Josh Packard

Direct Democracy
For larger gatherings or for when decisions are likely to affect an entire congregation (e.g., moving locations), direct democracy with a simple majority rule is used as a way to make sure everyone is able to contribute and have a say. The most important thing about the direct democracy vote, however, is when it happens. Context specific decisions often involve a lot of dialogue and an effort must be made to ensure that everyone’s voice has been heard prior to the vote.

In the past three years, the people at Calvary have had to make several major decisions as it has gone from being a large church with its own building in a downtown location to a small house church, to finally dissolving as an official entity during the course of this research. For each one of these important decisions direct democracy was employed. A corporate gathering would be announced and the attendees would discuss the issues before ultimately voting. When I asked the pastor who would call the vote, he said that decisions would arise out of consensus and often there would be several meetings before a vote was taken, but that they were committed to this method. Cody, a congregant at Calvary for over 7 years pointed out how common voting was for major decisions.

And that was one of the things at Calvary was when the lease was up and we were broke, and that’s when we had two months left on the lease and we were broke and that’s when we became a house church. And you know it worked out. Somebody volunteered their house. And questions came up like should we even stay as a church. Should we even stay as an entity. We voted on it. Basically every decision we ever made we voted on. I can’t remember there ever being a decision without one. There would be opinions exchanged and discussion and then a vote…And then later, we had to leave that house and we had the whole conversation again, Do we stay as an entity? And we voted again, and decided to keep meeting together.

About a year after that move the congregation made the decision to stop meeting regularly and they voted to dissolve Calvary as a congregation. The decision to have the conversation and, ultimately the vote, about closing down came at the prompting of the pastor who had received some indication that people were only coming to Calvary to support him and his wife.

I met with the remaining core people individually and they were suggesting was the possibility that the remaining community loved me and my wife enough to support us and they didn’t have any other place to go. No other place with a strong community and lack of strong corporate mentality. And the more I thought about it I was like these are the same people that have been with us for a long time. This better not be about us. Because if this is about us, then I’m killing it. I’m killing it now. That’s my pastoral responsibility. That’s not church, that’s just a group of people who like our company. We were on our way to Olsteen fame (sarcasm). So one Sunday we [as a group] just said, “Okay, let’s take the next two weeks off and just pray about this then come back together and decide if we want to continue this.” Every time we’ve gone through one of these questioning seasons everyone has come back, one hundred percent, and said that we should stay. This time it was just the opposite. We voted and not one person had the heart to continue.

In this case, of course, the decision to have a vote about the future of the congregation was not prompted by some external force such as the funding problems or lack of meeting space that prompted the other discussions, and there was not a corporate discussion as had happened in the past. Instead the pastor called the vote out of “pastoral responsibility” and people were asked to pray. However, this process still yielded a vote in the end. The context of the decision as one derived from internal dissatisfaction rather than from external pressures caused a modification in the normal process for making major decisions, but in the end, the vote was still used as it had always been.

Additionally, although Jeff refers to his power to kill it, this power only exists if the church is indeed about him and his wife. This highlights one of the dangers of these kinds of organizations. One of the hallmarks of institutionalization is that the institutionalized position, process or idea exists apart from any one individual. The goal for a resistant organization, then, is to tie positions intimately to individuals. This means an individual can “kill” whatever his/her role is in an organization, something fundamentally impossible to do in an institutionalized organization. A pastor in a denominational church cannot dissolve the role of pastor because he/she is unhappy with the direction of the church. He/She might choose to leave, but there are typically processes and procedures in place to call and hire a new pastor. This becomes problematic when official positions such as “pastor” are intertwined with one individual.

Taken alone, neither of these decision making methods is revolutionary or even all that different. What makes these the decision process in these organizations unique is that these two strategies merely represent two choices in a very broad repertoire of possibilities any of which can and are employed depending on the situation at hand. For example, in each of the two congregations discussed above, I also witnessed several occasions of authoritarian control, where the leader of a particular group simply made a unilateral decision for the purposes of moving a discussion ahead. On more than one instance, this was met with immediate resistance from a group that wished to continue resolving an issue together, but other times, the group was content to allow the decision to be made in this way. The important point is that nobody knew beforehand how a particular issue would get resolved. It depended wholly upon the make-up of the particular gathering.