Making A Change

This is a re-post, about making a change (in fact, not making a change), and how we handled it in the Church: "Over the past months, we have been dealing with the issue of changing the time of our Sunday morning service, which is relatively late at 10:00 am. The issue came up unexpectedly in our leadership meeting. Our leadership wanted to vote immediately for a change to 9:30 am. I thought that this was too important an issue to act impulsively, and asked for time. I promised that we would take a decision at our leadership meeting the following month. In the meantime, I asked our assistant minister to investigate how this would affect various categories of people in the congregation. I also checked our constitutional requirements (the constitution states that "motions dealing with services" must be put to the members). Our assistant minister reported back that most members were indifferent, many were in favour, and a few were reluctant. So our leadership voted in favour of the change. However, now it needed to go to the members. The next issue was how to go about that. It was decided to share the decision with members immediately, as a firm and motivated proposal from the leadership, but not to push it. It would be voted on by all the members after two months, and, if passed, would come into effect a month later. The proposal was turned down by the members. In the meeting with the members, it became clear that a good number would be much affected by the change."