Red Tape, No Scissors

Today represents a first for me. This is the first day that I have wanted to shut everything off, scream, and go home. There are three major items that I have been working on today:

1) Making my opting out of Social Security official
2) Making the changes to my Terms of Call because of said opting out official with the national office
3) Trying to get the Nominating Committee put together so that we can fill two sudden vacancies on our Session.

I have been here at work for a little over three hours...and I'm just about ready to either cry or take a baseball bat to something. Knowing my nature, it would probably be the former...but if I get put on hold again, it's going to be the latter. Here's what I've been up to this morning:

I received a phone call yesterday from a man named Jeff who works for the IRS. He informed me that they have received my paperwork, but it is incomplete. I had evidently misread the completely convoluted and confusing letter and the person I did talk to about it gave me the wrong advice (I believe it was, "Just sign the thing and send it in...you don't need anything else.") Jeff, in a spectacularly IRS-perfect nasally-robotic tone, informed me that I would need to supply him with copies of a couple of forms that would prove the tax-exempt, non-profit status of the church. He fired the alphabet soup of form numbers at me...and I waited until today to check the files. I can't find any of them...the Treasurer doesn't know where they are, the chair of Finance doesn't know where they are...and I'm tearing through the church files like a man possessed. You want copies of the minutes from the June 1945 meeting of Presbyterian Women? We got that...can put my finger on it in three minutes. The forms granting us non-profit status in the eyes of the US Government? Not so much. After a little over 45 minutes of ravenous searching, I gave up and realized that said document would have probably had to have been procured in the late 1800s for this church. I called Jeff. Hold. Two minutes go by. I hang up.

I exhale...calmly exhale...and move on to the next order of business. I start to fill out a form of "change of call" from our beloved Board of Pensions. I don't understand a couple of things on it at all. I place a call to the home office in Louisville. Hold. A minute goes by. I hang up.

And so I move to the project I have been dreading the most. We have had one elder move and another resign because of health concerns over the past month. The one elder happens to be taking an at-large member of our nominating committee with her (her husband). My mission was to find out what stipulations there are in the church by-laws for appointing new members of nominating committee and to see what hurdles there were that we needed to clear before we could convene as a nominating committee. There are none...none written at least. My calls produce three nobody-at-homes, two I-have-no-ideas, and a twisted web of positions that have yet to be filled from the various organizations of the church. This is all simply to put the nominating committee together...we haven't even started asking for elders yet. That process last fall, in and of itself, was like trying to find someone on the Rockies who can pitch in the 8th. And so, after about a half hour of calls, I hit another brick wall.

I try Jeff again. Out to lunch. He must be recharging his batteries. Call back tomorrow. I call our clergy tax advisor. He won't be in until Friday, and doesn't answer questions over the phone. I need to make an appointment on my day off to come in to ask him, "What forms do I need?" A parishioner walks in to ask me about to forms you need to fill out for camp scholarships...it takes me a little over eight minutes on the presbytery's convoluted website to find the forms.

And so that's my morning: a black hole of productivity where any project I begin is met with a wall of red tape and Don Henley hold music. As I go out to make an adjustment of the church sign, I half-expect a police officer to roll up and ask me, "Do you have a 606R Religious Display Authorization Form for that?" and then sing me "End of the Innocence" as I try to ask him questions.

I didn't sign up for this. I hate this. This is what I was trying to avoid...the forms, the desk work, the administrative red tape. It just makes my blood boil. I stare at my desk: the church by-laws, the book of order, tax forms, and Board of Pension documents are thrown haphazardly across the surface. And I stew...and I get angry.

But then I choose to write. And while I didn't know where I was going when I started this post, I realize something as I write. This is the first day in nearly 9 months that I have felt this way. When I worked at my former jobs (particularly in secondary education), I could have written a post like this every day. I hated it, and hated my job as a result. Here...I've had one bad morning of bureaucracy in, what, 9 months? Wow. I guess that I've avoided it for so long that I've lost my ability to tolerate it.

And so I will now shut the computer off and stop calling the Jeff-O-Tron 5000. I will go down and have lunch with a fellow minister. I will walk away. I will realize that those questions will eventually be answered. And, more than anything, I will realize that red tape and bureaucracy are not the norm in small church ministry. And I will thank God for that.