BYLAW UPDATES

As a part of our Lead Pastor Transition, our Elder board has been working to update the Rolling Hills Community Church Bylaws. On January 29, these changes were presented to the congregation. There is a 30-day window where members can provide comments. If you have comments you can email them to bylaws@rollinghills.org.

LETTER FROM THE ELDERS

Dear Rolling Hills Community Church Members,

Our Bylaws are an important document that define how we, as a church, function and operate.  Because of their importance, we take updating them very seriously and do not do so often. The last revision to the Bylaws occurred in December 2014.  

As we prepare for Bill’s planned retirement at the end of 2024, we told you we would be reviewing the Bylaws as part of the transition planning process.  We have completed our review and are recommending some changes to the Bylaws.  It is important to us to have the members in our faith family take time to review these changes and provide feedback to us. To help prepare you for that, we are providing you with some background as to why some of these changes are being recommended.  Here is a brief summary of some of the proposed changes:  

• There are several changes that help us align to the current Oregon Statutes.  As an example, we changed the segment on emergency meetings in Article 2, Section 3 to align to the definition of those meeting names. 
• Since the Bylaws were last updated, there have been changes in our organizational structure. For example, the senior pastor is now called the lead pastor. We also clarified that the lead pastor must be an elder. Because of our doctrinal belief that Scripture reserves the role of elder for men only, this now clarifies that the lead pastor must be a man. At the same time, we made changes to clarify that the business manager (who holds the corporate office of Secretary-Treasurer) is not required to be an elder, which opens up the possibility of a woman holding this position.  
• Since our business manager is currently an elder and the Bylaw revisions will not require that position to be an elder (see previous point), we added the requirement that the board has at least two staff elders.
• We also added language to address changes to the doctrinal statement. The doctrinal statement describes what we believe, and it is important to protect its integrity. We added language that requires the elders to approve any changes to our doctrinal statement. This is how we have operated historically, but we wanted to be sure this was a requirement within the Bylaws.
• Additionally, we clarified the language to enhance readability or clarify how we operate.

We very much appreciate you taking the time to review these proposed changes and provide your feedback.  The bullet points above only provide background on some of the more significant changes. Some other changes are very minor. All changes are highlighted in a “tracked-changes” version in the documents provided with this information to enable you to easily see those changes. 

If you have questions or comments regarding these changes, please send them by email to bylaws@rollinghills.org.  The elder team is collecting comments this way until February 29. The elder team will then consider all feedback before voting on the final document.