As the book of Jeremiah wraps up and my studies finish there for now, I'm turning my attention back to the pragmatic things of my life as a pastor.  I'll have one or two more posts I suspect on Jeremiah and then this fall I will turn toward the book of Luke, that gold mine of stories that still speak to us. In the meantime, I'm writing a series of Bible Studies that are story based and very centered on the Why. Why honor Sabbath, Why look forward to the Second Coming, etc, Why Get Married In a Church, Why Make Money, and so on. You can probably tell from the titles and what I've said about them, that they are not normal or traditional. They are written for folks who want to think about why they do what they do. So I've got the next three months to finish those. In the meantime, I'm jogging and blogging here.

Now here's an off the wall connection about something I've been thinking about for a while and the intersection of creativity and church and nominating committee. We have used a nominating committee process for many years in order to place people in positions of responsibility in our churches. We elect elders and deacons and deaconesses and clerks and treasurers and communications directors and the list goes on, way on in fact. I think I could find pastors who argue that this process has worked well and others who suggest it is not working well. I am growing more and more concerned that it does not achieve what we need it to as well as it once did.

I'm convinced that we need to look at each individual in our church, member or not and ask ourselves some basic questions about where they can serve God and how the church can assist them in this service. Nominating Committee is not built for that. It is about filling positions that already exist in our church, no more, no less. Practically speaking, just about every nominating committee I've ever been a part of has served in this manner. On top of that, the process has often been affected by power, control, and conflict as groups try to exercise power to place their favored candidates in position. At other times, no matter how careful the members of the nominating committee were, they were suspected of some foul dealings because someone was not nominated and they wondered why or their friends took up their case and began questioning why they were not elected.

I look at all of it as a systemic problem. The system either needs tweaking, overhauling or a total revolution. The word revolution grates on me more often than not so I won't go there. But change is necessary. Systemic change does not come easily nor should it always come easily. But the pain of staying the same needs to reach a certain level before we will look more closely at the system and its results.

Several folks have posted the following talk from Sir Ken Robinson on their facebook page and there are a couple of things that he shares about education that crossover to what we do in nominating committee. Watch it and see if you get what I get out of it.