Category Archives: Church admin.

One really good suggestion

Bill, Carl, and I were standing around talking with the architect who’s overseeing the repair work at our church. She had come to tell us how much it might cost to remove an underground oil tank, and she stayed to inspect the repairs to our fire escape. Afterwards, the four of us stood around chatting. Since she’s a church-goer too (she’s active in a nearby UCC church), our conversation turned to churches.

We compared horror stories about how churches neglect routine maintenance, which neglect always leads to costly repairs. Our architect had one really good suggestion that I can’t resist passing along. She said when she served on her church’s board of trustees, she would make them do a complete walk-through inspection of the building and grounds once each year. When the board members confronted building problems face-to-face, they realized just what the money is going to, and routine maintenance was less likely to be neglected.

We also talked about when would be the best time to do such a walk-through. I suggested that maybe November would be the best month for our church, because we try to start planning the next fiscal year’s budget in January — do the walk-through in November, and it would allows you to get estimates in time for the budget planning cycle. Bill added that it’s best to do a walk-through when the leaves are off the trees.

The Case of the Pointless Paperwork

This afternoon, I worked on organizing my office. I hate organizing my office. It’s boring. I want to be making something happen, not straightening up my desk and filing paperwork. Of course, sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and do those mundane office chores. Somewhere, the poet Gary Snyder talks about how important maintenance is — you can’t always be creating things, he says, you also have to maintain what you’ve got. So I tried to tell myself that I was doing Snyderian maintenance this afternoon, even though I think what Gary Snyder had in mind when he was talking about maintenance was more along the lines of sharpening his axe or cleaning out the barn, chores which would have been much more attractive than dealing with paperwork.

In my opinion, the greatest theorist on the subject of paperwork was the great philosopher, Perry Mason….

….Perry Mason regarded the pasteboard jacket, labeled “IMPORTANT UNANSWERED CORRESPONDENCE,” with uncordial eyes.

Della Street, his secretary, looking crisply efficient, said with her best Monday-morning air, “I’ve gone over it carefully, Chief. The letters on top are the ones you simply have to answer. I’ve cleaned out a whole bunch of the correspondence from the bottom.”

“From the bottom?” Mason asked. “How did you do that?”

“Well,” she confessed, “it’s stuff that’s been in there too long.”

Mason tilted back in his swivel chair, crossed his long legs, assumed his best lawyer manner and said, in mock cross-examination, “Now, let’s get this straight, Miss Street. Those were letters which had originally been put in the ‘IMPORTANT UNANSWERED’ file?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve gone over that file from time to time, carefully?”

“Yes.”

“And eliminated everything which didn’t require my personal attention?”

“Yes.”

“And this Monday, September twelfth, you take out a large number of letters from the bottom of the file?”

“That’s right,” she admitted, her eyes twinkling.

“And did you answer those yourself?”

She shook her head, smiling.

“What did you do with them?” Mason asked.

“Transferred them to another file.”

“What file?”

“The ‘LAPSED’ file.”

Mason chuckled delightedly. “Now there’s an idea, Della. We simply hold things in the ‘IMPORTANT UNANSWERED’ file until a lapse of time robs them of their importance, and then we transfer them to the ‘LAPSED’ file. It eliminates correspondence, saves worry, and gets me away from office routine, which I detest….

[from The Case of the Perjured Parrot by Erle Stanley Gardner, 1939.]

In the book, Mason works on paperwork for about ten minutes before a new client walks into the office with another high-speed murder case. I should be so lucky. In my office, I plugged away all afternoon. I kept hoping that a client would walk in the door and want me to investigate a murder case. That didn’t happen, although the chair of the House and Grounds Committee did stop in for ten minutes to let me know how the various building maintenance projects were coming along.

By the end of the day, I had found lots of paperwork that had once been relevant, but was now so irrelevant that I skipped the “LAPSED” file and threw it right into the recycling bin. Such was the sad end of the case of the pointless paperwork.

Family values in the workplace

Last Sunday’s issue of the New York Times Magazine contains an article by Eyal Press which explores the emerging legal issue of how and when an employer can fire an employee for taking family leave, either for the employee’s health concerns or because the employee is acting as a caregiver for a family member.

