Our pastoral team can offer you insightful help in all areas of church governance, its development, or refining your policies for high freedom and high accountability in your church’s pastoral, staff, or volunteer leadership roles.

Services Offered -

• Taking a Governance Inventory—the Discernment phase of a weekend training event that will help us get a grasp on what reality is in your church. 

• Facilitating Your Church’s Polity— a weekend training event and working meeting designed to help your church:

  • Discover what you believe about polity.

  • Reconsider what you believe about polity.

  • Accomplish the above with homework and collaborative meetings.

• Becoming An Effective Board Process—our modified “policy-based governance” explanation and implementation connected to your church’s conclusions from the first two events. 

• Being an Effective Board Praxis—continued coaching by facilitating 1-2 board meetings for you and being available for ongoing consulting.

We can help you -

1. Determine Your Existing Reality

We will give you a self-study inventory that your governing board or leadership team will use to help us (or the governing authority) determine what you actually believe about governance. That will include answers to questions like:

• What is an elder, a deacon, or a deaconess?

• What’s the role of the pastor? Associate pastors?

• How are people nominated?

• How are board members chosen and trained?

• What’s the criteria for being on the board?

• Can women be on the governing authority?

• Will there be a difference between elders and the governing authority?

  Answers to each of these questions, and many others like them, will provide you with the inventory needed to understand the current reality at your church. 

2. Discern the Biblical Precedent

Given the reality that each church has a unique understanding of biblical church governance based on their own thinking or denominational structure, the information gathered above will determine what needs to be studied, reset, or reconsidered at your church. This is a very dynamic process. For example, most Presbyterians have a predetermined understanding of church polity that is very clear, very structured, and very much a part of board life. To mess with it could cease to make the church a Presbyterian church. For that reason:

• Denominational churches are asked to reconsider and reacquaint themselves with the governance and polity of its denominational background.

• Non-denominational or independent churches are given the opportunity to do their own study of Scripture to determine polity. 

• Reading material related to church polity and governance are presented. 

• You will use Scripture to discern the definitions of elder, deacon, deaconess, pastor, bishop, and the like. This is a guided Bible study with open-ended questions that lead to answers for your church. VitalChurch will facilitate those conversations for you. 

3. Clarify Your Board’s Function and Process

This is a training event for policy governance which will show you how meetings can run and how elders connect to each other, to the lead pastor, to the staff, and to the congregation. 

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