The Epic, Pt. 78

At the beginning of 2009 the church office issued an events calendar to the church officers as a template for filling in their events. This template calendar listed several administrative events. The most notable of these was the beginning of the election process with selection of the large committee on September 12, 2009. Subsequent calendars featuring events from the various departments had this item removed, but the Group had already taken note.

When September 12 came the Group was puzzled by an apparent lack of action on this item. We concluded after the fact that some bulletins had been stuffed with nomination forms and others had not. When questioned about it Elder J claimed that there had been an announcement about the process from the front, but none of the Group were able to testify to having heard such an announcement. The results of these nominations were not brought back to the church for confirmation of the exact makeup of the large committee. When questioned about how the committee had been selected Pastor DeSilva stated on separate occasions that the committee was made up of those with the most votes on the nomination forms and that “they” had tried to get a diverse group that truly represented the church. These statements cannot both be true as they are mutually exclusive.

For many in the congregation the first indication that the election process had begun was the report of the large committee (recommending the membership of the nominating committee) which was published in the bulletin on September 26, 2009. Pastor DeSilva made a point of claiming his right to be chairman of the nominating committee, saying that if we wanted to do things by the Church Manual we would get exactly that. However, this new-found zeal for playing by the rules only seemed to come upon him when the rules somehow benefited him. For example, contrary to the Church Manual (p.153, edition 17) the church board did not make a decision about the proper size for the nominating committee before the nomination process began.

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