Last week I put six sentences in front of you. Six real verses, each one quoted accurately, each one pointed the wrong way.
I want to say now the thing I did not say six times.
Every one of those sentences had an answer. Not a clever answer. An ordinary one, the kind a church could have printed on a single page years earlier: this is how a concern gets raised here, this is who receives it, and this is what you will hear back. In every case that answer exists somewhere in the world. In none of those rooms was it within reach.
So somebody reached for the nearest thing. And the nearest thing in a church, always, is a verse.
That is what I want to look at this week. Not the misuse. The emptiness the misuse was filling.
A room with nothing to reach for will reach for something. It will reach under pressure, in front of people, with something that has to be decided before anyone goes home. Improvisation is not usually a strategy. It is what a good man does when he has run out of preparation, and in a church it sounds like Scripture, because that is what he has.
So the question underneath all six of those sentences is this one. What should have been in reach?
What Paul Was Actually Worried About
There is a verse almost every church person can quote, and almost nobody has read in place.
“But all things should be done decently and in order” (1 Corinthians 14:40 ESV).
It gets used for tidiness. It gets used to end meetings, to justify agendas, and now and then to tell somebody that the way she raised a thing was improper. It is a fine verse for none of that, because the chapter it ends is not about neatness at all.
Paul spends that chapter on a congregation whose gatherings had become impossible to follow. Tongues without interpretation, people speaking over one another, gifts real and genuine and landing on nobody. And the concern he keeps returning to is not how the room looks. It is one particular person sitting in it.
“Otherwise, if you give thanks with your spirit, how can anyone in the position of an outsider say ‘Amen’ to your thanksgiving when he does not know what you are saying?” (1 Corinthians 14:16 ESV)
That is the anxiety running under the whole chapter. Somebody is present who cannot tell what is happening. He has no standing. He did not plan the meeting and does not know its conventions. He is not being excluded on purpose by anyone. He simply cannot follow, and because he cannot follow, everything true and good being said in that room is passing over him.
Watch what Paul does with that. He does not tell the outsider to try harder. He reorders the room.
“What then, brothers? When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up” (1 Corinthians 14:26 ESV). Prophesy one at a time, he says, “so that all may learn and all be encouraged” (1 Corinthians 14:31 ESV). And then the reason, which is not a preference and not a temperament: “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33 ESV).
Then comes the verse everybody knows. Decently and in order is the last sentence of that argument, and it means what the argument means.
Here is the definition I want to carry into the rest of this, and I think it is the one the church has mostly lost. In Scripture, order is not measured by how a room looks to the people running it. It is measured by whether the person with the least standing in the room can follow what is happening.
That turns a question most boards file under administration into a pastoral one. A church’s process for handling a hard thing is not paperwork. It is whether the woman who does not sit at your table can tell what became of the thing she brought you.
What a Process Is, and What It Is Not
Before I describe anything to build, I have to say what I am not claiming, because I have argued the other side on this platform and I still believe it.
No document makes anyone faithful. A board of honest men working from a thin process will feel their way toward health over time. A board of men who will not tell the truth can follow a beautiful process precisely and arrive, on schedule, exactly where they intended to. Structure serves shepherding. It does not save anybody, and a church that thinks otherwise has swapped one god for a smaller one.
So the claim here is narrower than it may look, and it is this.
A process decided in advance is not a better set of men. It is the same men, deciding while they can still afford to be fair.
Consider the same elder board in two different months. In March nothing is wrong. They sit down and decide how a charge against one of their own would be received, and the decision costs them nothing, because it is about no one. Every man in the room can be generous, careful, and slow, because generosity is free that day.
In November something is wrong. The same men are in the same room, and now every clause has a face attached to it. Deciding that an accused elder steps out of the deliberation is no longer a principle; it is a decision about Jim, who has been in this church twenty years and whose wife is sitting in the parking lot. Deciding what the congregation will be told is no longer a commitment; it is a calculation about what happens to the building fund. The men have not changed. What it costs them has changed, and under that kind of cost, honest men make their worst decisions and never once experience themselves as dishonest.
That is the whole of it. A church cannot decide in advance to be brave. What it can do is decide in advance what brave will look like, on a day when nobody has to be.
Everything below inherits that. None of these is a safeguard against bad men. Each is a way of making sure that when the hard week comes, the room is reaching for something instead of inventing something.
Five Things to Decide While Nothing Is Wrong
One. Where a concern goes.
Write down the path a member’s concern takes. Who receives it. What happens to it next. What she will hear back, and roughly when. One page is plenty.
Most churches have no such page, and that absence does more damage than any policy. A concern raised into an undefined process does not get denied. It gets absorbed. Nobody refuses her; it simply never surfaces again, and she is left to decide privately whether she was ignored, or whether the matter was handled and she was not told, or whether she was the problem all along.
The test is the one the chapter gave us. Could a person who has never sat at your table tell you what happens next? If the only people who know the path are the people who would be walking it, the path does not exist yet.
Two. What happens when the concern is a charge.
A charge against an elder is different from a concern about the church, and Scripture treats it differently, with protections running in two directions at once. We spent a whole article on that two weeks ago and I am not going to teach it again here.
What I want is the part that is nobody’s teaching and everybody’s failure: the filing. Decide now that accounts are written down, dated, kept, and read together. Decide now whose office keeps them, and that it is not the office most likely to be the subject of one. This sounds like clerical detail and it is the difference between a threshold that can be met and a threshold that cannot, and the decision costs nothing to make in a year when no account has come in.
