Sharing Power and Blessing

[Dr. Shane]

Your feelings are not important.  Your opinion is not important.  Those are the messages sent by abusive people to their victims.  Those are also the messages sent by the old guard in the church to the young people.  How many church elders sit in that position for years while younger members are asked to teach Sabbath school or serve as deacons?  Too many so-called servants of God take ownership of church positions that place them on the Church Board.  Positions like Head Deacon, Treasurer and Elder are too often held by the same members until they are so old they can't do the job any more.  Many churches do not have even one elder under the age of 30.  I was fortunate to be involved in a Hispanic church that invested in their youth.  I accepted the position of an elder when I was 29 years old but that is unheardof in some churches.

Contrast this with recovery support groups that propose a "spirit of rotation".  That means that a person can only serve in a specific role for a specific period of time.  The concept is that a person receives a blessing from the role and to hang on to it for too long would be a selfish thing to do. I did not hang onto the role of elder.  I rotated out of it to serve as Pathfinder Director and Men's Ministry Director after that.  That was because before I was ever asked to be a church elder, I had been involved in a recovery group and learned principles of selflessness there.

The other side of the coin is that in many churches, the nominating committee has a hard time finding volunteers.  A solution to that is a mentorship program.  An outgoing elder mentors an incoming elder - or treasurer, head deacon, lay ministry's director, etc.  Mentoring relationships also bring about a spiritual blessing.