As Christians who want to love people well, we should prize clarity as being the kindest way we can speak.
Luke Simmons tweeted this a few months back:
The thread moves on to discuss ways he hadn’t been clear in his leadership in the past and how to produce clarity in the future. It’s mostly on leadership issues like the need for clear vision, needing clear roles and clarity over who makes decisions.
I’ve been on the inside of enough churches to see this done well and to see it done badly, perhaps unsurprisingly sometimes you get both in the same church. We are all contradictions, after all. Clearly defined responsibilities for staff members who aren’t at ‘the top,’ however your ecclesiology defines that (or even if it rejects that, there’s probably a tacit hierarchy of some sort) help them do their roles well. Clearly defined areas in which they have the autonomy to make decisions and in which they don’t—and who does in those cases—are also helpful.
It might sound like it’s confining but it’s the opposite, it gives freedom and autonomy. By that I mean that when you know that you can make decisions in these areas, and that whatever mistakes you make you’ll be backed rather than micromanaged, you’re free to run with things. When you know that you can’t touch these areas over here, you’re safe from blundering into grey zones where you make mistakes you didn’t know were mistakes.
Churches are the sorts of organisations plagued with grey zones. It comes in large part from the roles being about people, making them harder to nail down, but we often don’t help ourselves by providing the clarity we can. I’ve been in the sort of position more than once where I’ve blundered into something that I didn’t know was something nor did I know I was blundering; this happens (at least in part, my own sin notwithstanding) because things weren’t clearly laid out.
I would also advocate, as Simmons does, for making it clear by writing it down. This feels very ‘formal’ to most church environments but is—I contend—necessary. It allows everyone to not only be clear but not have to rely on their memories to see what we’re clear about. Other people can also see them and call people out if they aren’t following them—as Marcus Honeysett argues in Powerful Leaders this is a helpful way to stop many pastors from developing bullying and abusive tendencies, because stepping over small lines means you get called out on it. If something doesn’t happen as it’s meant to, we can get the documents out and check what wasn’t in line with what we agreed.
It also should prevent us from changing our minds quite so often. I don’t think policies should be written in stone, but they should have a ‘not reviewed until’ written on them to stop those who don’t like operating within clear lines from tinkering about with things. Clarity is only clarity if it doesn’t change all the time. While nothing can stop someone in a senior leadership position from doing whatever they like if they’re really determined to do, if we assume that everyone in Christian organisations—including but not limited to churches—is a good-hearted Christian, then drawing lines will stop them falling into patterns they shouldn’t in many cases. I appreciate that assumption is simply not true, but drawing lines isn’t going to prevent wolves, we need to deal with that in other ways.
This applies more broadly than staff teams, though, it’s just as important for volunteers. Hopefully most church staff see themselves as there to facilitate the church to do ministry rather than to do ministry themselves. If that’s the case, then you want to give authority and responsibility in different ways to lots of people across church life. Absolute clarity with them on what they’re responsible for and what they aren’t, who gets to decide on what, and when you’ll review this with them to listen to whether its working, is vital.
Doctrine
Clarity is kind. Not only when it comes to policies and responsibilities, but when it comes to doctrine too. If we believe that the Christian sexual ethic is the teaching of the Bible and that it’s good news for people, we should say that. I completely understand the reticence, the desire to not offend, or the concern that you’ll put things badly when communicated with a church full of people who are all over the map on whichever question you’re addressing. I just think we need to be clear anyway.
Especially for Pastors who are paid by churches, as the other Pastors may feel restrained by their jobs to speak as clearly and publicly as a paid Pastor can. That’s a topic for another post, though.
In the same, and for the same reasons, we should write this down. I come from a section of the British New Church movements that are deeply reticent about writing down doctrine or uniting around written documents. I think this is true across the charismatic churches, with some notable exceptions, though it tends to be very different in what’s often called the ‘conservative evangelical’ churches. Which, for American readers, refers to a specific subset of evangelicals who are conservative in the UK. Which is—I appreciate—confusing.
I think this reticence about writing things down is a problem. We should articulate our theology, especially our ecclesiology, in writing. These don’t always have to be public documents, though some of them should be. I say especially our ecclesiology not because it’s more important than other kinds of theology, but because it underlines the practical policy related challenges I started with. Who gets to make which decision is a theological question. It needs thinking through from that angle and being clearly defined for all those involved.
If we’re honest, every question is a theological question.
Defining our doctrine more broadly is also good for us. Of course, your public preaching ministry does this to some extent, but articulating it in writing is helpful. To take just one example from myriads, if you’re in a church that allows those who aren’t pastors to preach and you’re training a new preacher who hasn’t been with you all that long you have a doctrinal challenge. They may not have heard you preach on this issue, and you don’t expect it to come up, but if they stumble into it and unknowingly preach something that the church believes differently on then they’ve caused you a problem. Except, actually you caused you a problem. If you could present them with doctrine written down you could have avoided this issue. Of course, you could never get anyone to preach who hasn’t been around for donkey’s year or who doesn’t have one or another sort of formal training from your denomination. Those are choices you could make, and they would solve this particular problem while causing you others. Those choices themselves are also theological choices.
We do need some caveats. Writing statements of faith is hard work and if done by one person tend to be idiosyncratic. We look to the tradition for help and embrace the creeds, we look to our own day and embrace the EA statement of faith—but we probably need more than that. If your church is Calvinistic, or Arminian, or Amryldian, or some other position on those questions, none of those documents will help you. You will have a position, nevertheless.
What do you make of the sacraments? How do sanctification and justification interact? What sort of blessings do we expect from God? These are questions a church would struggle to be formally divided on, even though people who attend may think all sorts of things.
Clarity is kind. There comes a point when we can’t write it all down to the nth, of course. There are questions where the church may not have an entirely settled position, which is fine for some kinds of theological questions. Very few churches I know have a formal eschatology (except ‘not-dispensational’), which is fine until you want to preach certain passages. Confessions of faith may help us here. I could sit under the 2nd London Baptist Confession of Faith from 1689 for example. That could be helpful in lots of ways.
Even then, as a Reformed Charismatic, it doesn’t say everything I would want to say. That doesn’t have to be a problem, but as soon as write down one thing and not another you give it relatively more importance. These are real challenges.
It is difficult to get clear to the tiniest degree, but we continue to confess that clarity is kind and should be sought wherever it can be found.
Photo by Parker Gibbons on Unsplash
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