2025 Week 26
Hello, Springers!
Please plan to attend our informational congregational meeting this Sunday following the worship service.
The service is being shortened slightly to facilitate as high attendance as possible.
We will ask everyone to register their attendance by checking in.
At the meeting, we will practice determining whether we have a quorum. A quorum is the minimum number of communicant members that must be present at a congregational meeting in order to transact business (i.e., take a vote).
It’s good to practice something like this now, when we are just having an informational meeting with no business to transact. It can help us ensure that our rolls are correct. Right now we have 196 communicant members at Valley Springs.
A quorum is one-sixth (1/6) of the resident communing members if a church has more than 100 such members. For Valley Springs today, a quorum is 33 communicant members. So when everyone checks in we will be looking for that number.
The quickest way to establish a quorum will be to do it electronically. Having the Church Center app set up on your mobile device will be the quickest way to register your attendance. We will also have a QR code on the screen that you can use. If you are not set up or not that tech savvy, don’t worry. We will have folks there helping everyone check in.
Again, establishing a quorum by registering everyone’s attendance is just practice. No votes are being taken at this meeting.
One of my mentors used to talk about “organizational love of neighbor.” Organizations have particular (and sometimes persnickety) rules. When I was a younger Christian, I thought the rules of most churches seemed very pedantic and tedious. They didn’t seem like the kind of thing that Jesus would care about.
On the one hand, it’s true. Jesus called out the idolatry of pedantic rule-following. He accused the Pharisees of being blind guides who would strain out a gnat but then swallow a camel (Matthew 23:23-24).
The Pharisees cared about following the rule of tithing right down to their spice cabinet. If they had ten dill seeds in a jar, one of them would be tithed. But they neglected showing mercy and justice to their fellow countrymen who were most in need of their love.
So, what is having a quorum? Or, for that matter, what about other rules we use in meetings? Are we straining out gnats? I hope not. A quorum ensures that you have enough of your organization represented to make decisions that will be fair to the whole.
Organizational love of neighbor is having rules that govern a meeting so that no one’s voice is marginalized. Yes, the majority rules in decision-making, but the minority position always has a voice.
If you find yourself wondering why we follow a particular procedure or process in our church, it is almost always rooted in the practice of organizational love of neighbor, which protects the rights of all involved.
in Christ,
Pastor Tag