Frank W. Childers

 A Personal Story

As I drove home, I could not believe it was forty minutes past midnight! Another church leadership meeting had lasted hours past the scheduled completion time. I was not comfortable with the decisions we made hastily at the end of the meeting in order to adjourn and get some sleep.

Once again, we had avoided the critical issues of vision and strategic ministry. We had dropped down into ministry tactics and details in order to justify spending over six hours together inefficiently wrestling with a broken church governance process.

As I turned into my driveway, this church leadership thing seemed a million miles from anything resembling a spiritual process. And to make matters worse, the church staff would be once again frustrated and discouraged by our micro-management of issues and decisions they had been thoroughly trained and carefully hired to handle.

Something had to give. Something had to change. We were all exhausted as elders. It was apparent to our families and to elder recruits who were growing more reluctant to join our leadership team. Frankly, I did not blame them as I laid my head on my pillow. I quietly longed for the end of my term so I could gracefully exit this disappointing chapter of my life.

If you are able to identify with any part of this story, there is a way you and your church leadership team can move beyond this mess. You can move toward a more effective division of labor that restores the spiritual essence to church leadership. You can transform church meetings into significant and desirable investments of your collective time and talents. It’s a concept called staying “above the line.”

Above the Line

Staying “above the line” is a metaphor describing the use of defined boundaries to clarify roles, responsibilities and interaction among leadership of a local church. It has become an organizational model that frees the elders to be elders and empowers the vocational church staff to own and execute ministries across the church through a vast array of lay people.

Once “the line” has been defined, the elders or overseers (including the senior pastor) are able to remain focused on the strategic and spiritual aspects of church leadership. In the vernacular of Acts 6, they no longer need wait on tables to serve special interests in the family of God but rather stay focused on “prayer and the ministry of the Word.”

The notion of “eldering” has a broad scope and definition, depending on your church, location, size, worldview and heritage. In my experience in three churches over the last thirty years, the common denominator for leading a healthy, growing church has been humble, patient, lay leaders who meet biblical qualifications for elders and seek God for the direction of their local fellowship. However, this focus on humility and patience should never translate into long, unruly meetings where everyone feels the need to struggle for power, represent a partisan constituency, jockey for position or simply be heard on every issue.

Larry Osborne, in his book, The Unity Factor, summarizes this phenomenon well as he observes, “Whenever the decision making process becomes paralyzed or produces inordinate conflict and power plays, it’s a sign that something is structurally wrong.” It is this structural aspect of church leadership that staying “above the line” practically facilitates. In practice, it has translated into the elder responsibilities to (1) pray seeking God’s will for this church at this time, (2) decide (after prayer) what the vision and direction of this church will be, and (3) delegate the implementation of this vision and direction to staff and ministry teams for implementation.

One example was an annual budgeting cycle. It took dozens of hours to complete because most elders had special interests in various ministries. There was general disagreement over the need to moderate top-down budgeting vs. the appeal for bottom-up ministry needs. Praying first and delegating this task to a budgeting sub-committee would have saved so much time and preserved unity across senior leadership of our church.

The importance of these three strategic elements is not often argued among church leaders. However, the importance of elders staying in this domain and avoiding the natural tendency to drop below the line is the part of the model that does not work so smoothly.

Below the Line

Once decisions are made, elders tend to jump into the implementation fray with experience, opinions and hands-on guidance. And this is precisely where the conflict, dysfunction and micro-management lead to Osborne’s quote. Wherever you and your leadership team draw “the line,” the discipline to work your side of the model is essential to leadership unity and church harmony. The temptation to play out of position is great and leadership accountability should guide elders back above the line at every opportunity.

To illustrate: I sat in a ministry team meeting once as confusion led to frustration and frustration led to discord. Simply stated, the lay leadership team had developed a sound plan that was in line with staff direction for the ministry but an elder had inserted himself into the process to review “strategy, tactics and goals.” Unaware of the implications of his questions and methods, the elder effectively undermined staff credibility and so discouraged the lay leaders of the ministry team that most of them quit the team and some left the church. In spite of efforts to bring these folks together, the divisive finger pointing and lack of unity that followed wounded the church for many months.

To better understand the typical activities below the line, let me illustrate using our model. Delegated decisions from the church elder board need comprehensive plans including budgets, talent recruitment and training and the on-going execution of the service tasks that make the ministry effective.

The division of labor and responsibility is best described as elder decisions of what? and when? that are then followed by staff and ministry team decisions of how? and who? As a result, key staff and lay leaders under the direction of the executive pastor(s) build the ministry plans without specific and detailed input or participation by the elders. The elders may see evidence of these plans when ministry goals or budgets are rolled up for their edification. The ultimate role of the elders is to encourage, support and serve the staff and ministry teams through prayer and public endorsement.
 

In the model detailed above, elder roles and responsibilities change from hands on management and oversight of any and every detail in the church to a short, but very important list of activities. This Pray, Decide & Delegate list prevents the elder board from becoming a bottleneck in the church decision process and sets free the staff and lay leadership of the church for ministry that supports and fulfills the decisions of the elders.

Perhaps the greatest two examples of the healthy benefits of this model were the changes in elder prayer and staff creativity.

Elder Prayer

Elder prayer was often characterized by reactionary intercession for the health and wealth of the church … little more than praying for the injured, ill and recovering inside the body along with asking God to meet various financial needs the church encountered. Even when prayer occasionally focused on issues outside the church, the tone was one of asking God to solve a “problem” in the culture that was affecting or inhibiting the church in some way. Again, the result was ultimately inward focused and reactionary.

Above the line, elder prayer has become a regular, healthy process of seeking God’s master plan for the church, including growth in accountability among the elders and growth in the breadth and depth of what God is doing locally, regionally and globally for the gospel. It has resulted in a regular petition of God for His plan that promises eternal return on ministry investment and transformed lives that make Him look good.

Staff Creativity

Staff creativity was waning as the pattern of elder insertion into decisions and details of ministries grew more and more predictable. The “tall, thin” elder who would move from seeking God’s will for the church to deciding what ministry was needed and then to the implementation details of how and who would be best suited to accomplish these tasks had become commonplace. Elders conducting unscheduled “operations reviews” with strong opinions and hidden agendas had not encouraged independent action or even creative thought among the staff and lay leaders. Instead, it had produced political behavior that often undermined staff credibility and morale.

Above the line, elders were now free to release the tactical and detailed issues of how? and who? to the staff and ministry leaders. This empowered and encouraged creativity and personal ownership of these important functions and led to ministry growth that would not have been realized otherwise. The ability to delegate and leave the decisions below the line enabled the elders to avoid the micro-management that had resulted in many problems, including long elder meetings and reluctant elder candidates.