Religion – Yet Another Unitarian Universalist

The opposite of a bullying boss

Over the past week, I’ve been writing a series of posts about bullies in the workplace —although I prefer the terminology of Robert I. Sutton, professor of business at Stanford University, who calls them “assholes,” not “bullies.” Now I’d like to consider the opposite of assholes. And what, you ask, is the opposite of an asshole? — it’s a boss who’s nice but incompetent.

Back in 2012, Sutton wrote a blog post titled “Are incompetent and nice bosses even worse than the incompetent assholes?” This post is based on a chapter from his book Good Boss Bad Boss, in which he describes in some detail what a good boss looks like. Sutton says that “one of the most personally troubling lessons I’ve learned (or at least am on the verge of believing)” is this:

“I am starting to wonder… if nice but incompetent bosses are even worse (at least in some ways and at certain times) than competent assholes.”

Sutton then includes an excerpt from his book Good Boss Bad Boss which gives a vivid portrait of a nice-but-incompetent boss:

“People may love that crummy boss so much they constantly excuse, or don’t even notice, clear signs of incompetence. For example, there is one senior executive I know who is utterly lacking in the necessary skills or thirst for excellence his job requires. He communicates poorly (he rarely returns even important e-mails and devotes little attention to developing the network of partners his organization needs), lacks the courage to confront — let alone fire — destructive employees, and there are multiple signs his organization’s reputation is slipping. But he is such a lovely person, so caring and so empathetic, that his superiors can’t bring themselves to fire him.”

So does this apply to Unitarian Universalist clergy? You bet it does. If you’ve been around Unitarian Universalism long enough, you’ll be able to think of clergy who were kind, gentle souls whom everyone loved — and who drove their congregation into the ground because of their incompetence. I started working as a Director of Religious Education (DRE) in 1994, and I remember hearing from other DREs about ministers who were good and nice people, but who were horrible to work for because they lacked necessary skills, had no thirst for excellence, communicated poorly, lacked the courage to confront poor employees, didn’t develop the network of partners the congregation needed, etc. — just like the senior executive that Sutton writes about.

But remember that the ultimate boss of a Unitarian Universalist congregation is the board. And in my experience, boards of congregations can also be nice-but-incompetent. Back in the 1990s, I remember one board that was so nice that they refused to terminate a destructive employee, even though that one employee was causing massive turnover in every other staff position. I’ve also seen boards that were poor communicators, that neglected to develop a network of partners, etc.

Whether it’s a nice-but-incompetent board, or a nice-but-incompetent minister, it can be very unpleasant to work under them — ask any DRE who has worked under a nice-but-incompetent boss. Sure, they’re really nice people. But they will not protect you from another staff person who’s destructive. They will not communicate effectively with you. They do not have the skills they need to lead effectively. They will not develop networks that bring in resources that will help you do your job. And because they’re so nice, they will never get fired. Finally, to point out the obvious, whether you’re paid staff and to volunteer staff, it’s equally painful to work under a nice-but-incompetent boss (it might even be worse for volunteer staff, because you’re not even getting a salary).

Sutton concludes his blog post with some advice:

“There are two lessons here. The first is for bosses. If you are well-liked, civilized, and caring, your charms provide protective armor when things go wrong. Your superiors are likely to give you the benefit of the doubt as well as second and third chances — sometimes even if you are incompetent. I would add, however, that if you are a truly crummy boss — but care as much for others as they do for you — stepping aside is the noble thing to do.

“The second lesson is for those who oversee lovable losers. Doing the dirty work with such bosses is distasteful. But if rehabilitation has failed — or things are falling apart too fast to risk it — the time has come to hit the delete button.”

Close-up of a delete key on a computer keyboard. — “…if rehabilitation has failed…the time has come to hit the delete button….”

Part of a series of posts on clergy and bullying — Sigh. Not Again. — What ministerial bullying looks like — What ministers didn’t learn in theological school — When clergy get bullied — The opposite of a bullying boss

When clergy get bullied

Recently, I wrote about what it looks like when clergy act as bullies. But clergy can also be the targets of bullying. What does that look like?

In a recent article on a United Church of Canada website, Christopher White describes what it looks like when clergy get bullied:

“In all the conversations I had with clergy on bullying, the pattern was identical: one congregant takes the lead and levels small, unrelenting criticisms against the minister that grow over time. Clergy are confused, and the congregation often has no idea what is happening until it is too late. The regions or Office of Vocation get involved in what is perceived as a ‘conflict’ and bring to the task a set of policies and procedures that are inadequate for bullying. The problem goes unresolved, and bullying remains unchecked in congregations, impacting minister after minister.”

