Below is a presentation I did at our Board retreat this morning. The presentation is titled, “How to take big-picture goals and spread them through every aspect of congregational life.” I’m posting this here both in case any of our Board members want to review some of the things I said, and in case any of my other readers are congregational leaders with an interest in this topic. (If you were there yesterday, you’ll see I didn’t follow this script exactly.) Continue reading “From the big picture, to day-to-day operations”
Category: Religious institutions
A key concept
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about an article on the Alban Institute Web site which introduces the concept of distinguishing between that which is foundational and that which is accretional within a religious tradition. The article focuses on foundational and accretional practices in worship services, but the concept can be applied more widely. A good bit of Harvey Cox’s latest book, The Future of Faith, is his attempt to show that belief is an accretional practice within Christianity, whereas faith (in his careful definition) is foundational. So this has gotten me thinking about what is foundational and accretional within the liberal traditions of Unitarian Universalism. Liberal traditions tend to embrace the surrounding society, so my feeling is they accumulate lots of accretional practices — and as shed lots of those accretional practices as time goes on. This raises the interesting question of what, exactly, is foundational to Unitarian Universalism; a question to which I have no firm answers yet, but I’m thinking about it.
Liberty and democracy in liberal religion
From Gary Dorrien’s new book, Economy, Difference, Empire:
What would a just society look like? What kind of country should the U.S. want to be? For more than two centuries U.S. American politics has featured two fundamentally different answers to these questions. The first is the vision of a society that provides unrestricted liberty to acquire wealth. The second is the vision of a realized democracy in which democratic rights over society’s major institutions are established. In the first vision, the right to property is lifted above the right to self-government, and the just society minimizes the equalizing the role of government. In the second view, the right to self-government is considered superior to the right to property, and the just society places democratic checks on social, political, and economic power. Economy, Difference, and Empire: Social Ethics for Social Justice (Columbia University, 2010), p. 143.
Unitarian Universalists would seem to align themselves with the second vision, the vision of a democratic society, given that the bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) claim a commitment to democratic process. However, it is not clear to me that this is the case — the major attraction to Unitarian Universalists for many people in our congregations is that no one can tell them what to believe or do, and this too is enshrined in the bylaws of the UUA, in the claim to a free and responsible search for truth, which is often restated in colloquial terms as “no one can tell me what to believe.” This last attitude is in close emotional alignment with the attitude that the government shouldn’t tell individuals what to what to do with their property.
Thus I see a built-in theological tension within Unitarian Universalism between theological liberty on the one hand, and on the other hand a commitment to democratic theological community in which the right of self-governance is superior to the right to believe whatever one wishes. There is a difference, however, between Unitarian Universalism and wider U.S. society: it is much easier to remove oneself from Unitarian Universalism. There are many people who feel themselves in complete alignment with theological Unitarian Universalism and more specifically with the principle of a free and responsible search for meaning without a creed, but who also find themselves unwilling or unable to submit any of their individual theological liberty to the demands of being part of a democratically organized congregation — many of these are the people who call themselves Unitarian Universalists on national polls but who aren’t part of a local congregation.
One last note on this topic: Historically, Universalists were more committed to theological liberty than were the Unitarians, and the loose structure of their national organization reflected that commitment to liberty. The Unitarians, by contrast, affirmed theological liberty and had, on the face of things, fewer theological restrictions than the Universalists; but beginning in the late nineteenth century the Unitarians poured far more of their energies into their democratic institutions. When the two denominations consolidated, the Universalists felt themselves out-organized at nearly every step of the way; and the new denomination has ever since then invested more energy into its democratic structures than into theological liberty.
Notes from a fundraising workshop
Below are my notes from a fundraising workshop led by Kim Klein, author of Fundraising for Social Change, at Starr King School for the Ministry, Monday 25 April 2011. My notes are just a bare outline of the presentation. perhaps the most important part of the presentation was Kim Klein’s straightforward, easygoing, no-nonsense, humor-filled approach to talking about money. She was not in the least uptight when she talked about money. In fact, perhaps the most important thing she told us was that it’s OK to talk about money, that we have to un-learn all the taboos and social constraints we have around money.
That being said, here are my notes:
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The key questions nonprofit organizations must ask themselves before beginning fundraising:
— What does your organization most believe? You want to have a short memorable sentence describing what you believe. Example: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
— What does your organization do? You want to be able to talk very coherently about what you do.
— How well have you done? — your track record
— How much? — sources of money: Who gives?
The purpose of fundraising is to build relations.
“We don’t want a donation, we want a donor.” So you build relations with people who will be ongoing donors. Continue reading “Notes from a fundraising workshop”
A thought experiment
Some scholars of religion criticize the very category of religion. There are several possible critiques, including:
- “Religion” as typically defined by Western scholars assumes Western religion as a norm, so that for example belief in a supernatural, transcendent deity is a defining characteristic of religion, even though significant numbers of Buddhists and Confucians do not require such belief.
