Every October, the nominating committee of a congregation like ours sits down with a legal pad and a problem. The problem is not that nobody will serve. The problem is that the same six names keep coming up, and everyone in the room knows it before the first name is written down.
I want to be careful here, because the temptation is to make this a story about people. It is not. It is a story about a document. The slate that gets printed in the bulletin and voted on at the annual meeting is the output of a process, and if the process only knows how to reach six people, it will reach those six people every year no matter how sincerely the committee prays about it.
What follows is not a case record from a particular church. It is a decision debrief built from the governance documents that congregations actually use, with the dollar and hour costs named where I can name them honestly. Where I describe a scenario, I am describing a hypothetical, not a memory.
The document at the center
The document is the bylaws article on nominations and elections. Not the committee’s intentions. Not the pastor’s preferences. The article that says who nominates, how long they serve, whether the congregation may nominate from the floor, and what happens when a term ends.
Most small-church bylaws I have read say something like this: the nominating committee shall present a slate of officers at the annual meeting. That is the whole procedure. It does not say how the committee gathers names. It does not say how long the suggestion period runs. It does not say whether the committee may contact a candidate before the congregation has had a chance to suggest one. It does not say what happens when a sitting officer has served twelve years and the committee cannot imagine the finance chair being anyone else.
When the bylaws are silent, the committee fills the silence with habit. Habit is not wicked. Habit is just the path of least resistance, and in a congregation of 120 people, the path of least resistance runs through the same six front porches.
Why the same six names keep appearing
Look at what a typical single-slate process actually does. One congregation’s written nominating best practices, adopted and revised over two decades, states the tradition plainly: only one candidate is placed on the written annual ballot for each office, and at the annual meeting, “No nominations from the floor are allowed, and no ballots.” The document gives reasons — that contested elections can hurt people, that elections become popularity contests, that prayerful discernment by a small committee is preferable to a congregational vote. Those are not unreasonable concerns. But the same document also instructs the committee to “make an effort to provide a balance of lay leadership from both long term members and newer members of the congregation and not simply choose those who are familiar to them for offices.”
Read those two provisions together and you see the tension. The committee is told to widen the circle, and it is also given a process that makes widening the circle optional. There is no floor nomination to catch a name the committee missed. There is no ballot to reveal that the congregation knows someone the committee does not. The only check on the committee’s acquaintance network is the committee’s own discipline.
That is a document problem. It is fixable with a document.
The levers a congregation can actually write into its bylaws
Here are the levers I would put in front of a bylaws committee, drawn from documents other congregations have already adopted. None of these is novel. All of them cost more in meeting hours than in dollars, and the meeting hours are real.
Term limits with a one-year gap
The same best-practices document states: “With the exception of the Treasurer, no Officer may be elected to a third consecutive term in the same position until at least one (1) year has passed.” That single sentence does more to break the same-six-names pattern than any exhortation to the committee. It forces the committee to build a bench, because the bench is the only way the work gets done when a term ends.
The treasurer exception is worth noticing. It is an admission that some roles are hard to fill and that continuity has real value. A congregation can decide for itself which roles get that exception. The point is to decide on purpose rather than by default.
A rule barring paid staff from elected office
The same document provides that “Elected Officers of the Congregation may not also serve as paid members of the Church Staff.” In a bi-vocational setting, this matters more than it looks. When the person who keeps the books is also the person who signs the checks and also the person who nominates the people who oversee the books, the congregation has lost the separation that makes oversight mean anything. The rule costs nothing to write and protects everyone involved, including the staff member.
A defined suggestion window before any contact
The document directs that “The Nominating Committee should not contact any potential nominees until after the suggestion period is completed and the congregation has had a least four Sundays to make their recommendations.” Four Sundays is a concrete number. It converts “we couldn’t find anyone” from a vague complaint into a measurable process failure. If the committee opens the suggestion window on the first Sunday of September and closes it on the last Sunday, the congregation knows when to speak and the committee knows when it may begin calling.
The cost is time. Four Sundays is a month of the committee’s calendar. In a church that is already stretched thin, that month feels expensive. It is still cheaper than a slate that the congregation receives with resignation because no one knew how to suggest a name.
Staggered terms for the committee itself
A United Methodist congregation’s nominating sub-committee charter provides that the committee’s members, excluding the senior pastor and a board representative, “shall be divided into three classes, one of which shall be elected each year for a three-year term.” Staggering does two things. It keeps institutional memory on the committee, and it prevents any single annual meeting from replacing the whole group at once. In a small congregation, staggering also means the committee is never entirely composed of people who have never done the work.
Confidentiality that protects candidates without entrenching a circle
A Church of Scotland guideline for nominating committees states that the committee’s work “is confidential at all times” and “should not be discussed with other members of the congregation or with others outside the congregation, including family members.” That is a strong rule, and it exists for a good reason: a candidate who is being considered should not be exposed to gossip, and a sitting minister should not be undermined by a leak.
But confidentiality has a shadow side. When the only people who know the process are the six people on the committee, the process becomes the committee’s private property. The practical answer is to keep deliberations confidential while publishing the process and the timeline. The congregation should know when the window opens, when it closes, when the committee will report, and what the qualifications are. It should not know who is being discussed. That distinction is the difference between a confidential process and a closed one.
The conflict-of-interest question, honestly
Here is where I have to be careful about what the sources actually say and what they do not.
