The shirt is not subtle. Across the chest, in block lettering, run the words MADE TO WORSHIP. Beneath or beside them, depending on the print, are two raised hands, palms open, fingers spread — the posture of a congregation mid-hymn. And then, small but legible, the citation: Psalm 95:6. The retail listing calls it a Christian praise and worship design; the visual observation confirms the lettering, the raised hands, and the printed reference. That is the whole object. No dove, no cross, no clever subversion. Just a claim, a gesture, and a verse address.

I want to take that combination seriously, because I think it is doing something more interesting than it first appears. A shirt that says “made to worship” is making an argument about human nature. A shirt that prints Psalm 95:6 is making an argument about what worship actually is. And a shirt that pictures raised hands is making an argument about the body. Put those three together and you have a small theology of worship compressed into a wearable sentence. The question for a volunteer team, a worship committee, or a pastor deciding whether to hand this to a youth group is not whether the design is nice. It is whether we agree with what the design assumes.

What the verse actually says

Psalm 95:6, in the familiar English rendering, reads: “O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker.” The Hebrew verbs are physical. Bow down and kneel are not metaphors for a feeling. They describe bodies on the ground. The verse is an invitation — “O come” — and the invitation is to a posture, not merely to a mood. Whatever else the psalm is doing, it is not asking the congregation to feel something. It is asking them to do something with their knees.

That matters for how we read the shirt. The printed words say made to worship. The printed reference points to a verse about bowing and kneeling. But the printed image is raised hands. There is a small tension there, and I do not think it is a mistake. Raised hands and bowed knees are both biblical postures of worship; the Psalms are full of both. The shirt has chosen the upward gesture, the one that reads as praise, rather than the downward gesture, the one that reads as submission. That is a choice, and it is worth naming. A design that pictured kneeling would say something slightly different about what we think worship is for.

I am not making a historical claim about where the raised-hands motif comes from in Christian art or contemporary worship culture. I do not have the sources in front of me for that, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I can say is what the shirt shows: two hands lifted, the words made to worship, and a verse that commands kneeling. The reader is left to hold those together.

The claim underneath the claim

“Made to worship” is a stronger sentence than it looks. It does not say “called to worship” or “invited to worship” or even “worshiping.” It says made. That is a claim about design. It asserts that worship is not an activity some people choose and others skip; it is the purpose for which a human being was constructed. The shirt is not advertising a preference. It is stating an anthropology.

For a small-church volunteer team, that distinction has practical weight. If worship is a preference, then the worship service is one program among several, and attendance is a consumer choice. If worship is a design feature, then the gathered service is something closer to maintenance — the regular exercise of a capacity that will otherwise atrophy or misdirect itself. I have watched committees argue about music style for forty-five minutes and never once ask what the congregation is for. The shirt asks the question in five words. That is its usefulness. It is a conversation starter that does not require a curriculum.

I would not overstate this. A shirt is not a catechism. It does not explain the doctrine of worship, it does not distinguish between corporate and private worship, and it does not tell you what to do on a Tuesday. But it does put a sentence on a body that a stranger can read in three seconds. And in a county where everybody already knows everybody’s church affiliation, that sentence is doing public work whether the wearer intends it or not.

The hands are the argument

Most Christian typography shirts stop at the words. This one does not. The raised hands are the part I keep coming back to, because they introduce a problem the words alone would avoid. Words on a shirt are a statement. Hands on a shirt are an invitation. The image asks the viewer to imagine the gesture, and imagining a gesture is the first step toward doing it.

That is either the design’s greatest strength or its greatest liability, depending on the room. In a congregation that already raises hands in worship, the shirt is a confirmation. In a congregation that does not, the shirt is a small provocation — not a scandal, but a question. Do we mean this? The design has taken a position on what worship looks like, and it has done so in a form that a teenager can wear to school and a grandmother can wear to the grocery store. The posture is the same; the context changes what it means.

I think that is why the shirt works as a volunteer-team conversation piece rather than a sermon illustration. You can lay it on a table and ask a room full of people a question that does not require anyone to defend their musical taste: When you picture worship, do you picture hands up or knees down? And what does that tell you about what you think you are doing? That is a better meeting than most of the ones I have sat through.

What I would not claim for it

I want to be careful here, because the temptation with a shirt like this is to make it carry more than it can. The shirt does not make anyone worship. It does not improve attendance, deepen a prayer life, or settle a worship war. It is a piece of printed cotton with a verse reference on it. The verse is doing the real work; the shirt is a signpost. If a church committee buys a batch of these for a retreat and expects the retreat to go differently because of the shirts, they will be disappointed, and they will have spent money on the wrong thing.

I also would not claim that the design is historically or liturgically precise. The raised hands are a real biblical posture, but they are not the posture Psalm 95:6 names. A careful reader might notice that. A careless reader will not, and the shirt will still say something true. That is the nature of devotional clothing: it is a prompt, not a treatise. The prompt is good. The treatise is the congregation’s job.

The practical question for a volunteer team

If you are the person who orders shirts for your church — the youth leader, the retreat coordinator, the pastor’s wife who ends up doing the Amazon order at eleven at night — the question is not whether this design is theologically adequate. It is whether it fits the conversation your people are already having. A shirt that says made to worship with raised hands and a psalm reference is a good fit for a congregation that is trying to think about worship as a whole-life calling rather than a Sunday slot. It is a less good fit for a congregation that is already divided over whether the service should be traditional or contemporary, because the raised hands will read as a side in that fight, whether or not the designer meant it that way.

That is the tradeoff, and it costs nothing to name it. The shirt is available at the Amazon listing for the Made to Worship Psalm 95:6 design. The listing identifies it as a standard t-shirt from Sunday Field. I have not worn it, washed it, or handed it to a congregation, and I am not going to pretend I have. What I can tell you is what the design says and what I think it is good for.

The design is a sentence, a gesture, and a citation. The sentence claims you were made for this. The gesture shows what it looks like. The citation tells you where to read more. That is a reasonable structure for a piece of clothing that is trying to do more than decorate a back. Whether it does more than that depends entirely on the room it walks into.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. This is not an independent review.

So here is the question I would put to your team, if you are the one who has to decide: when you picture the people in your pews worshiping, do you see their hands or their knees — and does the difference change what you plan for Sunday?

It is 6:10 on a Tuesday morning in March, and the phone in the church office is ringing because the funeral home has a Thursday 2 p.m. slot and a family with no church home. The funeral director is polite and efficient. He asks the only question he needs answered: is the sanctuary available, and what does it cost? You are standing in the hallway in your coat, coffee not yet poured, and you realize the church has no document that answers him.

That is the moment a non-member funeral policy is for. Not the theological argument about whether the man who died ever darkened the door deserved a funeral in a building he never supported. That argument is real, and it will happen, but it is not what the policy decides. The policy decides who can say yes, what the building costs, and what the church will not promise. Everything else is a conversation you can have with a family in a room with chairs.

The wrong frame: worthiness

Most church fights about non-member funerals are not really about funerals. They are about the unspoken ledger: who has been faithful, who has given, whose grandmother was baptized here in 1962, and whether the sanctuary is a community asset or a family inheritance. A policy that tries to settle that ledger will fail, because the ledger is different in every family and every pew.

