Some things make amazing servants but terrible masters. Policy and procedure is one of them – especially in the Church!

In recent history, the Church has bought into a massive societal push to establish health, safety, and protection policies in an attempt to safeguard the people within her care. The motivation behind this is generally a noble one: the Church – tired of seeing people hurt and abused – seeks to put protections in place to ensure that everyone is safe. From this good intention, churches develop child protection policies, procedures for dealing with confrontation, and guidelines for reconciliation and restoration. These sound marvellous – unless, of course, you’re the one writing or reading them!

You might be wondering what is wrong with such things. To be honest, in and of themselves, there is nothing wrong with them. Policies and procedures, much like church constitutions and books of polity, can be a real blessing when used well. But here is the problem: most of the time, they aren’t.

Policies, procedures, constitutions, and orders make fantastic servants but terrible masters. Unfortunately, they are more often than not the masters in the Church. To illustrate this, ask yourself: if something went majorly wrong in your church, where would the leaders turn first? To the Scriptures – or to a book of church governance, a policy manual, or a procedural guideline?

I have sat in many leadership meetings within the Church at various levels and sizes – from local ministry teams through to national committees. One day it struck me that seventy-five percent of the men in the room were holding books of rules and policies, and almost none of them were holding Bibles. Why is this? I’d love to think it’s because they know the Word of God so well that they don’t need to carry their Bibles – but I doubt that somehow!

Men bring to meetings what they consider their most important tool. A builder carries a hammer, a lawyer a briefcase, a doctor a stethoscope – and a church leader…a book of church rules. Shame on us! The Church of Christ has been given one book with which to govern herself: the Word of God. To the extent that we neglect it, the Church will fail.

Rules, policies, and governance documents can be a real boon to the Church when they are subservient to the Word of God. But when the Scriptures are set aside in order to follow the rules we have agreed to uphold…disaster follows. This is sadly all too often the result of pragmatism in the church.

Have you experienced the Word of God being neglected in exchange for a set of man-made rules? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.