by Josh Bryant

We are excited to announce $1W (short for One Dollar Webinar).  This is going to be a short, 15-minute webinar on a wide variety of topics that church leaders need to know about.  Our first webinar will be on vetting volunteers.  We'll have quick points that are easy for you to copy down, and you'll have the ability to ask questions.  You are guaranteed to get an answer from an attorney that specializes in the law as applied to churches if you are a registered attendee.  We'll have a follow up Facebook Live at the Church Esquire Club immediately following the webinar.

Don't miss this awesome opportunity.  Sign up below!

by Josh Bryant

Church General Counsel is super excited to announce the launch of Law and Church, a podcast for church leaders from church lawyers.  We will interview some of the top church leaders from across the country on issues churches are facing that have legal implications.  We'll work through cases of churches that are in court right now so that we can learn from them together and work to avoid similar situations.  

The podcast will be hosted by Josh Bryant and Bryan Fittin.  Our first guest is Dr. Thom Rainer, President of Church Answers and former CEO of LifeWay Christian Resources.  We will also interview Jim Sheppard, Principle and CEO of Generis. Generis is a stewardship consulting firm that helps churches across the country.  We also have interviews scheduled with student pastors, security experts, child abuse experts, senior pastors, and more.  

We look forward to helping pastors, ministers, and church leaders with this podcast.  Learn more at www.LawAndChurch.com.

If your church bylaws are like most church's bylaws, they probably aren't a very exciting read.  Managing Attorney Josh Bryant has had pastors confess falling asleep reading them.  Why is it that the document that establishes how our church operates at the most basic level is so boring?  Your church bylaws create a system which allows your church to become one of three types of churches.

Poky Churches
These are the churches whose bylaws are so restrictive that the church can't move.  Nothing gets accomplished.  I once heard church planting guru Mark Clifton say that in dying churches it is easy to tell from the bylaws who in the church can say no, but it is almost impossible to tell who can say yes.  Decisions about the most mundane things get bogged down in a committee staffed by members who are dead or don't even know they are on the committee.  If the decision is lucky enough to make it out of that committee, two others with the same problems have to sign off on it too.  Josh Bryant helps churches like this modify bylaws to get unstuck.

Pandemonium Churches
These are the churches where more than likely no one cares what's in the bylaws.  Often times, their bulletin contains a menu of veritable gourmet Christianity.  Any possible Bible study or program you could want, they have it.  Everyone in the church can say yes to anything they'd like to say yes to.  When a member asks to do something, the church leader says yes without hesitation.  These churches can be likened to a spiderweb.  Do everything you can to catch as many people as you can, and then have them running in circles around the web or stuck by the program that caught them in the first place.  Josh Bryant helps churches like this utilize bylaws to reign things in a bit.

Polestar
These are the churches that have a vision and a mission.  They know where God is leading them and aren't afraid to say no to any distractions that may steer them off course.  These churches can be likened to a super highway.  Their leaders keep the vision before them like a polestar to guide the way.  Every program moves the church closer to its vision.  Members are engaged in the mission through those programs to get the church where it needs to be.  The bylaws may not be central to the polestar (and I'd guess they aren't), but they can help.  This is the type of church Josh Bryant keeps at the forefront of his mind when helping a church update their bylaws.

How?  I'm glad you asked.

1. Institutionalize Your Vision
Josh Bryant recommends institutionalizing your vision in your bylaws.  Make your vision a part of the DNA of your church.  The Founding Fathers did it in the U.S. "bylaws":

(Yes - every capital letter and the word defence is found exactly that way in the Constitution.)

The founding fathers had a vision of an increasingly perfect union of states and Americans.  They had a vision of a nation in which justice, peace, security, welfare, and liberty were commonplace, not just for themselves but for their posterity – for us – as well.  That vision has inspired generations of Americans in part because the founding fathers institutionalized it in the nation’s bylaws – its Constitution.  They didn’t have vision casting meetings in homes across the states.  They didn’t have social media campaigns.  They put it in writing and made it the supreme law of the land.  Millions have fought for that vision; hundreds of thousands have died for it.  Why and how so many have lost that vision is a topic for another day.

