The Epic, Pt. 31

A meeting of the Church Ministries Board was held on August 10, 2008. Arriving board members were surprised to find members of the building committee in the room. When the meeting began Pastor DeSilva “explained” that since the building committee was voted by the business meeting to be a subcommittee of the Ministries Board that its members were also members of the Ministries Board and entitled to attend Ministries Board meetings. This statement was faulty for so many reasons that the attendees were at a loss for where to begin objecting, so it went unchallenged.

Before detailing those objections we should include a little more history about the building committee. As mentioned earlier in the Epic, it was formed as a subcommittee of the finance committee. Now, when a committee makes a subcommittee of itself it is entitled to choose the members of that subcommittee without any outside input, and the subcommittee is to report back to its “parent” committee, and no one else. In this case, however, the building committee’s membership had been approved by the standing nominating committee, which is a procedure that would be expected if this was an independent committee that would report to the business meeting or some other committee specified by the church as a whole. But, there was no follow-through in taking the standing nominating committee’s recommendations to the church body for a vote, without which their involvement was moot.

Pastor DeSilva’s announcement regarding the status of the building committee and its membership was faulty for the following reasons. 1) The business meeting had never taken a vote of any kind regarding the creation of this committee. Its existence had simply been announced as fact. 2) The building committee, when announced, was declared to be a subcommittee of the finance committee, not the Ministries Board. 3) The only committee the building committee should have been permitted to report to was its parent committee, the finance committee. 4) Even if the building committee had been a subcommittee of the Ministries Board, membership in a subcommittee does not give automatic membership in the parent committee. 5) The building committee could not possibly be a subcommittee of the Ministries Board because, per the duty lists prepared by Pastor DeSilva, the Ministries Board had no authorization to deal with the matters the building committee was tasked with handling. 6) The building committee couldn’t be a subcommittee of the Ministries Board because the Ministries Board hadn’t had any hand in its creation or the selection of its members.

Declaring the building committee a subcommittee of the Ministries Board enabled Pastor DeSilva to bypass the finance committee and increase his influence on the selection of a contractor to repair the air conditioning. The building committee had so far been reporting to the finance committee as it was supposed to, which Pastor DeSilva was finding inconvenient because the finance committee was insisting procedural propriety in contractor selection. He had asked the finance committee for a vote to enable the building committee to report directly to the business meeting with its contractor recommendation, thereby skipping the finance committee’s oversight. This request had been refused. He was now doing the same with the Ministries Board.

The first 40 minutes of the meeting were taken up with a report and discussion about the nature of the air conditioning problem and the various recommendations on how to fix it. Finally, a member of the Group asked Pastor DeSilva what action he wanted from the Ministries Board on the subject. He replied that he wanted the Ministries Board to empower the building committee to report directly to the business meeting with a contractor recommendation. At this the Group member pointed out that that action would not be appropriate because the Ministries Board was not empowered to deal with issues such as contractor selection. She pointed Pastor DeSilva back to the duty list that he himself had prepared for the committee (worship planning, responsible for developing a yearly calendar of events and celebrations, responsible for keeping the church missionally focused, leadership development, develop Mission and Vision, develop long and short term vision goals) and observed that this was what the congregation understood the Ministries Board to be authorized to do—this and nothing more.

This observation angered Pastor DeSilva. His response was, “I wrote that list, let me interpret it!” The next 15 minutes were taken up by a tirade from Pastor DeSilva complaining about the Group, and how he couldn’t get anything done because every meeting was taken up by disruptions from the Group. He further complained about how incredibly mistreated he had been by the Group, and cited as evidence of this a “horrible” and “threatening” letter he had received. He declared that he was not going to accept any more letters from us, and that if we had anything more to say that we must say it to the conference, and that if he was wrong the conference would tell him so. (By the way, the “threatening letter” was identified in a conversation after the meeting as being the cover letter we had sent with Elder Bediako’s letter. His claim was that the timetable included with the request for reconsideration qualified as a threat. We observe that in order to be a threat there would need to be an implication of negative consequences for failing to grant the request, which was entirely absent.)

The motion to allow the building committee to report directly to the business meeting passed.

The next item on the agenda was listed simply as “disciplinary action.” As you will recall, Pastor DeSilva had aborted a sneak attempt to discipline a member he didn’t like at a business meeting on January 28, 2008. This was the same matter. He made a token effort to explain the charges against the member and claimed that the Potomac Conference had a file of evidence against this man that was “this thick!” He offered to ask the conference to meet with the elders and detail this evidence if anyone felt such a need. When asked, he claimed that the congregation had already made the visitation and reclamation efforts required by the Church Manual in disciplinary matters. He asked the Ministries Board to recommend to the business meeting that this individual be removed from membership. The Group found this inappropriate for the same reason that the motion regarding empowering the building committee was inappropriate, but since the argument of its not being within the job description of the Ministries Board had already been made and ignored by Pastor DeSilva, there was no point in making it again in this instance. Pastor DeSilva got his much-desired recommendation for discipline.


Next: Reasoning Together


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