The better frame is authority and cost. Who has the authority to open the building? What does it cost the church in staff hours, utilities, and volunteer time to open it? Who pays, and how? Those are answerable questions, and a written policy can answer them before the family arrives.

What a published policy actually contains

One useful comparison document is the funeral policy of The Fort Bend Church, a congregation in Sugar Land, Texas, published on its website. It is one church’s document, not a denominational standard and not a legal template, but it shows what a working policy looks like when it has to be used by staff and funeral directors.

The policy states plainly that conducting funerals for people with no connection to the church is a normal part of the ministerial obligation, but that it is up to the Senior Pastor’s discretion whether a non-member or inactive member funeral may be held at the church. That is the first decision: the policy names the decision-maker rather than pretending the question will not come up.

It also sets a fee schedule. Active members use the sanctuary free; non-members and inactive members pay $500. Musicians and the sound system operator are listed at $125 each. The policy defines “active member” partly by regular attendance and financial contribution, and extends the designation to homebound members and former pastors. That definition is doing real work: it tells the office who qualifies for the member rate without requiring the pastor to make a judgment call at the door.

The policy requires the Senior Pastor to approve all funeral arrangements and states that decisions outside the policy’s scope are at the Senior Pastor’s discretion. It sets building rules: all caskets closed during the service though they may be open during the viewing; displays and pictures appropriate to a worship setting; no nails, tacks, staples, or screws in walls or pews; all items removed within one hour of the service’s conclusion; only fresh cut flowers and planters in the sanctuary. It also states what the church does not do: no childcare for funeral services, no traffic control.

None of that is glamorous. All of it is the kind of thing a funeral director needs to know before Thursday.

The four decisions to put in writing

A policy for a 50-to-300 member congregation does not need to be long. It needs to answer four questions in writing, in plain language, and be short enough that a volunteer can find the answer while the funeral director is on hold.

1. Who has final approval authority, and who acts when that person is unavailable

“The pastor decides” is not a policy if the pastor is bi-vocational, on vacation, in the hospital, or driving a truck route with no signal. Name the decision-maker and name a backup. In a small church the backup is often a deacon chair or a trustees’ chair, and the policy should say whether that person can approve a non-member funeral on their own or only confirm a date and hold the request until the pastor is reachable.

Write down the exception process too. A policy that covers the ordinary case and gives the pastor a documented way to make an exception is better than a policy that tries to anticipate every family story. The exception should be recorded somewhere — a line in the funeral file, a note in the minutes — so the church can see later what it actually did.

2. The fee schedule, including staff honoraria

The funeral home needs a number before the family arrives. The volunteer sound operator needs to know whether they are being paid. Put both in the policy.

A worked example, clearly hypothetical: a 180-member bi-vocational church with an inherited 1948 sanctuary sets a $500 non-member use fee, keeps member use free, and lists $125 for the musician and $125 for the sound operator. The Thursday call is answered in five minutes: yes, the sanctuary is available; the fee is $500; the musician and sound operator are each $125; the pastor will call the family this afternoon. The funeral director has what he needs, and the church has not had to invent a number under pressure.

Whether $500 is the right number for your building is a local question. The point is that the number exists, is published, and is the same number for the funeral director, the family, and the volunteer.

3. Building-use rules

The Fort Bend policy’s rules are a useful checklist: casket open or closed and when; what may be displayed and where; what may not be attached to walls or pews; how long after the service items must be removed; what kind of flowers are allowed. Add whatever your building actually requires — the fellowship hall kitchen, the parking lot, the cemetery gate, the thermostat — and keep the list short enough to be read aloud on the phone.

4. What the church will not do

State the exclusions plainly so the funeral director can plan around them and the family is not surprised at the door. The Fort Bend policy states that the church does not provide childcare for funeral services and will not assist in traffic control. Your list may include the repast, the graveside setup, or the reception. Saying no in writing before the funeral is kinder than saying no at the door.

The relational cost of yes and the cost of no

Every non-member funeral has a cost, and it is not only the $500. It is the volunteer who leaves work early to run sound, the trustee who stays to lock up, the pastor who spends Thursday afternoon at the church instead of at the job that pays the mortgage. A policy that names those costs is honest. A policy that pretends they are free will produce resentment the first time the volunteer is not thanked.

The cost of no is also real. A church that refuses the funeral of a neighbor’s father will hear about it in the community for years, and the hearing will not be fair to the reasons. The policy cannot make that cost disappear. It can make the decision deliberate rather than accidental.

Communicate the policy to the congregation before the first non-member funeral. The first test case should not also be the first time members hear that the church charges $500. A short note in the newsletter, a line in the annual meeting, and a copy in the office will do more than a perfect document nobody has read.

What this article does not settle

Several questions sit outside what a published church policy can answer, and this article does not answer them.

Tax treatment of funeral fees and sanctuary-use payments is not addressed here. The IRS materials on charitable contributions describe when a payment to a qualified organization is deductible and when a benefit received reduces the deductible amount, but they do not address funeral or sanctuary-use fees specifically, and the church’s accountant should be asked before the policy states anything about tax.

Liability and insurance coverage for a non-member funeral are not addressed here. Whether the church’s policy covers a funeral open to the public, and what the insurer requires, is a question for the church’s insurer and attorney, not for a comparison document from another state.

North Carolina estate-law questions — who has legal authority to arrange a funeral when the deceased left no will or known family — are not addressed here. Those questions belong to a North Carolina attorney.

What this article does offer is a way to write the document that answers the 6:10 a.m. call: name the decision-maker, publish the fee, state the building rules, and say plainly what the church will not do. The rest is pastoral work, and it happens in a room with chairs.

Questions readers ask

Do we need a policy at all, or can the pastor just decide case by case?

The pastor can decide case by case, and many small churches do. The cost is that the decision is made under pressure, the fee is invented on the phone, and the volunteer does not know whether they are being paid. A short written policy does not remove the pastor’s discretion; it gives the pastor a default to depart from.

Should the fee be the same for members and non-members?

That is a local decision. The Fort Bend policy charges non-members $500 and members nothing, and defines “active member” partly by attendance and giving. A church that finds that definition too sharp can use a different line — membership roll, family relationship, community service — as long as the line is written down and applied consistently.

What if the family cannot pay?

The policy should say who can waive the fee and how the waiver is recorded. A church that waives quietly and often has a policy problem, not a generosity problem.

Does the policy need to be approved by the congregation?

That depends on your bylaws and on how the church handles building-use decisions. A policy that sets fees and names authority is the kind of thing many congregations expect to vote on. Check the bylaws before the first Thursday call, not after.

On the front of the shirt, in the plainest possible arrangement, are the words GOD SAYS I AM, a cross, and then a list: LOVED, CHOSEN, FORGIVEN, STRONG, HIS. That is the whole design. No verse reference, no church name, no decorative vine. Just a claim and five words that hang off it like a receipt.

