First Central Church – Who’s in Charge? Part 2

When we restructured our church governance in 2012, we aimed at streamlining the organization and making it more flexible in order to keep our focus on mission and ministry. This required a better distribution of authority.

To do this, we created ByLaws that call for five Ministries whose primary job is to think big and to discern God’s call for the on-going mission of First Central, guided by our covenant, mission, and vision statements. It’s their job to figure out strategies for implementing that call, each with a focus on one of the following: (1) Worship, (2) Education, (3) Congregational Care, (4) Congregational Outreach, or (5) Ministry Support (maintaining the infrastructure that permits the other Ministries to carry out their work).

We recognized that it’s easy for any group to get bogged down in day-to-day details and lose sight of the larger strategic issues of discipleship. And so our ByLaws call for Teams of individuals who have a specific interest in one or more aspects of our program. Teams do the actual daily work, including making routine decisions on how to carry it out. One of the tasks of each Ministry is to coordinate, initiate, and support Teams to accomplish its program. But Teams are not merely minions of their Ministries. Next week, I’ll talk more about how Teams and their Ministries work together.

—Deb Kirwan