Last night we called a special meeting of the church to discuss the re-appointment of a pastor. What made this different to previous meetings of this kind is that this pastor's appointment comes with a list of duty restrictions because of a breach of our denominations code of conduct.

He was in fact our pastor previously and was stood down for the last two years because of this breach and has now been allowed to reapply for a ministry position.

Obviously this was a meeting that required great care in how we approached it and there were questions going back and forth along the lines of "should we mention this", "should we mention that", and in the end we decided that the best way we could approach this was with complete transparency. Transparency to the process, transparency to the sanctions and transparency to the person.

Why is this important and why wouldn't you be transparent? From my observations there is a tendency of an organizations leadership (be it a church or secular) to gloss over the more messy details of failure. About 8 years ago my church asked the then current pastor to resign due to performance reasons. That time it was handled terribly. There was little transparency to the reasons, the pastor resigned mid Sunday service without notice, the leadership closed ranks and were reluctant to talk about it at all.

In that instance around half the congregation left the church.

The effect of transparency in these very difficult dealing with the current pastor have been a most satisfying and healthy contrast.

In the meeting last night we laid it all out there: why we were offering re-appointment, what the restrictions were and why they were there. At every point we allowed time for the hard questions to be asked and did not shy away from the answers no matter how difficult they were.

I know it sounds like I'm just giving us a big pat on the back but I'm trying to highlight a critical issue in church governance. Be as open as possible as much as possible to as many people as possible. Do your dealings in the light and you will be resilient to gossip and false testimony about your dealings.