I keep looking at the order of those words. Loved comes first, before chosen, before forgiven, before strong. That is not how most of us introduce ourselves to a volunteer team. We usually start with what we need from people — faithful, available, teachable, willing — and let love arrive later, if the year goes well. The shirt puts the identity before the assignment. I think that ordering is worth an hour of your next leadership meeting.

Here is the argument I want to make, and it is a small one. The shirt is not a program and it is not a slogan. It is a list of five words that a congregation already believes about itself in theory and routinely forgets in practice, especially in a 90-member church where the same fourteen people do everything. The design works because it is declarative. It does not say try to be. It says God says. Whatever else you think about printing theology on cotton, that grammatical move — from aspiration to announcement — is the move most volunteer teams need to make and almost never do.

What the design actually does

I am reading the artwork, not the marketing copy. The visual observation is straightforward: the phrase GOD SAYS I AM sits with a cross, and the identity words LOVED, CHOSEN, FORGIVEN, STRONG and HIS are printed as a set. I do not know the designer’s intent, and I am not going to pretend I do. But I can tell you what the arrangement does to a reader, and that is fair game.

First, the cross anchors the claim. Without it, God says I am loved is a greeting card. With it, the list is tied to a specific event — the thing we say we believe happened — rather than to a general mood of self-esteem. That matters for how you talk about it. If you hand this shirt to a teenager or a tired deacon, you are not handing them a compliment. You are handing them a summary of the gospel in five nouns and an adjective.

Second, the words are mixed. Forgiven sits next to strong, which is a strange pairing until you have sat with a church treasurer who has been doing the books since 2009 and is not sure anyone has noticed. Forgiveness and strength are not the same gift, and the shirt does not rank them. That flatness is the point. Nobody’s word is more important than anybody else’s word.

Third — and this is the part I would bring to a team — the list is second person turned first person. It says I am, not you are. That means it is a shirt you wear, not a shirt you hand out as a correction. There is a difference between a team that says you are loved to each other and a team whose members can say I am loved without flinching. The first is a compliment. The second is a discipline.

The conversation I would actually have

If you are a pastor or a lay leader and you want to use this object — or the idea behind it — with a volunteer team, here is the meeting I would run. It takes about forty-five minutes and costs nothing but the coffee.

Start with the list, not the shirt. Write the five words on a whiteboard: loved, chosen, forgiven, strong, his. Ask the team which one is hardest to believe on a Tuesday. Do not rush to fix it. In my experience the answers split along lines you did not expect — the person who teaches children’s Sunday school says forgiven, the person who counts the offering says strong, the person who has been on the nominating committee for eleven years says chosen and means it bitterly. Let that sit.

Then ask the harder question. Which of these words does our church actually say to people, and which one do we only say from the pulpit? A congregation can preach forgiven for a decade and never once tell its own volunteers that they are loved in a way that does not depend on showing up next Sunday. That gap is not hypocrisy. It is just neglect, and it is fixable.

Then name the cost. If you decide to take the list seriously, something has to change in your calendar or your budget. Maybe it is a quarterly volunteer dinner where nobody hands out assignments. Maybe it is a line in the annual budget for childcare so that young parents can serve without trading away their marriage. Maybe it is simply that the pastor stops opening the deacon meeting with a task list and starts it with a sentence about who these people are. None of those are expensive. All of them cost something, usually an hour and a habit.

Then close with one question. Ask each person to name the word they most need to hear this month, and write it down. Not to fix it. Just to know. That list is more useful to a pastor than most of the surveys I have seen.

Where the shirt fits and where it does not

I am not going to tell you this shirt will change your church. It is a shirt. It will not fix your bylaws, pay your insurance premium, or keep the seventeen-year-old from quitting the youth band in March. What it can do is put a sentence in front of people that they might not say out loud otherwise. If you are looking for a god says i am shirt — for a volunteer gift, a baptism, a confirmation class, or just because someone asked — this is the object in front of us, and the words are the right words.

But I would be careful about handing it out as a substitute for the conversation. A shirt that says forgiven given to a volunteer who has been carrying an unspoken failure for two years is not a gift. It is a reminder of the thing nobody has talked about. The design is honest, and honesty cuts both ways. If you give it, give it with a sentence: I saw this and I thought of you, and I meant the first word especially. That sentence is the ministry. The shirt is just the occasion.

There is also a practical question about where a shirt like this belongs in the life of a small church. It is not a vestment. It is not a uniform. It is the kind of thing a person wears to the grocery store in Mitchell County on a Saturday, which means it is doing public work whether the wearer intends it or not. That is worth naming to your team. A shirt with God says I am on the front is a small, portable claim about who is speaking and who is being spoken to. If your people wear it, they are not just expressing a private feeling. They are making a public statement that someone might ask them about in the checkout line. That is either an opportunity or a hazard, depending on the person and the day, and it is worth preparing for rather than pretending it will not happen.

The one thing I would change about how we talk about it

Most of the conversation around shirts like this — and I have had it, and I have been wrong in it — turns on whether the wearer feels loved, chosen, forgiven, strong. That is a therapeutic frame, and it is not the frame the design uses. The design says God says. The question is not whether you feel it. The question is whether you are willing to live as though it is true when you do not feel it. That is a harder and better question, and it is the one I would put to a volunteer team before anybody puts on the shirt.

So here is what I would do with this object in a 90-member church with a part-time pastor and a treasurer who has been at it since the first Bush administration. I would buy one. I would not buy fifty. I would give it to the person on the team who is most likely to be surprised by it, and I would say the sentence about the first word. Then I would wait and see what happens at the next meeting. If nothing happens, I have lost twenty dollars and learned something about my own assumptions. If something happens, I have a conversation I did not have to schedule.

That is not a strategy. It is a small act of attention, which is most of what ministry in a church this size actually is.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

One question back to you: if you wrote the five words your congregation most needs to hear on a Tuesday, what would they be — and which one would you be afraid to say out loud?

On the front of the shirt, in plain block lettering, are four words: TEACHING IS MY MINISTRY. Beneath or beside them sits a small apple, and the printed reference Romans 12:7. That is the whole design. No flourish, no clever subline, no second verse. The apple does the cultural work of saying school; the lettering does the theological work of saying ministry; the reference points the reader back to a passage about gifts and offices in the body of Christ.

I want to take the shirt at its word rather than treat it as a slogan. The interesting thing about this design is not that it is religious. Plenty of shirts are religious. The interesting thing is the claim it makes about a job that most Southern Appalachian congregations treat as adjacent to the church rather than inside it. The shirt says teaching is ministry. That is a stronger sentence than it looks, and it is worth a conversation among the volunteers and staff who run the Christian education wing of a small church.

What the design actually says

I am reading the artwork as observed, not as a marketing description. The lettering is the dominant element. The apple is a conventional schoolroom sign, not a theological symbol, and I would not press it into one. The Romans 12:7 reference is printed, which matters: it invites the wearer and the reader to go look it up rather than take the shirt’s word for it.

Romans 12, as it is commonly translated, lists gifts and roles within the body and includes teaching among them. I am not going to build a doctrinal argument on a single verse, and the shirt does not ask me to. What the shirt does is put the word ministry next to the word teaching and let the reader decide whether that is a stretch or a plain fact. That is the whole editorial occasion here.