As it happens, I’ve been bullied by congregants a couple of times. The first time it happened, I lucked out — the bully (who was also bullying other staff and lay leaders) left the congregation soon thereafter. And by the time it happened to me again, I knew exactly what was going on, so it had less impact on me. It was still extremely unpleasant.

Perhaps the most important part of the article is the brief section on why bullying seems to be on the increase:

“Alison Miculan has been on the front lines of supporting bullied clergy as the organizing chair of Unifaith. She believes the problem is ‘pretty rampant right now.’ Miculan says the COVID-19 pandemic led to an increase in bullying due to the frustration, fear, and anxiety in congregations today. ‘We are an angry society, and that’s been reflected in the church.’ …”

Note that the article is about congregations in Canada. I’d say that the United States is even more angry than Canada right now, which I guess means our congregations can expect more bullying and bullies than usual.

Mind you, I still don’t care for the term “bully.” I still prefer the term “asshole,” as defined by business professor Robert Sutton in his book The No Asshole Rule. Using Sutton’s term helps me remember that assholes have a negative impact on organizational performance. That is, it’s not just about one bully making the life of one target absolutely miserable — it’s about how an asshole not only makes life miserable for their targets, but they can also drag down the entire organization.

Whatever term you use, it’s definitely worth reading the article: “More United Church clergy are feeling targeted by congregational bullies.”

What ministers didn’t learn in theological school

The Religious Workforce Project has released a report titled “What Clergy Leaders Wish They Had Been Trained To Do: And Why It Matters.”

I think it’s a pretty good report. And I think anyone involved in congregational leadership will find it worth reading.

A key finding detailed in the report is that there are five key skill sets where clergy leaders felt they did not receive adequate training. Those five key skill sets:

Administration and management
Technology skills
Soft skills for leadership, a broad category which includes:
- inspire others to achieve shared goals
- set a clear vision and communicate it effectively
- create a culture of accountability and excellence
- solve problems
- coach or mentor others
- manage conflict well
- delegate tasks
- have high emotional intelligence, incl. self-awareness and self-care
Counseling and pastoral care
Facilities management

I encourage you to read the report, which includes many direct quotes from interviews with working clergy about what they wished they had been taught in theological school. One of my favorite quotes in the report starts off like this:

“So, I took two semesters on the early church and memorized all of the heresies of the early church. No one has ever walked into my office with a crisis on Donatism. No one has ever come worried about the light of Christ in them and if they were a Gnostic. I feel pretty strongly that a vast majority of my seminary education was great if I wanted to be a theologian, and useless if I wanted to be a parish pastor.”

But the real point here — for both clergy and for lay leaders — is pretty simple: clergy do, in fact, need to know these skills. In the Unitarian Universalist tradition, lay leaders of congregation supervise ministers, so lay leaders should be prepared to evaluate whether clergy have these skills or not. When clergy do not have these skills, lay leaders should work with clergy to prioritize which of these skills are most important in their congregation, and then figure out how to get clergy appropriate training for any needed skills. And lay leaders have to realize that learning these skills takes time, which means they have to reduce the clergy workload so that there’s time for the required training.

Furthermore, since lay leaders are pretty notorious for being inconsistent supervisors, clergy have to take it on themselves to hold themselves accountable for learning the high-priority skills. Ideally, clergy will find someone (e.g., a consultant or coach) who will work with them over an extended period as they learn a needed skill.

Another thought [added 15 April 2025]: I’ve been thinking about ministerial bullying recently, and I suspect at least some bullying happens because clergy lack soft skills (esp. inspiring others, coaching and mentoring, managing conflict, delegating tasks well, and having emotional intelligence), and because they lack administration and management skills. I suspect that if you don’t have soft skills, and you don’t know how to manage, it’s much easier to become a bully — because you don’t know any other way to get things done.

One more thing: when lay leaders are in the process of hiring a new minister, they should look over these five key skill sets, and determine which ones their new hire absolutely must have. During the hiring process, both lay leaders and clergy should make a point of discussing these five key skill sets together. Better that everyone has clear expectations right up front.

What ministerial bullying looks like

Last month, there was a dust-up at Winchester Cathedral in England. Not surprisingly, as a cathedral of the Church of England they have an unbelievable music program. The long-time music director and organist was Andrew Lumsden, led the Winchester Cathedral Choir to a Grammy award in 2024 for their soundtrack to a Star Wars video game. Lumsden suddenly resigned last summer with no explanation. At about the same time, half the adult choristers — so-called “lay clerks” — quit. In addition, the boy choristers were also well below the usual number. Upon receiving numerous complaints, including a negative social media campaign, the bishop commissioned an outside review. Very Rev. Catherine Ogle, Dean of the cathedral — the senior management position in the Cathedral organization — announced she would retire in May, 2025, but after the outside review was completed she announced an immediate departure and left in early March.

