Protecting Churches By Legally Securing Bylaws with Brian Schuette

Church Law Institute and the Act 6 Project

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We have a guest with us today. The Honorable, can I, do I say that for someone who's a lawyer, right? The Honorable, or is that for judges only?

Do I start with that?

I don't.

Yeah, absolutely. Say it again, actually. That's great.

The Honorable Brian Schutte.

All right. Yes, sir.

Okay.

Let's talk about your ministry, though. You have a unique ministry, honestly. It's a ministry that I haven't really heard of before, any other person doing, and I don't know that there are people doing it.

There may be, but you help churches with their bylaws and their polity. And really, I think of the line, actually, from the Constitution from, this is applying to government, but external threats and internal threats, you help prevent those things with the way that church's legal documents are worded.

And I'm just, this intrigues me a lot because it's so needed, but yet it's so rare to find someone who can help churches with the legal background you have solidify themselves. So first of all, let's just base a question here.

What exactly is it that you do and how does it help churches?

So the Act 6 Project is a part of Church Law Institute, which is a nonprofit legal ministries that serves churches and church leaders. Through the Act Project, specifically, we help churches with organizational documents, which would include bylaws.

And we also do some dispute resolution work and then some training work for church leaders, obviously focusing on the legal aspects of operating a ministry.

So when, how many churches have you done this with?

You know, I should have counted, I haven't, but I would say probably 100 or so, maybe a few more than that. I've worked with churches as far South as Florida and as far North as, but not only your part of New York, but even farther North up into the Adirondacks.

One church that I've worked with is just right up there at the Vermont border. So we've worked with churches on the East Coast. We've worked with churches in most of the states between New York and Florida at one time or another in one capacity or another.

A Florida Church Conflict Resolved Through Biblical Governance

So can you give me some examples, maybe specifically, what's a church? You don't have to give the description of where the church is or anything, but like a story that would relate to people, the importance of what you're doing and how you can help churches that are in certain jams, perhaps.

So there are a couple of examples that really stand out. I'll give, I'll start with the one in Florida. A church found us, I think they just found us through our website and they had been working on their organizational documents and they saw that that's part of what we did.

And so they contacted us and we worked with them for, it was a period of a few months. It can be a process that takes a little while, although there are times when we push it through more quickly, just depending on the urgency of the circumstance.

But this particular church had been thinking about it and they'd actually done a lot of good preparation work for it. And by the time we came in, it was really a matter of helping them organize the work that they had already done and then to express it in a way that was legally appropriate and helpful.

And so we took them through that process and the end result of it was that they had updated bylaws and that was pretty much the end of the engagement up to that period of time. And of course, in the process of doing that, you develop relationships with people.

That's actually my favorite part of doing this work. And a few months after we did this process, which at that point had been all remote, we didn't even travel down to Florida to meet with them because it wasn't really necessary, but we got a call from them and they had developed an issue with their founding pastor.

They'd been there for almost 20 years, I think at that point. And so the pastor went and hired his own lawyer and was making some threats about the church because he had, I think, maybe gotten angry and submitted his resignation and then tried to retract it.

And they just decided, no, we don't think that he needs to remain in leadership here. And so once they started getting some threatening communications from this pastor's attorney, they decided they should call us and they did.

And we ended up traveling down there and we spent two or three days at the church in the city where this church is located. And part of that was interacting with the leadership team of this church that we had already become acquainted with by going through the process of developing their documents.

And then we also communicated directly with the pastor's attorney. And one of the things that a lot of attorneys don't understand, it's what makes this work a little bit specialized, is that the remedies that are available in the employment law realm, like for a job working for the government or for a private company, are not available in the church realm.

Title VII is the federal law that protects employees and it specifically excludes churches. And I'm not sure that the pastor's attorney actually knew that. And so when we went and met with this attorney, we kind of explained to him that those remedies are not actually available to him.

And we were able to persuade him that that was the case. And instead of making this a legal battle between the pastor and his then former church, we really turned it into kind of a mediatorless mediation where the council and parties just came together and worked out a deal.

And the end result of it was that even though this pastor had acted badly, this church still felt a real obligation or sense of obligation to him. And so we were able to work out a severance agreement for him, which included some compensation.