The distinction the shirt is making

In a lot of small churches, ministry is what happens on Sunday morning and Wednesday night, and teaching is what happens Monday through Friday in a building the church does not own. The two are kept in separate columns. The Sunday school teacher is a volunteer; the schoolteacher is an employee. One is thanked from the pulpit; the other is thanked at a banquet in May. The shirt collapses the columns.

I think that collapse is useful, and I think it is also incomplete. Useful, because the woman who teaches third grade in a public school and then teaches the middle school class on Sunday night is doing one kind of work with two different employers, and she ought to hear that both are ministry. Incomplete, because the shirt cannot say what ministry costs in either setting. It cannot say that the schoolteacher is now managing a classroom with a substitute shortage and a new reading curriculum and a parent who wants a conference at 7:15 in the morning. It cannot say that the Sunday school teacher is now teaching a class of four with a curriculum from 1998 and a copier that jams. The shirt makes the claim; the congregation has to decide what the claim requires.

A conversation for the education committee

If I were sitting with the Christian education committee of a 120-member church, I would use the shirt as the opening question, not the answer. Here is how I would frame it.

First, name the teachers in the room. Not the ones you wish were in the room. The ones who are actually there. In most small churches that is a handful of people, several of them over sixty, some of them teaching the same class they have taught for a decade. Ask them plainly: do you think of what you do on Sunday as ministry, or as a favor you are doing the church? The answers will tell you whether the shirt’s claim is already believed or still needs to be taught.

Second, separate the two kinds of support. A teacher who works in a public school and teaches in the church has two sets of needs. The school needs supplies and patience and a working copier. The church needs a curriculum that is not older than the students and a substitute list that is not one name long. A committee that lumps these together will fund neither well. A committee that separates them can at least see what it is actually being asked to pay for.

Third, decide what the church will say publicly. The shirt is a public statement. If the church commissions its teachers in the fall, or prays over them in August, or recognizes them in a bulletin insert, that is the congregational version of the shirt. If the church does none of those things, the shirt is doing work the church has declined to do. That is worth noticing. It is not a scandal, but it is a gap.

What the shirt cannot do

A shirt is not a commissioning service. It is not a budget line. It is not a substitute for the awkward conversation with the woman who has taught the fourth grade class for eleven years and is tired. The shirt can start a conversation; it cannot finish one. I would be wary of any church that buys the shirt for its teachers and considers the matter handled. The purchase is the easy part. The hard part is the January Wednesday night when the teacher calls in sick and there is no one on the list.

I also want to be careful about the word ministry itself. It is a word that can flatten distinctions. The schoolteacher down the road who is not a believer is not doing ministry in the sense the shirt means, and I do not think the shirt is claiming that. The shirt is a personal statement of vocation, worn by someone who understands their work as an offering. That is a narrower claim than all teaching is ministry, and it is a more honest one. The wearer is saying something about their own work, not drafting everyone else into it.

The apple and the reference

The apple is the part of the design I find least interesting and most revealing. It is a schoolroom shorthand so old it has become invisible. Put an apple next to the word teaching and no one has to explain the connection. But the apple is also a gift, historically, given to a teacher by a student or a family. That is the economy the shirt is quietly invoking: teaching as a gift received and a gift given. The Romans reference does something similar. It places teaching inside the body’s economy of gifts, where different members have different functions and none is self-sufficient.

I would not overread the apple. It is a visual cue, not an argument. But it is the right cue for this design, because it keeps the shirt from floating off into abstraction. The lettering makes the claim; the apple keeps it in a classroom; the reference keeps it in the church. Three elements, three registers, one sentence.

Where the shirt fits

The shirt is available as a standard t-shirt through the listing at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HLDM8YPR. I am not going to tell you it is the perfect gift for Teacher Appreciation Week, because I have not worn it and I do not know how it fits or how it washes. What I can say is that the design is legible, the claim is specific, and the reference is printed rather than implied. Those are the things I would check before buying any slogan shirt for someone else.

If you are the teacher, the shirt is a way of saying out loud what you may only say quietly to yourself on a hard Tuesday in February. If you are the pastor or the education chair, the shirt is a prompt. Buy one for the teacher who has been carrying the middle school class, and then ask her what she needs for the spring. The shirt will not answer. But it may get the conversation started, and in a small church that is often the most a piece of clothing can do.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. This is not an independent review.

So here is my question back to you: in your congregation, is teaching named as ministry from the front, or is it treated as a favor the church is grateful for and does not fund? The answer will tell you more about your education budget than any line item will.

The shirt reads, in full, LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW. The words wrap around four smiling root vegetables — a carrot, a radish, a beet, and an onion — each drawn with its roots visible in the soil. The pun is doing double duty: root as in the part of the plant underground, and root as in the thing you do for a teammate. The design is not subtle about the connection. The roots are right there, drawn in, labeled by the picture itself.

I keep coming back to that. The shirt does not show a harvest. It does not show a basket of vegetables on a table or a row of seedlings breaking the surface. It shows the part of the plant that stays under the dirt, and it shows four different root vegetables side by side, each with its own shape and color and root structure, all of them smiling. That is a specific visual argument, and it is worth taking seriously before we treat the shirt as a cute gift for the church garden committee.

What the artwork actually shows

Four root vegetables. Carrot, radish, beet, onion. Each one has a face — a smile, eyes — and each one has roots drawn below the soil line. The text surrounds them. The composition is circular or near-circular, the words forming a ring around the vegetables, so that the sentence and the plants are one unit. You cannot read the shirt without looking at the roots. You cannot look at the roots without reading the sentence.

That is not a generic gardening slogan with a clip-art carrot dropped in the corner. The design puts the underground part at the center. The visible, above-ground part of a carrot is a spray of green leaves; the part we eat is the root. The same is true of the radish, the beet, the onion. What the shirt celebrates is the part you have to dig for.

I am not making a botanical claim beyond what the drawing shows. The drawing shows roots. The drawing shows soil. The drawing shows four different vegetables with four different root shapes. That is the visual evidence, and it is enough to build a conversation on.

The volunteer team conversation this shirt opens

Most volunteer teams can tell you what they do. They can list the ushers, the nursery workers, the people who set up the fellowship hall, the ones who count the offering, the ones who make the coffee. What they cannot always tell you is what is happening underneath — who is tired, who is carrying something heavy, who has been showing up for eleven years and has never once been asked how they are doing.

The shirt’s argument is that growth is a root-level activity. You do not watch a beet grow by staring at the leaves. You watch it by tending the soil, by watering, by waiting, by noticing what is happening where you cannot see. And you do it together — the shirt says each other, not yourself. The four vegetables are not competing for the same patch of dirt. They are drawn as a set, each with its own root system, each smiling.

That is a useful frame for a volunteer team that has been running on fumes. The question is not are we doing enough. The question is what is happening in the soil. Who is rooting for whom? Who is watching for whose growth? Who noticed that the person who has been setting up chairs every Sunday for three years has not been asked to sit down in a while?

