{"id":53798,"date":"2022-09-30T10:28:49","date_gmt":"2022-09-30T15:28:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/?p=53798"},"modified":"2022-11-02T01:19:38","modified_gmt":"2022-11-02T06:19:38","slug":"why-a-church-constitution-is-more-than-a-necessary-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/?p=53798","title":{"rendered":"Why a Church Constitution Is More Than a Necessary Evil"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span data-contrast=\"none\">There\u2019s a set of people for whom things like rules, constitutions, and by-laws are endlessly fascinating, people who salivate at the prospect of being asked to revise or\u2014even better!\u2014write from scratch a set of procedural rules for an organization. There is a set of people like that. And then there are normal people! For most of us, constitutions and by-laws are far from fascinating; they\u2019re legal documents, necessary administrative evils at best, and at worst, a kind of desiccated straitjacket that hinders the Spirit and turns what should be Spirit-led churches into hide-bound bureaucratic behemoths.<span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;335559738&quot;:120,&quot;335559739&quot;:120}\">\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"none\">In my experience, though, the people who are most likely to have that sort of low opinion of rules, constitutions, and the like are people who are <span data-contrast=\"none\">about <span data-contrast=\"none\">to lead something, not people who have actually <span data-contrast=\"none\">led<span data-contrast=\"none\">. They\u2019re people who are <span data-contrast=\"none\">going to <span data-contrast=\"none\">plant a church or take a pastorate but haven\u2019t yet found themselves having to make real decisions in real time in a real congregation. But once you\u2019re in a leadership position, it becomes clear pretty fast that solid rules aren\u2019t a necessary evil at all; they\u2019re an indispensable weapon for safeguarding the unity<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Once you\u2019re in a leadership position, it becomes clear pretty fast that solid rules aren\u2019t a necessary evil at all; they\u2019re an indispensable weapon for safeguarding the unity of the church.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":678,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[793],"tags":[312],"class_list":["post-53798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-9marks","tag-leadership","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/678"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53798"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53800,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53798\/revisions\/53800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}