Executive Committee and the concerns of an era

Dr. Michel E. Abs

Secretary General of the Middle East Council of Churches

Beyond the closing statement and the minutes of the meeting, we need to stop at the "experience" of the Executive Committee meeting that was held during the last two days in a calm monastery in Mount Lebanon.

There is no doubt that nothing is more lovable than meetings between brothers after a long separation, especially when it is in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and on common issues and concerns related to the Middle East region with all its components and their various affiliations.

We have been holding meetings remotely, online, as the name used to be, even in Arabic, during the hard years of the pandemic that struck humanity at its core, and we found, at that time that these remote meetings were the effective solution when the pandemic threatened every human life on earth. We have adopted this online solution, trained ourselves on its uses and adapted it to our needs. It was the perfect expression of the logic which says that “technology that may harm humanity in some of its manifestations is what provides humanity with the means that help it save itself”. However, with the return of life to normal, people came back to taste and realize the importance of face-to-face meetings with this interaction that takes place between two people in direct encounter versus the encounter between two computer screens or cell phones.

This new reality was reflected in the interaction between the parties participating in the meeting, whether they were members of the Executive Committee or the General Secretariat's team, and the relations became within this small team emanating from the General Assembly, which works in its name and by delegation from it.

Here is the starting point in the analysis and in the variable within the constants of the Middle East Council of Churches.

The attendees considered that they represent the General Assembly and therefore have a duty to inform it about the progress of the work in the Council during the period that separates two General Assemblies. Accordingly, the General Secretariat team will inform all members of the General Assembly of the development of work in the Council by providing it with reports and all publications issued by the Council, just as the Executive Committee is provided with that.

In addition, the Executive Committee approved a new approach in appointing department and program committees as stipulated in the Council's Constitution and Bylaws. The MECC team seeks a balance between governance and management, between decision-making and implementation. In order to achieve this, the Executive Committee was requested to distribute its members on the committees of the various departments and programs of the Council. What happened practically it is that the Executive Committee has gone further than that and approved that in each of the departments and programs committees there should be only one member from the Executive Committee, provided that the rest of the members are appointed from among the experts and specialists of the churches. In addition to that, non-Christians have shown high dedication throughout the history when appointed in the council.

Here, the Executive Committee recorded two very important positive points in the context of our work as a team of the General Secretariat:

The first point is that it restored the work of the committees, which were suspended for a long time for administrative and financial reasons, which means that the decision-making methodology has returned to the optimal method.

As for the second point, it lies in the fact that the Executive Committee has raised the level of decentralization of decisions, as it did not confine it to itself, but rather distributed it to experts and specialized people, considering that knowledge is as important as ownership, and this is a very advanced position according to modern management science and reflects the concern of raising the effectiveness of the leadership bodies in the Council.

As for the working group in the various departments and branches of the Council, when the issue of appointments was raised, the Committee emphasized the complete reject of the logic of apportioning jobs over churches and insisted relying exclusively on the standard of competence in appointment of candidates that are invited to apply by announcing vacancies through church channels as well as through announcements on public advertising sites in our countries.

In addition, the Executive Committee drew attention to the need to develop some paragraphs of the Bylaws, as there are some administrative and organizational measures or steps that are not clear. Worth mentioning that the opinion of the Executive Committee fully coincides with the observations of colleagues who practice on daily basis these rules of procedure and see where the weaknesses lie in the clarity of the regulatory texts. This is what forced us to take strict measures during the General Assembly, as the available texts do not cover all stages of the General Assemblies. The lack of clarity is also found in several points  of the administrative structure of the Council, and this requires "Fine Tuning" for a more dynamic, flexible and clear performance.

This is the case for all corporate systems, as time passes and they find themselves faced with new needs in governance and management, so they seek to develop themselves by crystallizing the modification of some of the organizational paths.

“You are about to build a new culture for the organization,” one of the bishops present told me. I replied: You are right!

This MECC has heavily suffered in its not too distant history disintegration and dislocation, and resurrected from its ashes again because the church in our region is certain of its importance. It is the only platform that brings together the Church of Christ, where he was born and where his message spread. Its role is permanent and renewed due to the vitality of its teams and leaders. It is not the strongest financially, but it is the strongest with its consciousness, symbolism, and vision of its future role.

The executive committee meeting during the past two days approved holding an extraordinary general assembly after two years, that is, on the occasion of the council reaching its fiftieth year. It insisted, and the work teams think with the same logic, that the approach to the 50-year jubilee should not be celebratory, but has to be a station for evaluation, analysis, lessons learned, and preparing to go forward towards the next fifty years. And so, it will be.

Before the MECC reaches the age of fifty, the  institutions that compose it jointly think about renewing the role in a new Middle East, inspired by the Master's Salvation message, his behavioral values, and the action that this message did on the level of the human race.