​Why and how so many have lost the vision of the Kingdom of God and the church – the Bride of Christ – is a topic for right now.  Our Lord, the head of the church, revealed the vision throughout Scripture.  “After this I looked, and there was a vast multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language, which no one could number, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.  They were robed in white with palm branches in their hands.  And they cried out in a loud voice: Salvation belongs to our God, who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” Rev. 7:9-12 (HCSB).  He revealed the commission to “Go and make disciples of all the nations.” Matt. 28:19.  The means by which God has led your church to partake in the mission towards His revelation of eternity should be institutionalized in your bylaws.

2. Remember the Purpose and Power of Bylaws
Your church's bylaws empower your church to act in our world.  They can restrict the church too much, like a Poky Church.  They can also set the church on course and keep it there.  The trick is to provide enough restriction to keep the church moving toward its vision, but not so much that it can't hardly move at all.  We don't need fences around churches, but we might need guardrails to keep them from veering off course.  Your bylaws can serve as one of those guardrails.

3. Remember the Purpose and Power of Policy
Church policy is born of the bylaws.  Those bylaws give people in the church the ability to set policy.  As such, policy can act as the other guardrail to keep your church on track.  You can use policies to determine the means by which new programs or events are vetted to determine whether they will distract the church or move it closer to its vision.  You can use policy to set forth how back office functions should be performed in furtherance of the vision.  What you'll find is that with policy inevitably comes process.  Policy acts as a guardrail, but process drives the church forward.

More from Managing Attorney Josh Bryant on this topic very soon!

As another house of worship recovers from a shooting during services, its time again to check our own security processes to make sure we are ready for what the world may throw at us.  On Saturday, a gunman entered a synagogue near San Diego, shot, and killed people there to worship. The assailant praised recent shootings and bombings at houses of worship across the globe. Church leaders can no longer afford to think it won't happen to their church.  We must have security teams in place.  The good news is that many already have them in place and don't know it, or could put them in place to bootstrap church growth and guest retention.  Josh Bryant has three tips on preparing your church's defenses.

Guest Services Teams Are Your First Line of Defense.  Train them well.  They should be the friendliest people in your church.  They should be in the parking lot welcoming those who arrive and helping them inside.  They should be holding the doors as guests and members enter the building.  They should be stationed at key choke points in your building to help people get where they need to go.  And all of them should be on the lookout for anything that looks suspicious.

​Your Second Line of Defense May Cost Some Money.  You need actively monitored security cameras.  If you have the financial means to do so, you can outsource this to a private security company.  If you don't, you need to install security cameras that cover every square inch of public space in your church.  You need a volunteer in a secure room actively monitoring those cameras.  That volunteer needs to have the ability to contact key staff quickly and discreetly, as well as the ability to contact law enforcement.  Passively monitored systems (those that just record) are of little help in stopping a mass shooting at your church.

Don't Start With Your Last Line of Defense.  Often times, church leaders ask Managing Attorney Josh Bryant who gets to carry a gun.  If they haven't addressed the first two lines of defense, that's not the correct question.  However, there comes a time when it is a good question to ask, and we need to address it.  There is no one answer that fits every church.  If you have the ability to hire an off duty law enforcement officer or private security company, that's the best way to go.  If not, you need a team of volunteers that you select (not that come to you begging to carry a weapon).  They need to be well trained by someone with experience training law enforcement or military personnel in the handling of small arms in stressful situations.  If this post listed everything you need to consider, it would be quite long.  Instead, join one of Josh Bryant's security webinars to learn more.

​Don't Forget to Pray.  "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places." Ephesians 6:12

For the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, we recommend you take a look at the following books, especially The Gospel & Racial Discrimination by Russell Moore.

Managing Attorney Josh Bryant has been a discipleship pastor and lawyer, responsible for the church's legal safety and along with an amazing team of church leaders for assimilating guests into the church.  Church General Counsel can help your church not only systematize its church growth processes, but merge those with church security processes into a seamless cross-functional team.  And yes, we can help you determine who gets to carry a gun!

Churches have a heightened sensitivity to background checks right now in light of a report by the Houston Chronicle that found 700 cases of sexual misconduct over the last 20 years in Southern Baptist Churches.  But do you know what to do when you get a positive result?  The answer may seem to be as simple as telling the person they cannot volunteer or serve on staff, but because of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, it isn't that simple.  Here are five things you need to know about a positive background check.