So why all these departures?

According to Living Church magazine — an international periodical of the Anglo-Catholic wing of the worldwide Anglican communion — the problem was bullying by the Precentor of the Cathedral, Rev. Canon Andy Trenier. Back on July 3, 2024, Living Church reported:

“Amid public accusations of bullying, Winchester Cathedral has lost its 22-year director of music [i.e., Lumsden], the senior non-executive member of its chapter, and half of its adult male choristers, or lay clerks. The dean, the Very Rev. Catherine Ogle, has taken a break that the cathedral suggested will be brief, and the precentor and sacrist accused of bullying, the Rev. Canon Andy Trenier, ‘is on light duties,’ a statement by the cathedral staff said.”

Living Church quotes from other news sources that point to management practices that sound questionable to me, including possible mismanagement of funds:

“The cathedral’s season of discontent has been the subject of various media reports, from the tabloid Mail on Sunday to the cultural magazine The Critic. ‘The talk is of funds being diverted away from the choir and into other areas of cathedral life, including other start-up choral groups within the cathedral,’ Gavin McCormick wrote in The Critic. ‘Rumours that the whole choral foundation in the cathedral is under threat have abounded. It is not difficult to see why: the ranks of the lay clerks (who stood at a full complement of 12 in [former dean Trevor] Beeson’s day [the 1990s]) have shrunk to a minimal level (now just 7, perhaps soon 6); boy choristers are also numerically down. The choir looks threadbare — and communication about why this is so, and how the problem will be solved, has been non-existent.'”

The idea of start-up choral groups sounds good, but if those start-up groups sued funds earmarked for the main music program, to me that doesn’t sound so good. I’d pay more attention, however, to the decline in the number of choristers. Reportedly, that decline was the result of the alleged bullying. Living Church went on to report what the bullying looked like:

“Ali Kefford of The Mail on Sunday wrote about Trenier: ‘He is said to have berated the Director of Music Dr Andrew Lumsden in front of the boy choristers, and told singers they could leave if they didn’t agree with his approach. Those targeted by his volcanic temper are said to have been left trembling.’ Kefford added: ‘Canon Trenier’s relationship with the eight adult male lay clerks is said to have irretrievably broken down amid allegations that he has been coercive, manipulative, and belittling. They are four short of their usual tally of 12 because, his critics say, working at Winchester is now seen as a poison chalice.'”

These days, the term for people who behave in the way Trenier is alleged to have behaved is “bully.” I often use a different term. Back in 2007 Robert I. Sutton, professor of business at Stanford University, called this kind of manager an “asshole.” In his book The No Asshole Rule, Sutton details how abusive supervisors — bullies, if you will — often prove to be a detriment to the overall performance of an organization. Thus, it’s not just that assholes are a pain to work with, they actually damage the organization.

Best of all, Sutton has a fairly precise definition for what constitutes an asshole. “Bully” often proves to be a vaguely defined term, but Sutton turns “asshole” into a precisely defined term so you can clearly identify who’s an asshole, and who isn’t. According to Sutton, there are two main tests for determining who is an asshole:

“Test One: After talking to the alleged asshole, does the ‘target’ feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled by the person? In particular, does the target feel worse about him or herself? Test Two: Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather than at people who are more powerful?”

From the few reports that I’ve read on the situation at Winchester Cathedral, it does sound like Andy Trenier might pass both tests. If it’s true that he has a “volcanic temper” that leaves underlings “trembling,” then he appears to pass the first test. And according to reports, he yelled at people he supervises, i.e., people who have less power than he, which would mean he passes the second test.

For our purposes, though, we don’t need to try to judge the facts of the Winchester cathedral case. The allegations, whether true or not, give a pretty good feel for what ministerial bullying looks like — it’s “coercive, manipulative, and belittling”; it can leave the target “trembling”; it may include a my-way-or-the-highway demand; and people do in fact leave the organization rather than have to deal with the ministerial bully.

If you’re in a situation where you think you’re seeing ministerial bullying, you might want to check out Robert Sutton’s books on assholes: The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide: How To Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt. Or, if you’re a minister or supervisor, you might want to read Sutton’s book Good Boss, Bad Boss: How To Be the Best…and Learn from the Worst.

