property so that the congregation (a mission to its community) is aided in its effectiveness by the “tool” of its facility. Example: If the church’s heaven-sent focus (or “target”) group is seniors, the property will be decorated accordingly.  I’ve seen churches which declared that they were targeting a particular demographic group while meeting in facilities which appeared to be carefully designed to appeal to a very different demographic group.
• A good VBS committee, serving a church which is committed to reaching the unchurched in the church’s neighborhood, is going to work hard – very hard – at actually getting those neighborhood kids and their parents into the building, instead of just the usual revolving congregation of highly-churched kids from all over town.

At the risk of provoking those dreaded “unsubscribe” responses, I have to speak the truth about the three most dangerous – and innocuous sounding committees:

1. The evangelism committee. It’s terrific if a congregation’s evangelism committee exists to help every person who is part of the congregation to be more effective at the crucial “front end” of the disciple-making process: evangelism.

But it’s toxic if the evangelism committee sees itself as (a) the only group of people in the church who actually need to do evangelism, or (b) the group which constantly criticizes the rest of the church for not doing evangelism, or (c) the group which promotes evangelism styles which are disconnected from the overall process of disciple-making, or (d) a group that does evangelism which elicits professions of faith from people who have no connection to the congregation and no reasonable chance of being “discipled.”

In a healthy church, every healthy believer understands that evangelism is (a) part of the normal Christian life, and (b) the first step in the disciple-making process.

2. The Christian education committee. In the educational philosophy of the Bible, learning a Biblical truth goes beyond mere cognition to making it a part of one’s life. I have learned the command to honor my parents when I’m treating my parents with respect and deference, not when I have learned to parrot the commandment.

In many churches, the pastor and board or staff members are on their knees praying about how an effective disciple-making process will look within their ministry. Wonderful!  Naturally, that process will involve teaching content, but it will be focused on helping believers turn new content into transformed lives.

Meanwhile, down the hallway, a completely separate Christian education committee is still focused on communicating content, content and more content as if Christian maturity and Bible knowledge were synonymous.

3. The fellowship committee. In the New Testament, fellowship seems to be a blessed by-product of Christians “doing” the Christian life together.  My experience suggests that the best fellowship is always attained by working, teaching, learning, evangelizing or worshiping together with – side by side with – other believers.

But the fellowship which comes out of fellowship committees is usually seen as an end in itself. “We need more fellowship here at Fellowship Bible church.”  This kind of manufactured fellowship, fueled by cookies and Kool Aid, is usually off-task and sadly disappointing.

In the worse-case scenario, on the second Tuesday night of the month, eight committees in eight rectangular siloes (classrooms) are all working hard at how to advance eight different agendas.

This is how your committees might be killing your church.