"Fr. Gregory Boyle: Save the World or Savor it? An Interview with Faith & Leadership"
Countless thousands of former Los Angeles gang members have had their lives transformed -- in some instances, literally saved -- thanks to Homeboy Industries, the world's largest gang rehab and re-entry program. Yet ministry is not about saving the world or saving people, says the organization's founder and executive director, Father Gregory Boyle.
Ministry aimed at saving people and the world instead leads to burnout, he said.
"If the intent is to save people, or even to help people, then it works that way," Boyle said. "You're going to be depleted."
For Boyle, ministry is never about depletion.
"It used to be, when I used to think my job was saving lives," he said. "But now I think saving lives is for the Coast Guard.
"Our choice always is the same: save the world or savor it. And I vote for savoring it. And, just because everything is about something else, if you savor the world, somehow -- go figure -- it's getting saved."
Boyle was at Duke University recently as a practitioner-in-residence at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. While at Duke, he spoke with Faith & Leadership in an interview conducted by L. Gregory Jones, the senior strategist at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity and a professor of theology at Duke Divinity School. He also met with the staff of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity in a conversation moderated by Jones. The following are excerpts from Boyle's visit with the Leadership Education staff.
On the Jesuits, the church and Pope Francis:
I love being a Jesuit. Being in the church is a kind of more difficult thing, although made easier by our current pope. I was reading a Q&A by Whoopi Goldberg. They asked her, "What living person do you most admire?" And she said, "Pope Francis." And then she goes, "Yeah, he's going with the original program." I loved it. I thought, "Yeah, that's exactly right." Suddenly, everybody can connect to the original program. You know what she's talking about, and you go, "Yeah, wouldn't it be nice to go with the original program?"
On how Homeboy Industries began and evolved:
A lot of times, people ask, "How did you ever think this up?" And the truth is, nobody would have thunk this up. I certainly didn't. But you evolve, and you walk backwards into things, and the next thing you know, "Oh my God, here we are. How did that happen? How did we get to a place like this?" It's like what E.L. Doctorow said about writing a novel. You're on a country road, there are no lights, it's a moonless night, and you can only go as far as your headlights take you. And then you get there, and then you can only go as far as your headlights will take you again. And that's kind of like the story of Homeboy.
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SOCIAL INNOVATION, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, PASTORAL LEADERSHIP
Gregory Boyle: Save the world or savor it?
Photo by Jessamyn RubioMinistry focused on saving the world leads to burnout and depletion, says the founder of Homeboy Industries. Our choice is always the same: save the world or savor it.
Countless thousands of former Los Angeles gang members have had their lives transformed -- in some instances, literally saved -- thanks to Homeboy Industries, the world’s largest gang rehab and re-entry program. Yet ministry is not about saving the world or saving people, says the organization’s founder and executive director, Father Gregory Boyle.
Ministry aimed at saving people and the world instead leads to burnout, he said.
“If the intent is to save people, or even to help people, then it works that way,” Boyle said. “You're going to be depleted.”
For Boyle, ministry is never about depletion.
“It used to be, when I used to think my job was saving lives,” he said. “But now I think saving lives is for the Coast Guard.
“Our choice always is the same: save the world or savor it. And I vote for savoring it. And, just because everything is about something else, if you savor the world, somehow -- go figure -- it’s getting saved.”
Boyle was at Duke University recently as a practitioner-in-residence at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. While at Duke, he spoke with Faith & Leadership in an interview conducted by L. Gregory Jones, the senior strategist at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity and a professor of theology at Duke Divinity School.
Fr. Gregory Boyle (right) talks with L. Gregory Jones and the Leadership Education staff about Homeboy Industries.He also met with the staff of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity in a conversation moderated by Jones. The following are excerpts from Boyle’s visit with the Leadership Education staff.
On the Jesuits, the church and Pope Francis:
I love being a Jesuit. Being in the church is a kind of more difficult thing, although made easier by our current pope. I was reading a Q&A by Whoopi Goldberg. They asked her, “What living person do you most admire?” And she said, “Pope Francis.” And then she goes, “Yeah, he’s going with the original program.” I loved it. I thought, “Yeah, that’s exactly right.” Suddenly, everybody can connect to the original program. You know what she’s talking about, and you go, “Yeah, wouldn’t it be nice to go with the original program?”
