Yesterday’s New York Times carried a story by Neela Banerjee titled “Sex Offenders Test Churches’ Core Beliefs: Safety Is Weighed Against Tolerance.” The story is about a Congregational church that is wrestling about whether they can welcome and accept child molesters and other sex offenders who want to attend their church once they get out of prison. Can a church minister to both sex offenders and to families with children?

“They are conflicting ministries,” the Reverend Patricia Tummino said about reaching out to sex offenders, to children, and to adult survivors of abuse. Since the late 1990’s, Ms. Tummino’s congregation, the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Middleboro, Mass., has dealt with two known sex offenders. “You can’t be all things to all people.”

I couldn’t agree more with Trish Tummino, my ministerial colleague from two towns over. Yes, former child molesters should be able to find a church to which they can belong; the problem is that they will probably need to find a large church, or a smaller church that does not have a ministry to children. But if you’re in a church with less than two hundred at worship each week (which includes most churches in the United States), there just isn’t enough room for both child molesters and children. Heck, I see this with divorces — when a couple divorces in a church with an average attendance of less than two hundred a week, typically one member of the couple gets custody of the church and the other member of the couple has to find a new church.

The only exception I can think of is the smaller church with at least two worship services, where one of the worship services has no Sunday school and no real accommodation for children — in such a church, a former child molester might be able to attend the child-free worship service. But really, as Trish says, smaller churches cannot be all things to all people — and thanks, Trish, for telling this somewhat awkward truth.

Parenthetical note: Trish was invited to talk about this topic live on MSNBC this morning at 10:45 EDT. Unfortunately, it looks like MSNBC didn’t put the video of Trish’s interview online.

Conflict is everywhere, including inside congregations. If you’re part of a congregation that’s in conflict, it really helps to have tools to help you understand and manage conflict. One of the most useful models for helping manage conflict in a congregation comes from the Alban Institute. The model posits that there are five levels of conflict, and as the conflict escalates up to the higher levels it gets harder to manage or resolve the conflict — and the modle helps you understand how to lower the conflict to a more manageable level.

And you can read a great summary of the five levels of conflict online, at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockville’s Web site. In fact, go read it now, so you’re familiar with this very useful concept before you find yourself in a congregational conflict:–

Link.

Update: the blog “Speaking Truth to Power” has an excellent piece on the limitations of this model: link.

My sense is that the Alban Institute model would not be very helpful for congregations in the middle of revelations of clergy sexual misconduct.

Speaking as one religious professional among many, I personally have found the model useful in certain high-conflict settings, used as one among many diagnostic tools that can help orient me to what’s going on around me — in such situations, if I determined that the situation was at or above level three conflict, I would know that it would be wise for me to seek outside help (at level three I’d be looking for a consultant for me, at level four+ I’d be looking for outside intervention). And I have found that lay leaders and religious professionals can often make effective use of the model for conflicts up to level three.

Thanks to uugrrl for pointing out the very real limitations of a potentially useful model — and for sharing the fact that grief counseling worked so well in her congregation’s situation. (And uugrrl, sorry for not posting my comment at your site, but Blogger refused to recognize my usename….)

“Steward’s Prophet” is a new Web site run by Rev. Karen McArthur. Karen, who is affiliated with the United Church of Christ, has a strong background in congregational finances and administration (I’d say she knows more about these topics than anyone else I know). She has been doing interim ministry for a while, but has now decided to go out on her own as a financial consultant to congregations.

Her Web site is still brand-new, but she says she plans to add new material monthly. If you’re interested in congregational finances, it’s worth bookmarking. Link.

Finally, the weather turned cold again. When I took a walk this afternoon, it wasn’t that cold — just below freezing — but the wind was blowing hard enough that I had to lean into it at times. I had to walk hard and fast to get warm. It felt good to take deep breaths of the cold, dry air.

Once the sun went down, the temperature started dropping quickly. I had to make a hospital visit, and on the way there I checked the heat in the church. The furnace was off again. I hit the reset button on the burner, and it roared back to life. I got back from the hospital, had a late dinner, and on a hunch went back up to the church to check the heat again — of course the furnace was off yet again.

So here I sit, waiting for the furnace repairman to show up. He is no happier than I to have to go out on such a cold night; what makes it worse is that he’s been here at least once a week since Christmas. Our architect tells us that the whole heating plant needs to be replaced; so our repairman fixes one thing, and something else breaks.

I’m taking a week of study leave, which begins next week — next week begins in approximately ten minutes. When I’m on study leave, I’m supposed to devote myself to study and continuing education, and I’m not supposed to go to the church at all. But I will still be here past midnight.

I still like cold weather, but I hate deferred maintenance.

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, one of the readings for the sermon this week will be Exodus 16.1-3; the other reading will be from Leadership for the Twenty-First Century by Joseph Rost. You can look up the passage from Exodus on your own [link]; here’s the passage from Rost’s book:

Followers are part of the leadership relationship in a new paradigm of leadership. What is different about the emerging view of followers is the substantive meaning attached to the word and the clarity given to that understanding. The following five points give the concept of followers substance and clarity.

First, only people who are active in the leadership process are followers. Passive people are not in a relationship. They have chosen not to be involved. They cannot have influence. Passive people are not followers.