And we stretched that compensation out over a period, I forget now exactly, six to 12 months. And it allowed him to transition from being a lead pastor at a large church into other ministry work without being financially devastated.

And the result of all of that was a really peaceful resolution of a dispute that could have split the church. And the thing that we take away from it mostly is the organizational documents that they had in place created some procedures for this, and it identified who the decision makers at the church were.

And so as a result of that, we had the right people in the right seats on the bus, so to speak, and were able to navigate what could have been a very, very bad situation. And the end result was a peaceful resolution to it.

And that church has gone on and continued to minister very effectively in the community. That pastor has gone on and actually ended up establishing another church.

In the community.

And they are now just ministering in the same geographical area, but they're doing it as brothers, not as opponents of one another. And I do think that our organizational document work played a significant role in that, because prior to doing that, this pastor had almost absolute authority.

And we kind of fixed that and made it a more biblical arrangement in keeping with Acts chapter six, which is, of course, where we get the name of our organization. And it was a real success story for us.

Biblical Church Polity, Acts 6, and the Structure of Church Documents

Wow.

I mean, this is, that is amazing. And it's something that if you just apply biblical principles, it works, but having a legal mind to also know how to set that up is so important in the context in which we live.

So why don't you talk about that, bringing those two things together, biblical understanding of church polity, and maybe after you can kind of attach to it, or maybe we can get to it later on, kind of the threats, the external threats from the LGBT lobby and these kinds of things.

So that the biblical understanding, and then also the legal understanding of why things need to be set up in a particular way in the church bylaws.

So here's how we started. When we decided to start doing this work in a focused way, rather than being members of churches, they would call us for things and most any lawyer that's a part of a church gets called on from time to time.

We're usually put on the trustees or the finance committee or whatever, just to offer guidance. But we started to do this work in an organized way. And we decided to start from scratch. And we started at Matthew chapter one, verse one, and went all the way through the end of Revelation and identified every passage that we thought spoke to the issue of church governance or church leadership.

And then from that, we kind of identified a set of working principles. And then we applied that to what we knew about the legal aspects of things. And really the goal there was to integrate as fully as possible, the biblical principles of church governance with the legal principles for the operation of nonprofit organizations.

And that's certainly been developed and refined over the years. But we started with a basic set of principles and we express those in the documents. It would probably be helpful for me to identify the documents that I'm talking about.

Most of the time, churches are organized as nonprofit corporations under the state law of the state where the church is. And a nonprofit corporation is like any other charitable nonprofit. It has a board of directors.

And then the document that is filed that creates that organization under the state law, it usually goes by one of two names, either articles of incorporation, which that would apply to business corporations too.

Or sometimes the lingo is a corporate charter, which is a way to refer sometimes to nonprofit entities. But we just use the articles of incorporation label. And you use that to set up the corporation to identify its purposes.

And we always want to identify the spiritual purposes very specifically. And then you also talk about how the church is to be governed. And we try to integrate into that document the principles primarily of Acts chapter six verses one to seven, which tells the story of the dispute that arose in the early church when the apostles were leading it there in Jerusalem.

And it shows how a church can navigate conflict if it is set up in a biblically sound manner. And so what we're trying to do is to emulate that just as much as we possibly can. And then express that, first of all, in the articles.

And the articles are a more general document. If you were to compare it to our national legal documents, the articles are kind of like the constitution. And then the bylaws are kind of like the federal statutes by analogy.

And then the policies would be kind of like federal regulations. So we start with the main document that creates the organization and lays out the broad principles for its operation. Then we move into the bylaws, which express in a more detailed way how the church is to be set up and operated.

And then we also do policies, for example, a marriage policy or a facilities use policy or a church security policy. Any number of things where a church might wanna be more specific, but it doesn't really belong in a bylaw or in the articles.

So that's kind of the big picture of how we approached it. And the guiding principles for the Act 6 project are number one, we always want to prioritize the gospel. Any church that prioritizes anything else is failing in a very fundamental way, we think.