On how Homeboy Industries began and evolved:
A lot of times, people ask, “How did you ever think this up?” And the truth is, nobody would have thunk this up. I certainly didn’t. But you evolve, and you walk backwards into things, and the next thing you know, “Oh my God, here we are. How did that happen? How did we get to a place like this?” It’s like what E.L. Doctorow said about writing a novel. You’re on a country road, there are no lights, it’s a moonless night, and you can only go as far as your headlights take you. And then you get there, and then you can only go as far as your headlights will take you again. And that’s kind of like the story of Homeboy.
Homeboy Industries is located in the heart of downtown Los Angeles.
On the importance of kinship:
I talk a lot about kinship, and I say, “No kinship, no peace; no kinship, no justice; no kinship, no equality.” We’ve become focused on peace, justice and equality, when the truth is, none of those things can happen unless there’s some undergirding sense that we belong to each other, that we’re connected, that we matter. But the good news is, if we focus on kinship, the byproduct of that effort is peace, justice and equality. It’s how it happens. Our mistake is that we focus on peace, justice and equality, and we herniate ourselves trying to get peace, justice and equality, and then we’re surprised that we burn out and that we never really get close to it.
On good guys, bad guys, monsters and belonging:
The thing I deal with all the time is this idea of the good guy and the bad guy. Desmond Tutu says there are no monsters. There are monstrous acts, but there are no monsters. And to that you might go, “Well, yes, there are,” or you might say, “Well, duh,” but either way, the truth is, we operate like there are monsters. We operate as if there are people out there who don’t belong to us. Ask Jesus to identify somebody who doesn’t belong to us, you’re going to get a big fat zero. Jesus will not be able to come up with a name.
On being sustained in ministry and not burning out:
Ministry’s not meant to be like a gas tank, where you begin the day with a full tank and by the end of the day your tank is on E. Something’s wrong if that’s the way it works.
If the intent is to save people, or even to help people, then it works that way. You’re going to be depleted. But if the task is allowing yourself to be reached by people, can you receive people? Can you be anchored in the here and now and practice the sacrament of the present moment? If you can do that, then it’s all delight and it’s all amazement and it’s all awe. We’re only saved in the present moment. If we’re not saved in the present moment, we’re not saved at all.
For me, it’s never about depletion. It used to be, when I used to think my job was saving lives. But now I think saving lives is for the Coast Guard. Our choice always is the same: save the world or savor it. And I vote for savoring it. And, just because everything is about something else, if you savor the world, somehow -- go figure -- it’s getting saved.
On why people join gangs:
No kid is seeking anything when he joins a gang. He’s always fleeing something. But you ask gang members, and people will say this, reporters will say this: “I’ve talked to gang members, and they said, ‘Wine, women and song -- join a gang and see the world. I just wanted to belong.’”
That’s just because it’s too hard to say, “My mom used to put cigarettes out on me and hold my head in the toilet until I nearly drowned, or slit her wrists and say, ‘See what you made me do.’”
The need to belong is a presumption that we all make about kids joining gangs. Recently, I had a reporter say, “We all know that kids join gangs because they want to belong,” and I said, “Well, no. Actually, no.” And he says, “Everyone knows that.” Like we’re in a Geico commercial. And I said, “I joined the Little League team because I wanted to belong. But a kid joins a gang because he wants to die.” And that’s kind of a key.
On saving the world, mature spirituality and tenderness:
We get so stumped by “I’m going to save the world” or “I’m going to build an orphanage.” All those things are good; I don’t mean to disparage activity. But we get tripped up, and this is why people burn out and there’s compassion fatigue or whatever the hell you want to call it. But I learned a long time ago that no amount of me wanting that guy to have a life is the same as that guy wanting to have a life. So in the meantime, what do you do? You wait and you love and you cherish and you know that all mature spirituality is about tenderness. That’s the mark of mature spirituality, because tenderness is the connective tissue. It’s the only thing that joins us together.
