DEATH BY COMMITTEE

I received a number of comments about my post concerning a Pastor’s first encounter with the liturgical committee of the parish to which he was recently assigned.

The reactions to the article were mixed.  One Pastor commented that I was being too harsh in my assessment of the value of liturgical committees.  Another wrote that I didn’t go far enough in pointing out how much angst most Pastors experience when they meet with liturgical committee members.  And a woman who serves as her parish’s liturgical committee chairperson suggested that it was very good that my Archbishop granted me early retirement and “got me out of parish work altogether”!

I do not publish the comments which I receive for this reason:  there a many who apparently take great delight in trolling the Internet with no other purpose but to leave nasty and often obscene comments on various blogsites.   I simply choose not to give these disturbed souls a public forum for their mischief.  Instead, when a particular comment strikes me as relevant to a subject, I will either refer to it directly or use it as the basis of a future post.

Since it appears that my liturgical committee post hit a nerve among a number of those who regularly visit here, I thought I’d expand upon the topic and talk about the uselessness of committees in general and specifically how they are misused in many parishes.

I’ve entitled this post “Death By Committee” so that, from the outset, you have an idea of where this is heading. 

The proliferation of parish committees is staggering.  It seems that there is no area of parish life that isn’t subject to the scrutiny or supervision of a standing or ad hoc committee.  Pastors’ schedules are overwhelmed by committee meetings.  And, as is generally true of committees in any bureaucracy, parish committees are largely a waste of time and energy.

Parish committees are killing our Pastors and destroying effective leadership and innovation within our parishes.  Here’s how they do it.

1)  Committees meet regularly, even and, sometimes especially, when there is nothing to accomplish.  Committees will generate useless tasks and activities to simply justify their existence.

2)  If left unsupervised by the Pastors, committees will assume authority to enact or enforce their policies.  Then, they will become hostile or disenchanted when they discover that they had no such authority in the first place.  Bickering and division become the major byproduct of their activities.

3)  Committees are never evaluated for their effectiveness or their need to be continued.  Some, if not most, parish committees have outlived their original purpose and mandate, yet they remain part of the parochial structure.

4)  Committees often do nothing more than stifle creativity by becoming just another layer of “bureaucratic red tape" the Pastor needs to consider before getting anything done.  This added layer of decision-making impedes what could easily be undertaken and accomplished immediately and effectively.

In response, some Pastors allow the status-quo to continue concluding that wasting an enormous amount of time and energy is preferable to dealing with the fallout of doing something positive by disbanding many of the directionless and time-consuming committees within their parishes.  These Pastors simply abdicate their leadership role and entrust what could be done efficiently by one person to a committee of individuals who will expend as much time and resource allowed to them.

Other Pastors allow the committees to continue to exist but pay little attention to anything they have to say, hoping the members will resign in frustration. 

Still other Pastors move to disband committees which have outlived their usefulness, only to incur the wrath of the former committee members and suffer the divisions they sow within the ranks of parishioners.

I, for one, favor the suppression of committees and suggest the fewer the better.  Sure, I have suffered the hostility and outrage of the members of committees I have suppressed.  But, the rancor lasted only for a brief moment and I continued to enjoy the favor and support of the vast majority of parishioners who understood that I had the interests of the parish in mind in every decision I made, spiritual and temporal.

These are my thoughts.  Why do you think?  I’d love to hear from you