Category Archives: Church admin.

General Assembly, day three

Tonight I had dinner with Bette and Joan, two of my favorite lay leaders.* We went over to the “Bistro” in the basement of the Renaissance Suites hotel, where the food was good (but the service was erratic and untrained).

Bette is beginning her term as her congregation’s Board President, and she has been attending the series of events for congregational presidents. “It’s great,” she said. “It’s really good stuff.” Bette never pulls her punches when events are mediocre, so this is high praise indeed.

Not surprisingly, we wound up talking about congregational governance at the dinner table. John Carver’s Policy Governance model came up, and we all agreed that policy governance is not appropriate for small congregations. Joan has an excellent analogy to make this point.

When you have a condo association with only 2 to 6 units, says Joan, the condo board has to be involved in hands-on management of the building. The condo association is not big enough to hire a professional manager. But if you live in a condo association with, say, 60 units, there is simply no way the condo board can manage all the day-to-day complexities of maintenance and upkeep, and so the board is pretty much forced to hire a property manager or a management company. In the large condo association, the board should be keeping track of the big picture; and the large condo association has enough resources to be able to pay staff to manage the day-to-day matters.

So too with congregations. Small congregations, with fewer than 50 people in attendance at worship each week, are likely to have a managing board. Large congregations, with more than 350 people in attendance at worship each week, are big enough that they can afford to hire staff to run the day-to-day matters of the congregation, leaving the board free to deal with strategic planning, visioning, and the big picture in general. These large congregations are good candidates for the Carver Policy Governance model, or some equivalent governance model. Boards in congregations of between 100 and 350 in attendance each week will be somewhere betwixt and between — not ready for a full-fledged Carver Policy Governance model (or equivalent), but big enough that the board cannot afford to remain a managing board.

I pointed out that actually no board, even the board of the smallest congregation, can afford to spend all their time managing. I feel strongly that the boards of small congregations have to spend at least half their time dealing with the big picture. Joan agreed that was so.

I like Joan’s analogy because it’s concrete and easy to understand. Her analogy has been far and away the best thing I have learned or heard during this General Assembly — and it took place over an excellent dinner instead of sitting in those horribly uncomfortable chairs in the convention center.

(* This is why I missed the UU blogger’s dinner — sorry, fellow bloggers, I missed you all!)

Why church administration is important, conclusion

To end my discussion of church administration, I’d like to look at two specific instances of applied church administration.

Emergency preparedness

I recently talked with Christana Wille McKnight, a Unitarian Universalist minister who works as a chaplain in a nursing home. Christana mentioned that the health care industry is taking seriously the possibility of an avian flu epidemic, to the point of making fairly detailed emergency preparedness plans.

Not that there are any firm predictions about an avian flu epidemic — no one knows if or when an epidemic will occur, nor if a mutated avian flu will even be deadly. However, from an administrative point of view, it makes sense for all congregations to engage in at least a basic level of emergency preparedness planning. And while the specific possibility of an avian flu epidemic might give us an opportunity to motivate our congregations to put basic emergency plans into place, anyone who was working in a church on September 11, 2001, knows at a gut level that an emergency can arise at any time. Better to have at least basic plans in place now than try to scramble to put something into place at the last minute.

Here are some elements of basic emergency preparedness that most congregations could easily put into place in less than a month:

  • Functional telephone tree that can be used to contact every member of the congregation
  • Plan for checking on shut-ins during an emergency
  • Up-to-date list of members and friends of congregation who work in health care and public safety
  • Plan for supporting health care workers and public safety employees in an extended emergency
  • Plan for building use in case of natural disaster (flood, storm, earthquake, etc.)
  • Ministers, lay leaders, and staff are not overworked so that if an emergency happens, they are not exhausted at the start of the emergency

    • In certain regions, churches will wish to engage in more specific emergency preparedness (earthquake preparedness in California, etc.). Similarly, the possibility of, say, an avian flu epidemic will prompt us to engage in planning specific to that possible emergency. So for an avian flu epidemic, we might do the floowing:

    • Plan to use church communication channels for public health or emergency messages (this implies contact with public safety authorities)
    • Alert congregation to possibility of closing down church services in case of quarantine
    • If appropriate, plan for using church building and facilities as emergency wards or morgues

    In closing, we can ask: Why should churches worry about emergency preparedness? From a practical standpoint, people in churches are aware at some level of the possibility of an emergency, and we might as well address this openly; at the very least, by so doing we’ll reduce congregational anxiety. From a theological standpoint, churches exist in part to help people get through extraordinary moments in their lives (birth, passage into adulthood, marriage, death). But these extraordinary moments are not limited to predictable life passages; they also include crises that go beyond individual lives; so emergency preparedness is simply an extension fo our core theological mission.