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Monday, February 29, 2016
Pastoral leaders often feel pulled in many directions and challenged by how to integrate the varied strands of parish life and their own identities with church, family, and personal pursuits. Varieties of Giftsdraws on original research and interviews by Cynthia Lindner to illustrate the many sides of pastoral leaders and offer suggestions about how to live well while embracing the challenging realities of ministry.
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Ideas that Impact: Combating Burnout:
"Beating Burnout by Building Teams" by Lynne Baab
When people perceive that they are working with others who are enjoying the sense of camaraderie, they are able to work longer, harder, and with greater joy. When I conducted interviews for my book on burnout among volunteers, Beating Burnout in Congregations, I heard again and again that people are happiest serving when they are relationally connected to the people around them.
Read more »About two years ago I performed Beth and Steve’s wedding ceremony. At that time they were brand new to our congregation. Over the months that followed I watched them get involved in a small group and then begin to serve as Sunday school teachers. Toward the end of their first year teaching Sunday school I had a few minutes to talk to them. “How are you doing?” I asked. “How’s it going for you as Sunday school teachers?” “We love it!” one of them answered, and I’d have to use the word “radiant” to describe their demeanor as they talked about teaching Sunday school.
Some months later I went to visit Beth after the birth of the couple’s first baby. “Are you getting help?” I asked. She told me that two couples had been bringing them lots of food, and I asked where she and Mark had met them. One couple was in their small group, and they knew the other couple, Mike and Sandy, from their Sunday school team.
Later I asked Dianne Ross, our children’s ministries director, about the Sunday school team that Beth and Steve had served on. “I set up that team intentionally,” Dianne told me. “Mike and Sandy are well connected here at church, have experience in teaching, and have a deep personal faith. I wanted them to be teamed up with a couple who were learning to teach Sunday school and who were newer to church and perhaps even newer to the Christian faith. Beth and Steve fit the role perfectly. I asked Mike and Sandy to take Beth and Steve under their wing, to invite them over for dinner and pray for them, that kind of thing. I added two single people to that team, and I watched them all connect and become friends.”
Since I had the impression that on Sunday school teams the two couples and the singles took turns teaching, I asked Dianne how the two couples would get to know each other if they were always teaching on different Sundays.
“I have the whole team teach together the first two weeks,” she said. “That way the kids can get to know all the teachers and the teachers can begin to get to know each other. Then, after they start teaching on alternate Sundays, they usually need to talk most weeks to tell the other team members what happened. I try to match up people on teams who I think will enjoy getting to know each other and might become friends. We have quarterly events for our Sunday school teachers. Often our teachers are glad to come to the training and appreciation events because they will get to see their teammates.”
Dianne said Beth and Steve’s team members became close friends. She described seeing them talk intimately with each other at teachers’ functions and at the end-of-the-year party, and said she could see their tender care for each other.
Dianne also described one large Sunday school class for which she recruited a group of couples and singles in their twenties. The eight of them rotate teaching and have a growing friendship. For the nursery team she recruited mothers with very young children so they would have something in common as they served together and found their “place” in the church.
For Beth and Steve, teaching Sunday school became a place where they could serve God together and grow in friendship with another couple and the singles who were on the team. I could begin to see why they seemed so radiant as they described their experience in serving. Burnout was the furthest thing from their experience.
The Example of Alpha
A similar pattern has emerged among the members of my church who have participated in Alpha, an 11-week introduction to the Christian faith, complete with weekly dinners, videos, and small-group interactions. In my congregation, we are just finishing our third Alpha course in 18 months. This course is one of the most labor-intensive programs we have ever provided. I expected that it would require a lot of work and that the benefits would be worth it, and both of these expectations have been met. Participants have grown in faith and become connected to each other, and Alpha has proved to be a very good thing for us to do, just as I expected. However, I didn’t expect that one of the sweetest blessings would be the deep relationships formed among the Alpha team members.