Second, active people can fall anywhere on a continuum of activity from highly active to minimally active, and their influence in the leadership process is, in large part, based on their activity, their willingness to get involved, their use of the power resources they have at their command to influence other people….

Third, followers can become leaders and leaders can become followers in any one leadership relationship. People are not stuck in one or the other for the whole time the relationship exists…. This ability to change places without changing organizational positions gives followers considerable influence and mobility.

Fourth, in one group or organization people can be leaders. In other groups and organizations they can be followers. Followers are not always followers in all leadership relationships.

Fifth, and most important, followers do no do followership, they do leadership. Both leaders and followers form one relationship that is leadership. There is no such thing as followership in the new school of leadership. Followership makes sense only in the industrial leadership paradigm, where leadership is good management. Since followers who are subordinates could not do management (since they were not managers), they had to do followership. No wonder followership connoted subordination, submissiveness, and passivity. In the new paradigm, followers and leaders do leadership. They are in the leadership relationship together. They are the ones who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes….. Followers and leaders develop a relationship wherein they influence one another as well as the organization and society, and that is leadership. [pp. 108-109; emphasis in original]

Rost’s analysis of leadership is one of the best I’ve seen. The book is pretty dry, but it’s worth wading through the academic prose to get to the ideas.

Ideas like: “Passive people are not followers.” I see this happening in liberal religion right now. There are the passive people who sit and complain about having to take on responsibility for their own well-being (as happens in Exodus 16.1-3). There are the passive people can also hide behind individualism as their excuse for not being active followers; “doing your own thing” all too often translates into doing things that don’t effect real change (as happens in Exodus 32.21-29, which I almost used as one of this week’s readings). Individualism is my preferred form of passivity.

In the December, 2006, issue of Harvard Business Review, Wayne Cascio has a short article titled “The High Cost of Low Wages,” taken from a longer article he did for Academy of Management Perspectives. In the article Cascio, a professor of management at University of Colorado, compares the salaries of two retail giants, WalMart and Costco.

WalMart’s subsidiary, Sam’s Club, competes directly with Costco. Yet while Sam’s Club pays an average of about $10 an hour, Costco pays an average of $17 an hour. In the cut-throat business of retailing low-price merchandise, where wages make up a substantial part of costs, how can Costco afford to pay wages that are more than 40% higher than Sam’s Club wages?

Cascio points out that the “fully loaded cost of replacing a worker who leaves (excluding lost productivity) is typically 1.5 to 2.5 times the worker’s annual salary” — but to be conservative, Cascio pegs it at 60% of a worker’s annual salary. In addition, Cascio points out that each year Sam’s Club loses “more than twice as many people as Costco does: 44% versus 17%.”

Bottom line: even though Sam’s Club pays far less, the annual cost of employee churn for Sam’s Club is $5,274 per worker, whereas it’s only $3,628 per worker for Costco. Cascio concludes: “In return for its generous wages and benefits, Costco gets one of the most loyal and productive workforces in all of retailing…. These figures challenge the common assumption that labor rates equal labor costs.” [Emphasis mine. Reprints of this article may be purchased online: Link.]

While Cascio does his calculations for the world of retailing, I believe the same principles apply to congregations. Churches often pay low wages in the mistaken assumption that they are saving money. However, low wages can contribute to high turnover. And in the church world, it takes far longer to build full productivity in an employee than it does in the retail world, suggesting the full cost of replacing a church worker is substantially higher than it is for Costco or WalMart.

Given the phenomenon of Baumol’s cost disease [which I defined in a past post: Link], I believe that churches also have to find ways to boost productivity. Generous salary and benefits packages alone won’t boost productivity — good management and evaluation are obivously necessary as well. On the other hand, low salary and poor benefits are likely to contribute to lower productivity — if you pay WalMart-level wages, you’ll get WalMart-level work.

Paying low wages and providing skimpy benefits packages may seem to save money for churches in the short term. But the most cost effective solution is to cut back on staff turnover and to boost productivity, by providing excellent salary and benefit packages.

For reference: Tables of salary guidelines for Unitarian Universalist churches can be found online: Link. Salary guidelines for the American Guild of Organists can also be found online: Link.

At the meeting of ministers on Tuesday, I heard several of the ministers talk about September in a tone of voice you might use when talking about implacable forces of nature. “Not a chance, not in September.” “Well, you know, it’s September.” Churches are busy in September — at least, liberal churches in this part of the world are busy in September. There’s no good reason for our churches to be so busy in this month, but they always are.

I know from experience that if you get behind in September, you won’t catch up again until after Christmas. I’ve already fallen behind this year. Our Director of Religious Education resigned a week and a half ago, and that put us behind schedule. I’m officiating at two memorial services over the next week and a half, and that has put me further behind. I’ve already had to give up several non-essential projects and plans.

But I haven’t given up the Wednesday morning work parties we have scheduled. Four other people showed up at ten this morning, and we all went out into the garden. It was a gorgeous late summer morning. We pulled weeds, we spruced up the gravel path by the front door to the church, we enjoyed the sun, chatted with each other, and drank strong coffee.

I suppose I should have been sitting indoors staring at a computer screen or talking to a disembodied voice on the telephone, feeling the stress build up in my body. But feminist theology has long warned us that being disembodied, being out of touch with our bodies, forces us to ignore something essential about what it means to be human. In which case, hands-on physical labor outdoors with other people makes more theological sense, than staring at a computer screen does.