Harry Boessenkool

KW raises an interesting topic. Wrong headline - resources are not scarce but people willing to part with them are! When is the last time a church bulletin has had a report from a Classis meeting on it? Each church sends two people, do they ever report to the congregation? There are 52 Sunday bulletins put out in most churches. Classis meetings I believe are twice a year.  Could churches make room on the bulletin for "Classis News" at least once a month? Who would do this and who would edit?   Maybe pastors who are the communicators and often attend the meetings might take this on. Most churches will have someone talented in writing to do it as well.

At last count CRCNA congregations are growing in number (but churches are getting smaller in number). That implies that Classis' are getting more people to attend its meeting with fewer people to report back to!

Measuring congregational "passions" may not be as simple as KW makes it out to be. If you measure passion based on donations, many congregations, hands down, have WR (CRWRC).  Many others have climate change high on their agenda (based on the time spent on it).

Some countries in Europe are looking at doing away with provincial legislatures (our Classis?). In this country (Canada) many communities are being "eaten up" by big cities.  That implies centralization for efficiency and cost savings. Does this have application in the CRCNA? What role does technology play for the CRCNA? Participation at Synod via online was very encouraging and lots of room for greater involvement.

The CRCNA has three agencies that have the word "International" or "World" in it. How much does the CRCNA pay for Agency Directors and other employees resident in North America to fly to the farthest corners of the world? How many use Skype or Teleconferencing instead? (This of course gets Ministry shares brought into the discussion.)

Last year the folks in CRCNA HO tried to inform congregations on Ministry Shares, via what I call the "Frisbee" program. Great idea but not great execution.

KW has good questions. Who is going to volunteer to base a congregational meeting around his questions and then share the results?

A late comer to these comments. Several years ago, when this issue started to become relevant, I was concerned, no matter which way the decision went, how Pastors and Employees of the church would be treated. I made those views known to the leadership of the CRCNA as it was at the time.

Now that a decision has been made, a Pastor, an employee or Council members, are going to be faced with a decision eventually. In the case of paid employees there must be no situation where, as a commented by Pastor Vrieland, that he feels "pushed" out. The council cannot just fire him, which is a course of action that is often contemplated. The solution is to agree to a severance arrangement that values the Pastor's (or employee's) length of service. In the case of 40 years’ service the severance should be something above two years of full compensation including housing allowance. (In the Canadian context.)

I realize this sounds cold and harsh, but when an employee with "conscientious" objection can no longer live with a decision his/her employer (a church in this case) has made, the separation must be as amicable as possible and not become a court issue or headlines in the local paper.

When I looked at this two years ago, I thought that up to 25% of Pastors (on either side of the issue) might not want to live with the Synodical decision(s) and leave the church. The readers can do their calculation of the potential cost.

This does not in any way do away with the points raised in the article under discussion. The reality is that the consequences of decisions need full discussion.