Why the root vegetables matter more than a flower would

A flower shirt would make a different argument. A flower is the visible, above-ground, decorative part. A flower says look at what we produced. A root vegetable says look at what is holding us in place. The carrot, the radish, the beet, the onion — these are not showy plants. They are ordinary, earthy, kitchen-garden crops. They are the kind of thing a small-church volunteer grows in a raised bed behind the parsonage and brings to the potluck in a plastic bowl.

That is the register of the shirt. It is not a prosperity-gospel harvest. It is not a bumper crop. It is four smiling vegetables with their roots showing, and the words let’s root for each other. The humor is gentle. The metaphor is agricultural. The theology, if you want to call it that, is about patience and mutual attention rather than visible results.

I would not preach a sermon from this shirt. But I would put it in front of a volunteer team that has been measuring itself by attendance numbers and asking why the growth is not showing. The shirt’s answer is that the growth is underground, and the work is rooting for each other while it happens.

A practical use for the conversation

Here is one way to use the shirt’s argument without turning it into a program. At your next volunteer gathering — the one before the fall kickoff, or the one after the Christmas cleanup — put a single question on the table: Who on this team have you seen grow in the last year, and what did you see that other people might have missed?

That question does two things. It asks people to name growth that is not visible on a spreadsheet. And it asks them to root for someone out loud, which is a different act than privately appreciating them. The shirt’s phrase is let’s root for each other — a plural invitation, a shared practice. The conversation is the practice.

You do not need the shirt to have the conversation. But the shirt is a useful object to have in the room, because it makes the metaphor visible. It is a conversation piece in the literal sense: something you can point to and say, this is what we are talking about. The roots are drawn in. The soil is drawn in. The smiling faces are drawn in. Nobody has to explain the pun.

The shirt is available here: Let’s Root For Each Other And Watch Each Other Grow Garden.

What the shirt does not claim

I want to be careful here. The shirt does not claim to improve your volunteer retention. It does not claim to grow your church. It does not claim to cure burnout or fix conflict or make your nominating committee suddenly find three new deacons. It is a shirt with a pun on it. The argument I am making is about the conversation the artwork opens, not about any effect the shirt has on the wearer or the church.

What the artwork does is put a specific image in front of a specific phrase. The image is four root vegetables with their roots showing. The phrase is let’s root for each other and watch each other grow. The two belong together. The shirt is a way of carrying that pairing into a room where a volunteer team is trying to figure out how to keep going.

That is enough. It does not need to be more than that.

One question back to you

When was the last time someone on your volunteer team told you, out loud, that they had seen you grow — and named the thing they saw that you thought nobody noticed?

Disclosure: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

The artwork is simple enough to take in at a glance: the words CATCH UP WITH JESUS wrap around a red ketchup bottle, and two tomatoes sit nearby. The pun is the whole engine of the thing. Catch up becomes ketchup, and a condiment becomes a devotional prompt. I keep looking at it because it does something small and useful: it turns a vague spiritual intention into a concrete, slightly ridiculous image you could actually talk about at a kitchen table.

That is not nothing for a volunteer team. Most of our conversations about invitation and follow-up stall on abstraction. We say we want people to grow, to return, to take a next step, and everyone nods. Then the meeting ends and nothing changes. A shirt like this one, with its bottle and its tomatoes, gives you a handle. You can hold up the idea of catching up and ask what it would actually mean this quarter.

I want to be careful about what the shirt is and is not. The design is a pun, not a program. It does not tell you how to disciple anyone, and it does not promise that wearing it will start a conversation. What it does is put a question in plain language: are you catching up, or are you just keeping the bottle in the fridge? That question is worth borrowing for a board meeting or a Sunday school hour, even if nobody in the room owns the shirt.

The object itself is a standard t-shirt from Sunday Field, sold under the title Catch Up With Jesus Ketchup Bottle Funny Christian Pun. The printed design is the phrase and the illustration, nothing more elaborate. I am not going to tell you it is soft or that it fits a certain way, because I have not worn it and I do not know. What I can describe is what the artwork shows and what that artwork might be good for in a small congregation that is trying to talk honestly about follow-up.

Here is the argument I would make to a volunteer team. The ketchup pun works because it names a real gap without scolding anyone. Catch up implies you are behind, but it also implies the gap is closable. That is a better posture for a follow-up conversation than either guilt or vague optimism. If your church has a list of people who visited once and never came back, or members who drifted after a funeral, or families who show up at Christmas and Easter and nowhere else, the shirt’s phrase gives you a way to ask the question without making it a referendum on anyone’s faith. What would it look like to catch up with Jesus together this season? That is a question a lay leader can ask. It does not require a program budget.

The risk is that the pun becomes the whole conversation. A clever shirt can get a laugh and then sit in the drawer. If you use the image as a discussion starter, you have to move past the joke to the actual names and dates. Who are we thinking of? When did we last see them? Who is going to make the call, and by what date? The shirt does not answer those questions. It just makes the first sentence easier to say.

I would also be wary of treating the shirt as a tool for someone else’s conviction. It is one thing to wear a pun about catching up; it is another to hand it to a lapsed member as a hint. The design is lighthearted, and that lightness is a gift, but it can curdle if it becomes a passive-aggressive nudge. The better use is internal: a volunteer team wearing the question themselves, admitting they are also behind, and then making a plan to do something about it. That keeps the humor aimed in the right direction.

There is a small theological point here that I think is worth stating plainly, and it is my interpretation, not a claim about the shirt’s intent. The phrase catch up with Jesus can sound like Jesus is the one who is ahead and waiting, which is true enough, but it can also sound like the Christian life is a race to close a gap by our own effort. The ketchup bottle softens that. A bottle of ketchup is not a training plan. It is something you pass at the table. If the image does any spiritual work, it might be to remind us that catching up happens in ordinary places, over ordinary meals, with ordinary people, and that the point is presence, not performance. That is a reading, not a doctrine, and your team may land somewhere else.

For a small church with no staff and a long list of things that did not get done last year, the appeal of a shirt like this is that it costs almost nothing to try. You do not need a curriculum. You need a question and a date. I would put it on the agenda for the next deacons’ meeting or the next Sunday school class and give it fifteen minutes. Ask people to name one person they have not caught up with, in the plain sense of the phrase, and one step they could take this month. Then write it down. The shirt is not the point. The list is the point.

What I would not do is buy a stack of them and call it a campaign. That turns a small, human question into a merchandise moment, and it puts the emphasis on the object rather than the people. One shirt, worn by someone who is willing to say I am behind too, is worth more than a box of them handed out with a memo. The design is good enough to start a conversation. It is not good enough to replace one.

So here is the question I would leave with your team: if you had to name one person you have been meaning to catch up with, and one date by which you will actually do it, what would those be? Write them down before the meeting ends. The ketchup bottle can stay on the shirt. The catching up has to happen in a kitchen or a pew or a gravel driveway, and it has to happen on a calendar.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

The shirt is not subtle. Four words in bold white capitals across the chest — I HATE SATAN — with a small cross set into the lettering. No Scripture reference, no soft-focus dove, no clever subversion. Just the declaration, the cross, and the wearer.