Three. Who steps out of the room.
Decide, before you know whose name it will be, that a man does not sit in deliberation on a matter about himself. Not because he is presumed guilty. Because no one can weigh a thing he is standing inside of, and asking him to try is unkind to him before it is unfair to anyone else.
Peter opens his charge to elders by placing himself among them: “So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed” (1 Peter 5:1 ESV).
As a fellow elder. An apostle who had walked with Christ, writing to men he was instructing, takes the seat beside them rather than above them. That is the posture the whole office is supposed to have, and it has a hard-edged consequence. A man who is one of the elders is inside the plurality, not over it, and being inside it means the process the elders built applies to him exactly as it applies to the rest. An elder who cannot be subject to his own board’s procedure was never really sitting in the same room as the others. He was being hosted there.
Write the rule while it is about nobody. Written then, it is a protection. Invented in the moment, it is always an accusation.
Four. Who you call when the board is the problem.
Some matters cannot be handled by the men they concern, and a board that is itself conflicted cannot see that about itself in the week it becomes true. So name the help in advance.
I am not going to tell you what form that takes, because Scripture does not, and churches are put together differently. Elders from a congregation you are in fellowship with. An association you belong to. Men outside your membership whose only stake is the truth. What matters is not the form. It is that they are named by office and not by friendship, named before there is a crisis to name them for, and that their authority is written down rather than assumed. “We would bring somebody in” is not a plan. It is a feeling boards have about themselves, and it evaporates in exactly the week it is needed.
Five. What the congregation will be told.
Decide, while nothing is wrong, what a congregation will be told when something is: who tells them, how soon, and what a member can ask for and expect an answer to.
This is the one boards resist most, and I understand the resistance. It feels like promising to air things. It is not. It is deciding the shape of honesty before you know the contents, so that the decision is made by men who are not yet protecting anyone.
And this is where the chapter comes all the way back. The congregation is the person who cannot follow. She was not in the room. She does not know the conventions, she has no standing in the deliberation, and she will learn what her church did from whatever reaches her. If nothing reaches her, she will not conclude that nothing happened. She will fill it in, and so will everybody else, and a church that will not say what it did has not protected the peace. It has only chosen which version of the story it will be unable to correct.
Let all things be done for building up. Not for comfort, and not for exposure. So that the ones who cannot see for themselves are not left standing outside of what their own church has done.
If You Sit at a Table
Three things, and none of them requires a crisis or a consultant.
Ask, at your next meeting, which of the five your church has actually written down. Not which ones you would do. Which ones exist on paper that a member could be handed. In most churches the honest answer is none, and there is no shame in it. Almost nobody builds these before they have needed them once.
Pick one and build it this quarter. The first is the right one to start with, because it is the smallest and it is the one your congregation meets first.
And then the hard one, which belongs in this article because of the article before it. The process you build can become the shield. A written path that is followed when it is convenient and set aside when it is not is one more accurately-quoted thing pointed the wrong way, and it is worse than having nothing, because now the room has a document to hold up. You already know what that looks like from the inside. It looks like men saying we followed the policy in the same tone others say you didn’t follow Matthew 18.
There is only one safeguard I know for that, and it is to write into the thing itself what happens when the thing is not followed. Who may say so out loud. What is owed to the person it was set aside for. A process with no answer to that question is not a process. It is a description of what you hope you would do.
If You Are Watching From a Pew
You may ask your elders for any of this, and asking is not an accusation.
Ask what happens to a concern when a member raises one. Ask whether it is written down anywhere. If the answer is that it has never come up, that is worth knowing and it is not a scandal. Most churches have never built these things, for the ordinary reason that nothing had gone wrong yet and there was always something more pressing.
But notice how the question is received, because that will tell you more than the answer does. A board that has nothing built and says so plainly is in a completely different condition from a board that hears the question as a threat. The first has a gap. The second has already decided something about you, and it decided it in the time it took to hear a question.
And if you are reading this from further out than that, from a church you have already left or from the back row of one you are not sure about, I am not asking you to go start a committee. Only to know that what happened to you was not the only way it could have gone, and that the thing that failed you was not the character of every man in that room. Some of it was that nobody had decided anything, and then it was too late to decide it well.
The God Who Is Not Improvising
I have never sat on a board that had all five of these, and I have never met one that regretted building even one.
But the reason to build them is not that they will work. Sometimes they will not. The reason is underneath the whole chapter we have been in.
“For God is not a God of confusion but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33 ESV).
Order in the church is not a management practice borrowed from the world and dressed up with a verse. It answers to the character of the One whose church it is. He is not confused about what is happening in your congregation. He has never had to improvise a way of dealing with one of His own, never had to invent a rule in the middle of a hard night, never had to decide under pressure what a person is worth to Him. The peace He is the God of is not quiet. It is a thing He builds, and He has been building it since long before the trouble arrived.
So when a church decides in advance how it will treat the person who brings it bad news, it is not being administrative. It is telling the truth about its Shepherd. It is saying that this flock belongs to Someone who is not panicked, not calculating, and not making it up as He goes, and that the way we handle one another here is going to look at least a little like the way He handles us.
That is worth a page. It is worth a meeting in a month when nothing is wrong.
And a process built well is still going to end somewhere. Discipline concludes. The hard season closes, and then there is a man standing outside a room he used to sit in, and a congregation watching to see whether he is ever asked back. That is next week.