Committed or Committeed?

For God so loved the world that he did not form a committee…..

It’s easy to have a pot at committees, and sure there’s a lot of time spent talking, consulting, reporting, recording, remitting. A large American church has a consultative committee of the sub group on church committees. I’ve just come through several days of being over committeed. Days of talking in small select groups, around pre-arranged agendas. In all the talk surrounding Christian leadership, vision-building and development, there are times when it seems the consensual, consultative confabbing that goes on in committees, seems to slow down rather than facilitate necessary change and innovative thinking.

But I wonder if what is criticised is committee at its worst. Sure, at worst committees can be bottlenecks where good ideas are put on indefinite hold till the original enthusiasm and energy dissipate. ‘A cul de sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled’. At worst a committee can be made up of people whose ability to veto, delay, frustrate and revise innovative, risk taking and original initiatives, gets in the way of ‘real leadership’.  Fibber Magee speaks of committees as ‘a small group of the unqualified, appointed by the unthinking, to undertake the utterly unnecessary.’ So that’s committee at its worst.

At its best a committee can provide important space for creative thinking, trusting conversation, collaborative discussion, in which expertise and experience are freely tabled in the interests of making good decisions and forming strategic initiatives. The good committee can also act as a corrective, a friendly critic, a cautionary voice, while also being an enabling resource and a permissive supporter of adventurous thinking. I happen to believe in committee at its best; the ability of a diverse group to meet, listen and speak, to think clearly enough and to be confident enough in their own insights that they are prepared to change their minds in the light of others’ experience. Of course it requires self discipline, humility to listen, trustfulness to speak, confidence in the reality of the Holy Spirit’s influential presence, discernment to know when someone else is ‘at it!’, and through the whole process a commitment to the communal and relational foundations of Christian fellowship. ‘It seemed good to us and to the Holy Spirit’ is one of the most intriguing statements about church administration in the entire NT!

Two further thoughts – If it is true that the saving work of Jesus was purposed and determined in the eternal relations of the Triune God, should we be so sure that ‘God so loved the world that he did not form a committee……???’

Isn’t it true that the gathering of a congregation as the Body of Christ, meeting to discern the mind of Christ by listening to God, listening to each other, and listening to God through each other, is itself a reflection of the relational mutual exchange of love and trust that defines the love of the Triune God?

In our church life, when committees meet, they begin in prayer – so the real chairmanship is already determined by the promised presence of the risen Lord; the discussion quality controlled by the fruit of the Spirit who indwells our hearts and reminds us we all call "Abba, Father"; the agenda open to revision because the Kingdom of God is leaven, new wine, mustard seed and many another metaphor for the uncontrollable activity of God in our midst; the fundamental relations are that of family, brothers and sisters and children of the Father, from whom every family on earth is named.

If our committee meetings are boring, frustrating, sterile, a waste of time, talk-shops, perhaps that is because we dampen our capacity to be what Elton Trueblood, that forgotten philosopher saint of the Quaker tradition once described as, the incendiary fellowship.