Quill pen and documentYesterday I got a frantic phone call about our church’s website. It was a staff member wanting to know if our new alcohol policy was on the site. There was about to be an event on church property and she needed to let the people running it know our rules. She was delighted to hear it was, and I was delighted she’d called. I had always known having our policies on the web would be useful, and here was a great example.

I suspect it may be peculiar to my faith, or perhaps even to my church, but we are awash in policies and procedures. Give us a good challenge, and we answer it with a policy. Not that I think this a bad thing. To the contrary. I even enjoyed reading Robert’s Rules of Order. Seriously. When difficulties arise, and there’s a relevant policy, things typically calm down more quickly.

However, policies don’t do much good if you can’t get your hands on them. For many years our bylaws said they would be available in the church office. However, few of us had easy access to the office. Then even if we did, 80% of the time it was hard to find the needed document – and that’s assuming you knew it existed at all.

Enter the web. About four years ago, I started one of my major nag campaigns. “We need the policies and procedures on the web,” was my constant refrain. Gradually we started to get few on the site. And then, as luck would have it, I got put on a committee that was making recommendations about minor changes to our bylaws. I bet you can guess where that took us.

Our Bylaws Section 8.1.3 now reads: “A current and complete copy of the Policy and Procedures Manual shall be available from the church office and on the church website for reference by the general membership.”

Of course, as anyone who has been around the block a few times might guess, just having this in the bylaws still didn’t guarantee success. It just gave the web diva more leverage. And now, I’m happy to say, we have a fairly comprehensive set of Policies and Procedures on our site.

We also have developed a good process for getting policies on the web. The Board has a designated person (a past president of our congregation) who vets all policies, reformats them and gets them to me. I then take the original Word documents and keep them in a private folder on the web, while also posting a PDF version.

While even I will never argue that having policies on the web is easy to organize, let alone cool, nonetheless I think it’s one of the best uses of your time. If information is power, then this is a simple and effective way to share the power and promote a healthy congregation.