The vote to adopt the changes will be held at the August 20, 2023 Business meeting. Proposed changes to the bylaws are noted as footnotes in the draft document.

Proposed Change Summary

OVERVIEW
In summer 2022, the elders began reviewing Hope Fellowship’s By-Laws for consistency with current practices. We found several issues which needed clarification and improvement.
First, our by-laws became crowded by procedural details. By-laws exist not to dictate procedure but to “define rights and roles of each member of the organization.” They exist to “settle any problems that come up among parties.” We removed procedures from the bylaws.

• Second, sometimes our policy manual and our bylaws were in contradiction. For example, the practice of our church has been to keep personnel salary confidential, but the by-laws stipulate that the church vote on salary for new positions. We rectified many such contradictions by amending the by-laws to cohere with current practices.
• Third, sometimes there were undefined terms, or one entity had multiple names throughout the document. We aligned terms for consistency and clarity.
• Fourth, sometimes the responsibility and authority of various parties in the church were unclear. We clarified and delineated the roles of the congregation, elders, and trustees.
• Fifth, we fixed numerous typos, and updated language where necessary.

SPECIFIC CHANGES WORTH NOTING
In the hiring of staff members, the congregation no longer must approve a job description, salary, qualifications, and position. The existing bylaws created uncertainty regarding the roles and responsibilities of the various parties in hiring, which are clarified in the proposed bylaws. ¹

• The new by-laws require the elders to explain the new position to the congregation. The congregation approves an amended budget which provides financially for the new staff position. The hiring cannot happen without budgetary approval; this is the congregation’s check on hiring. The Trustees are implicitly required in this budgetary action, as it would be impossible to amend the budget without their involvement. 
• In the past, the elders and/or pastor would fill an existing position that already was budgeted. This provides clarity that this practice is OK.
• In the case of elected ministry leaders (care team, outreach, etc.), we removed the one term limit. Several ministries have been manned by the same people for several terms.
• The “Trustee Board” is now called the “Trustees.” This is important because a board is a governing body, and that is not what our Trustees are. Their responsibilities and duties are maintained. (Thank God for our Trustees!)
• Finally, we changed our doctrinal statement to accord with the EFCA’s updated statement in summer of 2019, changing the word premillennial to glorious regarding the return of Christ. This does not mean that Hope is no longer premillennial in its belief, but we no longer view this as a necessary doctrine and seek to maintain alignment with our denomination.

¹ The bylaws contradicted our policy manual which requires the guarding of personnel salary information. They were also inconsistent with current practice, because the congregation has not been involved with job description changes. Also, the bylaws granted the elders the authority to hire and dismiss staff, yet there were congregational responsibilities which obscured the nature of that responsibility.