The IRS Publication 1828, the Tax Guide for Churches and Religious Organizations, states that churches and religious organizations, like all organizations exempt under IRC Section 501(c)(3), are prohibited from activities that result in inurement of the organization’s income or assets to insiders — persons having a personal and private interest in the activities of the organization. The publication names the minister, board members, and officers as possible insiders. That is a real constraint, and it applies whether or not the congregation has ever thought about it.
What the retrieved sources do not do is prescribe a specific board composition or a specific percentage of independent members. A legal explainer on nonprofit board composition notes that the IRS governance guidance says a governing board “should include independent members and should not be dominated by employees or others who are not, by their very nature, independent individuals because of family or business relationships.” The same explainer is explicit that the widely cited 51% figure is a sector benchmark, not an IRS regulation. I am not going to dress up a benchmark as a rule.
The practical implication for a nominating committee is narrower and more useful than a percentage. If the committee’s product is the slate, then the committee itself is where insider familiarity does its work. Writing recusal language into the nominating document — not only into a general board policy — is the specific fix. If a committee member’s spouse or business partner is under consideration, that member should disclose the relationship and step out of the discussion and the vote. The minutes should record who disclosed what and who left the room. That is not a legal requirement imposed from outside. It is a practice that makes the committee’s work defensible to the congregation it serves.
What this costs, in dollars and hours
I want to name the tradeoffs plainly, because a reform that ignores its own cost will not survive its first difficult year.
The dollar cost of amending the bylaws article is usually near zero. A congregation may need a lawyer to review the amendment, and in Western North Carolina that review might run a few hundred dollars for a short opinion. The larger cost is in hours. A bylaws committee that meets three times to draft the amendment, a congregational meeting with proper notice, and a follow-up meeting to adopt the revised nominating calendar will consume something like fifteen to twenty volunteer hours spread across three or four people. That is not nothing in a church where the same people already mow the cemetery and count the offering.
The cost of not doing it is harder to see and easier to pay every year. It is the cost of a finance chair who has served eighteen years and cannot imagine stepping down, and a congregation that cannot imagine who would replace him. It is the cost of a new member who has gifts for administration and who is never asked, because the committee does not know her name. It is the cost of a slate that the congregation receives with a nod and a silent prayer that someone else will do it next year.
A dated action list for the next committee cycle
What follows is a hypothetical example, not a record of a particular church. It is the sequence I would recommend to a congregation that wants to change its document before it changes its slate.
By the first Sunday of August: The church council or board appoints a three-person bylaws review group, including at least one person who has served on the nominating committee and one person who has not. The group’s charge is narrow: draft an amendment to the nominations and elections article, not a wholesale rewrite of the bylaws.
By the third Sunday of August: The review group drafts the amendment using the levers above — term limits with a one-year gap, a staff-exclusion clause, a four-Sunday suggestion window, staggered committee terms, and recusal language. The draft is circulated to the committee and to the pastor for comment.
By the second Sunday of September: The board approves the draft for presentation to the congregation, with the required notice period stated in the current bylaws. If the bylaws require thirty days’ notice, the clock starts here.
At the annual meeting: The congregation votes on the amendment. A two-thirds vote is common for bylaws changes; the current document will say what is required. The vote is recorded in the minutes, and the revised article takes effect for the next nominating cycle.
By the first Sunday of October: The nominating committee meets under the new rules. The suggestion window opens. The committee does not contact anyone until it closes. The slate that emerges may still include some of the same six names — term limits do not take effect all at once — but the process that produced it is now visible, and the congregation knows how to speak into it.
What this does not fix
I will not pretend that a bylaws amendment solves the deeper problem. A congregation can adopt every lever in this article and still nominate the same six people, because the document does not create willingness. It does not create the courage to ask a new member. It does not create the humility to step down after two terms. Those are gifts of the Spirit, and they are not amendable by a vote.
What the document does is remove the excuse. When the process is written down and published, the committee can no longer say that no one told them there was a window, and the congregation can no longer say that no one asked. The same six names may still appear. But they will appear as a choice that the congregation can see, and a choice that the congregation can change.
That is not a triumphal ending. It is a slightly better document, and a slightly more honest annual meeting. In a small church in the mountains, that is often how grace arrives — not in a revival, but in a bylaws article that someone finally read out loud.
Questions readers have asked
Does the IRS require a written conflict-of-interest policy for churches?
No. The retrieved legal explainer states that a written conflict-of-interest policy is recommended but not technically required at the federal level. The IRS asks about it on Form 990 and on the application for 501(c)(3) status, and operating without one invites scrutiny, but the absence of a policy is not itself a violation.
Can family members serve together on a church board or nominating committee?
Yes. No federal statute flatly prohibits it. The IRS governance guidance says a governing board should include independent members and should not be dominated by employees or others who are not independent because of family or business relationships. The practical risk is not the relationship itself but the transaction it can produce — compensation, contracts, or property arrangements that benefit an insider.
What is the minimum number of Sundays for a suggestion window?
The retrieved congregational document uses four Sundays. That is one congregation’s written practice, not a universal rule. A congregation can choose a different number, but it should choose one and write it down, because an undefined window is the same as no window.
Do term limits apply to the treasurer?
The retrieved document makes an exception for the treasurer. That is a judgment call, not a requirement. A congregation should decide which roles need continuity and write the exception explicitly rather than leaving it to habit.
What if the current bylaws require a longer notice period than the timeline above allows?
Then the amendment waits for the next cycle. The notice period in the current bylaws governs the vote that changes the bylaws. A congregation that tries to shortcut its own notice requirement has taught the committee that process is optional, which is the opposite of the point.