The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act supposedly guarantees unpaid leave to employees with such serious health problems. But the law doesn’t cover employers with fewer than 50 people (which includes most churches), and it doesn’t cover caregivers.

On the other hand, an increasing number of former employees have successfully sued their employers after being terminated during unpaid medical leave. One scholar, Joan C. Williams, a professor at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, argues in her book Unbending Gender that offering unpaid leave is a feminist issue. The article by Press summarizes her argument:

Williams argued that the growing tension between work and family was not simply a product of economic necessity. It stemmed, rather, from a marketplace structured around an increasingly outdated masculine norm: the “ideal worker” who can work full time for an entire career while enjoying “immunity from family work.” At a time when both adults in most families had come to participate in the labor force, Williams argued that this standard was unrealistic, especially for women, who remained the primary caregivers in most households.

I would argue that most Unitarian Universalist congregations structure their ministry positions around this “increasingly outdated masculine norm” of the worker who can “work full time… while enjoying ‘immunity from family work’.” On a practical level, many (most?) congregations expect their ministers to work fifty to sixty hours a week (while being paid for forty hours), presumably under the unspoken assumption that if the minister has children, there will be another spouse to take care of them. On the legal level, often this outdated masculine norm is implicit in the contracts signed by ministers. By contrast, Directors of Religious Education often find themselves with flexible jobs that allow lots of freedom for caring for children — not surprising, since religious education is still seen as “women’s work.”

It would be an interesting exercise to examine one’s own congregation for this outdated masculine norm. What if the sexton needs family leave — will it be available? Are flextime and flexi-place available to every employee whenever possible? What sort of norms do employee contracts embody? Do all employees have access to unpaid medical leave? In a denomination where the feminist revolution still isn’t finished, I suspect this is now one of our most important feminist battlefields.

Recalling A. Powell Davies

When I was visiting my aunt and uncle last week, Uncle Bob got to talking about A. Powell Davies. You see, Uncle Bob grew up in All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., and he was a member there when the legendary A. Powell Davies was minister. Uncle Bob remembers it was an exciting time to be a part of All Souls, with large numbers of newcomers joining the church during this time. And he remembers regularly seeing United States senators and representatives sitting in the congregation, attracted by Davies’s preaching.

One of the things that Uncle Bob said that grabbed my attention was that Davies had little to do with the general administration of the church;– there was an executive secretary who took care of that. Davies attended some of the key committee meetings, and of course he had a big say in the direction of the church, but mostly he served as a religious leader. (I said that I’d bet that he had at least twenty hours a week to prepare his sermons, and Uncle Bob said that was possible. I added that I’d never be up to Davies’s level as a preacher, but that if I had twenty hours to write a sermon, it would be a lot better than what I produce now, and Uncle Bob laughed and said he’d bet that it would make a difference.)

Uncle Bob is a retired business executive, and so I thought I’d ask him what he thought of John Carver’s “policy governance” model, which is now all the rage among larger Unitarian Universalist churches, and which promotes the idea of the minister as the CEO of the church. Uncle Bob listened politely, but it was obvious he didn’t think much of policy governance. Neither do I. We both agreed that the All-Souls-Powell-Davies model of having the minister as a religious leader, with an executive secretary (or executive director, or whatever you want to call the position) sounded pretty good to us.

Uncle Bob said something else that grabbed my attention. He said that Davies typically preached about current events. According to Uncle Bob, Davies would pick a current event, hash out the moral and ethical implications of what was going on, and end up with three or four ways forward. I may not have gotten this exactly right, but the point is that Davies really gave his congregation something to chew on each week. That’s what Uncle Bob said he really liked best about a sermon — he wants something that’s going to keep him pondering over the whole week — and that’s what Davies was able to do. And what Davies chose to talk about was not typically religious:– he talked about current events, not about the Bible (or if he were still alive, things like spiritual practices and Eastern religions).

The end of a search

As of this morning, when the successful candidate signed the contract, we concluded a successful search for a part-time Director of Religious Education. We had five high-quality people apply, all of whom were qualified, and all of whom had relevant gifts and/or experience.