    Boundary violations

    In my Unitarian Universalist tradition, some experts estimate that over fifty per cent of all Unitarian Universalist congregations have experienced an incident of clergy sexual misconduct since the 1960’s; that is to say, within living memory. Church consultant Deborah Pope-Lance has said that the effects of clergy sexual misconduct are pervasive, that is, they pervade every part of church life, and persistent, that is, they persist for decades after the misconduct ended. Clergy sexual misconduct is one instance of what are more generally termed “boundary violations,” where someone in power violates the boundaries (physical, emotional, spiritual) of people over whom he or she has power. I’ll focus on clergy sexual misconduct here only because it is so widespread.

    After clergy sexual misconduct has occurred, and after the perpetrator has been removed from the congregation, the work of healing can begin. However, healing a church after boundary violations can be a long, protracted, unpleasant process. Indeed, in spite of best efforts, boundary violations can kill a church, or choke it so that it stays small and useless. Obviously, then, it is extremely important to heal a church after boundary violations.

    There is now a fairly extensive literature on healing churches after boundary violations, which you should consult if you are in such a church. However, I have not seen anything in that literature that specifically addresses church administration as a way to promote healing. Having now served in two churches in which there had been clergy sexual misconduct, I have become convinced that good church administration can foster a safe environment in which healing can proceed more quickly; and it should be obvious how this can lower a church’s anxiety, which can in turn promote healing.

    Additionally, good church administration helps a church set up, maintain, and negotiate good boundaries. When a clergyperson violates sacred boundaries by engaging in sexual misconduct, that can cause people in a church to question all boundaries within that church. Good church administration sets up boundaries based on safety and on theological principles; it maintains boundaries through clear procedures and clearly demarcated power structures; and it can help persons negotiate boundaries by ensuring that boundaries are open and visible to all.

    From a theological standpoint, church administration promotes healing from clergy sexual misconduct by creating a (metaphorical) safe space in which trust and covenant can be restored between persons, those in leadership roles, and the Sacred. Church administration is not sufficient by itself for healing after clergy sexual misconduct, but it can be a key, even a necessary, component.

    Summary and conclusion

    Church administration differs significantly from administration in the business and non-profit worlds, because church administration is informed by theology. Two theologies in my tradition that can inform adminsitration are feminist theology and ecological theology. Safety becomes a key issue for church administration; safety can encompass physical, emotional, and spiritual safety, as well as emergency preparedness. Finally, church administration is an oft-overlooked tool for promoting healing after such boundary violations as clergy sexual misconduct.

    In conclusion, although church administration is often a low priority for clergy and lay leaders, I find it to be central to my ministry. I hope that this series of short essays on the subject will promote further discussion of the issue. Because standard theological education in my tradition neglects administration, ideally, I’d like to see a book-length study of the theology and practice of Unitarian Universalist church administration aimed at ministers, staff, and lay leaders.

    Back to first post in the series

    Why church administration is important, 3

    This is the third part of a series on how church administration can be a ministry.

    Early on in this series, I mentioned that I believe there is a fundamental connection between theology and church life. Having said that, it’s worth exploring one or two different theologies and their potential connection to church life. Since I’m most familiar with my own tradition of Unitarian Universalism, the theologies I’ll explore are common in my tradition. Specifically, I’d like to explore feminist theology and ecological theology.

    (A parenthetical note to my co-religionists: What usually poses as “theology” in our tradition is really religious ideology. Thus, when hard-line humanists engage in power struggles with hard-line Christians, they are struggling over power, not over theology. We can make this obvious in this particular example by asking two simple questions. We ask the hard-line humanists, “You say your theology is humanist, but what kind of humanist theology exactly? –existential, naturalistic humanist, Renaissance humanist, or what?” Then we ask the hard-line Christians, “You say your theology is Christian, but what kind of Christian theology exactly? –liberation, narrative, antinomian, or what?” As the hard-liners sputter and are unable to articulate a clear theology, it will quickly become clear that the labels “Christian” and “humanist” are smoke-screens to hide naked power struggles.)

    Feminist theology poses interesting questions for an administrative ministry. Most obviously, feminist theology asks: why is it that men and boys generally have more power than women and girls, even in congregations where women are in the majority? But feminism also asks us to confront some other issues. There’s the continued existence of clergy sexual misconduct in our churches, almost entirely perpetrated by male ministers, and feminist theology asks why this is so. There’s the continued existence of power structures based upon hierarchical male-dominant models, and feminist theology asks if we can’t find power structures more in line with our professed theology. There’s the marginalization of programs for children, where religious education is treated as “women’s work” and nine-tenths of professional religious educators are women who are paid substantially less than ministers, and feminist theology asks we it is that we devalue children in this way.