And so we prioritize our time and our work to help those churches that are making the gospel their priority. Secondly, is the authority of scripture. We believe that the Bible is, and I'm gonna use this word very deliberately, the inerrant word of God, so that it is absolutely authoritative in every issue that it addresses.

And we think it addresses most issues, if not all issues that a church would need to handle in order to operate. And then the third principle is the idea that the New Testament contains clearly expressed principles.

They're just principles, but principles for church governance and leadership. And what we try to do is to help a church apply all of those in their context and with respect for the history that that particular church has, but first and foremost, employing the biblical approach to it.

And then when we're done, that church has a set of documents that reflect their distinctives and their approach, but most importantly, reflect biblical principles.

Correcting Weak Church Bylaws and Balancing Church Authority

So let me ask you this, if there's a church that has bylaws that are not put together well, perhaps, they're not specific, two different scenarios. One, you have a situation where there's not a great polity set up in the bylaws that leaves things open to interpretation.

And then you have a guy who's on a power trip who comes in and becomes the pastor. You already described a scenario, I think earlier we can relate to, but the bylaws are just, they're really weak on this.

Or on the flip side, you have the congregation is battering this pastor or something, really just not taking them seriously, so opposite extremes on that. And then also maybe a scenario where you don't have tight language on LGBT scenarios and someone applies to work who then files a lawsuit based on discrimination when the church says, well, we don't believe that, but it's not in their bylaws.

If you could address, really that's three scenarios, I guess, those different scenarios and how having firm bylaws, which you can help with, would help with those.

So there's kind of a continuum here and you've identified it well. On one extreme is what I've heard described as the Moses model, where you have a church leader who has just a dominating influence. In fact, it's not even probably accurate to call it an influence, who just has a complete control over the church as an organization.

And we don't think that's a biblical way to organize the New Testament church. The other extreme is what I call a hyper-congregational church. And by that, what I'm describing is a church that is more like a Greek style democracy, where everything is decided by majority vote at a business meeting, rather than having what we believe is the more balanced and appropriate approach.

So those two extremes describe kind of the whole spectrum of church governance configurations. And we think that the appropriate configuration gives a proper degree of authority based upon spiritual responsibility.

So here's the principle. The greater the person's spiritual responsibility within the context of a local church, the more authority they should have. And by the same token, the less spiritual responsibility they have, the less organizational authority they should have.

And so churches can kind of get this upside down or out of balance. And the hyper-congregational church really prevents those who have the greatest responsibility to answer to God for how they have served in their ministry calling, but they don't end up with a corresponding degree of organizational authority.

And those are churches that, that's actually probably the most common setup for denominations that are non-hierarchical, meaning all locally governed by the church body itself. And that is an inherently dysfunctional model.

What you see with that model is pastors that don't have any authority. A lot of times they're not even allowed to vote on anything. And they are really not able to lead as fully as they are actually called by God to lead.

And so we think the proper setup is to look at Acts chapter six, and from that, draw the analogy that the apostles of the first century church are analogous to the elder leadership that's described in first Timothy and in Titus primarily.

And biblically qualified men who carry out those responsibilities. And we recommend the formation of a leadership team. It's really the board of directors of the corporation, and it goes by various names based upon whatever that church's history is, maybe a church council or an elder body, or I have a church that refers to them as the shepherds, any of those labels, but they're ultimately describing from a legal perspective, the board of directors, and from a biblical perspective, the pastor and the elders.

And we like to create a board comprised of those individuals, and they have general authority, but then we also, in recognition of the way that the apostles dealt with the conflict in Acts six, there's congregational involvement in major decisions.

And so biblically discerning leaders will involve members in decisions, but there are some decisions that the leaders themselves would make, but there are also a lot of decisions that the members need to be able to speak into.

And in the Acts six example, it was the selection of deacons to assist, to keep the apostles where they were freed up to pursue the ministry of the word and prayer, which was what God had called them to do in the Jerusalem church.

And then the deacons then became primarily the serving leaders of the church. And the result of that, of having a church organized that way, we see at the end of that passage is that the church flourished, and it was very, very spiritually productive.

And I think that's because whenever you align something with biblical principles, it's going to be more functional, just as a simple matter. When we conform our approach to what God has told us in his word, we're going to experience greater success.

