Understanding Robert's Rules, Part 1: Whose bright idea was this, anyway?

Have you ever, say, to take a random example, watched a livestream of the plenary sessions of the ELCA Churchwide Assembly, and thought: Why are they doing things like this? Who made this stuff up?!? These rules make no sense! How can anyone remember all this?

These are all very reasonable thoughts to have.

The purpose of this post is to possible begin to unravel a little of the mystery. It may, just possibly, turn out that there is some underlying logic here.

There really was a guy called Robert!

His name was Henry Martyn Robert, 1837-1923. If you are looking for someone to blame, here he is.

Robert graduated near the top of his class at West Point and returned to teach there. And then, when he was about 25, he attended First Baptist Church in Bedford, Massachusetts.

On one fateful day, they asked him to chair a congregational meeting. (Cue dramatic music.)

Since this was a really peaceful and uneventful time in U.S. history, of course it went really well, and…oh, wait, no, sorry, it was the opposite. It was the early 1860s, and things were intense. Robert completely lost control of the debate. People were shouting, interrupting, and insulting each other’s grandmothers, probably. It was extremely embarrassing. Robert was like, “nope, not doing that ever again”.

Here is something he later wrote, which I take to be a polite way of saying “OMG WTF?!?”:

“One can scarcely have had much experience in deliberative meetings of Christians without realizing that the best of men*, having wills of their own, are liable to attempt to carry out their own views without paying sufficient respect to the rights of their opponents.”

— Henry Martyn Robert

*Yes, he said “men”. Apparently women did not have this problem! Yes, that must be what he meant!

Anyway! In an effort to not have that happen ever again, Robert tried to read up on good meeting procedure, but nothing he found was all that helpful. So, he decided to create the resource he couldn’t find. (In the meantime, he was an army engineer and reached the rank of brigadier general.) Robert identified problems like these:

1. Vague, well-intentioned guidelines like “love and be kind to one another” don’t actually help very much when people are super angry. How do you enforce that, exactly? What if someone thinks it’s kind to interrupt people when they are wrong???

2. People from different parts of the country have different ideas about what standard meeting procedure should be. As a result, too much time is wasted arguing about the rules, instead of whatever we are supposed to be arguing about.

Sooooo, to try to solve these problems, the first edition of Robert’s Rules of Order was published in 1873. The current (12th) edition was published in 2020.

This has not actually stopped us from having those same problems, of course. But, at least in theory, we have agreed on how we are going to deal with them when they arrive. Which leads us to…

…but who says we have to use these rules?

Another very reasonable question!

The answer, generally, is: We do. We say that.

Organizations that follow Robert’s Rules will have that written into their governing documents somewhere. In the ELCA, this is in chapter 12 of our constitution.

“The Churchwide Assembly shall use parliamentary procedures in accordance with Robert’s Rules of Order, latest edition, unless otherwise ordered by the assembly.”

— 12.31.09

Says who? Who wrote this? Who do we blame??? On the title page of the constitution, it tells you who said this:

“as adopted by the Constituting Convention of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (April 30, 1987) and as amended by subsequent Churchwide Assemblies and Church Councils of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America”

Or, translated: We agreed to do things like this when we first got started, and we have kept updating that agreement to get to where we are today. In the ELCA, this means: We said this. The people we have to blame are us.

And, by agreeing to serve [at the Churchwide Assembly/on this board/as members of this organization], we are agreeing to be part of that “us”.

…which is not to say we can’t change that agreement. More on that later, possibly.

In summary:

Robert wrote Robert’s Rules. Other people have updated them over the years. We have to use them because we said we would.

Okay, fine, but the rules still don’t make sense!!!

You’re not entirely wrong about that. My copy of the 12th edition is 714 pages long, which is 713.5 pages more than you can expect people to read before a congregational meeting. The length and complexity are probably unavoidable in a set of rules that are intended to cover any possible situation, but there is no denying that these rules are lengthy and complex. And, yes, some of them do end up being kind of arbitrary.

And, let’s be honest, the way these rule are taught often does not help. Charts upon charts about which kinds of motions get precedence (is that even a thing?) do not exactly convey “these rules are helpful and easy to understand”.

However, the underlying principles are simple. and I believe they can be helpful to anyone trying to get large groups of people to make good decisions together. Further, if you understand what the rules are for, then you don’t need to memorize every detail. If you know what the rules are meant to do, you can have a pretty good idea what is going on without having to look everything up all the time.

Onward to part 2!