Thoughts on NDAs in our PCA churches

 

Dear PCA Elders,

   To use NDAs or not, that is the question.

Your church may have faced a situation where it was necessary to fire a staff member, or you felt it was necessary to do so. How the Elders went about that was as important as the decision itself. Perhaps your Elders have never used an NDA when terminating a staff member. If not, you might still glean some insights from this article. If you have used an NDA, I would hope it was done in a more pastoral manner than described in this article.

I’ve been an ordained TE for 40 years and I’m aware that there is a growing vibe today about ‘church abuse’  . If you’ve never heard the podcast “Sons of Patriarchy”, you might want to listen to some episodes that describe situations in the PCA or the OPC.

 What may not be clear to us as Elders is very clear to the average PCA member, i.e. our system of governance and appeal is very complicated and intimidating.

To make matters worse, it seems that our system is tilted in favor of the Elder(s). There are reasons why Biblical safeguards are in place, but it can be oppressive to members who are simply looking for an even playing field on which they can bring their concerns or complaints. We must remember that we are called to shepherd the flock without lording it over them (1 Pet 5). Leadership as demonstrated by Jesus involves a level of sacrifice and service for the sheep. Do we lead that way in our churches, be they large or small?

 The following excerpt (used by the author’s permission) is from a longer Substack article written by the wife of a former non-ordained PCA staff member. Her husband was the worship leader of a PCA church for fourteen years. Perhaps the work relationship needed to end, but the process was not pretty. Her article raises some questions that we as Elders should consider.

Even if your church is not part of the NDA culture, there may be other ways that your governance is intimidating to the average church member.

Brothers, you may not agree with the thoughts in the article, but I urge all of us to consider our ways as we await the return of the Chief Shepherd.

(Names are changed; underlines are mine for emphasis; footnote numbers pertain to references in the original article)

***

 When I read the document that my husband came home with only a few hours after he left for work on a Monday in March, particularly the sections containing the Non-Disclosure and Non-Disparagement Agreements (NDAs), embarrassment washed over me. I wasn’t embarrassed for myself or for Matt, though. I was embarrassed for the ordained pastors and elders whose moral and ethical imaginations were so stunted that they genuinely believed that trading silence for severance was walking the path of prudence.

   …= (edited for length)

I felt embarrassed for the two PCA pastors whose names were on the first page…

…When your pastors, men with whom your husband has worked for over a decade, present you with this gem of a clause, it’s hard not to feel embarrassed for them by their attempt at sounding authoritative and serious and professional:

Employee agrees to honor and remain obligated under any confidentiality agreement(s) Employee entered into with the Church or the released Parties, and nothing in this Agreement shall be deemed to limit, void, abrogate or lessen any otherwise obligation of the Employee to keep confidential any trade secret or confidential information belonging to the Church, including but not limited to any such contractual or common law confidentiality obligations Employee owes to the Church.

…Oh, the number of times I read the third point of the Non-Disparagement section and, like an alchemist watching for that most precious of metals, peer with my inner eye at the words, willing the hidden meaning to reveal itself amidst the jumbled statements that, by all appearance, said nothing at all:

Employee further understands and agrees that this paragraph is a material provision of this Agreement and that any breach of this paragraph shall be a material breach of this Agreement, and that the Church would be irreparably harmed by violation of this provision.

…And so, the terrible writing leapt out at me like a jump scare in a B-rate horror movie. I understood the individual words. I knew, basically, the facts that the pastors were trying to communicate. But writing is not just communication. Cocker spaniels communicate. Mushroom colonies communicate. Flies communicate with other flies as they alternately take off and land on a pile of feces. All living organisms communicate.
What makes writing different from mere communication is that it is a craft undertaken solely by human beings, in which a person faithfully attempts to convey reality to another person, in a meaningful exchange of ideas, through the creative use of words, and for a specific purpose. And by person I mean a human being with an immortal soul; and by reality I mean truth; and by truth I mean everything that flows from the Logos, which is Christ, the Word, the God-Man and Principle of reality itself.

 

For believers, the written word becomes a medium through which we can embody and live out the divine nature of which we are partakers (2 Peter 4:1). We do this in part by putting off “the corruption that is in the world,” including the corruption of language. We do this by treating words as more than tools to achieve our own ends, but as gifts that can bring order out of chaos, justice out of iniquity, beauty out of the wasteland. We do this because in the beginning, God spoke words, and He created us to be his word-speaking, word-writing icons here on earth.

 

The “Release of Employment” document that the pastors gave to Matt doesn’t deserve the modifier “communication.” These men, whose main job, according to their spiritual calling, is to communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ, either knowingly abandoned the effort to communicate clearly or they did so ignorantly. Either way, their actions reveal their priorities, and their priorities reveal their characters. Who needs perspicuity when you’re firing someone you’ve worked with for 15 years, someone who took spiritual vows to submit to your leadership? Later, when asked by the presbytery committee why they included the NDAs, the three elders of the Staff Oversight Team¹ said, “We use them all the time in our jobs.” So, it’s possible that after years of consuming and propagating corporate brain rot masquerading as effective communication these men lost the ability to tell clear communication from jumbled up garbage.

 

…After almost 15 years of working at the church, our pastors handed Matt a document that, if signed, would legally forbid him and his family from telling the whole truth about what happened. If he did not sign, he would get no severance, and he would go home to his homeschooling wife and children with nothing. That trading severance for silence was an unjustified act of coercion seemed like low-hanging fruit to me. So, I sent a formal complaint to my presbytery over the pastors’ inclusion of the NDAs, hoping, finally, for some clarity on the inappropriate use of coercion.