External Threats, Internal Threats, and Ecclesiastical Abstention

So that's kind of the big picture of how we like to approach the governance issue. Then as a practical matter, and you've already alluded to this, there are really two types of threats that churches face.

The first category would be external threats, and the second category is internal threats. Well, it's the external threats that tend to get the most attention because they're interesting and there's controversy associated with it.

And it's something that we can unite around as believers to deal with these external threats to the operation of the church. But as a practical matter, it's really the internal threats that end up harming churches far more often than the external threats.

And if the church is properly structured in a biblical way, and the pastor has a degree of authority that's appropriate to his calling, and the elders are properly qualified in accordance with what the Bible tells us to look for in that type of leader, and if they are leading the people with integrity and with gentleness and not by compulsion, and the people are submitted to that leadership, that's a church that's gonna be able to weather both the external threats and the internal threats.

And conflict is just a fact of life. I always say that where two or more are gathered, there will be conflict. And that is an immutable principle that we all see really in any organization, but I think because of the spiritual dynamics and the fact that we do have a very strong enemy, that the church is gonna be a place where there will be conflict.

And we can either choose to deal with it redemptively by following the principles God's given us in his word, or we can deal with it through human wisdom, and that doesn't turn out well.

Yeah, I know that the flashy thing is what gets the headlines, but I wanna talk about the flashy thing for just one more second here. Say there is a lawsuit against the church for discrimination, how does it help to have, or does it help to have the doctrinal statement and their position on sexuality integrated into their bylaws?

In a situation in court, is that gonna help them out at all?

It does help. And really what we're trying to do is to trigger what's called the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine, which is just kind of a fancy legal term for the idea that our government courts do not delve into matters of doctrine.

So just to illustrate that, if your church has a dispute with its neighbor over the boundary line between the church property and the neighbor's property, that's a matter that the court will weigh in on because they don't have to apply what I would call from a legal perspective, religious principles.

That's gonna be just a matter of the straightforward application of neutral principles of law. If on the other hand, let's say the church has disciplined someone for acting in an inappropriate way with regard to biblical sexual ethics, then that is going to be an internal matter for the church.

And a court generally is not going to deal with that because it requires the application of religious principles. And again, I'm using the word religious there in a legal sense. And if you have clearly expressed your beliefs in your documents, you enhance the likelihood that a court will promptly reach the conclusion that this is a matter that triggers ecclesiastical abstention and therefore the court won't delve into it.

And now that's also where it becomes important to have a well-organized church and to express not just your beliefs in your documents, but also to identify the people that resolve those disputes and also maybe even identify some processes for resolving those disputes.

And the churches that have that can be assured that they're not gonna have government interference in their operations, but they can also be assured that they've agreed in advance by adopting these organizational documents on the principles that they will follow to faithfully apply scripture and to deal with inappropriate conduct, so.

Who the Act 6 Project Will and Will Not Serve

So question for you practically here, you go travel, you'll help churches with their bylaws. I'm assuming they have to, I probably should preface it with this. They do have to agree with a basic doctrinal statement.

Am I correct before you will help them? You're not gonna obviously go to like a Mormon church or something, it's gotta be, what are your limitations on as far as that goes? I mean, we go to a Presbyterian church and a Baptist church and a Pentecostal church.

So we really try to express that in our guiding principles, the priority of the gospel, the inerrancy of scripture and the biblical principles for governance of the New Testament church. And typically anybody or any church that embraces those guiding principles is going to be like-minded with us.

And we don't do work for churches that are not in essentially complete agreement with those principles because I'm not interested in investing my time or my resources in a church that's not fulfilling the role that the church has been called to.

Okay, got it. So there's nothing outside of the guiding principles then that would limit that. So if someone goes to your website, act6project .com, they can find your guiding principles. And if they qualify, if they're looking for someone to consult them on issues such as the ones we talked to today, what's the process for that?

And then when you decide I'm gonna go and help this church, what does that look like? So is there a fee? Do you have to spend like weeks with them or days with them? Or what kind of information are you gonna try to get from them?

Those kinds of things, procedural.

