Leadership in Grace Fellowship

In the material that follows, I need to emphasize that I was always very much an outsider at Grace Fellowship. In my 30+ years at GFC, I was never an elder and never served on a committee, so all of my observations are very much the views of an "ordinary church member." This is, in itself, an interesting commentary on GFC leadership. In most churches, a constant question is is how to find people who are willing to fill leadership positions. Whether it's a Presbyterian Session or an Episcopalian Vestry, the membership rotates, and the result is that a large proportion of the congregation knows how leadership works. (And of course, the challenge faced by the pastor and other leaders is to keep those leadership spots filled.) There's less of an "us versus them" feeling about leadership when most of the eligible people sooner or later end up on the leadership council.

Grace Fellowship was different. The elders, always a very small group, served for life and were chosen by the other elders; the habit for a very long time was to recruit elders and other leaders from outside the congregation—the few who were selected from within were chosen almost the instant they walked in the door. One result of this was that the elders had very little prior experience being "ordinary church members." This isolation had the effect of turning the elders into an elite class of clergy who were ruling over a laity with whom they had little in common. Lay people did not expect to ever become elders, even though several good candidates were available. I remember one person suggesting that the best path to eldership was to quit the church, move to Gambier, and get a job at Kenyon College.

This lays down the basics of GFC leadership from the day I arrived in the 1970s until I left nearly 40 years later: It was a self-contained, self-perpetuating group whose membership was not normally drawn from the congregation (until much later) and whose doings were not normally known to the congregation as a whole. (I made several people angry by speaking of a clergy/laity division, but that distinction is much stronger at GFC than it ever is in a Presbyterian church or even an Episcopal church—and I have been in several of each.)

The back-story—again

Part of the back story of a discussion of GFC leadership has to be the Jesus Movement and the hippies of the 1970s. Among other influences, the Nixon scandal and the Vietnam War protests convinced many teenagers that adult leadership was inherently corrupt. Hippies taking drugs and dancing in the meadow while watching out for the police were not a group that was likely to generate many leaders or to do well with being led, and that was the background of many early Grace Haven people.

Meanwhile, in the religious renaissance of the 1970s, a loosely-defined group known as the Shepherding Movement sprang up, teaching that church leaders should regulate the smallest parts of the believer's life. Church leaders in the Shepherding Movement were seen as people with great divine authority who should not be questioned. (As an example, I knew a couple in Missouri who were told by their church leaders that they needed to buy a new station wagon. They didn't have the money and they didn't want a car that big, but they bought it because the church was going to need it sooner or later.) Grace Haven was probably aware of the Shepherding Movement, and I have heard rumours that the early Farm days ran that way, but by the time I got there, elders' interactions with members went in a totally opposite direction. Early Grace Haven policy was often reaction against the abuses (real or imagined) suffered by the members when they had been in other churches.

In the earliest days, there was no visible leadership for the church as a whole. Hod Bolesky owned the land and he recruited Ray Nethery; these two, together with an insurance man from Galion, constituted the Board of Grace Fellowship of Mansfield for the sake of Ohio laws, but most people didn't know about this board and its doings were never discussed. Hod soon stopped attending religious events at the Farm, so Ray was the only one of the three who participated in the Grace Haven group, and any governing they did was completely behind the scenes. One legacy of this era, which persisted for a very long time, was the feeling that the irresponsible kids needed real adults to run things for them.

There was, however, a need for leadership in the emerging house churches. These house churches were little different from weekly prayer meetings, and were very loosely organized and very loosely coordinated. Some of them eventually split off and became independent brick-and-mortar churches of their own. The house churches, not the Sunday morning meeting, were the locus for preaching, teaching, and sacraments. Each house church needed an elder—always a man—and the qualifications and selection process were very undefined. The result was a board of elders that was very loose and rag-tag. Often the only real qualification for someone being an elder was that he be "good in a prayer meeting" (which meant he was extroverted, enthusiastic, good at extemporaneous speaking, and probably likely to let himself go during a session of singing and praying).

The next step

This era of gentle anarchy was inherently unstable, and after a few years several things happened in quick succession:

• Grace Haven Farm and Grace Fellowship of Mansfield faded from view and were officially replaced by Grace Fellowship Church.
• The informal leadership of the house churches was abolished (and there was a significant amount of ill feeling about this), to be replaced by a formal, self-perpetuating board of GFC elders. Several former elders didn't make it into the new group.
• The fledgling Alliance of Renewal Churches grew rapidly, then split, leaving Grace Fellowship as the mother church of a fairly small denomination. Ray was sort of the bishop, though he never claimed the title. He did however—to the annoyance of several people—claim that his leadership was "apostolic," though he soon watered that down to a technical definition of the Greek term (a leader who is sent somewhere to do something). One result of Ray's "apostolic" leadership was that he became a very rare character on Sunday mornings in Mansfield. He spent a lot of time in Michigan and Wisconsin.
• Though Ray was always around (he maintained an office in the Lodge), Tim Barber became the pastor of the new church. Their leadership styles couldn't have been more different. Henceforth, Ray, the venerable patriarch whose mind went to implementing specific plans, limited himself to supervising the leaders of the far-flung ARC churches and to coming up with building projects for the Farm property. Tim was now the leader whose gentle, non-confrontational personality molded Grace Fellowship Church.
• A group of charismatic Roman Catholics interested in church renewal began in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For several years, the ARC and the Catholic group worked together and had joint conferences, etc., but attempts to officially unite eventually fell through. In the end, the Ann Arbor group were still Roman Catholics and the ARC were Baptists who had read some Presbyterian literature. The early strategy of ignoring our theological differences didn't work here.