I have been thinking about that design for a week now, and not because I want one. I have been thinking about it because it is the most theologically loaded piece of clothing I have seen in a while, and it is loaded in a direction that makes a lot of church people flinch. We are comfortable with shirts that say Blessed. We are comfortable with God is good. We are less comfortable with a shirt that names an enemy out loud.

That discomfort is worth examining, because the New Testament does not share it. Peter tells a church under pressure to be sober and watchful because their adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion. Paul tells the Ephesians that their struggle is not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers. James tells us to resist the devil and he will flee. The language of the enemy is not a fringe obsession in Scripture. It is ordinary pastoral vocabulary. And yet most of us would rather preach a sermon series on purpose than say the word Satan from the pulpit on a Sunday morning.

So the shirt does something a lot of our ministry language does not: it takes the enemy seriously enough to name him in public. That is not nothing. In a small church where the same twelve families have been fighting the same quiet fight for a decade — the one nobody names from the floor at the business meeting — a shirt that says I hate Satan is a reminder that the real opposition is not the deacon who voted against the budget.

But here is where I want to slow down, because the shirt is also a test of our pastoral instincts. The word hate is doing a lot of work in that design. It is a strong word, and it is the right word in one sense — we are to hate what destroys, to abhor what is evil and cling to what is good. But it is a dangerous word in another sense, because the same tongue that says I hate Satan can slide very quickly into hating the person in the pew who disagrees with us about the carpet color. The line between spiritual warfare and ordinary church conflict is thinner than we like to admit, and a shirt does not draw that line for us. We have to draw it ourselves.

That is the conversation I would want to have with a volunteer team, if one of them showed up wearing this on a Wednesday night. Not a lecture. A question. What do you think that shirt is saying, and who do you think it is saying it to? Because the answer tells you something about how that volunteer sees the room. If they see the room as a battleground where the enemy is the person across the table, the shirt is a problem. If they see the room as a place where the real enemy is the one who wants to divide it, the shirt is a witness.

The design itself is worth noting for what it does not do. It does not put the cross in the background as decoration. The cross is small and set into the lettering, which means the cross is not an afterthought — it is the answer to the declaration. I hate Satan is not a complete sentence theologically. The complete sentence is I hate Satan because Christ has defeated him. The cross in the design is doing that work, quietly, in the middle of the shout. That is a better piece of visual theology than it gets credit for.

I would not put this shirt on a list of things every church member should own. I would not hand it out at the door. But I would defend the impulse behind it, and I would use it as a teaching moment in a small group or a youth meeting or a men’s breakfast where the conversation has gotten too polite to be honest. The shirt is available here if you want to see the exact design for yourself.

The real question the shirt puts to a small-church leader is not whether you would wear it. It is whether your people know how to name the enemy without naming each other. If they do not, a bold shirt will not teach them. If they do, the shirt is just a signpost pointing at something they already know.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

So here is my question back to you: when was the last time you named the enemy out loud in a room full of your own people — and did they hear you naming the devil, or did they hear you naming them?

On the front of the shirt, the words run in comic-book capitals: JESUS IS MY SUPERHERO. Beneath the lettering, a gold cross wears a small red cape. That is the whole design. No lightning bolts, no city skyline, no muscular figure in a leotard. Just the cross, caped, and the claim in a typeface borrowed from Saturday-morning cartoons.

I keep coming back to that cape. A cross is an instrument of execution. A cape is what a child ties around his neck before he jumps off the porch. Put them together and you have a theological sentence a six-year-old can read and a forty-six-year-old can argue with. That is not a small thing for a volunteer team to sit with.

If your children’s ministry has a fall kickoff, a Christmas program, or a new class of second graders coming up the basement stairs, this shirt is worth more than a glance. Not because it solves anything. Because it asks a question your team has probably never put on a legal pad: what exactly are we telling children when we hand them a hero?

What the artwork actually does

The lettering is the loudest element. Comic-style capitals lean forward; they are built to be read at a distance, across a fellowship hall, from the back of a van. The cross is smaller, centered, and gold, which in church visual vocabulary usually signals something precious or something triumphant. The red cape is the only motion in the design. It is not attached to a person. It is attached to the cross.

I read that as a deliberate choice, though I cannot tell you what the designer intended. The cape does not make the cross into a cartoon. It makes the cross into the thing that moves. Whatever else is happening on that shirt, the cross is the actor, not the backdrop.

That is a different claim than most children’s curriculum makes. Most of what we hand out in Sunday school treats Jesus as a friend, a shepherd, a teacher, a light. All true. But a hero is a category children already own. They know what a hero does: shows up when everyone else has run, takes the hit, and comes back. If we are going to borrow that category, we ought to know what we are borrowing.

The conversation your team has not had

Here is the practical problem. A shirt like this will show up in your children’s wing, at a Wednesday night, at a grandparents’ day program. Somebody’s granddaughter will wear it. And the adults in the room will have two reactions at once. Half will smile. Half will wince, because superhero language feels like it flattens the cross into a marketing slogan.

Both reactions are worth hearing. I would put the shirt on a table at your next volunteer meeting and ask three questions. Not to reach a verdict. To find out what your team actually believes about how children learn the faith.

First: what does a hero do that a friend does not? A friend stays. A hero rescues. Children understand the difference before they can explain it. If we tell them Jesus is their hero, we are telling them they needed rescuing. That is a harder sentence than most of our welcome packets contain. Is your team ready to say it out loud, in language a parent can repeat at the supper table?

Second: what happens when the cape comes off? Every child in your building has watched a superhero movie where the hero fails, quits, or turns out to be the villain. The category is not stable. If Jesus is filed under ‘superhero,’ a ten-year-old may eventually file him under ‘fictional.’ That is not a reason to avoid the shirt. It is a reason to teach the difference between a hero who escapes and a Lord who dies. The cross on that shirt is already doing some of that work. Your teachers need to finish the sentence.

Third: who is the shirt for? The listing describes it as a children’s shirt, and the lettering is sized for a child’s eye. But the adults who buy it are making a statement too. Some are grandparents who want a birthday gift that says something. Some are parents who want a school-day shirt that quietly answers a question. Some are volunteers who want the children in their care to walk out of the building wearing the lesson. None of those is wrong. But they are different purchases, and your team should know which one it is encouraging.

What I would not do

I would not build a whole quarter of curriculum around a t-shirt. I would not order a matching set for the choir. I would not treat the shirt as evidence that your children’s ministry is healthy or that your theology is sound. It is a piece of printed cotton with a caped cross on it. It can start a conversation. It cannot carry one.

I also would not sneer at it. There is a strain in small-church leadership that treats anything cheerful as shallow. That strain has emptied more children’s wings than any comic font ever will. The shirt is trying to say something true in a register children already speak. The question is whether the adults around them can translate it without either flattening it or apologizing for it.

A way to use it

If you want a concrete next step, here is one that costs nothing and takes twenty minutes. At your next children’s ministry meeting, read the shirt out loud. Then read the passion narrative from Mark 15 out loud. Then ask the team one question: where does the cape show up in that story?

The answer, I think, is the centurion. A Roman soldier, standing at the foot of a cross, watching a man die in the dark, says the thing nobody expected: surely this man was the Son of God. He is not a hero. He is a witness. But he is the first person in Mark’s Gospel to get the title right, and he gets it at the moment when every hero would have run.

