The Epic, Pt. 43

Our pastors declared that in order to proceed with becoming “missionally focused” the church must first “discover its core values.” They chose to begin this process at the Ministry Board meeting on November 9, 2008. This was done by means of a survey sheet (see below) which was handed out in the meeting for the ministry board members to complete. This survey listed 25 potential core values and asked that each be ranked on a scale of 1 to 4 to indicate their importance. Here is just one rather scary example of these potential core values, “Obedience: A willingness to do what God or others ask.” We certainly have no issue with doing anything God asks of us, but that obedience does not, should not, automatically extend to unspecified “others.” You can see, however, how a pastor could use this line of reasoning to demand unquestioning obedience of his congregation rather than allowing members to exercise individual judgment.

This exercise in the ministry board meeting was recorded in the minutes that. “Church Ministry Core Values Audit forms were handed out to each CMB member to see what the CMB members assess as our core values. These forms will be tabulated and compared to the tabulation of the forms when they are given to the church membership to see if the CMB and the general membership agree as to core values.” No such comparison was made, or at least not presented to the ministries board, but survey forms were mailed out to the congregation shortly after this meeting. With the forms went a letter encouraging members to duplicate the forms as needed to ensure that each family member could submit a copy. Boxes were placed in the lobbies of the church to collect the completed forms. It was noted how easily such a system could be abused if someone wanted to pack the vote, but there wasn’t really anything anyone could do about it.

At the end of the Nov. 9 ministry board meeting Pastor DeSilva offered to any who wanted them a list of examples of “values statements” from other churches, and urged members to consider them in thinking about how our own should read. These examples came from Northwood Community Church (Dallas, TX), The Jerusalem Church (Jerusalem, Israel), Fellowship Bible Church (Dallas, TX), Lakeview Community Church (Cedar Hill, TX) Willow Creek Community Church (South Barrington, IL), Parkview Evangelical Free Church (Iowa City, IA), and Grace Bible Church (Laredo, TX).

The results of the core values survey were presented to the ministries board on December 7, 2008. The presentation did not include any exact data about how many points each option had received. A list of nine core values was presented. Pastor DeSilva declared that he wanted to narrow it down to six. (How he came to decide that nine was the ideal number of options to present or that six was the perfect number of values for the church to hold is unknown.) The nine values presented were prayer, Bible knowledge, excellence, worship, evangelism, community, encouragement, preaching, and obedience. Pastor DeSilva suggested that excellence be taken out of the running to be listed as a stand-alone value, because it was really a part of all of the others (excellence in worship, excellence in encouragement, etc.). It was agreed. In order to eliminate two more of the values to achieve the six each ministries board member was handed six colored sticky dots. Each of the remaining eight values was written on a separate piece of marker board and taped to the wall. Members were asked to vote by placing their sticky dots on the values they wanted to vote for. In this manner preaching and obedience were eliminated.

Next: Making a Statement

Religious