Judicial Committee Report 2014
After several months of prayerful dialogue and research in order to understand the heart of our brothers and sisters and provide appropriate responses to their legitimate questions and concerns, the Judicial Committee (Walter Frank, Bryan Lancaster, Richard Sapp and Alain Tamelissio) suggested that it is necessary to engage our brothers and sisters in an educational program. This is important because it will help everyone to better understand all the opportunities that our church is providing to each of us to better ourselves and our movement as a whole.
As the result, it was then decided that our first action steps should be focused on finding a way to better communicate with our members about the Whistleblower Policy. The committee suggested that this policy should be easily accessible on all our websites, especially the Family Federation website and the Blessing and Family Ministry website.
We also have suggested as second action steps to help our local churches form a Council of Elders to act as First Responders helping the local church councils deal with crises and thereby diffuse tension. Our hope and prayer is that brothers and sisters should get help to solve their own problems on the local level first. Our role is to provide as much support as we can. Therefore, it was advised by members of the National Council that we should form four major blocs of qualified elders with potential experiences on the national level to help deal with critical issues and crises in our local churches. As evidenced in the Bible and our own history as a movement, and also in established churches, clearly the role that elders play in the community is so critical. We certainly should learn from that and take full advantage.
Our third and last, but not the least, course of action steps is to educate ourselves and our brothers and sisters on the value of arbitration, because it is important, in order to have a credible and long-lasting solution, that both parties agree. An ad hoc committee has been recommended to help us better understand the rules and regulations of arbitration.
After several months of research, as the result of this preliminary work, the ad hoc committee has recommended two processes. One is Mediation and the second is Arbitration itself. Mediation is a much better process, because it allows both parties to actually have control over the outcome of the resolution. Arbitration, on the other hand, utilizes a neutral third party to hear a dispute between parties. The hearing is informal and the parties mutually select the arbitrator. The arbitrator is retained to decide how to settle the dispute, and the decision is final and binding on the parties.
Most importantly, both Mediation and Arbitration are more cost-efficient and quicker than litigation or any lawsuit. The only difference here is that, while the mediator acts more as a facilitator, in Arbitration it is the arbitrator, not the parties, who renders the terms and conditions of the dispute resolution.
The overall feeling and expectation from the Judicial Committee is that, as we prepare ourselves to be citizens of Cheon Il Guk, the kingdom of peace where the culture of heart is the center, we as a community of faith should always humble ourselves, act carefully and do everything in our power to avoid lawsuits and any other litigations that only increase the cost of conflicts and bring additional burdens on our families and community, as seen in early Christian history.