“Church committees are God’s way of slowing up change”

I’ve been an elder on and off for almost 30 years and I’ve assisted the elders at a number of other churches. I’ve made this observation. Very few of the most successful businessmen in our community serve on church boards or on committees. When I’ve polled them as to why, invariably their reason was something like, “Churches and their committees are so inefficient, I just couldn’t take it!”

That’s a true observation but a very unspiritual answer.

I have to confess, when I was first elected to be an elder, there were times I almost wanted a glass of wine, or a Valium. We’d sometimes spend hours talking about stuff that I thought was just a waste of time, or discussing a problem that would have been solved in a business meeting in a few minutes. “Who cares?” I’d silently think to myself. I quickly found out that somebody cares about everything in a church. But why should that concern me?