The Alpha team for each course consists of 10 to 12 people: the leader, the administrator, three small group leaders, and one or two helpers for each small group. Before each Alpha course starts, the team meets on two Saturday mornings for training. Those Saturday training times begin with a solid hour of sharing of personal concerns and prayer. The leader asks, “How are you feeling about being involved in this ministry? Are there things going on in your life that you want us to pray for?” and the group then prays for each other and for the many needs and concerns members have expressed about the upcoming Alpha course.
On each of the 11 nights that Alpha meets the team gathers 15 minutes before dinner to share concerns and pray for the evening. People have the opportunity to briefly mention their personal concerns: “I’m still job hunting.” “My boss is still pushing me to work too many hours.” “My mom’s chemotherapy is going better than expected.” The group then prays together.
Alpha originated at a church in England and has spread around the world, along with plenty of training opportunities for learning the accepted wisdom of what makes an Alpha course work. The Alpha trainers emphasize that the most important team meeting is the one that occurs at the end of each evening, when the team gathers for 15 to 30 minutes to debrief on how the evening went.
I served as a small group leader for our first Alpha course and I strongly resisted this idea of meeting together at the end of each evening. On Alpha evenings I often arrived at church at five o’clock to help set tables. We would gather as a team to pray at 5:45. Dinner was at six o’clock, followed by the video and small groups, which ended at 8:45. By that time I was more than ready to go home, but Alpha protocol insisted that we gather one more time as a team.
I’m now convinced that those late evening gatherings are one of the keys to the success of Alpha. In that debriefing time the team members share frustrations with each other: “In my group one person dominated the conversation.” “Someone asked a really hard question and I didn’t know how to answer.” They also share joys: “A woman in my group said she read the Bible every day this week and she’s starting to learn to pray.” They discuss logistics for the next week: “The room was too cold tonight and people couldn’t concentrate. Can we have the heat higher next time?”
Our Alpha leader told me that the debriefing process has an incredible bonding effect on the team. “I don’t have to prod people to stay late and meet together,” he said. “They are eager to hear what happened in the other groups.” In order to gather to debrief, the team members have to detach themselves from their conversations with participants. Placing this priority on talking with team members demonstrates that the team matters, that the members are serving with a group of people who are engaged in this ministry and committed to each other. In addition, the debriefing helps the team members gain perspective when their small group has not gone very well that evening. In such a labor-intensive ministry, a discouraging evening can make a team member feel that it is just not worthwhile to work so hard, but listening to someone else talk about the fruit that God is bringing through this ministry helps the members regain perspective. There is a shared excitement that is infectious.
Why Teams?
A practical, functional argument can be made as to why team building works to prevent burnout and to provide satisfaction in serving: When people perceive that they are working with others who are enjoying the sense of camaraderie, they are able to work longer, harder, and with greater joy. When I conducted interviews for my book on burnout among volunteers, Beating Burnout in Congregations (Alban Institute, 2003), I heard again and again that people are happiest serving when they are relationally connected to the people around them. One rabbi called it “flipping pancakes while talking with people.”
One woman I interviewed talked about the high level of burnout in many areas of ministry in her congregation, but described two ministries that never seem to lack for volunteers and where people seem to enjoy serving and don’t experience burnout. Those two ministries stood out among all the others for one specific reason: The volunteers gathered to share personal needs and to pray together before launching into their evening’s work.
In our increasingly fast-paced society, people are experiencing more isolation. Demographic studies show that more people are living alone. Even for people who live in families or with friends, our frantic pace makes it challenging to nurture caring relationships. The desire to “flip pancakes while talking with people” reflects a deep need for connection: to serve others while being in relationship.
The significance of building teams is rooted in who we are as people. This is the theological reason why teams work. We were created by God both for relationships and for meeting the needs in our world. Truly we are God’s hands and feet in our world, called to show God’s love in a world that desperately needs it. However, we are called to make God’s love known as a community, not as isolated individuals. Sometimes the most significant way God’s love is shown is through the way we love one another. As we serve we can’t grow in love with our fellow servers unless we take time to get to know each other, to listen to each other, and to pray for each other.
