One of the more interesting discoveries I made when researching
Baptist polity a few years ago was the lost practice of “recognition
councils.” Most Baptists are familiar with ordination councils,
in which a local church calls together a group of elders and messengers
from like-minded area churches to examine an aspiring minister’s
fitness for ministry, and thereafter to advise the church either to
pursue ordination, to delay ordination until the examinee is more fit
for the ministry, or to deny ordination entirely. Recognition councils
occur when a new assembly calls together a group of elders from
like-minded area churches to examine its governing documents, and
thereafter to advise the assembly to pursue chartering, to delay
chartering until its documents are in order, or even to abandon entirely
its plan for a new church.
Typically, recognition councils examined a prospective church’s
constitution and by-laws, doctrinal statement, and covenant. But there
are a great many other documents that may also be subjected to
examination: mission statements, philosophies of ministry, employee job
descriptions, teacher policies, nursery policies, facilities-usage
policies, etc. What I’d like to suggest in this post is that the lost
practice of recognition councils be formally revived, or, at the very
least, that churches informally pool their collective minds to assist
one another in creating ecclesiastical documents that are orthodox,
orthoprax, and in our litigious society, as litigation-proof as is
possible. Continue at Mark Snoeberger