1. Make sure you had their permission before you do anything.  Several laws require written consent of the person before you run a background check on them.  Failure to have that permission could get your church into trouble with the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the Department of Justice, and any number of state institutions, not to mention a law suit for invasion of privacy.  If you didn't have their permission, go get it and run the background check again.

2.  Don't say no...yet.  Before you take an "adverse action" against a volunteer or staff member by not allowing them to serve, you must give them a notice that includes a copy of the background check report you received.  You must also include a document put out by the CFPB called "A Summary of Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act" and give them at least five days to explain or contest the content of the report.  To be safe, give them ten.

3.  Now you can say no.  If they don't contest the information or explain it to your church's satisfaction, now you can tell them no.  But you have to do it in a certain way too.  You have to tell them that they were rejected because of the information in the report, give them the name, address and phone number of the company that ran the report, inform them that the company who ran the report did not make the decision to deny them the opportunity to serve, and inform them of their right to dispute the accuracy or completeness of the report and get a free copy of the report from the company that ran it within 60 days.  But...

4.  Make sure you say no uniformly.  Especially in the context of employment, failure to uniformly say no is discriminatory and can get your church in trouble.  For example, if you tell one applicant no because they had a DWI on their record and another yes even though they also had a DWI on their record, you'd better have a very good reason for treating the two differently or you could be in trouble with the EEOC.  Volunteers really don't have much of a recourse, but it does look bad.  So write down what disqualifies a person from what roles in the church so that you plan in advance how to handle certain findings on a background check.  And...

5.  Make sure you maintain confidentiality.  You need to lock the report up for a year and then either shred or burn it.  If you store it digitally (which I don't recommend), you need to make sure you've got adequate data security in place and that you have the proper IT infrastructure to completely erase the data from your systems after a year.  Moving it to the recycle bin or trash can on your computer is insufficient; the FCRA mandates that electronic copies cannot be reconstructed.  That usually requires special software or hardware to make happen.

Dark cloud.  Sad day.  Euphemisms like this abound regarding a report by the Houston Chronicle that found over 700 cases of abuse in Southern Baptist Churches over the last 20 years.  Prior posts on the Church Law Blawg have discussed how we can prevent claims like this.  We can implement stringent policies that govern who can work with children and under what circumstances.  We can limit counseling sessions with members of the opposite sex by bringing in a trained professional or including more than one counselor in the session.  We can install internet filters that prohibit and prevent access to pornographic or dating sites.  These are designed to increase your church's security, but as the adage goes, "there is no such thing as absolute security."  We live in a fallen world, and despite our best efforts to prevent sexual abuse and misconduct in the church, it will most likely happen again.  The question then is not just how do we prevent it, but also how do we respond to it?  Here are a few things you can do in your church:

1. Encourage Reporting.  When the dust has settled from a report of sexual abuse in the church, there can be no ambiguity about whether a victim was encouraged to or discouraged from reporting.  In fact, there are a great many pastors who this week will feel compelled to address their congregations about the Houston Chronicle story.  What a great time to stand in front of your congregation and encourage people to report it if they've ever been sexually abused in the church.  

2.  Institute an Open Door Policy.  Allegations of sexual abuse on staff should not be delegated to the worship pastor.  Unless the senior pastor is the alleged offender, the senior pastor's door needs to be wide open to hear allegations of sexual misconduct.  This is worth interrupting your study time to hear about.  It is a big deal that threatens the flock much more than losing a couple of hours of parsing out Greek words and diagraming passages.

We can't expect to accomplish great things for God without a bit of opposition.  There will undoubtedly be obstacles.  But, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right?  Marcus Aurelius said it this way hundreds of years ago:

There may be a giant ogre of an obstacle standing in your way, but that ogre cannot block your intention or happiness because you have it within your control to adapt.  Change your perception.  Use the ogre to help you advance your purposes.  Let the obstacle be your way, and remember: "affliction produces endurance, endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope." Romans 5:4

God has moved His church in recent years to really focus on developing church leaders who love Him immensely and know how to influence others to move the church towards executing its mission of reaching the lost.  He's taking it a step further to develop lay leaders in the church who are leaders in their homes, communities, governments, and businesses and can influence others in those contexts for Christ.  Now as a matter of necessity, the Church needs leaders who can simplify the complex interaction between the spiritual we learned in seminary and the law governing organizations that most of us did not.  Here are three principles church leaders should know in our legal environment.

