Take 2: Institutional Roadblocks (or “What Doesn’t Work”)
The “moo” doesn’t work! The MOU or Memorandum of Understanding. It’s the contract/covenant (if you will) between the aspiring project and ANiC, which spells out what relationships and potential actions are to be undertaken by the project, and what happens at an end-point: either the dissolution of the project or the movement of the project into a plant. There’s nothing wrong with it for a group who are starting up a Project with the hope and intention to move through the Three-P process, culminating in a Parish. And certainly, for a tiny group of 2 or 3 whose intention is to move that way forward, the “moo” works wonderfully. But we are choosing to put institutional requirements to one side in order to concentrate fully on ministering to arrivals at our door. Instead of the no more than 35% of assets (personnel, finances, time, energy etc.) that a parish spends on administrative endeavours, we are choosing to pare that to less than 10%.
There are ‘pro’s and con’s’ to this MOU. We are part of ANiC and if we wish to reap the benefits of belonging then we need a relationship with ANiC and for a start-up project of any kind, that relationship is realised in the MOU. So, we have a local finance officer to handle bill payments and income, but he (in our case ‘he’) is only a middle person between the recipient/donor on one side and ANiC on the other (as is the case for any project). ANiC handles all the more intricate niceties usually bequeathed to a parish treasurer. That’s a nice ‘pro’!
The MOU also requires us to be connected with an ANiC parish and for us that is only for prayer support. Our chosen parish is about an 85 minute drive from where we will have our Sunday worship meeting, so a close proximity is not a necessity. But where we are going to meet in Centre Wellington requires us to have certain insurance coverage in place, and that can be an expensive proposition, especially if it courses directly through the ANiC insurer; it reduces by about 2/3rds if it can be accomplished through the supporting parish insurance. The National Director, John MacDonald, is the go-to person for advice on this.
However, we found that we were walking perilously close to signing our names to a document that, for us, was blatantly untrue. We had no plans to have wardens or to move into becoming a parish. So, not wishing to perjure ourselves, we created our own ‘personalised’ MOU.
The document that ANiC uses was passed by the ANiC council, and so carries a certain legal weight, and we were to use that document instead of our newly created one. Following e-mail and telephone communications with John MacDonald, where our state of ‘potential perjury’ was spelled out, all parties agreed that consciences would be salved and legalities would be saved if the two lines relating to moving through the Three-P process were initialed with a note stating it is not relevant at this time. The wardens and other issues were deemed to be there in the MOU ‘if the project needs them’, as opposed to being definitively needed in situ.
We signed and initialed the MOU and, at time of this writing, it is presently in the Canada Post system.
No doubt we will find other roadblocks in our path, but once we had settled the MOU ‘issue’, as well as our Name, our minds have now turned to where the rubber hits the road. Literally. How do we do what we want to do, or, in my former nursing terminology – how do we ‘ground’ the ideas in our heads into action on the ground? What does Evangelism look like in ‘our’ neck-o’-the-woods?