 I assumed that the PCA pastors who fired Matt (and the PCA officers investigating the charges) had read BCO 11-1 and understood that they “ha[d] no power to inflict temporal pains and penalties,” for “their authority is in all respects moral and spiritual.” I assumed that they were familiar with BCO 11-2, which states that “they can make no laws binding the conscience.”²

Perhaps they only saw themselves as the passive party in a transaction between Matt and the law already established by the State, i.e.  We didn’t make the law, which says that if he breaks the NDA we can sue him and take back all his money; we’re just going to use the threat of the law to our advantage, which is a completely different thing and very, very godly.”

One of our pastors tried to play that card when we met with him a few days after sending the initial complaint. In a demure tone that beggared sympathy he said, “Guys, I’m not just your pastor, I’m also a boss.” 

Were we supposed to be psychologically moved by his harrowing plight?
Here’s a guy who has been granted spiritual authority and institutional authority to use as he sees fit (he and the other pastor did not have to confer with the senior pastor, or even the session, before they fired their veteran worship leader), and we’re supposed to feel sorry for him? He’s burdened with so much responsibility and power, let’s cut him some slack?

 …An NDA as broad in scope as the one the pastors gave Matt, that prohibits an “Employee and Employee’s family” from making “any statements, written or verbal…that in any way criticizes the personal or business reputation, practices, management, staff, or conduct of the church,” should not exist.

What does it say about the corporatization of the pastoral mind that my former shepherds did not view the imposition of those restrictions as a form of binding our consciences? One of the pastors claimed that they never seriously intended to follow through on any of it. He implied that they were never seriously going to take us to court if I posted on Facebook (or Substack) that Matt didn’t actually “voluntarily resign.”

 

“Of course you can tell your community group and the other staff members and other members of the church, even though the contract specifically says that you’re not allowed to do that because if you do you’d be in violation of the provision and if you violate the provision the church will be irreparably harmed.”

And double-minded people everywhere nod their heads and wonder what the problem is. It’s not technically binding anyone’s conscience if you cross your fingers while tightening the noose.

But if none of it was going to be enforced, what was the point of the NDAs in the first place?

 It was a flex couched in corporate jargon, dripping with formalistic arrogance, meant to intimidate and secure the outcome that five ordained PCA officers believed to be the most advantageous to the institution. It was pragmatism and utilitarianism at work. They were playing a game. And since they were fine with lying on their end (“The church will sue you if you tell your friends and coworkers what happened in this meeting!”), they assumed that we would be fine with lying on our end (“Matt quit his job today, and everything is great between us and the leadership!”).

 …It would seem to be an inexorable law that when a church grows to a certain size — say, over 500 members — Corporate Creep sets in, and the jargon of the boardrooms, which was stolen from the tech industry and sociology departments, reverberates around conference rooms all over the country as PCA elders, coming from their long day of board meetings in conference rooms, analyze “objectives,” evaluate “input,” and emphasize “components” of “processes.”

Jargon isn’t big words and it isn’t complex sentences. Jargon is soulless; jargon is cheap; “jargon is a handout of material designed to prevent the need for thought.”⁸ Depressingly, none of our institutions are jargon-free. “The propensity for jargon and bad language,” writes Richard Mitchell, “is a sickness not of this or that calling but of thought itself.”⁹

 Jargon is what comes out of a man with a flabby spirit, and “mens cujusque is est quisque.”¹⁰ (Cicero, “As is the mind, so is the man.”)

When people sit around and use jargon, whether in speech or in writing, they are essentially saying, “I have given up my God-given responsibility to think clearly, and I am now going to use some words, and my words will mean things, and the things will result in happenings, and the happenings will hopefully get me what I want so that I can leave.”

 

…Richard Mitchell calls this move the Principle of Unnecessary Specification; its “practitioners are traditionally careful not only to provide detailed specification where none is needed but also to withhold it where it is needed.”¹¹ They do this because they can. They do this because, “skillfully used, it projects an atmosphere, one might even say an aroma, of great insight and expertise about anything [they] might write.”¹²

 

My former pastors did this when they told Matt that, in order to get severance, he had to promise not to give away any “trade secrets” or Super Secret Confidential Information that he had been (apparently) gathering during his 15 years as worship leader and AV coordinator. They did this when they left out the specifics about how the church would be irreparably harmed if “the church” found out the truth about how and why Matt was fired. The Principle of Unnecessary Specification muddies the discursive waters until it’s not even worth sifting through the murky mess anymore. And that, my friends, is precisely its goal.

 Francis Bacon said, “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; writing an exact man.”

 What are our PCA elder-bosses reading, or not reading, that contributes to their lack of a robust ethical imagination? What are our PCA Executive Pastors conferring about, or not conferring about, that leaves their ideas so out of touch with reality? What are our PCA shepherds writing, or not writing, that keeps their thinking so muddied?

 …But in the spirit of Christian charity, let me suggest more for the ordained PCA officer.

I propose that he put down the Human Resources twaddle and pick up some classic fiction; The Brothers Karamazov is a good place to start, particularly the chapter called “The Grand Inquisitor.” He should read Malcolm Guite’s epic poem, Galahad and the Grail, recognize where he’s still trapped in the Wasteland, and long for transformation. He should pick up a pen and try writing poetry, like a real man. He should read the political philosophy of Frederic Bastiat and the metaphysical ideas of Josef Pieper, then accept that manipulation is tyranny. He should read Ross Bryd’s article, The Future Of Our Churches, and reconsider the nature of spiritual leadership and the role of the shepherd.

 Or the PCA officer can ignore the corporatization of his pastoral mind and succumb to jargon’s long march through the institutional church.