How good were our applicants? All our applicants identified themselves as Unitarian Universalists, which was a big plus from our point of view. All our applicants had at least two years of college. Our applicants included an experienced Director of Religious Education looking for a new job, four people with experience as religious education volunteers in their own congregations, two people with one to two years of seminary training, one life-long Unitarian Universalist, and one person with a background in counseling.

I thought other small churches might be interested in hearing why I think a tiny church like ours got such a good pool of applicants for a half-time job.

First and foremost, we committed ourselves to paying at the salary guidelines recommended by the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), and we also committed ourselves to coming up with enough money to make it a half-time position. In the past, when we advertised for a quarter-time or one-third-time position we got only one or two applicants. Increasing the position to half-time at a fair salary made a big difference in the number of applicants.

Second, two of our applicants mentioned that they checked out our church Web site before applying. Our Web site doesn’t pretend to be flashy, but I think it does accurately reflect who we are as a congregation. Although our Web site is aimed primarily at newcomers, I suspect it is equally useful for job applicants — which we will keep in mind during future revisions of the Web site.

Third, we advertised in the right places. We sent a full job posting out in our newsletter — two applicants saw it in the newsletter, and one applicant was given the job posting by someone who receives our newsletter. We also posted the job on the Web site of the Liberal Religious Educators Association (LREDA) — two of our applicants saw the job posting there.

Fourth, we stated that we were hoping for a three-year commitment. I believe applicants heard that and understood that meant that the church was going to be committed to them for at least three years — this was more than a one year trial commitment.

Finally, it helped that we are in Massachusetts, the state with more Unitarian Universalists than any other state. Only two of the five applications came from out of the state.

Of course, having these five excellent applicants created a problem for us — the search committee had to decide between them. It was not an easy decision for them. What a great problem to have.

A fictional story

The following is a completely fictional account of a conversation that I never had. It’s a conversation I could have had many times over, and it’s true that I’ve had similar conversations over the years, but this one is fictional. Do not imagine that I am talking about you or your congregation — this is fiction.

It’s that time of year, the time when religious educators in Unitarian Universalist congregations are gossiping about who quit their jobs this year, and why. I happened to be talking to Sue, an old friend of mine who’s Director of Religious Education (DRE) at First Universalist on the Beach.

“So I talked with ——, and asked her why she’s leaving,” said Sue.

“What’d she say?” I said.

“The usual,” said Sue. “Low salary. When they passed the budget this year, she finally realized that they were never going to get her salary up to guidelines in spite of all their promises.”

“How about you?” I said. “Last time I talked with you, you were talking about leaving.” Sue has been working at her new DRE job for a year and a half now.

“No, I’m going to stick it out for a while,” Sue said. “It’s a pretty good job. The money sucks, but it’s better than I could make working retail. I have flextime, so I can be there for my kids when I need to. And the minister pretty much leaves me alone. When I started, he told me, ‘Technically I’m your supervisor, but as far as I’m concerned you’re on your own.'”

“Actually, that’s pretty cold-blooded,” I said.

Sue was taken aback. She had left her first DRE job because of a new minister who micro-managed everything she did. Which meant that she was perfectly happy to be working with a minister who left her alone.

“OK, but he’s your supervisor,” I said, “which means he’s supposed to be offering support and guidance. That’s what supervisors are supposed to do. And he should be going to bat for you in the budget process, trying to get your salary up to guidelines.”

No need to recount the rest of this (fictional) conversation. It’s a conversation I’ve heard before. Many ministers supervise the staff in their congregation — yet many ministers seem to think that supervision means either (a) abdicating all responsibility for the employees they supervise, or (b) micromanaging everything those employees do.

Not that I’m a good supervisor yet, but I’m working on it. Over the years, I’ve found that good supervision takes a lot of my time. In the short term, it’s quicker (and easier) to abdicate responsibility or to micromanage — but in the long term, either of those approaches will lead to fast employee turnover and poorly-trained employees who don’t have the training and/or the resources to do their jobs. On the other hand, even though it takes more of the supervisor’s time and effort, good supervision will make the whole staff much more effective and efficient — which means the whole church will benefit.