Well, on the website, there's a section that describes the process in 10 steps. And those steps kind of begin with an initial consultation. And that initial consultation is really the point where we let them know who we are and we find out a little bit about who they are.

And that process will typically filter out anybody that doesn't have the Orthodox Christian views. Most of those churches aren't gonna wanna work with us anyway. And certainly those would be churches that we would just say, not sure that we're the right organization to help you.

And then as far as the process itself, it begins with a consultation of getting acquainted and us expressing to them what exactly it is that we're seeking to accomplish for the kingdom here. And then the next step is a review of their existing documents.

And then we make recommendations. And then once the recommendations are made, they would make a decision, actually probably a little bit before that, but at about that time, they make a decision whether to proceed all the way through the end of the process.

And we're looking for ways to work with every like-minded church that wants to do that. And so as a result, our approach is a little bit flexible. We do have a membership model. So if a church wants to become a partner with the Act 6 Project, they can do that based on a monthly contribution, and then we'll provide services in return for that.

Some churches prefer just to pay for the services straight up. And my concern and my goal is more about working with churches than it is following some sort of strict financial process. Now, regarding the financial part of this, we're just trusting that God will take care of our needs, knowing that we have to be compensated for what we do.

But at the same time, we're more interested in getting to accomplish the work because I've seen situations, and I'll actually give you another example here to illustrate this, where a church has gone through our process and they've updated or revised their documents, and then they've encountered a problem, and the problem has an outcome that's very different under our approach than it would be if they hadn't done it.

And here's one that illustrates the point. We had a church, and we'll call it in the South generally, that they did an annual confidence vote for their pastor. And this was a hyper-congregational church, meaning everything was decided at a business meeting by a majority vote.

And in this case, they had a super majority vote requirement that unless the pastor got a certain percentage, I think it was 75%, favorable confidence vote, he was out. And I can't think of anything more disheartening to a pastor.

And in this particular situation, the pastor was the sole breadwinner for his family. He lived in the church parsonage. His wife was a homemaker, and he had two school-age children. And so if you can just imagine each year when your confidence vote comes up, knowing that you could leave the meeting being out of your ministry position, being out of a place to live, and not knowing how you're gonna support your family.

And so one of our primary goals in working with that church was to get rid of that horribly unbiblical practice of conducting confidence votes. And we were successful in getting that taken out of it. And instead, we've created a process where it's possible to get rid of a bad pastor, but it's very, very difficult to get rid of a good one.

And there are various ways to approach that, but the way we approached it is there had to be a supermajority requirement to remove the pastor, not a 26 unfavorable vote. And within a year or two of this church adopting the updated documents, somebody at the church got mad about something.

I don't even know what it was now, but they decided they wanted to take the pastor out. And so they tried to trigger a no-confidence vote based on their former approach to it. And they came to the realization that that's not the way our church operates anymore based on the bylaws that everybody had accepted.

And the end result of that was that the pastor was not removed. And in fact, it even created an opportunity, really sort of a teachable moment, and it preserved the pastor and of course his family and his living and his place to live.

And most importantly, it preserved his ministry there at the church. And that's one of them that we point to as a real success story by protecting a good and godly man who now has actually been at that church for over 30 years, and we've removed that threat that was hanging over his head.

Why Churches Should Update Bylaws During Times of Peace

Wow.

I'm sure you have a lot of stories like this and more to come. And by the way, your website is very organized and all these steps are laid out with exactness, which I appreciate so much. So the process of contacting Brian, finding out what he can do for your church is pretty simple.

Brian, what about a church that might not think anything's wrong? It's been smooth sailing. Our bylaws, we don't ever even pull them out and read them. Could they use your services as well?

They can. I'll tell you, you've really keyed in on one of the challenges of this work. The typically churches that don't really pay attention to that sort of thing, they'll just let their bylaws sit and gather dust, but when there's a problem, then they pull their bylaws out.

And more often than not, they'll realize, well, this document is not adequate to help us address this. And unfortunately, sometimes the result is that the church loses members or sometimes even splits altogether.

And here's the idea, fix your documents during times of peace when things are going well, because you're not gonna be able to when there's a serious conflict. And so one of the challenges that we have in communicating to churches about our work is to help them understand that it is an important issue.

