Nov. 26 - Rethinking Church Organization-4

There is one body and one Spirit--just as you were called to one hope when you were called--one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all. Eph. 4:4-6, NIV.

How do we maintain both unity and efficiency in a world church? Not an easy task. But an important one. Part of the difficulty the rapidly spreading denomination faced in the 1890s was one of communication. In the name of unity, operating policy decreed that church headquarters in Battle Creek had to approve all decisions above the conference level.

A. G. Daniells spoke to the problem of time lag in communication and decision-making from the perspective of 1913. The difficulty was that at its best the mail took four weeks each direction and often arrived to find the members of the General Conference Executive Committee away from their offices. "I remember," Daniells noted, "that we have waited three or four months before we could get any reply to our questions." And even then it might be a five- or six-line inquiry saying that the General Conference officers really didn't understand the issue and needed further information. And so it went until "after six or nine months, perhaps, we would get the matter settled." By that point in his argument, Daniells' audience had no trouble understanding his meaning when he claimed that "we found continually that our work was hindered."

Ellen White also had problems with the 1861/1863 structure and its centralized decision making. Having spent years in the church's mission fields, she recognized that "the men at Battle Creek are no more inspired to give unerring advice than are the men in other places, to whom the Lord has entrusted the work in their locality" (Lt 88, 1896).

But how to decentralize and at the same time maintain unity was the challenge. The answer was the union conference, "invented" in Australia during the mid-1890s. The Australasian Union Conference consisted of the various local conferences and missions in its territory and served as an intermediary unit between the General Conference and the local conferences. With executive power to act within its territory, it regionalized decision-making while at the same time maintaining unity.

By the time the Australian church leaders had devised the union conference, A. T. Robinson had arrived from South Africa with the departmental system. Australia also adopted the latter.

Most of us don't think much about the mechanics of running a world church. Perhaps we
should. Even in that rather "mundane" area we see God's guiding hand.