- “Religion” can’t be separated from the larger culture; there is no religion separate from art, politics, sport, etc.
So here’s a thought experiment. Let’s jettison, just for the moment, the usual definition of religion as something separate from the rest of culture, something that requires belief in a perhaps unbelievable deity, and something the must be associated with a hierarchical or otherwise organized institutional structure.
Once we jettison that definition, we can understand religion as something that is akin to art and politics: it is something that is integral to culture, something that cannot easily be separated out from culture. Using this model of reality, we can make more sense of some otherwise baffling phenomena. Celebrity culture in the West, for example, may be considered as a religious phenomenon: Oprah and Princess Diana are saintly figures in just the same way as the Dalai Lama and the Pope are, which makes it more understandable why they receive the kind of religious veneration as the Dalai Lama and the Pope. Sports may also be considered as a religious phenomenon, right down to the orgiastic frenzies, reminiscent of Bacchic rituals, in which those who are not followers of one’s own sect are physically assaulted. Art and music may also be understood as religious phenomena: we’re all familiar with analogies between rock concerts and religious rites; and, speaking for myself, I get as much religious inspiration by going to an art museum as I get in a worship service.
If religion must be understood more broadly in this way, how then are we to characterize Western-style organized religion? It is a subset of religion, a specific manifestation of the way our broader culture does religion. We might consider it a discipline; early Christians sometimes referred to what they did as a disciplina, and it is Christianity more than anything else which has narrowed our Western understanding of what constitutes religion. However, “discipline” is somewhat problematic because it implies that this kind of religion can perhaps be done by oneself, which is clearly not the case. We could also speak of institutional religion, as opposed to other religious activities such as art, politics, etc.; organized religion is a less accurate way of saying much the same thing, for to say “organized” doesn’t tell us that this is religion organized into institutions.
That’s as far as I’ve gotten with this thought experiment. What do you think?
Disaster preparedness for congregations
Recently, I’ve been thinking about disaster preparedness for our congregation here in Palo Alto. Fortunately, here in the Bay Area the odds are extremely low for blizzards, ice storms, typhoons or hurricanes; and tornadoes are rare (although we did have one tornado watch this part year). So I don’t have to worry about whether the steeple is going to blow down in a hurricane, as we had to in Massachusetts; nor do I have to know where the storm cellar is, as we had to in Illinois. But we do have to prepare for some potential disaster scenarios.
Two of the more common Bay area disasters shouldn’t worry us much in Palo Alto: we’re on the flats so we don’t have to worry about landslides, and we are far enough from the Bay that tsunami risks are low. However, our buildings are at some risk for flooding: we are in Flood Zone X, which is defined as “an area of moderate risk of flooding (roughly speaking, outside the 100-year flood but inside the 500-year flood limits).” Thus, while we should be paying attention to flooding, it’s not of the highest priority.
Our highest priority for disaster preparedness is, not surprisingly, earthquakes. The USGS “Shaking Map for Future Earthquake Scenarios” (click on the map for Mountain View) shows that our location, because of underlying soils, etc., could be expected to experience very strong to violent shaking (Mercalli Instensity VIII-IX) in an earthquake like the magnitude 7.9 1906 San Francisco earthquake. In other words, it could be bad, and we should be paying attention to preparing for this kind of disaster. So at the moment, I’m reading through the USGS publication “Putting Down Roots in Earthquake Country”.
I’d be curious to know if your congregation has disaster plans in place, and what preparations you have made. Feel free to hold forth in the comments.
If Girl Scouts are doing it, will congregations be next?
200 Girl Scout troops in Ohio now take credit cards for cookies. One council reported a 20% increase in sales once they started using GoPayment, a little gadget that attaches to a smart phone, takes your money, and sends a receipt to your email address. Here’s a video from the Associated Press showing how they do it. And if you’re wondering how much it costs the Girl Scouts to take payment this way, here’s the scoop from a print version of this AP article:
Intuit, the Mountain View-based company that manufactures GoPayment, charges a small fee per transaction and offers various pricing plans to customers based on sale volume…. Intuit charges the Girl Scouts its lowest rate, at 1.6 percent plus 15 cents per transaction. Most customers pay 2.7 percent per transaction. [San Mateo County Times, 26 March 2011, p. A2]
As fewer and fewer people carry ready cash, this is an obvious way for the Girl Scouts to try to increase sales. But would it work for congregations who pass the collection plate in their services? If you watch the video, it’s obvious the transaction would take too long for the average offertory. It might possibly work for bake sales, rummage sales, ticket sales and the like, but my guess is that the cost is too high and the sales volume too low to make it worthwhile. If congregations want to fight their way out of the dark ages of cash transactions, my guess is that we’re going to have to change the way we do things — but I don’t know what that’s going to look like.
