We recently had elections for the vestry in our local church. After it was over, there were no protests and no lawsuits filed. Everyone walked away with confidence that every vote had been cast in the proper manner and counted swiftly and correctly.
Here’s what impressed me the most about the recent vestry election: The rules of voting were very clearly stated before the election took place and repeated several times. There could not possibly be any doubt about what was expected of each voting member of the congregation.
All voting would take place on a single day. Only bonafide church members could vote during any of the three services during the day, but they had to vote on-site while on church property. Each vote was verified through immediate checks on the church membership roll. The votes were tallied quickly, and the nominees who won the most votes were notified within 24 hours.
Perhaps another layer of security that could have been added to the vestry election would have been putting your writing hand on the Bible and swearing to be the person whom you said you were and promising to cast your ballot as a full member of the church, “so help me God.” Such an act in our civic elections would be difficult to demand in our pluralistic society when so many people are of different faiths or have no faith at all.
However, there was no doubt when the vestry elections concluded — the process of following the rules was not questioned by the voting members. It made me yearn for the days when our local, state and national elections could be conducted with the same degree and level of confidence and trust. The basic maxim of “the simpler the better” is as true in vestry elections as in any other walk of life.
The vestry election is a good model to follow. Are we going to take our church elections more seriously than our elections for president, Senate, Congress, and every state and local office in the land?
There is pushback from some quarters on the left about single-day elections and total verification of a person’s citizenship to be able to cast a vote. To carry out a comparison of the vestry election to the absurd, would or should any congregation allow an atheist to cast a vote for a leader of a Bible-believing church dedicated to spreading the Gospel and bringing new people into the household of the Christian faith? To begin with, they don’t share the common stated goals of the church. Should any person be able to just walk in off the streets to any church and cast a vote for leaders of the church without having joined the church or shown any interest or commitment to attend the services, classes or try to make friends within that particular church community?
It would be analogous to a person walking into the Alabama football locker room and demanding the right to vote on who should be the captain of the team without being a part of the team from spring through fall practice. Coaches from Bear Bryant to Nick Saban would find such a request to be completely out of bounds, as would the current Alabama Crimson Tide players, who would no doubt politely escort the intruder out of the locker room.
Any election is serious and should be treated as such. The sanctity of voting for elected officers in any church is elevated by the religious commitment behind it.
However, at the very minimum, shouldn’t we treat our civic elections as seriously as any local vestry, elder or diaconate election? After all, there is a moral contract our founders made with us, the future generations. They put everything they had at extreme risk to establish a unique country based on liberty, equality, duty and responsibility while putting much-needed checks on the innate proclivities of mankind to gain and abuse political power at the expense of others unable to defend themselves.
We should, at the very least, be able to ensure our elections are conducted in the most honorable and dependable way possible in the 21st century. Our local vestry elections proved it can be. That model should be followed for all civil elections to follow.
