What is a Guiding Principle?

You may have seen in our newsletter that our Leadership Team is creating things called “Guiding Principles.” Under our new Simplified Accountable Structure the Leadership Team has three choices regarding every decision. 1) Make the decision and move on. 2) Make the decision and create a Guiding Principle to answer future decisions around this same topic. 3) Call for a Town Hall to receive input from the congregation before making their decision. We have had all three of these choices made in this first quarter of operating under this new structure.

Previously, in order to understand the policies that Faith operated under we would have to go back through minutes of the meetings of individual committees or rely on memory. One example of this is our policy that only one group may fundraise per month. This policy was created to keep fundraising from overwhelming the congregation with asks for money. This was a policy that was decided when I was the youth director here between 2006 and 2013. But it wasn't written down and when we changed Business Administrators that information was not exchanged. When I returned as Associate Pastor I mentioned it in a staff meeting and people were surprised to hear about this policy. Now that policy has been written down as a Guiding Principle and put in our Leadership Team manual in the Finance section of the book. In the future, it won’t matter who is on the Leadership Team or who is on the staff because these policies will be in the operating manuals of the church. It should be a much more efficient way of operating.

The third option is to call a Town Hall. These are actually pretty rare but we have had several over the last 10 years. When the Special Called General Conference in the UMC was called we had a Town Hall to explain to everyone what was happening. We also made presentations about where the staff were on the issue and divided the congregation into small groups for feedback. Then when the denomination was in the season of the disaffiliations, we had a Town Hall to explain what was happening and answer questions from the congregation. Last year we had two Town Halls to explain and talk about the new Simplified Accountable Structure that we are now operating under. We needed to make sure that everyone understood what was being proposed and to have their questions answered.

This new Town Hall on the 21st is actually a lot more fun than any of those previous ones. We will be dreaming about the possibilities and options for Faith to broaden it’s footprint outside of our building. This is a topic that has come up previously and God seems to be nudging us in this direction for several years. I remember in 2012 that we set a goal to create another campus in the next five years. That didn’t happen. We have lots of options and I understand why people think that Faith should be a multiplying church. It is because we have a beautiful DNA of people who love to serve. We have been growing continuously for many years and we are economically stable. We have called this Town Hall to hear your hopes, fears and dreams about what God is asking from Faith next. Please be in prayer about this every day. If we do something new, it will take all of us believing in what God has called us to even when it sometimes feels uncertain and even scary. I look forward to this time of possibility and can’t wait to see where God leads.

Love and assurance,