    Feminist theology poses interesting questions, while at the same time offering hope-filled possibilities in administration. Feminist theology suggests that sexual misconduct thrives on secrecy, and it offers hope-filled possibilities for openness and transparency in administration. Feminist theology implies that we can and should experiment with more equitable power structures within our churches, and to the hope-filled administrator it suggests that management by empowerment is a better administrative model than traditional command-and-control management. Feminist theology calls our attention to the marginalization of children and teenagers in our churches, suggesting to administrators that young people should be at the center of our churches, not the margins, and that so doing will ultimately make our churches healthier, safer places all around.

    Turning to ecological theology, we find that it, too, poses some interesting questions for an administrative ministry. For example, if administration is concerned with safety, doesn’t that also imply that we should be concerned with the safety of the whole ecosystem around us? Thus, we should be concerned about the toxicity of our church buildings but also about the toxicity of the surrounding community where our church members live. And like feminist theology, ecological theology also asks us to consider the role of power structures; if the current secular power structures have gotten us into such an ecological mess, why on earth would we want to mimic them in our churches? And since ecological theology has pointed out how people of color suffer disproportionately from ecological disasters, it asks us to consider the role of racism in our churches. I have just begun my own exploration of ecological theology, and can’t say as much about it as I can about feminist theology, but I’m sure as I begin to try to answer its questions in my administrative ministry, I will understand it better.

    That is, of course, what happens in an administrative ministry. Rather than simply preaching about theology, an administrative minister puts theology into action. Words are powerful, yes, and my own Unitarian Universalist tradition has “preaching to Word” at its historical core. But actually putting theology into action in a church community turns out to be theologically rich: you try to administer theologically, and in so doing you learn where you aren’t quite clear enough in your theology, so you reflect on your theology some more, and then try implementing it again.

    To be continued

    Why church administration is important, 2

    This is the second part of a series on how church administration can be a ministry.

    Administering for safety should obviously start with physical safety. But physical safety covers far more than one might think. If I were to develop a preliminary checklist to be used by ministers specializing in administration, I would include at least the following items:

    • Emergency evacuation plans in place
    • Regular safety inspections of building
    • Building accessible to persons of all physical abilities
    • All volunteers trained in basic safety procedures
    • All employees trained in basic safety procedures
    • All employees screened for criminal backgrounds
    • Regular maintenance schedule for building
    • Budget includes reserves for emergencies
    • Sexual harassment policy in place
    • Behavior standards policy in place
    • Volunteers working with minors screened for appropriateness
    • Standards of behavior for church life made clear
    • Alcohol and tobacco banned or severely limited at all church events

    Of course, this list is incomplete; every church will have to add to this list depending on its own unique situation. You will notice that this list covers only physical and, to an extent, emotional safety. And it should also occur to you that, for many churches, checking off the items on this list could occupy an administrative minister for well over a year!

    Once physical and emotional safety has been adequately secured, the next step for the administrative minister is spiritual safety. “Spiritual safety” might sound a little vague, so I’ll try to define it more precisely. It’s easiest to start by looking at what happens when there’s a lack of spiritual safety.

    In a church that lacks spiritual safety, individuals may belittle or even attack other individuals based on spiritual matters. In my tradition, Unitarian Universalism, this most often happens in the area of theology. Even though we are a non-creedal group with no set theology, individuals may feel that it is acceptable to attack those who may hold a different theological position. A classic example is when someone who holds to a non-theistic theology attacks or belittles someone who holds to a more theistic theology. In my tradition, this results a kind of pseudo-creedalism antithetical to our professed spiritual core and an attendant general lack of theological conversations. Other traditions, and other specific churches, may experience a lack of spiritual safety in other ways. But the net result of a lack of spiritual safety is that matters of religion and matters of the spirit are suppressed within church life, to the point where the church can lose all semblance of a religious institution.

    A lack of spiritual safety also typically results in the same kind of anxiety that can result from a lack of physical or emotional safety. When you don’t feel physically safe in a church building, you may feel anxious because you feel as if you have to sit on the edge of your chair, ready to bolt in case something bad happens. When you don’t feel spiritually safe in a church, you may feel anxious because (metaphorically speaking)you’re sitting on the edge of your spiritual chair, ready to bolt in case you’re attacked.