Committees into Communities
In my interviews I heard over and over that boring committee meetings are a surefire road to burnout. I also heard time and again about the importance of transforming committees into communities, places where people can get to know each other and support each other personally, as well as tackle tasks together.
“We don’t have time for personal sharing,” committee members often object. “It takes us two hours just to get our business accomplished. How can we add in some sharing time?”
Committee business often takes a long time because people have a high need to be heard, so they talk at length about the issues at hand. Beginning committee meetings with a check-in time, where people can talk about personal needs and pray for each other, can help the business get accomplished much more quickly. This applies to church board meetings as well.
In one of our recent board meetings we had a discussion among the elders about their satisfaction level in serving. Some elders expressed contentment and joy in serving and others said they sometimes feel isolated and bewildered in their role. Some of our elders chair committees and some serve on teams with other elders. I noticed that all the elders who felt a bit uneasy in their roles are the chairs of committees, and that most of those who expressed contentment with their roles serve on teams with other elders. I concluded from this small sample that serving on teams with other elders helps the elders experience peer support in their roles as congregational leaders. I meet monthly with the administration team, which is composed of the elders for building and grounds, personnel, and stewardship. We spend about an hour and a half talking about administrative issues, then we share prayer requests and pray together. We pray for each other and for the administrative issues of the congregation.
Our personnel elder has a particularly heavy load. She chairs the personnel committee, which meets monthly, and she also meets monthly with the administration team and the whole board of elders. Her term as elder ends in about a year, and she says she will enjoy being free of all the responsibility but will sorely miss the three groups of people who have supported her personally. She knows she will have to find a new support structure. Her comments tell me that we truly have been building teams and fostering community in our committees, on our board, and in our administration team meetings. I really liked hearing that she views her three monthly meetings as places where she gets support personally.
Forming Teams
Based on my interviews and my observations in my own congregation, I have a few suggestions for forming and nurturing teams:
- When you have the opportunity to influence who serves on a specific team, as much as possible choose people who have something in common and might grow close to each other.
- When you pick leaders of teams, make sure they are committed both to achieving the task at hand and to nurturing relationships among team members. Make sure they understand that the hard-driving CEO model simply is not appropriate in congregations. All team leaders need to provide opportunities for people to grow together, as well as the logistical help and support for team members to get their jobs done.
- In all gatherings related to achieving tasks, set up structures for expressing personal concerns, such as a sharing time at the beginning, middle, or end of a meeting. In large gatherings, break into groups of two, three, or four to share personal needs. Don’t neglect the significance of debriefing times after a task is finished, asking, “How did it go for you? What can you share that might encourage the rest of us?”
- Pray together both for personal needs and for the ministry you are working on together. In large meetings, break into smaller groups for prayer. Praying out loud is great, but if there are people who aren’t comfortable praying aloud, offer times of silent prayer as well, and provide instructions for silent prayer, such as asking each person to pray for the person to his or her left or asking ahead of time for volunteers to pray silently about specific issues related to the task you are trying to achieve.
- Perhaps the most significant suggestion I can offer is to remember at all times the unique character of congregations. We are called to perform tasks and nurture relationships in community. We are not a business with its highest priority on achieving tasks. Every gathering in a congregation that is focused on a task should also include an opportunity to build and nurture relationships.
- Hestenes, Roberta. Turning Committees into Communities (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1991).
- Olsen, Charles M. Transforming Church Boards into Communities of Spiritual Leaders (Bethesda, Md.: The Alban Institute, 1995).
"Reaching our Limits: Burnout or Transition? What We Term "Burnout" May be a Call to Something Higher" by Karen Minnich-Sadler
Could it be that some of the "burnt-out" clergy are experiencing something more fundamental than exhaustion? If so, does a common theme unite some of these struggles? Could these experiences of burnout have more to do with personal transition and growth issues than with dysfunction? And if that is so, could an understanding of the process help us persevere through these crises with more compassion for both others and ourselves? If we better understood the concept that feelings of distance and alienation are a necessary part of the transition, would we be less likely to believe that we need to leave a relationship, a congregation, or the ministry to achieve resolution in our lives?
