Page Contents The Wild and Wonderful World of Procedure Congregational Governing Documents Updating Your Congregational Constitution Membership Matters Property Matters WV Congregations: Filing Your Trustees with the County Selling Church Property Synod Assembly, Conferences, Clusters, etc. Workshops and Presenctions

Welcome to the Polity for Congregations page of our newly (re)designed constellation of pages for all matters related to polity. This is a landing page. You will find here links to information related to congregational polity.

The Wild and Wonderful World of Procedure

Do you want to learn more about parliamentary procedure and how it works in your congregation? Visit our Robert's Rules of Order page. You will find there a discussion on the importance and utility of rules of order. You will also find information on using something other than Robert's Rules of Order. Other topics include procedure in small boards (e.g., you Congregation Council), electronic meetings, and emergency situations like a pandemic.

Constitutions, Bylaws, and Continuing Resolutions

Our developing Congregational Governing Documents page discusses each of these governing instruments along with others we don't normally think about.

Updating Your Congregational Constitution

We provide some guidance on how to go about updating your congregational constitution on our Congregational Governing Documents page. It's a good idea to do this after every Churchwide Assembly.

Membership Matters

We'll be rolling out material related to membership over the course of the next several weeks. To get started we have a page dealing with removal from membership for inactivity. The next page to be posted will deal with managing the roll of voting members.

Property Matters

WV Congregations: Filing Your Trustees with the County

Selling Church Property

Synod Assembly, Conferences, Clusters, etc.

The ELCA is designed as a participatory democracy. That includes participation in suprcongregational ecclesiastical deliberative bodies through congregational enfranchisement authorized under required provision *C5.04 of the Model Constitution for Congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America:

*C5.04. This congregation shall elect from among its voting members laypersons to serve as voting members of the Synod Assembly as well as persons to represent it at meetings of any conference, cluster, coalition, or other area subdivision of which it is a member. The number of persons to be elected by this congregation and other qualifications shall be as prescribed in guidelines established by the West Virginia-Western Maryland Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

At this point, none of the conferences and clusters in this synod are structured as deliberative assemblies. The Synod Assembly, however, is, and every congregation is entitled to two lay voting members in the Synod Assembly. To be eligible to serve as a Synod Assembly lay voting member, the individual must be a voting member of the congregation that enfranchises them through an election process defined in the congregation's governing documents. For a full discussion on election to Synod Assembly, click here.

Workshops & Presentations

The WV-WMD Synod offers workshops and presentations for congregations on a variety of topics. The following are currently available, but more will be added as time goes on. If there is something you would like to see that is not listed, contact Bishop Riegel. To make arrangements for a presentation or workshop, email Bishop Riegel (Bishop@WV-WMD.org).

• Intro to Roberts Rules of Order
• Polity for Councils: A Crash Course
  
• Updating Constitutions & Bylaws
  

Events that have been scheduled can be found on the synod's Education for Clergy & Laity page.

Couldn't find what you were looking for?

Try refreshing your page. Most browsers cache pages for faster loading. Unfortunately, when a page updates, sometimes, your browser is pulling a saved copy of the page from your cache. If you came here because you saw an announcement about something being added to the page but can't find it, it could be browser caching. By refreshing your page, you can force your browser to download the most recent version from the server---well, most of the time.