Return to the M.B. Herald Vol. 35, No. 9
Home Page
Around coffee a while back, it was suggested that the most powerful committee at both the congregational level and the conference level is none of these. It is the nominating committee.
The nominating committee? That obscure group thrown together out of those individuals who weren't important enough to sit on a real committee with a real program?
Yes. There is certainly an argument to be made for the nominating committee being the most powerful. It doesn't make any decisions--just chooses the people who will make all the decisions. This is considerable power. Put in a young radical, a seasoned moderate, a staunch traditionalist, a spiritually mature prayer warrior, a visionary, a worldly tactician--and all other decisions fall into place.
Yet, the work of this most important of committees is often overlooked.
I used to push for more and better information to be given to convention delegates, so they could choose wisely in the election of conference leaders. I still push for this. However, I am beginning to think that the work of the nominating committee is even more crucial than the elections that take place on the convention floor. (After all, sometimes the nominating committee only presents one candidate for a position, or six candidates for five positions.)
So how do nominating committees do their work? In theory, conference committees often ask local churches for nominations, just as local churches often ask their care groups or the individual members for nominations. The local churches, not anxious to see their best people spending their ministry time outside the congregation, are sometimes reluctant to respond. This places a great burden on the nominating committee, a burden which gets worse the larger the conference is. A small committee cannot even know the vast majority of the members from whom they are to select candidates.
Faced with this dilemma, what approach can nominating committees take?
There are four general approaches, I think:
The AWBWD approach. That is, "any warm body will do." Nominating committees face great pressure to present a full slate of nominees. That is their task. After a long series of people have declined nomination, they must sometimes feel tempted to nominate just about anybody who is willing to serve.
The lobby approach. There is also a temptation (for others as well as the nominating committee) to use the nomination process as a means to get "our people" into positions of power. In particular, traditionalists feel more comfortable nominating traditionalists, and radicals radicals. Those on the nominating committee naturally tend to know and put more trust in people of their own age group, geographical location and ethnic group. How does a nominating committee resist its own natural inclinations?
The credentials approach. In this approach, the nominating committee looks for skills and experience. Thus, it nominates businessmen for management boards, educators for education boards, writers for publishing boards. There is certainly some legitimacy to this approach because boards need expertise. However, it is dangerous to look only at these credentials. Boards should have a broad persepctive rather than simply perpetuate a narrow, in-house philosophy that is out of step with the church in general. Boards need wise critics as well as defenders of the status quo, people who will ask: "Is this really what God wants us to be doing now?"
A subset of this approach is to overvalue experience. A person who has been on another board before is more likely to be known to the nominating committee and thus be nominated because of his or her "experience". Thus, we have the phenomenon of recycling members from one board to another. Experience can be a great asset to a board and should certainly be considered by the nominating committee. People who have proven themselves in one position are well qualified for another position. However, experience alone is not sufficient--the nominating committee must also consider whether the person has proved to be a good board member or a poor one, and the people in the best position to know that are the other people this board member has worked with.
Prayer and discernment. This is the best approach, and it is the approach taken by conference nominating committees more often than we sometimes fear. Discernment will take into account elements of some of the other approaches as well. Skills and experience are certainly relevant. So is geographic location. (For instance, for balance, many conferences have a rule that no congregation can have more than one member on a given board.) So is philosophy. If a conference badly needs structural renewal, it is not wise to fill the boards with traditionalists--just as it is not wise to elect only young radicals who are too far in advance of the majority of members.
A key part of such discernment is consultation with the people who know the potential candidate best. Many local churches insist that nominations for their boards be passed through the candidate's care group and the church council. (The church leaders may be aware of personal or disciplinary concerns in the candidate's life which are not known to the general membership.) At the conference level, candidates should be processed through the local church council or elders; and candidates for Canadian and North American boards should be processed through the provincial executive boards. (At the Canadian MB Conference level, the nominating committee is now made up of the provincial moderators. This recognizes the importance of the nominating committee, assures representation from all provinces, and uses individuals who are in a position to know far more potential board members than most nominating committees.) There is a danger of boards becoming self-perpetuating power blocks, but that is balanced by the added discernment that current leaders can give to the process of choosing future leaders.
Above all, nominating committees must rely on God through prayer. God, after all, knows individuals far more intimately than any other human being can. This is particularly so because, while skills and experience are important, the primary qualifications for church leadership remain what they have always been: spiritual qualifications. As outlined in Scripture, church leaders must be temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, gentle, not quarrelsome, upright, disciplined, holy. . . .
Return to the M.B. Herald Vol. 35, No. 9
Home Page