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!)