If you cringed reading those three words, you're not alone. I cringed writing them.  But by definition, leadership (the action of leading a group of people or an organization) requires governance (the manner of conducting the actions, affairs, and policies of an organization or group of people).  Do you see the difference, but synergy between the two?  

Leadership is what we do.  We rally the saints for worship, fellowship, discipleship, ministry, and evangelism.  We build consensus among the saints about the priorities and activities of the church.  Leaders motivate.  Leaders inspire.  Leaders build relationships with people who so are inspired and motivated by the leader's vision that not only will they follow the leader, but they'll lead others to follow too.  Then what?  

Our organizations - our groups of called out people (ekklesia) - must act.  They must carry on day-to-day affairs with the overarching goal to obey the command of Christ to spread His gospel from the pulpit to the farthest reaches of our planet.  Leadership is what we do, governance is how we do it.  

​God established the instruments of church leadership and governance in Scripture - pastors (poimen), elders (presbuteros), and overseers (episkopos).  Hermeneutically, how do we apply this as laid out in the historical context of Paul's writings to the Ephesians, Timothy and Titus to our current context?  How do we submit to the authority of Scripture and the authority of the rule of law?  The answer is deceptively simple.

The church is to be in the world but not of it, so we still must operate within its various constructs.  The American legal construct is becoming more complex by the day.  Churches are finding themselves more taxed than ever.  The rules around how you provide employee parking could subject your church or its staff to a tax.  The rules about revenue streams other than charitable donations are complex and being enforced more stringently all the time (even by sympathetic administrations).  Courts are side stepping First Amendment claims that the government has no business in a church's selection of its clergy relying on business law principles to force the church's hand in some employment cases.  If good leaders govern and good governance requires law, good leaders know law.

​Of course, the word law has multiple meanings.  There are tax laws, employment laws, safety laws, property laws, zoning laws, laws governing the duties we owe to one another (torts), contract laws, criminal laws - all of which affect the church in some way.  But there are also laws of church growth, laws of evangelism, laws of discipleship, laws of worship, laws of fellowship, laws of service, laws of ministry - timeless principles in Scripture that give the church its mission and function in the Kingdom.  There are laws of men and laws of God.  As long as the two do not conflict they must guide what we do. The question is, how are we going to do that? Again, the answer is deceptively simple.

Write it down.  Sounds simple, right?  As with just about everything in life, it is easier said than done.  Nevertheless, we must do hard things for the cause of Christ if those things will make our churches more secure, effective, and efficient.  Writing down how your church is going to carry out an action does all three.  

Let's take hiring a youth pastor as an example.  You've heeded the advice of this blog and sat down in your office to write down how you are going to do that.  The first thing on your list - write a job advertisement.  Next, publish the advertisement.  Third, receive resumes.  Fourth, review resumes.  Fifth, throw away 95% of them.  And so forth and so on.  Done. Right?

Not quite.  You've engaged in leadership - you've written down what the church is going to do.  But you've not engaged in governance - how you're going to do it.  Have you decided how much to pay the new youth minister?  Have you considered the Equal Pay Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and other laws of men that affect that decision?  Have you considered the biblical description of who fills the pastoral office and how the office must be filled?  How will your church meet all of these requirements?

The laws of men and laws of God weigh on how you hire; they speak to how you govern.  What you write down are policies and procedures.  They should provide two guardrails on either side of your church's path that provide security.  One guardrail stops your church from doing anything illegal under the laws of men, the other stops your church from doing anything unbiblical under the laws of God.  The guardrails are the governance.  The path in between and the ultimate destination?  That's leadership.

Writing it down also makes your church more effective.  You can look back at how your church hired a youth minister and take note of the stick points - those areas in the process that created difficulty and can be improved upon so that when it's time to hire a music minister you have a better job description, a better candidate pool, and ultimately a person in the job that fits your church's culture.  

Writing it down makes your church more efficient.  Most of the time, one person is not solely responsible for the hiring process.  Others in the church may participate in the interview process.  Others still need to know how to collect documents that comply with the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, the Internal Revenue Code, and other state and federal laws.  When you write down how to hire and teach it to everyone involved, that education combined with experience creates efficiency.

I believe every church can be more secure, effective, and efficient by leveraging the laws of men to obey the laws of God.  I hope this has helped you lead your church in some small way for His fame and glory.