Of course, it's one of those things. It's not important until it is, but once it becomes important, the die is pretty much cast. And if you've got a set of documents that actually allows you to fix the problem, then that's great.

But if you don't, you're just gonna have to suffer through that. And sometimes what we may end up doing is helping the remnant of a church or helping the new church that has split off from that. What we'd much rather do is be able to help the church before that happens and take them through that process.

And those churches that do that, in my experience anyway, are always glad that they did.

Gotcha.

And I think that's very wise advice. And I know from personal experience that when things are going well, or at least you think they are, that it is much easier to get things through than when there's controversy.

Because even if the controversy doesn't have to do with the bylaws, that's usually that's used somehow. Whatever issue comes up, sides form. So very well stated. I'd encourage people, if you're a pastor, if you're receiving a layman at your church, you have concern for your church, check out acts6project .com and you can consult Brian.

Brian, I know you have this background in law. I believe you also have a background in counseling if I'm not mistaken. Is that correct?

Not anything formal, but I can tell you that anybody that's been practicing law for a while, you realize that you do become a bit of a counselor. Now, I do have some training in biblical peacemaking. I went through the Peacemaker Ministries Christian conciliation training, which is very, very useful.

It's the organization that Ken Sandy started many years ago. And I think it's really an amazing organization. And the way they use, it's a faithful application of scripture that they use that's really quite remarkable.

And we use some of those principles, not so much in a formal way, but whenever we come into a church and help them with a dispute type issue, that's how we approach it.

Biblical Peacemaking, Unity Bylaws, and Dispute Resolution

Yeah, and I actually had a class in seminary, biblical peacemaking, where we use Ken Sandy's material. And probably one of the best classes I've had, most helpful. And so that's a process I believe in when the two parties agree to that kind of mediation.

And so I think that's a great resource. And so knowing that you're familiar with that and agree with that as well, just really boosts my confidence as well. Go to act6project .com, check it out. You can contact Brian for free, that doesn't cost anything and ask him questions if you have any.

Any final thoughts from you, Brian?

Yeah, I would say this on the issue of peacemaking. It's difficult to get people together so that they will follow that biblical peacemaking process. And what I've discovered as a practical matter, by the time the dispute reaches the point where they're calling lawyers, it's usually gone too far.

And the ability to come in there is pretty limited. And so one of the things that we like to use the tool of organizational documents to do is to express important principles, including biblical dispute resolution principles.

And in fact, it's been several years ago now, but I and a partner of mine, we were up in upstate New York, working with some churches up there. And we had an afternoon free. And so we went to the Starbucks just up the road from you in Glen Falls, New York.

And there we drafted what has become our unity bylaw. And it's a bylaw that expresses the aspiration really, to have a church that's characterized by unity. And so we include that. And then we couple that with the dispute resolution provisions.

And when you've put those in the documents, at least for members who desire to be faithful, that really gives them a kind of a tool or a context in which to resolve disputes. And hopefully, if you've got the church organized well and you're operating in accordance with your organizational setup, you can intervene as a leader earlier so that the dispute doesn't become a runaway train.

And having those principles embedded in the organizational documents is an important step in that direction. And I have seen those things work and they're wonderful alternatives to church splits and certainly to litigation.

Yeah.

Well, like I said before, check out the website if you want to know more information on the Act 6 Project, act6project .com. And Brian, as always, thank you so much for sharing with us this valuable information.

And I hope that a lot of pastors and laymen reach out to you as a result.

Let me just say, John, how much I appreciate your ministry. It's one of those podcasts that I watch for it to drop. And typically I listen to it about as quickly as it drops. I've only got about two or three podcasts like that and yours is at the top of the list.

And I'm very grateful for the opportunity to come on and share about my work. But I do just want to thank you for the incredibly courageous way that you speak to some very challenging issues.

And I hope you'll continue doing that.

And that God will bless and protect you in those efforts.

Well, you're too kind.

I appreciate it.

It's my pleasure. And it's good visiting with you out in Kentucky.

Hope to see you soon, all right?

Thank you.

God bless.