Mission statements, bylaws and all that good stuff

Let's revise our constitution, YAWN

It matters little how small or large your institution, organization, church, club or family is, fixing your constitution and bylaws—beginning with your mission statement—seems to represent the first task to which we will ever have to set our collective minds. The mission statement outlines the reasons for which all of the following bits and pieces exist, for the “because we want to be this, and accomplish this and that, we will do our politics this way . . . for now.”

The value in composing mission statements, goals and bylaws is not in the text they eventually produce, it’s in the exercise of getting there. The evidence for that lies in the degree to which the resulting text is referred to or ignored as time goes by. In many organizations, the constitution and handbook have been hauled out and altered occasionally—piecemeal and haphazardly, generally—but most members are hard-pressed to know where the true, revised copy exists or what’s actually in it.

My experience has been that we can adopt a very strange relationship to rules on paper, be they constitutional or confessional. As useful as following procedures in order to accomplish a mission may be, some of us can’t get past the reality that the text was written down a certain time ago by humans and does not exist as binding on the present; we were not smarter, not more inspired, not more certain then than we are now. It’s the same “common sense” that allowed us to write these things that permits us to revise them. No one I know of has ever declared verbal plenary inspirationⁱ as the source for our documents of order and yet, we often handle them as if they were “scriptural,” to be hauled out when they support an argument, usually an argument against change, in favour of the status quo.

This might logically raise the question of whether, then, there’s a good reason for composing mission statements, bylaws, constitutions or confessions of faith in the first place. To that, I would reiterate that the value lies not in the documents, it arises from the exercise of cooperatively, congenially inventing and revising them. A good metaphor to illustrate this lies in the practice of regular, physical exercise: the point of that is not to be able to tick off on paper the kilometres run, the weights lifted, the stretches and bends; the real point lies in the contribution exercise can make toward maintaining as healthy a body as possible.

And isn’t that what it’s all about? Mission statements, bylaws, constitutions, confessions of belief simply constitute agreements to be a group together, the why and the how? Opting out of a group and its agreed upon reasons for being is always a possibility. Emigrate, tear up your membership, leave your church, vacate and set up new premises, if you like. No nation, organization, institution can prosper unless its members are willing to define—and redefine—why it is that they’re together in the first place.

It’s no wonder that we’re reluctant to embark on mission statement, constitution, confessional, bylaw work. These tasks require imagination, commitment, perseverance, patience; sticking with what applied yesterday is generally much more inviting. Fact is, though, that when this work is done well, it can release the energies of an organization and produce a rallying of enthusiasm around a mission.

Poorly done, the opposite effect is bound to emerge: a strait jacket limiting us to very little beyond what seemed right . . . yesterday.

iEvery word dictated by God.