Read more »Burnout is a pressing concern of clergy—perhaps today more than ever before. Exhausted, overwhelmed, and caught up in a vocation that no longer embodies the meaning it once had, a pastor may fear that the clergy life, which once made sense, has disintegrated beyond repair. As increasing numbers of clergy suffer the symptoms, we must wonder why burnout seems so widespread today, after decades in which the malady was much discussed and presumably well understood.
Could it be that some of the “burnt-out” clergy are experiencing something more fundamental than exhaustion? If so, does a common theme unite some of these struggles? Could these experiences of burnout have more to do with personal transition and growth issues than with dysfunction? And if that is so, could an understanding of the process help us persevere through these crises with more compassion for both others and ourselves? If we better understood the concept that feelings of distance and alienation are a necessary part of the transition, would we be less likely to believe that we need to leave a relationship, a congregation, or the ministry to achieve resolution in our lives?
Things Fall Apart
“Constructive-developmental personality theory,” an idea developed by psychologist Robert Kegan, deals with human growth and the ways we understand our relationship to the rest of the world. It also addresses those terrible times of transition when everything falls apart and one is caught totally off balance, feeling that nothing makes sense anymore and uncertain that it ever will again.1 Although in one sense we are always growing and learning, and changing, these times of profound transition are few. If we fail to understand them, they can overwhelm us, for the way we have understood the world and ourselves to function is giving way.
Transition is a time of profound loss, for if we are to view the world from a new perspective, our old way of understanding must die. For people who are autonomous (self-differentiated),2 this time of transition is especially intense, and can cause us to question our closest relationships, our call to a particular congregation, or the vocation of ministry itself. It is this process on which I reflect.
Church leaders who see the world from the vantage point of autonomy (self-differentiation) often experience this transition as a vocational crisis. Autonomous people tend to experience a sense of completion for themselves and their lives through their vocation. For pastors, the tie to vocation is especially strong because our vocations are intertwined with our faith.
Rather than saying “I have this job to do within the church” or “I have been given this task as a child of God,” we are likely to assert that not only is our work what we do but also who we are. This intermingling of self and vocation has more to do with seeing life through the lens of autonomy than it does with faith issues. Autonomous people in other vocations would tend to feel the same: that their vocation somehow completes them and tells them who they are. For church leaders, however, the tie of self and vocation is so strong that we often have difficulty seeing ourselves as people apart from our work. We tend to equate our call as pastors with our call as children of God; we have difficulty seeing where vocation ends and self begins. As a result, ongoing tension in the congregation or a job loss can catapult clergy into a time of painful questioning that plants the seeds of transition.
Life Turned Upside Down
Aging increases the possibility that transition will occur. Many second-career pastors now enter the ministry in their 40s or beyond. Because of their maturity, it is more likely that transition for these pastors may begin at a fairly early stage of ministry (that is, within the first five years). If that happens, these pastors may find themselves wondering why they ever turned their personal and professional lives upside down to answer a call that they now question.
For example, I was ordained at age 44, with a background and interest in behavioral dynamics. I felt prepared to meet whatever life and the parish might throw at me. But I was unprepared for how quickly I would feel my limitations, and how overwhelming that experience would be. I vacillated between despairing that the congregation would never change and feeling inadequate to the call. It became clear to me, because of my experience with Kegan’s theory, that more was at stake than my needing to learn new skills and information. Life has a way of taking us to our limits and, in so doing, issuing an invitation to journey. While we may not know what lies ahead, we sense that to refuse the invitation could mean that something precious, struggling to be born, might not be given voice and life.
Directing Anger Outward
As we step out on the first stages of the journey, we feel that the world no longer works as it should. We can direct these feelings toward our spouses, our congregations, or the church itself; but the common thread is the conviction that if only they would straighten up, I would be OK. What we are struggling to do is to hold onto ourselves—keep ourselves together—in the face of a situation that no longer makes sense. Blame and anger are directed outward.