    As an administrative minister, how do I create an environment that is spiritually safe? Obviously, first you have to take care of the physical and emotional safety; if someone thinks they’re going to be hurt by the building, or sexually harassed, they’re not going to have any energy for matters of spirituality and religion. Assuming those issues have been taken care of, standard administrative practices suggest that spiritual safety can be addressed by training, logistics, and scheduling. Train key volunteers in how to address spiritual matters; in my tradition, small group ministry training or training in active listening would be good places to start. Next, schedule times and places where persons can address spiritual matters with the help of the trained volunteers. Finally, when a significant percentage of persons have been affected by the first two steps, look at how spiritual matters can be incorporated into every part of church life using those people who have been affected; thus, budget discussions should become spiritual discussions, which would become possible if even one or two members of the Finance Committee had participated in safe spiritual/religious discussions.

    Not that creating spiritual safety of the kind I’m trying to outline is an easy matter. Like many matters pertaining to church administration, it requires constant oversight, management, and ongoing attention to niggling details.

    To be continued

    Why church administration is important

    This is the first part of a series on how church administration can be a ministry.

    Church administration is often given a low priority by both clergy and lay leaders. Typically, administrative procedures are borrowed from the techniques of for-profit or non-profit organizations, and it is assumed that those techniques will work in churches without any substantive modification. Indeed, this assumption is probably in large part true: standard administrative procedures used in the business and non-profit world do work quite well in churches.

    However, I begin with a different assumption. I assume that every facet of church life should be informed by theology. Therefore, when it comes to church administration, I begin with the assumption that, no matter what the final outcome, there should be a fundamental connection between theology and church life. Note that I am not asserting that church life should be grounded in some abstractly true theology; rather, theology and church life inform each other in a theory-praxis relationship wherein each supports and modifies the other in a sort of co-evolution.

    Nor is this merely an academic question for me: church administration is at the heart of my own praxis as a minister. Those who use the language of “call” would say that I, as a minister, have church administration as the central part of my “call to ministry.” Having never heard a “call,” I don’t use the language of “call”; I’d prefer to say that the rest of my ministry grows out of what I do in church administration. But whatever language you prefer to use, church administration is central to who I am as a minister; and so it is that I believe there is more to church administration than what the M.B.A’s teach us.

    To find out why adminstration is so important to me, let’s compare administration to preaching. Most people in my Unitarian Universalist tradition consider preaching to be far more important for ministers than administration, because preaching is typically the heart of our worship services, and our worship services are at the heart of our congregations. As a thought experiment, imagine I was serving a congregation where I happened to be the only minister but where for some reason I didn’t preach. Yet though a ministry of administration, I could nonetheless ensure that the congregation heard excellent preaching each week. I could, for example, help reorganize the budget to cover fees for outside preachers, and take care of the logistics and scheduling of outside preachers. Or in another example, I could recruit, train, and support lay preachers, while administering the logistics of scheduling, etc.

    That second example, of recruiting, training, and supporting volunteers, brings up a critical point about church administration. Although I’m now a parish minister, I started out as a minister of religious education (MRE). Rather than preaching, an MRE’s central task is making sure religious education classes take place. But whereas a preaching minister can have hundreds of people hear a single sermon, religious education classes work best when they take place in small groups. So an MRE has to make sure lots of small group religious education classes take place, which generally means that the MRE can’t lead every class by him- or herself. Therefore, an MRE has to learn the art of administration so that he or she recruits, trains, and supports volunteers — in short, empowers volunteers — to do the actual face-to-face ministry of teaching. As an MRE, I had to learn how to ministry by administration; and I learned that it is just as effective as direct ministry.

    It might help if I talked about a few specific issues so you can see how ministry by administration works. Obviously, since some of the programs an MRE administers serve minors, issues of safety are brought into high relief, due to the legal issues involved. But what I discovered as an MRE is that if I focused my administrative efforts on safety, I noticed a qualitative change in the mood of the congregation throughout all age groups. I think what happened was this: Many churches are not safe places; physically, churches often occupy buildings with serious maintenance issues; emotionally, there has been little attention to issues of emotional safety; and most importantly, spiritually there is often little attempt to create a safe place for people to engage in spiritual exploration.

    When the church building, church community, and church “spirit” do not feel safe, it can feel as if the people of the church are, as it were, sitting on the edges of their chairs getting ready to run out of the building if a disaster happens. In church administration jargon, there is a lot of anxiety in that church. In my experience, it’s possible to lower that anxiety substantially with seemingly minor safety features. I have found that the simple act of posting clear, well-thought-out maps showing emergency evacuation routes in each and every room in the church building (including the primary worship space) can lower anxiety to extent that seems hardly credible.

