Annual Council again holds class: Working Policy 201

October 14, 2013 – Silver Spring, Maryland, United States…Edwin Manuel Garcia/ANN

How do you explain some of the most mundane yet significant aspects of denominational policy and make it interesting for hundreds of church administrators who have come from around the world for the 2013 General Conference Annual Council?

Adventist world church Executive Secretary G. T. Ng quizzes the “class” during Annual Council on October 14. Top church executives held a “Working Policy 201” lecture to reinforce principles of governance in the denomination. Image by Edwin Manuel Garcia

You transform the 650-seat auditorium into a pretend college lecture hall, give pop quizzes, hand out apples and books as prizes – and ask an organist to play Pomp and Circumstance at the end of the 90-minute class.

In a sequel to the popular inaugural course last year, church officials Monday afternoon taught GCWP201 – General Conference Working Policy 201: Foundational Concepts in Church Organization and Governance.

A central purpose of the session was to help church leaders understand that the meetings they help oversee need to be in harmony with governance documents.

After the course, Seventh-day Adventist world church President Ted N. C. Wilson took to the microphone to express the importance of the class: “What was presented today is surprisingly violated in many parts of the world,” he said. “I want you to take very special note of what has been presented. Make sure that we’re following in the right pathway of understanding what the Working Policy is all about.”

Much of the course, hosted by “chancellor” G. T. Ng, the animated executive secretary of the Adventist world church, and his “professors,” – Karnik Doukmetzian, the general counsel, and Lowell Cooper, a vice president – focused on a single passage contained in the 900-page Working Policy book, also known as the “family code of conduct.”

They were tasked with reviewing and explaining basic and advanced concepts, some of them as simple as the denomination’s organizational structure: Local churches report to conferences and missions, which report to unions, which in turn report to the General Conference.

Among the more complex: Understanding that the denomination has both corporate and ecclesiastical structure. For example, the corporate entity holds property and has fiduciary responsibility to the members, while the ecclesiastical entity is the non-profit arm that is held together by the Working Policy and Church Manual.

The hardcover, black-bound Working Policy book is designed to protect the organization from autocratic and erratic leadership, reactive decision-making, and widely differing patterns of action. The Church Manual, on the other hand, is the operational guide for local churches.

Doukmetzian shared how the church is structured from a legal standpoint. He explained how most of the denomination’s activities are accomplished through the church’s unincorporated entities, which includes unions and conferences. Yet, sometimes the denomination faces challenges – such as when an individual owns a church property, and that person dies, and surviving family members make legal claims to the land. “We’ve gotten into some difficulties,” Doukmetzian acknowledged.

Cooper went over the eight key elements of Working Policy Section B: Membership basis of organization; conferred status; representative and constituency-based; authority rooted in God; distributed to whole; committee system; shared administration, not presidential; unity of entities; and separate but not independent organizations.

He also stated the common mistakes when church institutions veer from their constitutions, bylaws and operating policies, such as when an executive committee finds that it did not address amendments on time.

“The point in all of this, brothers and sisters,” Cooper said, “is to make sure that we who bear the privileges and responsibilities of leadership in the church need somehow to demonstrate competency in this most essential function of organizational life, enabling membership to have its voice.”

He added: “The most important human resource in the church is trust, and those of us in leadership can act in ways that build trust.”

At the end of the class, Secretary Ng distributed evaluation forms and report cards. Every student present received an A+. The homework was to become more familiar with the church’s governance documents.