Church Administration

Church Administration

1. Church law

Church law comprises the constitution, discipline, requirements, legislative, administrative and judicial structure and procedures, governing membership and officers, acquisition and administration of finance and property in, and the external as well as internal relationships of any Christian community. It varies in scope, form, and style according to each community's understanding of God and of human relations with God, and each community's size and self-definition(Gager 2011).

Protestant church law generally differs from Roman Catholic Church law in the degree and character of AUTHORITY claimed for the church as an institution. The statutory style also differs from ancient Eastern and Latin legislation in most Protestant churches, although the form of canons survives in the Anglican Communion, which also traditionally appeals to patristic precedent in its legal thought. However, all churches are obliged by the realities of experience to legislate on the same issues, however much the respective laws may vary. These issues also overlap; for example, questions about membership are distinct from, but inevitably overlap with, rules about church officials, and ecumenical policy affects and is affected by both of those areas.

The basic issue in all church law is the definition of DOCTRINE: What do we teach, and on what authority? (The second part of the question is also inherent in the first). At one extreme are the few communities that insist that they have no stated doctrine at all. Some Protestant churches (Lutheran, Anglican, some Reformed, some Methodist) agree that the creedal decisions of the early councils (Nicaea, Constantinople, Chalcedon) are still binding on the modern church, and that REFORMATION decisions (confessions, catechisms, articles) are similarly normative, whereas other Protestant denominations claim that only the BIBLEhas claim to allegiance. (The confessional churches may observe that the definition of the Biblical canon is itself a tacit acceptance of the early church's informal process of decision, or an acceptance of Reformation decisions, or of a late Reformation reversion to the rabbinic decisions of 70 A.D.). Also diverse are the effective statuses given to the admitted standards: binding on all teaching programs and their contents, or normative of the character of those programs, or “articles of peace” (i.e., not to be disowned or opposed), or “landmark documents”; the last may mean that the past decrees mark vital and lasting decisions (like the admission of the Gentiles) or fascinating and venerable irrelevancies. Equally variable, among churches and in all churches through time, is the important legal distinction between what must be policed and enforced andADIAPHORA, the things that can be tacitly tolerated.

Church law reflects differing Protestant ecclesiologies, that is, differing understandings of the church: if the church is the Body of Christ, and essentially one, may or must it have a single governmental system, or are the different gatherings of Christians to be autonomous (not, that, literally self-governing, but discerning and applying the will of Christ through more local instruments? In the Reformation period Protestant churches were national churches or separatist congregations, whose interdependency, even if adjudged to be divinely mandated, was voluntary and ...