Statistical modeling of membership in organized Western religion
A recent research paper, “A mathematical model of social group competition with application to the growth of religious non-affiliation”, co-authored by Daniel M. Abrams, Harley A. Yaple, and Richard J. Weiner, applies the tools of statistical mechanics and non-linear dynamics to membership in religious organizations. Unfortunately, based on this mathematical analysis, the authors jump to unwarranted broad conclusions:
People claiming no religious affiliation constitute the fastest growing religious minority in many countries throughout the world. Americans without religious affiliation comprise the only religious group growing in all 50 states; in 2008 those claiming no religion rose to 15 percent nationwide, with a maximum in Vermont at 34 percent. In the Netherlands nearly half the population is religiously unaffiliated. Here we use a minimal model of competition for members between social groups to explain historical census data on the growth of religious non-affiliation in 85 regions around the world. According to the model, a single parameter quantifying the perceived utility of adhering to a religion determines whether the unaffiliated group will grow in a society. The model predicts that for societies in which the perceived utility of not adhering is greater than the utility of adhering, religion will be driven toward extinction. [p.1]
The mathematical analysis appears to be sound — I’m not a mathematician, and not competent to judge this myself, though it seems consistent with what little I know about mathematical modeling of non-linear systems. But the model really only applies to reported membership in traditional Western religious groups. In religion will be “driven toward extinction”, the authors are assuming that membership in a congregation or organized religious social group is equivalent to “doing religion” or “being religious.” While this may be true for certain cultural contexts, e.g., where contemporary Western Christianity is assumed to be normative, it does not hold true in other cultural contexts. For example, in Japan individuals are often not “affiliated” with, or “adherents” of Buddhist temples or groups, yet when a family member dies many people will still turn to a local Buddhist temple for funeral rituals; this type of religion does not equate being religious with group or institutional affiliation or adherence. Continue reading “Statistical modeling of membership in organized Western religion”
Limits of entrepreneurial endeavor
In the most recent issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review, Johan van de Gronden, CEO of the World Wildlife Fund in the Netherlands, says that markets are not capable of solving all the world’s problems:
As change agents, we’d do well to seek inspiration beyond the language of business and entrepreneurship…. Suggesting that sufficient entrepreneurial tools and practices will solve most of society’s ailments is a category mistake. It comes with the tacit assumption that society is better off when social entrepreneurs replace the many functions of government. This is the classic fallacy of development aid. When NGOs start delivering the services that many poor governments can’t deliver, they involuntarily aggravate the problem rather than build a solution. Governments spiral into a starvation cycle. If citizens cannot hold government accountable for basic services, for the proper spending of the collective revenue for the public good, then on what grounds would they favor one government over the other in the polls? And what reasons would citizens have to pursue a government career?
It seems to me that some of these characteristics are not alien to, say, the state of California. The world’s eight largest economy and home to some of the planet’s wealthiest individuals is barely capable of running a balanced state budget, while providing a minimum of basic and affordable services to its citizens, from health care to public schooling. There is tragic irony in this, as some of the world’s most generous foundations, finest NGOs, and best universities are part of the same societal fabric. And I think there is a correlation. When we place so much emphasis on the values of entrepreneurship to the extent that we start defining the poor quality of basic services as market failures, we may begin to think that the conception of a business plan in the mother of all solutions.
— Johan van de Gronden, “It takes three to tango: a European perspective on American civil society,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, spring, 2011, p. 23.
The peculiar American proclivity for insisting that markets provide solutions for all problems does interesting things to liberal religious congregations. This proclivity forces those of us in congregations to adopt entrepreneurial approaches in order to remain in existence, because we have to compete in the market with extraordinarily well-funded and well-supported alternatives, such as large market-driven conservative mega-churches that preach the gospel of prosperity, the entertainment industry, therapists, yoga studios, etc. In the same vein, this American proclivity also affects the expectations of those of us in congregations, such that we demand the constant innovation of products and services that is characteristic of American markets.
Those of us in liberal religious congregations have to carry an essentially impossible balancing act. We have to utilize the best resources of entrepreneurial endeavor, not just to thrive, but to survive; and as the years go by, we have to rely more and more on entrepreneurial endeavor. At the same time, we would be betraying our ethical and theological ideals if we go too far down the market-driven path of the prosperity gospel (“Come to church, build a purpose-driven life, and you will find financial success!”), or if we began to believe that the markets are more important than our historic ethical and theological ideals. This is a big part of the basic challenge facing liberal religion today.
Online summary of distributed cognition
Joe sent me a link to an excellent online summary of distributed cognition some time ago, and I have been meaning to post the link on my blog. Here it is:
“Distributed Cognition” by Edwin Hutchins of the University of California, San Diego
In this ten page paper, Hutchins gives a good concise introduction to distributed cognition. He points out the close relation between Vygotksy’s theories and distributed cognition. Hutchins provides a nice division of distributed cognition into three types: cognition “may be distributed across the members of a social group,” cognition may involve an interaction between internal processes and the material environment, and cognition may be distributed through time.
I’ve been finding that the concepts of distributed cognition are extremely useful in understanding how congregations work. I’ve found this paper to be very helpful as I continue to deepen my understanding of distributed cognition, so I thought I’d share it here.