CHRISTIANS DON'T TRUST EACH OTHER

Christians don't trust each other? Believe it or not, it's true; we don't. Not only that, but we even put it in our church constitutions and/or by-laws that we don't trust each other. Anyone who's interested in seeing it can do so by reading almost any church's by-laws or by punishing themselves and attending a church business meeting.

Let's go back to 1863, to a business meeting held in a church, one which gave birth to a guidebook that's plagued multiplied thousands of churches ever since. It all started when Henry Martyn Robert was an engineering officer in the Regular Army. Without warning, he was asked to preside over a meeting and realized that he didn't know how. He tried anyway and his embarrassment was supreme. This event left him determined never to attend another meeting until he had read and mastered parliamentary procedure. He did and published in February1876 what we know as "Robert's Rules of Order." (RRO)

Few have read RRO, but when the meeting starts, whoever oversees the meeting using RRO controls who makes motions from the floor and how a motion is tabled. He decides who has the authority to say when a motion is out of order. He knows when you can cut off a discussion and when you may vote. Whoever controls the RRO controls the meeting. The person who controls RRO is the person who knows exactly what they are and how they work to control a meeting.

Robert was so discouraged after that meeting, he said, "One can scarcely have had much experience in deliberative meetings of Christians without realizing that the best of men, having wills of their own, are liable to attempt to carry out their own views without paying sufficient respect to the rights of their opponents." If Christians loved each other and trusted each other, they wouldn't need Robert to darken and dampen any meeting.

Have you ever read RRO? Most people haven’t, which is a problem because the person who knows the rules may not have the best interest of the church in mind, or worse yet, he may be a carnal believer or an immature one.

Here's the heart-wrenching testimony of one man: "A friend called me a couple of years ago after a church business meeting.  In tears, he told of the ungodly things said among the people of God. He told me about the personal attacks that took place.  He told me of the name-calling, the cursing, and the selfishness that pervaded the entire meeting.

"He asked me what I thought went wrong.

"I asked him to describe how the meeting started.  Taken aback, he said, "The beginning of the meeting was fine. Later it turned ugly. I asked him to describe it in detail.  He finally shared the piece of information that I was looking for.

"After praying, a moderator took the platform, grasped the pulpit with his hands and then told the people of God that they would conduct their meeting according to Robert’s Rules of Order.

"My response to the caller was that the church business meeting didn’t have a chance for success when they relied more on Robert’s Rules of Order than they did on the Word of God.  Many would argue that you need structure and systems in meetings like these, and I would agree, but the Bible has plenty of instructions on that matter.

"God says to regard one another as more important than yourself (Phil. 2:3-4).  God says not to let any unwholesome word come out of your mouth (Eph. 4:29).  God says to respect and to honor spiritual leaders (Heb. 13:17).  God says there is an order about a confrontation in the church (Matt. 18:15).  And so much more!

"What needs to happen in many American churches is that they get rid of Robert and put Jesus back in his rightful place!  Robert didn’t die on the cross for your sins, so I would let the one who did say how the people of God should conduct themselves.

"I don’t know how many church business meetings you have attended.  You may be at a church where that doesn’t happen.  You may be at a church where the business meeting is the thing that has the most attendance.  Whatever your situation may be, don’t allow our culture or the words of man to dictate how you conduct yourselves.

"Let God’s Word be the standard by which we live. Which book guides your church’s business meetings?" The Bible? Captain Robert's 699-pages of rules? The church always shoots itself in the foot when it borrows from the world. It's like trashing fine china and replacing it with paper plates.

What Robert did was to treat the symptoms and not the cause of the disastrous meeting. The rules were an aspirin; the symptoms would return meeting after meeting with the cause never addressed.

In II Peter, we read that believers have all they need to live a godly life. If that's true, why do churches incorporate RRO?

If Christians love each other and in loving each other, they, therefore, trust each other, then RRO are out of order.