That is the conversation I would want a shirt like this to start. Not ‘is Jesus cool.’ Not ‘is this appropriate for children.’ But ‘what kind of rescue are we actually talking about, and who is standing close enough to see it.’

You can find the shirt here: Jesus Is My Superhero Christian Kids Girls Boys Faith.

One question back to you

When the children in your care leave the building wearing something that names Jesus, what do you hope they think they are wearing? A costume, a badge, or a witness? The answer will shape what you teach them long after the shirt has been outgrown.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. This is not an independent review.

I keep looking at the shirt. The words are set in a plain, confident type: LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY JESUS. A cross is worked into the design, and the whole thing reads less like a slogan than like a door left open. It is the kind of sentence that begins a conversation rather than ends one.

That is the argument I want to make about this particular piece of clothing. The phrase is not a tract. It is not a four-point outline pressed into cotton. It is an invitation, and invitations have a different grammar than arguments. They require a listener, a willingness to be interrupted, and a story that belongs to the person telling it. For a small-church volunteer team, that distinction matters more than it first appears.

I have sat in enough fellowship halls to know how easily our evangelism training slides into scripts. We hand out folded pamphlets. We rehearse three questions and a closing prayer. We mean well, and some of that is faithful. But the shirt says something else. It says let me tell you, which assumes a relationship, a table, a moment where someone actually wants to hear. That is a harder posture to teach and a better one to practice.

If you are looking at the shirt itself, the listing is here: Let Me Tell You About My Jesus Christian Faith. The design is straightforward typography with a cross, and I am not going to pretend it is a curriculum. It is a shirt. But shirts are worn in public, and public words do work.

Here is what I would put in front of a volunteer team: not a lesson on how to defend the faith in seven minutes, but a conversation about what we actually say when someone asks. Most of the people in your pews have a Jesus story that is not dramatic. It involves a hospital hallway, a marriage that held, a season of doubt that did not kill them, a stranger who showed up with a casserole. Those stories are not less true because they are small. They are often more credible because they are small.

The shirt’s phrase also carries a quiet correction for those of us who lead. It puts the emphasis on my Jesus, which can sound possessive until you remember that testimony is always personal. We are not asking people to recite a doctrinal statement. We are asking them to say what they have seen. That is a different assignment, and it is one a fifty-year-old treasurer and a bi-vocational pastor and a teenager in the back row can all attempt.

I would not hand this shirt out as a uniform. I would not make it a campaign. I would wear it, or let someone in the congregation wear it, and then I would be ready for the question that follows. Because the sentence on the front is not the end of the conversation. It is the beginning of one, and the person wearing it had better be prepared to listen as much as to speak.

There is a temptation in small-church life to treat every object as a program. A shirt becomes an outreach initiative. A coffee mug becomes a stewardship campaign. I understand the impulse. We are tired, and we want things to count. But the phrase on this shirt does not ask to be managed. It asks to be inhabited. The difference is whether the person wearing it has actually told someone about Jesus lately, or only worn the words.

So here is the question I would bring to your next volunteer meeting, and the one I am bringing to mine: when was the last time you told someone about your Jesus, not in a sermon, not in a class, but in an ordinary conversation where you were not sure how it would land? If the answer is a long time ago, the shirt is not the problem. The shirt is just a reminder that the door is still open.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

Every October, the nominating committee of a congregation like ours sits down with a legal pad and a problem. The problem is not that nobody will serve. The problem is that the same six names keep coming up, and everyone in the room knows it before the first name is written down.

I want to be careful here, because the temptation is to make this a story about people. It is not. It is a story about a document. The slate that gets printed in the bulletin and voted on at the annual meeting is the output of a process, and if the process only knows how to reach six people, it will reach those six people every year no matter how sincerely the committee prays about it.

What follows is not a case record from a particular church. It is a decision debrief built from the governance documents that congregations actually use, with the dollar and hour costs named where I can name them honestly. Where I describe a scenario, I am describing a hypothetical, not a memory.

The document at the center

The document is the bylaws article on nominations and elections. Not the committee’s intentions. Not the pastor’s preferences. The article that says who nominates, how long they serve, whether the congregation may nominate from the floor, and what happens when a term ends.

Most small-church bylaws I have read say something like this: the nominating committee shall present a slate of officers at the annual meeting. That is the whole procedure. It does not say how the committee gathers names. It does not say how long the suggestion period runs. It does not say whether the committee may contact a candidate before the congregation has had a chance to suggest one. It does not say what happens when a sitting officer has served twelve years and the committee cannot imagine the finance chair being anyone else.

When the bylaws are silent, the committee fills the silence with habit. Habit is not wicked. Habit is just the path of least resistance, and in a congregation of 120 people, the path of least resistance runs through the same six front porches.

Why the same six names keep appearing

Look at what a typical single-slate process actually does. One congregation’s written nominating best practices, adopted and revised over two decades, states the tradition plainly: only one candidate is placed on the written annual ballot for each office, and at the annual meeting, “No nominations from the floor are allowed, and no ballots.” The document gives reasons — that contested elections can hurt people, that elections become popularity contests, that prayerful discernment by a small committee is preferable to a congregational vote. Those are not unreasonable concerns. But the same document also instructs the committee to “make an effort to provide a balance of lay leadership from both long term members and newer members of the congregation and not simply choose those who are familiar to them for offices.”

Read those two provisions together and you see the tension. The committee is told to widen the circle, and it is also given a process that makes widening the circle optional. There is no floor nomination to catch a name the committee missed. There is no ballot to reveal that the congregation knows someone the committee does not. The only check on the committee’s acquaintance network is the committee’s own discipline.

That is a document problem. It is fixable with a document.

The levers a congregation can actually write into its bylaws

Here are the levers I would put in front of a bylaws committee, drawn from documents other congregations have already adopted. None of these is novel. All of them cost more in meeting hours than in dollars, and the meeting hours are real.

Term limits with a one-year gap

The same best-practices document states: “With the exception of the Treasurer, no Officer may be elected to a third consecutive term in the same position until at least one (1) year has passed.” That single sentence does more to break the same-six-names pattern than any exhortation to the committee. It forces the committee to build a bench, because the bench is the only way the work gets done when a term ends.

The treasurer exception is worth noticing. It is an admission that some roles are hard to fill and that continuity has real value. A congregation can decide for itself which roles get that exception. The point is to decide on purpose rather than by default.

A rule barring paid staff from elected office

The same document provides that “Elected Officers of the Congregation may not also serve as paid members of the Church Staff.” In a bi-vocational setting, this matters more than it looks. When the person who keeps the books is also the person who signs the checks and also the person who nominates the people who oversee the books, the congregation has lost the separation that makes oversight mean anything. The rule costs nothing to write and protects everyone involved, including the staff member.

A defined suggestion window before any contact

The document directs that “The Nominating Committee should not contact any potential nominees until after the suggestion period is completed and the congregation has had a least four Sundays to make their recommendations.” Four Sundays is a concrete number. It converts “we couldn’t find anyone” from a vague complaint into a measurable process failure. If the committee opens the suggestion window on the first Sunday of September and closes it on the last Sunday, the congregation knows when to speak and the committee knows when it may begin calling.