Sigh. Not again.

I got one of those emails today, informing me that a Unitarian Universalist minister has been removed from fellowship. It read:

“The Ministerial Fellowship Committee voted recently to remove the Rev. John Saxon from fellowship for actions and behaviors constituting bullying, creating a hostile environment, and conduct unbecoming a minister.”

A quick web search (including what appears to be his Facebook page) shows John L. Saxon as a professor of public law and government at UNC-CH, retiring from there in 2010. He graduated from Meadville/Lombard Theological School in 2009, serving as hospital chaplain for Alamance Regional Medical Center, beginning c. 2010. He was assistant at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh, N.C., beginning in 2010, then later lead minister; he left the latter position in 2017. From 2017 to 2020 he was Executive Director of the Unitarian Universalist Social Justice Ministry for North Carolina, and then apparently from 2020 to 2022 he was president of the organization (online sources are not clear). One brief bio of him says he retired in 2022, so it’s not at all clear where he allegedly engaged in the actions that led the Ministerial Fellowship Committee to remove him from fellowship.

As usual when I publish these announcements, I’m making no judgements on the truth of the allegations. I’m publishing these because up until a few years ago the UUA did not maintain a public list of this sort of thing; and since then it has become increasingly difficult to find out where the accused ministers have worked.

I will make one general comment, though, which is that removing a minister from fellowship for bullying now appears to be more common than removing a minister from fellowship for sexual misconduct. Does this mean I believe UU ministers are no longer engaging in sexual misconduct? No, I suspect it’s simply more difficult for victims of sexual misconduct to come forward. [Plus as I outline in a later post in this series, there are societal factors leading to more bullying.]

First in a series of posts on clergy and bullying — Sigh. Not Again. — What ministerial bullying looks like — What ministers didn’t learn in theological school — When clergy get bullied — The opposite of a bullying boss

What youth engagement can look like

In the last 1990s, I took Prof. Robert Pazmino’s course in teaching practices and principles, aimed at education in local congregations. One of Bob’s memorable insights was that congregations should have a teen voting member on every church committee, including the governing board. As Bob pointed out, not only is that the best way for teens to learn how congregational governance works, it’s also good for congregations who want to figure out how to meet the emerging needs of the rising generation.

This principle holds true for all nonprofit organizations. In 2014, when the Religious Education Association annual conference was in Boston, I went with a group to visit the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI). This community group, which served a white-minority low-income neighborhood, had 4 seats on its 25-seat board dedicated to teens. Not only did DSNI benefit from the insights of its teen board members — not only did the teens benefit enormously from this real-life experience — but serving on the DSNI board as a teen provided a direct path into city government for ambitious teens; this helped both the teens, and DSNI, who now had a sympathetic ear in City Hall.

Now Hamilton Ontario is applying this same principle to the public sector:

“When Hamilton [Ontario] first set its sights on bolstering youth engagement, it focused on some of the places it could connect with the greatest number of young people: local universities. After years of working with individual institutions in effective, yet often one-off and ad hoc ways, the city saw merit in striking a long-term partnership with its three core schools—Mohawk College and McMaster and Redeemer universities—with the shared aim of integrating students into public problem solving…. All four partners committed to a five-year pilot program—including funding, time, and even a physical building next to city hall—to turn the seat of local government into a classroom and the schools into extensions of city hall….” [via Bloomberg Cities Network at Johns Hopkins Univ.]

So… now you have even more motivation to get teens on your congregation’s board and committees.

Questionable quotes

While researching the provenance of quotes from the UUA’s “Wayside Pulpit” quote collection, I’ve uncovered a number of questionable quotes. Some of the quotes are clearly spurious or otherwise wrong. Others, however, may be real quotations, but my research didn’t happen to turn up a firm attribution. Since some of my readers enjoy working on this kind of puzzle, I’ll post some of the results of my research below.

Quotes for the Wayside Pulpit

The “Wayside Pulpit” is a long tradition for Unitarian Universalist congregations. In the old days, the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) would print up large poster-size sheets with various inspirational quotes on them, and congregations would purchase those sheets, and post them in signboards outside their church or meetinghouse. Nowadays, the UUA provides free PDFs and you print them yourself.