Sooner or later in this journey, however, we will reach a place where we begin to question ourselves, and to believe that we are the ones who do not “work” anymore. The world is OK and everyone else seems to have a place in it, but we feel disconnected, insubstantial; we have no idea whether life will ever come together again in a meaningful way.
Kegan discusses this process in detail in chapter 9 of The Evolving Self.3 One idea, I believe, may be particularly helpful to us in ministry—the concept of pushing away people and things that represent our old way of understanding the world.
When we begin to move away from our old way of understanding, we naturally reject what has been part of the old perspective. We will eventually recover these things in new and richer ways, but that recovery is still far in the future. For quite some time, we will be in a vulnerable state of mind, feeling that we may need to jettison certain commitments such as marriage, leadership of a congregation, or the ministry as vocation if we are to get our lives together and move on. At this point the pain may be so deep and the struggle so oppressive that we seek relief at any price. What is happening, though, is that we are confusing our partner in marriage or our partners in work with the side of ourselves we now have trouble accepting, the part that no longer works and that we want to abandon as quickly as possible.4
No Solid Ground
An added complication to this time of transition: Autonomous people tend to identify strongly with certain principles—such as integrity, justice, competence—and see these principles or standards as part of who they are.5 Thus, if an autonomous person’s integrity or competence is questioned, one may feel that that his or her very selfhood is being challenged.
As this autonomous way of seeing begins to disintegrate, one will also feel a disintegration of the standards with which one has identified. Suddenly a void opens where universal principles used to be, and the individual is no longer certain of truths on which to rely. A by-product of the awareness that one no longer stands on the solid ground of standards is despair or cynicism. For a child of God, the anguish of this stage may result in a choice to opt out of ventures or relationships to which one had been deeply committed.
Kegan describes this juncture as a sense of leaving the moral world behind, feeling beyond good and evil, or having no way to distinguish wrong and right that is worthy of one’s respect. If the
journey ended here, we would be left with despair or cynicism.6 While these feelings are intrinsic to the time of transition, they are not to be permanent stopping places for the people of God. The fact that we cannot see God’s truths accurately and completely does not mean that no truths endure to be known. What we will come to realize in a deeper way, if we allow enough time to the journey, is that we do indeed see through a glass darkly but that God is still with us and anchors us on life’s continuing journey.
The Necessity of Grief
Throughout this process we will grieve because our understanding of the way life works has suddenly, it seems, been wrenched from us. We will mourn specific losses; we will mourn that loss is a fact of life. What we are most mourning, in a myriad of ways, is the loss of ourselves and our place in the world as we knew it. This transition does not happen overnight or in one giant step; it is an ongoing process that includes times of extraordinary intensity.
We will have moments of joy and peace when things seem to come together, but will likely then find ourselves thrown into turmoil once more. Our way of seeing affects every part of our lives, and we will come to see in new ways, piece by piece, before final resolution comes. But grace abounds, always grace. Our glimpses of peace and renewed joy in life are a taste of what lies ahead. We can trust the purpose of the journey because we know that God is present in it.
Understanding the process does not lessen its intensity. The experience is necessary for growth and cannot be avoided. The process is indicative of neither dysfunction nor an inability to handle matters appropriately. From the perspective of human development, this time of transition beyond autonomy will be one of the deepest and most profound of our lives.
Hope is Present
Understanding the process can give us insight into what is happening and perhaps encourage us to persevere through the journey without making major decisions we may regret for the rest of our lives. Hope is present: although the struggle feels like death, we know that in reality new life struggles to be born. Eventually we will realize that nothing has been lost, that what has come before is recovered in new ways, and so we are doubly blessed.
The call of Abram in Genesis 12 is applicable to this experience, for Abram was called from his country, his familiar place, out into the unknown. He was given a promise by God that the journey had purpose. Even such a promise can be hard to hang onto when we arrive at the most difficult places and have no idea where or when the journey will end; but we, like Abram, can believe that journeys always contain possibilities for new life.
