FAQ's about Transition - Leadership and Ordination

This is the second post in a series of posts answering common questions about our transition from being a "church-within-a-church" at First Pres to becoming our own full fledged church plant here in Spokane. 
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What would church governance look like, will the Leadership Team make decisions or just be an advisory group?

• When we started the Leadership Team it was for the explicit purpose of functioning as an elder group one day. We will utilize a Presbyterian model of church government which means that the Leadership team will be composed of non-staff and staff working together to make decisions cooperatively. The Leadership Team, as elders, will not simply be advisory, but will be the ones that will prayerfully lead our church. As we setup our original incorporation documents we have written in that the Leadership Team will be composed primarily of non-staff because we don't want it to simply be run by one person. 

​What about ordination, it seems like an issue if our staff isn’t ordained yet...

• Within historic large denominations across the United States the requirements for ordination are not only strict, but very clear as to what is necessary. These generally involve an MDiv degree, a lot of internships and work in hospitals over the course of several years. Over the last 100 years on every continent we are seeing a surge of churches and denominations that no longer require an Mdiv for ordination because they have seen that it is often an ineffective barometer for determining somebody’s call to ministry, how well they would do, how their heart is toward Christ and the leading of the Spirit or if they are even orthodox in their faith. Our staff at Communitas is committed to education: Asher already has two Master’s degrees (one of them in Theology and one in Urban Planning) and Emily is working on her MA in Theology. Asher is already ordainable in ECO and can be licensed in the Covenant Church if we were to go either of those directions.
  

​Will there be a vote of the congregation about whether or not launching a new church is a step we want to take or not? Have we prayerfully asked whether stopping meeting together is an option?

• This is a great question that connects with how our church is governed. There are several models of ways that different Christians run churches. Some of them have the congregation vote on nearly everything. This is direct democracy ala ancient Greece and in the church is called “Congregationalism”. On the far other end are churches that either have a pastor or a bishop that makes many or all of the decisions. That can be something like the Catholic or Anglican models. We exist in the middle in a Presbyterian model in which we have people from within our congregation that we call as leaders. This will be able to be formalized once we launch as an independent church. This is what we have been living into though for the last year as the Leadership Team has taken on a greater role of authority and autonomy. At the Communitas Leadership Team meeting on November 8 we took a great deal of time to pray as well as to talk about the future of Communitas and the Leadership Team was in unanimous support of moving forward as a church plant at this time. This is something that we have been considering and talking about in various forms for five years, but had been having specific conversations about the timing of this over the last year in particular. Our hope is that everybody that has been a part of Communitas to this point will continue to be. We did consider the option of dissolving, but everybody on the Leadership Team felt as though moving forward together was not only best for Communitas, but for the larger church in the city of Spokane. There will be other things that the congregation will formally vote on though such as a denominational affiliation and the individuals that make up the leadership team.