When we installed a Wayside Pulpit outside the meetinghouse of First Parish in Cohasset, Mass., I started looking for some more (and more recent) quotations to add to the ones I found in the UUA website. I quickly discovered that the web is inundated with spurious quotes, and quotes with inaccurate attributions. Then I noticed that some of the quotes provided by the UUA had problems. As an example, the quotation “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing” gets attributed to Edmund Burke, but the Quote Investigator website states that this attribution is wrong. Or take the quotation that says “If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way” — the UUA attributes this to James Freeman Clarke, but I couldn’t find it in Clarke’s published works (which are mostly digitized and easily searchable online), and various online sources attribute this same quote to Napoleon Hill or Martin Luther King, Jr.

After many hours of research, I finally came up with 77 quotes where I had reasonably good evidence that (a) the quote was actually said by the person it’s attributed to, and (b) it represents pretty much the same words that the person actually said or wrote. For each quote, I included attributions showing their source. (In a couple of cases, I shortened quotes so they’d fit into the Wayside Pulpit format; I’ve noted where I’ve done so, and I also give the original wording.)

Several of these quotes date from the past five years, including words from Brene Brown, Joy Harjo, Tricia Hersey, Yara Shahidi, Taylor Swift, and Greta Thunberg. I’ve also added a couple of quotes from non-White UUs including Mark Morrison-Reed and Imaoka Shin’ichiro. (Update: just added a bunch of quotes from scientists, for those of us who are geeks.)

You can see this collection of quotes here.

A sign in front of the corner of a New England clapboard meetinghouse. — The Wayside Pulpit in front of the 1747 Cohasset Meetinghouse.

When to open

Since COVID, I’ve noticed a growing trend among Unitarian Universalist congregations — decisions about whether to close on a given Sunday. Here in New England, that often takes the form of deciding whether to open up when there’s a winter storm on Sunday morning. This has been especially noticeable because we’ve had a winter storm hit on each of the past Sundays.

Typically, three options are considered — (1) Have both an in-person service and a livestreaming option; (2) No in-person service, service available via livestream only; and (3) Cancel the service entirely. Congregations within a couple of miles of each other can wind up making different decisions based on their livestream capabilities vs. their in-person capabilities, as well as the needs and interests of their members and friends. There is no one correct answer. Yet although there is no one correct answer, canceling in-person services carries a significant risk.

Here’s how I explain that risk: Congregations are operating in an increasingly competitive market for people’s leisure time. We used to place based on the assumption that congregations were in competition with one another, e.g., the Unitarian Universalist congregation was in competition with the local Congregational church and Reform Jewish synagogue. But now our primary competition is with other leisure time activities. For many people, our primary value may not be religion and spirituality, but community and interpersonal contact. So here at First Parish in Cohasset, our most direct competition includes both the liberal UCC church across the street, and the local coffee shop a block away.

As it happens, I live above the local coffee shop. The past two Sundays, the coffee shop opened promptly at 7 a.m. as usual, regardless of the winter storms. Because I’ve noticed that the coffee shop is always open, I’m reluctant to cancel in-person services for a winter storm — if we do cancel, we’re essentially saying that we’re less important than a cup of coffee. At the same time, we offer livestreaming for anyone who’s still snowed in, or who feels physically unable to wade through snow and ice to get to services. (And maybe there’s a sense in which livestr4eaming allows us to out-compete the coffee shop.)

Yes, in-person attendance was low both weeks (on 2/9, 11 in person, 32 livestream log-ins; on 2/16, 20 in person, 20 livestream log-ins). Foot traffic at the coffee shop was also low, from what I could see. But First Parish wants to remain competitive with other leisure time activities, and that’s reason enough to stay open for both in-person and livestreaming during both winter storms. — Mind you, that’s me speaking as someone who’s worked in sales and marketing; I can totally understand why other congregations would think this strange.

Noted without comment

From “The American Taboo on Socialism” by Robert N. Bellah in The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial, 2nd Edition (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1992), chapter 5, pp. 112-138:

“Inevitably when a dichotomy becomes magnified in such a way that both sides of it are distorted, one begins to suspect the presence of the psychological mechanism of projection. The ‘rugged individualist’ decrying every form of collectivism, above all atheistic communism, as the very embodiment of evil, may be projecting his own dependency needs and needs for community, ruthlessly repressed and denied in himself, onto his alleged enemies. Even granted the unspeakable crimes committed in the 20th century by Communist nations (a close inspection of the history of the century, however, would disclose that such societies have had no monopoly on unspeakable crimes) the morbid anti-Communism of the American right, and the tendency to assimilate every kind of socialist or even liberal position to that of Communism, indicates, I believe, some serious failure to come to terms with the balance between dependence and independence, solidarity and autonomy, that are part of any mature personality or society. This morbid obsession may be a symptom then, not of the genuine Americanism that it claims, but of its distortion and pathology.”