If you’re looking for reasons why so many congregations remain small and ineffective, look at the supervisory skills of ministers for one such reason. But if you find ministers who are lousy supervisors, don’t jump to conclusions and blame the ministers — maybe you should blame a system that forces ministers to be supervisors without giving them adequate training and without giving them the time to supervise the staff — maybe you should blame congregations who don’t allow their ministers the time to be good supervisors. Actually, instead of blaming anyone, why not change the system so that your minister has the time and training to be a good supervisor of staff?

Email [curse | blessing], part two

The second installment in an occasional series where I think out loud about using email effectively.

First off, reader and comics fan Craig pointed out this wonderful comic strip on the perils of email: Link. Thanks, Craig!

Next, here are some of my own current ruminations about email….

Spinning out of control (and how to stop)

Sometimes you have to use email to conduct business. The problem is that email discussions have this habit of spinning out of control. Sometimes people write things they later regret. Sometimes people stop reading carefully, and talk at one another instead of with one another.

Recently, I was participating in an ongoing email discussion. Another woman and I separately sent out perfectly innocent email messages that unwittingly stirred up strong emotions in someone else. That person sent out a very restrained reply, but suddenly it occurred to me that something was wrong.

Suddenly, it felt like things might spin out of control very quickly.

Fortunately two other people sent out nearly simultaneous email messages:– one person wrote, Let’s wait for our face-to-face meeting next week and discuss this there;– the other person wrote, This can wait until we have our next meeting. And our email conversation stopped immediately, while we wait for our next face-to-face meeting.

I’ve decided that when you’re communicating via email, you always have to be ready to stop and say, I’ll call you and we’ll talk on the phone — or, Let’s meet face-to-face and discuss this. In addition, I’ve decided that when you’re communicating via email, you always have to be ready to listen when someone says, Hey I’ll call you on the phone — or, Hey let’s meet face-to-face and discuss this. You always have to be willing to stop the email discussion at someone else’s request, and move to a more interactive mode of communication like the telephone or a face-to-face meeting.

The thing about email is that you often don’t know the emotional state of the person with whom you’re exchanging email. When someone else asks for a phone call or a face-to-face meeting, you have to trust that they really mean it. I’m thinking that when someone else asks for a phone call, the only appropriate email response is:– What are some times I can call you, and what’s the best phone number to reach you at? (or: What phone number are you at right now?) If someone asks for a face-to-face meeting, you can say:– When and where? That should keep things from spinning out of control.

Two other possibilities:– I believe that the better you know someone, the less likely it will be that an email discussion will spin out of control (which means that team-building for committees using email heavily is probably a good idea). I believe that having regularly scheduled face-to-face meetings helps a little to keep things from spinning out of control (because you know that you’re going to have to come face-to-face with those people).

But everything I’ve said here is up for debate. What are your experiences with email spinning out of control? What goes on when email discussions spin out of control? Once they start spinning, how to stop?

Next installment: Email [curse | blessing], part three

Email [curse | blessing] pick one

Yesterday’s issue of The New York Times Book Review reviews a new book called Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. The review was written by Dave Barry, and it sounds pretty much like everything Dave Barry has ever written, except that he doesn’t make any potty jokes.

Fortunately, the online version of the review has a link to the first chapter of the book. Here’s an excerpt that pretty much sums up the book’s purpose:

So what is it about email? Why do we send so many electronic messages that we never should have written? Why do things spin out of control so quickly? Why don’t people remember that email leaves an indelible electronic record? Why do we forget to compose our messages carefully so that people will know what we want without having to guess? We wrote this book to figure out why email has such a tendency to go awry — and to learn for ourselves how to email not just adequately but also well. Our Holy Grail: email that is so effective that it cuts down on email.

Those are good questions, and I think maybe I need this book. Some weeks, I spend two hours or more a day reading and writing email. Some days (today!) I find myself spending forty minutes carefully writing and rewriting an email message, when a five-minute phone call would have been more effective. Email is frustrating. Email is extremely useful. Somehow, I need to learn to make better use of email.

