The annual business meetings of churches used to have a bad reputation. Many viewed these as a benign yet boring slog through boilerplate reports on the routine happenings of the previous year. It was a tedious necessity in the rhythm of the church year.

The challenge of getting a quorum to show up—even today—suggests that this assessment has not vanished from the earth.

If the meeting livened up at all, it was when the budget came up. Here, alas, was where the worst side was liable to surface. Some people were sure to raise objection to a line item or grouse about some perennial pet concern. I can recall a debate on a pastor’s salary, almost 40 years ago, which descended into an almost comical series of motions and amendments that, in the end, amounted to a derisory annual increase equivalent to a couple of weeks’ pulpit supply in a vacant congregation! That congregation did love her pastor, but when money came up it seemed to love a good scrap more! Sharp words were used, and personal godliness and communal harmony were the losers. Congregational meetings in another church would sometimes run into the wee hours of the morning and involve harsh criticism of the leadership in general and the pastor in particular. The traditional practice, in past days, of the pastor removing himself from the budgetary part of the meeting made room for the temptation to talk behind his back and sidestep the pattern of Matthew 18:15–20 for dealing with problems. Afterward, the pastor’s phone rang off the hook as his supporters would tell him what his detractors had been saying.

In many congregations, the annual meeting was the low point of the year. Thankfully, the trend in the last quarter-century seems positive. Pastors often remain in these meetings nowadays, and one hears fewer tales of tensions and disagreements marring these proceedings.

Whose Will Be Done?

Few passages of Scripture are better known than the Lord’s Prayer. Most of us can probably recite the third petition, which is, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10). The question in this context is, What is its bearing on the conduct of our church business meetings? One thing we can say without much risk of refutation is that our annual meetings will be fruitful and edifying to the degree that this petition is at the heart of the proceedings and in the hearts of the participants. Let us therefore begin to think of it as our mission statement for these gatherings, and let us apply it across the various spectra of issues to be addressed, attitudes to be formed, questions to be asked and decisions to be made. Let the Lord’s will be done and His will only!

God’s will, however, is not always a simple matter to discern. On the one hand there is His decretive will—that eternal decree, secret and settled in the heavens and not revealed in Scripture. This we cannot know until it is unveiled in the course of God’s providential dealings with us. Even then, it is invariably clothed in mystery. The proper response is to trust the Lord and offer due submission—and resolve to resist the itch to speculate where God has told us nothing. The other department of God’s will is His preceptive will—that which is revealed in Scripture and is known to us if we would read and understand the Word.

We may pray for God’s decrees to be “done on earth”—even if it is praying for we know not what to be done, we know not when. Therefore is rather abstract, and even formless. But it is surely His precepts—His known will—that confer meaning, content, purpose and focus upon our implementation of the third petition of Jesus’ great template for prayer. We pray for His revealed will to be done, for His precepts to be applied and for his plan of salvation to bear fruit in our world. There is nothing abstract about this, because one vital thread running through this prayer is our obedience, and that of others, to our Savior Jesus and the specifics of the Word of God. This is picked up in Shorter Catechism 103, which says, “In the third petition…we pray, That God, by His grace, would make us able and willing to know, obey and submit to His will in all things, as the angels do in heaven.” The Lord’s Prayer as a whole is for us, as believers seeking to be obedient to the Lord, that we would be empowered by the Lord to do His will from the heart.

It should be obvious from this that knowing God’s will is not enough. We are called to do His will! Thomas Watson (1620-86) writes, “Knowledge is the eye which must direct the foot of obedience. Knowledge alone is like a winter-sun which has no heat or influence; it does not warm the affections or purify the conscience. Judas was a great luminary, he knew God’s will, but he was a traitor” (The Lord’s Prayer, p. 152).

Two Hours’ Worth of Heaven?

We know already that we are called to do God’s will in our lives, including in how we conduct our annual business meetings and in how we conduct ourselves in them. We understand that this covers all the decisions we make, and all the things we think and say. Even when we disagree on some point of policy or some line item in the budget, we are aware of this and for the most part we are trying to do the right thing. That is the rub, because there are many gray areas that are matters of judgment and of conscience. It takes the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ to negotiate these shoals and potential causes of discord. Here is where the whole of the third petition comes in. The standard and measure of what we do and how we behave in seeking to do God’s will “on earth” is in the often-ignored words, “as it is done in heaven.” The catechism gets it right when it defines this in the words “as the angels do in heaven.” Doing God’s will in heaven is the model for the doing of God’s will here and now. New as the thought may be, even our annual business meeting is supposed to breathe the life of heaven itself!

You mean we aren’t supposed to brawl about the budget? You mean it isn’t (as was said to me a long time ago by a church member) the arena where “we get our say” (as over against the rest-of-the-year rule of pastor and elders)? We are to have heavenly harmony and bow to the gracious autocracy of our Father in heaven? Yes, we are indeed to be holy because our God is holy (1 Pet. 1:16). Not just trying to be holy, or content to be half-holy, but determined to be wholly holy! That is what God wants. That is His will for us on earth. And the proof of His seriousness is that our obedience is to echo that of heaven, where no one slips for a millisecond!

There is a great British chocolate product called Cadbury’s Flake. In my vanished Scottish youth, the advertisements touted this wonderful indulgence as “sixpence-worth of heaven.” Now, suppose we advertised our annual meetings as “Two hours’ worth of heaven.” Suppose we all covenanted, the Lord helping us, to make it so? After the wretched wrangling you may have witnessed in meetings over the years—and even contributed to—does this sound a tad unrealistic, if not downright silly? But it is God’s will. Heavenly sentiments are to guide our thoughts, words and actions, even in a business meeting. We are called to be as obedient as God’s ministering spirits, the angels of heaven. “It is not our golden words, if we could speak like angels,” says Thomas Watson, “but our works, our doing of God’s will which bears witness of our sincerity. We judge not the health of a man’s body by his high colour, but by the pulse of the arm where the blood chiefly stirs; so a Christian’s soundness is not to be judged by his profession, but by his obedient acting, his doing the will of God” (The Lord’s Prayer, p. 153).

Our prayer and our commitment must be to do the will of the Lord on earth, exactly “as it is done in heaven.” That is our God-given goal. This means at least three things for the annual meetings of our congregations:

1. We are called to think, speak and obey the Lord like the angels in heaven, here and now on earth.

2. We are called as congregational bodies to witness a good confession that partakes of the life of heaven through the victory of Christ.

3. We are called in this to serve the Lord, for, as “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you [every believer] free from the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:2), such that we may act in every situation upon the prayer He gave us.

To excuse ourselves on the ground that we are not actually in heaven and will never be made perfect in holiness on this side of eternity is an excuse that basically allows us to wink at the sins we plan to commit. So here is the watch word for all your congregational meetings: “Two hours’ worth of heaven.” And the Scripture that calls us to this is, “Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10).

—Gordon Keddie is pastor of the Southside Indianapolis, Ind., RPC. This article is based on a devotional he delivered at the congregation’s annual business meeting Jan. 29. Gordon is also a contributing editor for the Witness.