The cost is time. Four Sundays is a month of the committee’s calendar. In a church that is already stretched thin, that month feels expensive. It is still cheaper than a slate that the congregation receives with resignation because no one knew how to suggest a name.

Staggered terms for the committee itself

A United Methodist congregation’s nominating sub-committee charter provides that the committee’s members, excluding the senior pastor and a board representative, “shall be divided into three classes, one of which shall be elected each year for a three-year term.” Staggering does two things. It keeps institutional memory on the committee, and it prevents any single annual meeting from replacing the whole group at once. In a small congregation, staggering also means the committee is never entirely composed of people who have never done the work.

Confidentiality that protects candidates without entrenching a circle

A Church of Scotland guideline for nominating committees states that the committee’s work “is confidential at all times” and “should not be discussed with other members of the congregation or with others outside the congregation, including family members.” That is a strong rule, and it exists for a good reason: a candidate who is being considered should not be exposed to gossip, and a sitting minister should not be undermined by a leak.

But confidentiality has a shadow side. When the only people who know the process are the six people on the committee, the process becomes the committee’s private property. The practical answer is to keep deliberations confidential while publishing the process and the timeline. The congregation should know when the window opens, when it closes, when the committee will report, and what the qualifications are. It should not know who is being discussed. That distinction is the difference between a confidential process and a closed one.

The conflict-of-interest question, honestly

Here is where I have to be careful about what the sources actually say and what they do not.

The IRS Publication 1828, the Tax Guide for Churches and Religious Organizations, states that churches and religious organizations, like all organizations exempt under IRC Section 501(c)(3), are prohibited from activities that result in inurement of the organization’s income or assets to insiders — persons having a personal and private interest in the activities of the organization. The publication names the minister, board members, and officers as possible insiders. That is a real constraint, and it applies whether or not the congregation has ever thought about it.

What the retrieved sources do not do is prescribe a specific board composition or a specific percentage of independent members. A legal explainer on nonprofit board composition notes that the IRS governance guidance says a governing board “should include independent members and should not be dominated by employees or others who are not, by their very nature, independent individuals because of family or business relationships.” The same explainer is explicit that the widely cited 51% figure is a sector benchmark, not an IRS regulation. I am not going to dress up a benchmark as a rule.

The practical implication for a nominating committee is narrower and more useful than a percentage. If the committee’s product is the slate, then the committee itself is where insider familiarity does its work. Writing recusal language into the nominating document — not only into a general board policy — is the specific fix. If a committee member’s spouse or business partner is under consideration, that member should disclose the relationship and step out of the discussion and the vote. The minutes should record who disclosed what and who left the room. That is not a legal requirement imposed from outside. It is a practice that makes the committee’s work defensible to the congregation it serves.

What this costs, in dollars and hours

I want to name the tradeoffs plainly, because a reform that ignores its own cost will not survive its first difficult year.

The dollar cost of amending the bylaws article is usually near zero. A congregation may need a lawyer to review the amendment, and in Western North Carolina that review might run a few hundred dollars for a short opinion. The larger cost is in hours. A bylaws committee that meets three times to draft the amendment, a congregational meeting with proper notice, and a follow-up meeting to adopt the revised nominating calendar will consume something like fifteen to twenty volunteer hours spread across three or four people. That is not nothing in a church where the same people already mow the cemetery and count the offering.

The cost of not doing it is harder to see and easier to pay every year. It is the cost of a finance chair who has served eighteen years and cannot imagine stepping down, and a congregation that cannot imagine who would replace him. It is the cost of a new member who has gifts for administration and who is never asked, because the committee does not know her name. It is the cost of a slate that the congregation receives with a nod and a silent prayer that someone else will do it next year.

A dated action list for the next committee cycle

What follows is a hypothetical example, not a record of a particular church. It is the sequence I would recommend to a congregation that wants to change its document before it changes its slate.

By the first Sunday of August: The church council or board appoints a three-person bylaws review group, including at least one person who has served on the nominating committee and one person who has not. The group’s charge is narrow: draft an amendment to the nominations and elections article, not a wholesale rewrite of the bylaws.

By the third Sunday of August: The review group drafts the amendment using the levers above — term limits with a one-year gap, a staff-exclusion clause, a four-Sunday suggestion window, staggered committee terms, and recusal language. The draft is circulated to the committee and to the pastor for comment.

By the second Sunday of September: The board approves the draft for presentation to the congregation, with the required notice period stated in the current bylaws. If the bylaws require thirty days’ notice, the clock starts here.

At the annual meeting: The congregation votes on the amendment. A two-thirds vote is common for bylaws changes; the current document will say what is required. The vote is recorded in the minutes, and the revised article takes effect for the next nominating cycle.

By the first Sunday of October: The nominating committee meets under the new rules. The suggestion window opens. The committee does not contact anyone until it closes. The slate that emerges may still include some of the same six names — term limits do not take effect all at once — but the process that produced it is now visible, and the congregation knows how to speak into it.

What this does not fix

I will not pretend that a bylaws amendment solves the deeper problem. A congregation can adopt every lever in this article and still nominate the same six people, because the document does not create willingness. It does not create the courage to ask a new member. It does not create the humility to step down after two terms. Those are gifts of the Spirit, and they are not amendable by a vote.

What the document does is remove the excuse. When the process is written down and published, the committee can no longer say that no one told them there was a window, and the congregation can no longer say that no one asked. The same six names may still appear. But they will appear as a choice that the congregation can see, and a choice that the congregation can change.

That is not a triumphal ending. It is a slightly better document, and a slightly more honest annual meeting. In a small church in the mountains, that is often how grace arrives — not in a revival, but in a bylaws article that someone finally read out loud.

Questions readers have asked

Does the IRS require a written conflict-of-interest policy for churches?

No. The retrieved legal explainer states that a written conflict-of-interest policy is recommended but not technically required at the federal level. The IRS asks about it on Form 990 and on the application for 501(c)(3) status, and operating without one invites scrutiny, but the absence of a policy is not itself a violation.

Can family members serve together on a church board or nominating committee?

Yes. No federal statute flatly prohibits it. The IRS governance guidance says a governing board should include independent members and should not be dominated by employees or others who are not independent because of family or business relationships. The practical risk is not the relationship itself but the transaction it can produce — compensation, contracts, or property arrangements that benefit an insider.

What is the minimum number of Sundays for a suggestion window?

The retrieved congregational document uses four Sundays. That is one congregation’s written practice, not a universal rule. A congregation can choose a different number, but it should choose one and write it down, because an undefined window is the same as no window.

Do term limits apply to the treasurer?

The retrieved document makes an exception for the treasurer. That is a judgment call, not a requirement. A congregation should decide which roles need continuity and write the exception explicitly rather than leaving it to habit.

What if the current bylaws require a longer notice period than the timeline above allows?

Then the amendment waits for the next cycle. The notice period in the current bylaws governs the vote that changes the bylaws. A congregation that tries to shortcut its own notice requirement has taught the committee that process is optional, which is the opposite of the point.