The Epic, Pt. 5

The second Town Hall meeting ended with an agreement that the changes in governance structure would be excluded from the vote on the recommendations of the report from Dr. Paul Borden, but that the recommendations for neighborhood evangelism and "diversity" in selection of church music would remain intact. Because of this agreement, the third Town Hall meeting went smoothly. After the third Town Hall meeting, it slowly surfaced that the pastoral staff had no intention of honoring this agreement. Our senior pastor Alan DeSilva began to privately whisper that we would have to vote on the entire set of recommendations as proposed. Why? Because, as we were told, our church had a contract with Borden and the report he provided to us was a part of that contract. (The report specified that it must be voted on in its entirety.) Pastor DeSilva’s argument was that if we didn't follow through with a vote on Borden’s entire set of recommendations, we could open ourselves up to a lawsuit.

As far as legal analysis goes, this was just ridiculous. This is just like saying that if you contract for a deck on the back of your home, and you don't use it, you could open yourself to a lawsuit from the builder. In a nutshell, if you contract for a deck, the builder performs the work, and you pay the builder the agreed-to price, the contract is completed and fulfilled. It is now your deck. You can have a birthday party on your deck, you can paint it green, or you can burn the whole thing to the ground. It's you deck to do with as you please. The same could be said of the Paul Borden Report. The church had work for which they had paid $6500. We were free to do with it as we pleased. But our pastor stuck to his "lawsuit” story, and held his vote on Sabbath, in the sanctuary, during the Divine Worship Hour on November 17, 2007. The result of the vote was a 60/40 split in favor of approving the report.

I started this series of posts with the intention of sticking to a description of events, and leaving the arguments and analysis for other posts, but in this instance I’m going to depart from that intention and spend the remainder of this post dissecting this infamous vote. There are so many ways in which it was horribly wrong, and much of our current appeals process involves these wrongs, so a listing thereof is imperative in order to understand what will follow in this narrative.

First, the vote was taken on a Sabbath. There are only two types of business that the Church Manual permits to be transacted during Sabbath worship services – membership changes and nominating committee reports. All other business is to be conducted at business meetings outside of the Sabbath hours. This vote should never have been held on a Sabbath, and there were members who declined to participate in the voting for that reason.

Second, there was insufficient notice given. Proper procedure is for announcements of pending actions such as this to be published in the bulletin for two weeks prior to the vote. We got only one verbal announcement the week before, which many missed.

Third, what was being voted on was not clearly spelled out. Many people missed the verbal announcement the week before, which (along with a second quick announcement on the morning of the vote) was the only time Pastor DeSilva publicly announced that the vote was on the entire Report. They believed that the structural change was not a part of the vote, consequently voting in favor of something they would otherwise have opposed. Even those who knew that the structural change was included didn’t know what that meant. In the last meeting where the details of the proposed new system were discussed, before it was agreed that the whole matter of structural change would be dropped, Pastor DeSilva had stated that there were still some adjustments to be made to properly describe the intention. No updated chart and/or written description were provided at the time of the vote to be the official description of the new system, and Pastor DeSilva has since treated that ambiguous vote as a blank check to not only make the new structure whatever he wanted it to be, but also to change or “interpret” it however it suited his purposes. (We’ll come back to this point later in The Epic.)

Fourth, opportunity was not provided for discussion of the matter, nor were formal minutes taken. The pastoral argument has been that this Sabbath vote was a legitimate business meeting of the church. However, there are certain hallmarks of business meetings which were notably absent in this situation – specifically that no opportunity was provided to discuss the motion within the meeting and no minutes of the meeting were kept. We submit that without these vital characteristics the event of Nov. 17, 2007 did NOT qualify as a legitimate business meeting of the Takoma Park SDA Church.

Finally, there was no way to verify whether the individuals voting were truly members of the congregation. The way the actual voting took place was that deacons with paper ballots wandered down the aisles and handed ballots to anyone whom they noticed raising their hands. The completed ballots were collected in the same manner. This system didn’t provide any means of verifying the membership of the voters. There were also members who complained afterward of having been overlooked by the deacons in the ballot distribution. With the vote having been split as closely as it was it is entirely possible that the outcome would have been different if more care had been taken in the process, but we’ll never know for sure. This is one of the inherent weaknesses of having taken this vote during Sabbath morning services. If it had been done outside of Sabbath hours as it should have been it would have been in a more controlled environment where the needed attention to the integrity of the process could have been given. For these reasons we believe that the vote taken was not legitimate.

Next: Shock and Bonding

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