What we ended up with

• The board of elders of the new church was a very small group and served for life. The early group was largely drawn from the leadership of the house churches (presumably selected by Ray). Later, for at least twenty years, leaders were normally recruited from outside the congregation.
• The elders were selected by the existing elders, and the congregation was, in the earliest days, not consulted at all. We were simply informed. Later, when we began to get a few leaders from within the Mansfield church, the members were consulted, but the only input available was to submit written objections to a person's candidacy. It was only at the end of my time there, about a dozen years ago, that the congregation was invited to vote for elders.
• Most of the time, probably owing to Ray's "umbrella theory" of the church, the elders' leadership was very hands-off. Sunday school classes, youth groups, and so forth were essentially independent projects of the people leading them.
• The leadership style felt very passive-aggressive and never very proactive. A person, a family, or a church ministry would go along their own way, then someone would register a complaint with the elders—often just an intuition or a feeling—and then, apparently after a lot of discussion and prayer, the words would filter down, inevitably phrased as "Some people think that …" There would never be a personal confrontation where someone would say, "John Doe says you said or did such-and-such," nor would there ever be a consultation such as "What are your future plans for this group?"
• If you had asked an ordinary member in those days just what the elders did, the member would say that they sometimes preach, they always were the leaders of the weekly small groups, and they formed sort of a small fellowship group to pray for one another. That was about it. Jerry King, the pastor who followed Tim Barber, did mention more than once that an enormous amount of elders' time was spent resolving conflicts between church members. One got the idea that Grace Fellowship was filled with people who were constantly complaining about one another and asking the elders to settle things.

Big church decisions

The inner workings of the board of elders were never discussed with the congregation at large, and for a very long time there were no congregational meetings. Stuff just happened. I remember one Sunday morning when the worship leader announced, "I'd like you to meet Ms. So-and-so, who has just been hired as our new youth group leader." That was the first any of us had heard that we were looking to hire such a person and the first time any of us had seen or heard about this particular young woman. She didn't last long. Several building projects were just announced, with little or no discussion. (The apartments above the Lodge wing and the Youth Building come to mind.) I suspect these were Ray's pet projects.

Ray once confided to me—I have no idea why he would have confided anything to me—that he never let anyone vote on anything because Tim Barber required absolute unanimity on every vote, and getting there took hours. This shows a couple of things. For one, even though Ray was not technically in a leadership position over the church, he could still forbid things both within the eldership and within the congregation as a whole. The other is a view into the inner workings of Tim's mind. If a proposal came up for a vote and it was six in favor and one against (we had seven elders at that time), the six would not carry the vote. It had to be unanimous. If, after a long discussion, the lone dissenter decided to change his vote just to get things over with, Tim still would not give in—the discussion had to continue until Tim felt that the dissenter had wholeheartedly embraced the idea and was not just giving pro forma agreement.

Congregational meetings

For a very long time, there were no congregational meetings. When, after several years in the "church" phase, they did begin, they were, for a very long time, very perfunctory. Decisions were announced, not made. The church financial statements were very vague, often only ten or fifteen lines. There were, of course, several reasons for this:

• The Grace Haven allergy concerning debate and discussion, together with a Shepherding Movement feeling that leaders should not be questioned, meant that there was no place for opposing views.
• There was still a strong feeling that the kids dancing in the meadow should leave all the important discussions about money and strategy to the adults, even though the "kids dancing in the meadow" were now in their 30s and 40s.
• If "unanimous rule" is the voting standard, not simply majority rule, voting on something like constructing a building or hiring a staff member would inevitably result in gridlock.
• And of course, because people became members of Grace Fellowship by simply deciding that they were members, there was no way to decide who would be eligible to vote on anything.

During my years at Grace Fellowship, the closest we ever came to the congregation voting on anything was an invitation by the elders (in the case of a really big decision such as calling a pastor or building a new sanctuary) that we could submit written objections. And sometimes even that minimal input was ignored. The pastor who came after Jerry King was hired with almost no congregational discussion and fired with none. He was simply gone one day.

A couple of personal comments

Many churches have a coterie of opinionated people who get together and gossip and end up really running things. The Apostle Paul complains about such groups in the churches he was starting. These people govern by innuendo and suggestion ("I've got a creepy feeling about …") and are gutless about actually stating their opinions ("Some people say that …"). In a church that values charismatic utterance and direct communication with the Holy Spirit, creepy feelings get elevated to the level of divine pronouncements, and it takes a very strong leadership to counteract that sort of whispering campaign.

Without a strong leadership willing to set priorities for the congregation, any individual could take off in any direction. When I was teaching the high school Sunday school class, I asked—pleaded—for the elders to come down and give some oversight so that what I was doing would fit in and cooperate with the what the elders wanted and so that parents could have some confidence in what I was teaching. The elders refused. And because any teacher or youth group leader was totally independent, anyone who had recently bought a self-help book or attended a Bill Gothard seminar could teach that material as absolute truth. Rock-n-roll music is demonic because the bass beats come from Africa? Physical measurements of an ideal Christian woman? The kids had no way to discern that this sort of malarkey wasn't church policy, and the leadership had no interest in counteracting it.

In the last analysis, Grace Fellowship attracted more than the usual share of Christian bullies and the leadership was too weak to take action against them.