    Next installment: More about safety

    Peter Drucker

    The Economist online has an excellent appreciation of Peter Drucker, the management theorist who died on November 11. The article’s assessment of Drucker’s legacy makes it worth reading if you have the slightest interest in this field. After a thoughtful, balanced examination of Drucker’s achievements in business management, the unsigned article says:

    Moreover, Mr Drucker continued to produce new ideas up until his 90s. His work on the management of voluntary organisations—particularly religious organisations—remained at the cutting edge.

    Cutting edge, and very useful — his work continues to guide what I do in congregational life. I only hope that Drucker’s work in management of voluntary organizations is now taken up by a new generation of talented thinkers.

    Just plain hospitality

    Just came back from a meeting of the brand-new Membership Development Committee here at First Unitarian in New Bedford. Some lay leaders got fired up about the possibilities for growing our congregation, and said, Hey let’s get together and talk about this. It was a great meeting and it got me thinking about a conversation I had on Thursday….

    I was talking with Greg Stewart, the minister in the Reno, Nevada, Unitarian Universalist congregation. Out in Reno, they have nearly tripled in size in less than two years, from about 50 to about 150. Greg said something about the momentum they’ve built, and how it might be hard for them to stop growing if they wanted to… and I got to thinking….

    My bet is that it’s hard to not grow a Unitarian Universalist congregation. We know there’s lots of people who long to hear our religious message. By some reports we already have more visitors per existing member than does a fast-growing faith like the Mormons. Logically, since we’re not growing and the Mormons are, we must be working pretty hard to keep people out of Unitarian Universalism.

    I mean, think about it. When someone new joins a group you love, your initial inclination is to share your excitement to keep them coming back. You’d have to work hard to choke down your inclination to extend that basic human hospitality. It’s like inviting someone into your home, and then ignoring that person — which, if you think about it, would be draining. It takes an emotional toll to deny basic hospitality.

    Therefore, it’s a lot less work to simply extend plain old hospitality to everyone who comes into one of our congregations. If we took the easy route and extended basic hospitality to all those newcomers, we’d grow quickly. Thus efficiency has become my new favorite argument for growing our congregations — it’s easier, and it’s less work, to grow!

    Committee

    A dozen and a half people gathered over at the Bethel AME church this evening to begin planning for a January celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s a diverse group, and not just racially but religiously and organizationally as well. In addition to Pastor Mark Green and lay leaders from Bethel AME, there were people from Trinity Lutheran, Grace Episcopal, the local Baha’i community, the local NAACP chapter, the Interchurch Council, New Life church, the Methodist church down the block, some others that I’ve now forgotten, along with two Unitarian Universalist ministers.

    I happen to like going to committee meetings. Committee meetings are never boring because you get to watch a little human drama unfold as discussion ebbs and flows and ideas bounce back and forth. And you get to hang out with a group of people who care about something enough to give up an evening of their precious free time (I mean, hanging out with a group of people who want to maintain the legacy of Dr. King’s work — can you imagine a better way to spend an evening?). Yes, I do like committee meetings.

    Of course every large committee has to have its subcommittees. I jumped at the chance to be on the publicity subcommittee, a perfect place for a former salesman who loves to do sales and project management and marketing communications. Plus that meant I got to avoid being on the program subcommittee, planning the music and the keynote speaker and lining up the requisite politicans to speak and all that (can you imagine wanting to be on the program committee? –sounds like work to me). And I get to avoid being on the finance subcommittee, the refreshments subcommittee, or one of those other subcommittees.

    Which brings up a good, solid reason why diversity is a Good Thing. The world does need people who will take care of finances, and people who will (shudder) find a keynote speaker. Thank goodness for diversity, because diversity means I don’t have to do those things.

    Dissent within the non-profit

    What’s the role of dissent within a non-profit organization? Here’s Peter Drucker’s answer, from his book Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices (Drucker includes churches as non-profit organizations):

    …Important decisions are risky. They should be controversial. Acclamation means that nobody has done the homework.

    Because it is essential in an effective discussion to understand what it is really about, there has to be dissent and disagreement. If you make a decision by acclamation, it is almost bound to be made on the apparent symptoms rather than on the real issue. You need dissent; but you have to make it productive.

    About seventy years ago, an American political scientist, Mary Parker Follet, said that when you have dissent in an organization, you should never ask who is right. You should not even ask what is right. You must assume that each faction gives the right answer, but to a different question. Each sees a different reality.

    Personally, I have found dissent to be a source of energy and inspiration in my work in UU congregations. Dissent may not be comfortable (especially when the people who dissent from me turn out to be right, as is often the case) — but a congregation without dissent would be dead.