So I’m going to start a short series of posts on using email more effectively in churches and other small non-profits. Not that I know how to use email more effectively than you do — but if I put down some preliminary ideas, and you respond with better ideas in the comments, we might actually make some progress towards that Holy Grail — email so effective it cuts down on email.

First installment: Meetings via email

For those of us who sit on boards and committees, it is very tempting to save time by using email to conduct business outside of regular meeting times. In my experience, conducting board or committee business via email is ineffective when either (a) it takes longer to conduct the business via email, (b) the business is too complex to conduct via email, or (c) the business item is not presented well initially. Let’s look at these problems one at a time:

(a) It takes longer to conduct the business via email. Emotionally-loaded business items never translate well to email — email discussions have this uncanny ability to go from civil discussion to outright war in less than five seconds — meaning it’s much more efficient to conduct emotionally-loaded business face-to-face. Business items where not all members of the board or committee have the same depth of knowledge never work well via email — the knowledgeable people are constantly re-explaining to the others what’s going on — so here again, face-to-face is better.

(b) The business is too complex to conduct via email. Complex business items do not seem to translate well to email — people ask the same questions over and over again, or the original details get forgotten as the email discussion drags on and on — so it seems more efficient to conduct complex business face-to-face.

(c) The business item is not presented well initially. If you present a business item badly in a face-to-face meeting, you know instantly from the blank looks on people’s faces. Since you don’t get that kind of feedback with email responses, you can find yourself deeply involved in an email discussion only to realize that people have very different understandings of what’s being discussed — in which case, you’re probably better off cutting your losses and postponing the business item until your next face-to-face meeting.

So what kind of committee or board business does work well via email? Well, setting an agenda for a face-to-face meeting works well via email — little emotion involved, no depth of knowledge required, it’s a simple task. In another example, here at First Unitarian in New Bedford the Board of Trustees has to approve all building rental requests, and mostly these routine votes are done via email (in rare instances where a building rental proves contentious, the vote is postponed to a face-to-face meeting). Related to this, routine votes and approvals can often be effectively handled via email. Finally, email is very useful to distribute staff reports or subcommittee reports prior to a face-to-face meeting.

There must be other examples where committee or board business is conducted effectively via email — what examples do you have from your own experience? Has your committee or board come up with any magic techniques for carying out effective business via email?

Next installment: Email [curse | blessing], part two

Redundancy

Maybe it’s the flu, maybe it’s just another cold, but I’ve been less than fully functional for the past five days. I feel like I’m walking around in a world full of jello. People look at me and say, “What’s wrong with you today?” “Uh…,” I respond, “uh, I’ve got a cold or something.”

All of which brings up an interesting point in church administration. At eleven o’clock this morning I realized that I was doing little more than staring at the pile on my desk and the unread email on my computer screen. Then I realized that I have a really long day tomorrow. So I came home, had some chicken soup, and now I’m going to bed. And probably no one will miss me at church, unless someone calls and asks for me directly.

One design feature that every administrative system should have is redundancy. Any administrative system that is too dependent on just one person is too vulnerable — if that person resigns, or gets sick, the whole system grinds to a halt. Therefore, church administrative systems should be designed so that if one person has to step out of the system, the rest of the staff and volunteers can immediately step in and take over.

At the most basic level, this means that filing systems should be understandable to everyone, computer passwords stored in a secure but accessible place, etc. At a higher level, staff and volunteers should have basic knowledge of the jobs of people around them, and training in what to do in case of someone else’s absence.

The key concept in this whole discussion is that administrative systems are designed — which also implies intentional thought, overarching goals, and ongoing maintenance.

The implicit conclusion for all this is that smaller congregations (under 50 active members, which is determined by average worship attendance in my denomination) will have the most vulnerable administrative systems, because the absence of one individual will have a proportionately greater impact — which means that small congregations like mine really have to concentrate on designing a robust, redundant administrative system.

I hope this all makes sense. My brain feels like it’s full of jello, so I’m not sure if what I just wrote is nonsensical or sensical. Is “sensical” a word? I’m going to go take a nap.