Harold Lee has a vision of how the church will look in 2025. You can find that post at the AdventistReview site. All of this information available on the web makes me wonder if we are nearing a proposed major structural change in the Advnetist church.
In another article, Less gives several proposals for restructuring the Adventist church.
The first of Lee's proposals is the centralization of services. He notes that the technology that is available should reduce the amount of personnel needed for paperwork, accounting, and even mangement in our church. One wonders if much of the Secretary/Clerk work could be done by some excell macros.
Another proposal is the hiring of bi-vocational pastors. Lee notes that the Potomac Conference has 19 bi-vocational pastors right now. In this setup the church would give a stipend to a "part-time" pastor who would have other employment. My concern would be that we not expect that the bi-vocational pastor does as much as the full time pastors, but that concern does not do away with the validity of attempting such a change.
Lee also talks about creating resource centers. Becuase the internet has made it much easier to move information around, we can create websites and the like to help people with their problems. Instead of having a Stewardship director in every conference why not have a Stweardship resource center that would make pertinent information available on the topic to the world church?
Lee also speaks of networking ministries that are small and nimble that don't have the encumbering components of a larger organization. He notes that the church should prmote such endevors.
Interestingly Lee notes that the NAD in 1995 voted to request that the union and the conferences restructure and cut out departments to save money. One wonders if this happens as more and more personnel are being hired by some conferences to work in their office.
An important idea of Lee is metropolitan area collaboration. Why would you have 3 adventist churches in 1 city with 3 pitiful community service programs when you could unify them and create a larger better one. It would require working together across churches and accross conferences.
There are a few more interesting ideas like direct delivery training where we train people through the web an the like. To put it bluntly, we cannot continue to do what we did.
We will continue looking at these subjects on the blog so stay tuned...
[...] At the moment there is quite a lot of discussion about restructuring the SDA church. Sherman Cox II has two posts on his Adventist Pulpit blog. The first points readers to two articles by Harold Lee on the Adventist Review website: Church Structure in 2025 and Proposals for Structural Change. (Lee’s first article is reprinted in edited–shortened–form on the Re-Inventing the Adventist Wheel blog here.) Cox’s second post points to the website of the GC Commission on Ministries, Services, and Structures. The commission was set up following an action of the GC Annual Council on October 11, 2005 and held its first meeting on April 11, 2006. The commission’s website has a number of interesting documents available, including one by George Knight entitled Organized for Mission: The Development of Seventh-day Adventist Organizational Structures. Other good sources on the historical development of the SDA Church’s organizational structure include: [...]
ReplyDeleteI'm all for change for the better, some of the proposals make me think "It's about time!" but I'm not so sure about bi-vocational pastors. In my mind, it seems to send an unspoken message that pastors (in the trenches) are not important enough to be paid FTE wages,but the administrators (who we never see, but that's another issue) deserve to be FTE. If I were a bi-vocational pastor, I'd be tempted to just start an independent ministry!
ReplyDeleteJust a thought from a member in the pews, left side, towards the middle.
Also, how do you think these changes will affect the regional conferences?
The first thing to do is eliminate local conferences in favor of Union Conferences. Travel and communication advantages in 2006 and beyond negate the need to local conferences. The next thing to do is to eliminate Regional Conferences. Our churches are well integrated now all the way up or down to the GC. Third use teleconferencing rather than redundant travel. TJZ
ReplyDeleteTom and Ann,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your interesting questions and comments.
First I think that the regional conferences issue is an interesting one and I will post on it in the not too distant future. At any rate if they eliminate the local conferences presumably that would elimninate the regional conferences because they are local conferences.
As far as the Bi-Vocational minister option. It is also an interesting issue. One thing that we would have to be sure of is that pastors are not expected to do all the work that they are expected to do today and yet make half or a third of the income.
I think that structural changes are more than likely coming and I welcome them. However, we should have open discussion over what these things.
This is our church and all of us should be invovled in the discussion. Once again I thank the church for putting these resources on-line and I think we should read them and be knowledgeable of them.
[...] Perhaps a third problem comes from not knowing what to pay them. I mean do you pay them half money? Do you pay them 2/3? Ann, in our comments section, questions why we are seeking to make part time pastors and not using the same effort to make part-time administrators. This is an interesting question. One should note that part time administrators does seem to be on the table at least in the Flexibility document that I have posted on. However her point is, if we really value the pastorate why not pay for the pastorate? [...]
ReplyDelete[...] Yes there seems to be talk about eliminating the conference level altogether. Now if you are a loyal reader of SabbathPulpit.Com, this would not have taken you by surprise. We talked about this four years ago in 2006. I discussed Harold Lee’s article on this page. [...]
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