God tells Abram that God will bless Abram so that Abram in turn may be a blessing. That is, after all, what makes the journey worthwhile. As we grow and experience new life again and again, we are put in a place where we can be a greater blessing to those who too must make the journey, and who perhaps find parts of the journey difficult to bear. We bring into the process ourselves—not our expertise, but our compassionate and understanding presence made possible because of the compassionate and understanding presence of God—and in doing so, provide for others what every human being in existence needs: a tangible affirmation that we do not make this journey alone.7
We, like Abram, embark on this journey with no guarantee, except that God goes with us. At times that will be all we have, but it will be enough. We learn this truth and live it because—by the graciousness of God—we come to that place in our own journey where we are able to say, with absolute conviction, that the journey was indeed worthwhile.
_______________
1. This theory is presented in detail in Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), and applied to contemporary life issues in Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
2. The capacity to understand self as separate from others, holding one’s own opinions and views.
3. Kegan, Evolving Self, 255–273.
4. Ibid., 250.
5. Ibid., 102.
6. Ibid., 232–233.
7. Karen Minnich-Sadler, “A Congregation in Conflict: Applying Robert Kegan’s Constructive-Developmental Personality Theory to the Underlying Issues” (D.Min. project, Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, 2000), 36–37.
30
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Continue Your Own Learning & Development
Foundations of Christian LeadershipA formational program offered by Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Through Foundations of Christian Leadership, Leadership Education at Duke Divinity aims to help Christian leaders explore their gifts and cultivate the practices that are essential for spurring transformation within Christian organizations. The program is best suited to those who have been in a leadership position for fewer than five years. Join up to 30 participants from nonprofit organizations, congregations, mission agencies, seminaries and denominations for two residential sessions and two online sessions over the course of four months.
Each Foundations participant will have the opportunity to apply for a $5,000 grant to support innovative approaches within his or her institution.
Learn more »
---------------------
"Pruning for Sustainable Design" by L. Gregory Jones - Alban Weekly for Monday, 22 February 2016
"Pruning for Sustainable Design" by L. Gregory Jones
We often associate growth with adjectives like thriving, transformative, generative and sustainable. If we want Christian institutions and Christian communities to be signs of God's reign, surely they will be marked by consistent growth, won't they?
Memphis' Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare faced this question a decade ago. Gary Shorb, the system's CEO, decided the answer was "no." To become more mission-driven as a church-related health system, Shorb's institution needed to decide what to stop doing and reallocate its resources.
This reallocation of resources was based on discerning the "soul" of the organization -- the heart of its mission -- and clearly identifying the needs of its primary constituents and community. Health system leaders decided to sell assets, including some rural hospitals.
Methodist Le Bonheur did not simply end relationships or cut programs that were no longer effective. It also sold assets and ended programs that were themselves worthwhile but that, after careful evaluation, were determined to be no longer at the center of its work. As Shorb put it, "Sometimes you have to shrink to grow."
The missional focus, in turn, became education, children's hospitals and the development of the system's Congregational Health Network. The innovative Congregational Health Network has helped establish relationships throughout the greater Memphis community to connect, as Methodist Le Bonheur Senior Vice President Gary Gunderson puts it, the "healing institutions" of Methodist Le Bonheur with the "health institutions" of local congregations.
The Congregational Health Network has helped Methodist Le Bonheur become a more generative organization, because it has enhanced the networks connecting people throughout Memphis with networks of services from midwives to hospice. It has also enabled a more proactive and holistic focus on health throughout the community.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. James Dubik, now a consultant for and board member of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management, advises institutional leaders to evaluate carefully what shouldn't change before deciding what can change.
Dubik has considerable experience guiding change -- he helped lead the Army through one of the most sweeping transitions in U.S. military history. In that process, before he was ready to advise what ought to change, Dubik had to describe the "soul," or essence, of the Army. That soul shouldn't change. Everything else, he says, is up for grabs.
Alban
Continue Your Own Learning & Development
Foundations of Christian LeadershipA formational program offered by Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Through Foundations of Christian Leadership, Leadership Education at Duke Divinity aims to help Christian leaders explore their gifts and cultivate the practices that are essential for spurring transformation within Christian organizations. The program is best suited to those who have been in a leadership position for fewer than five years. Join up to 30 participants from nonprofit organizations, congregations, mission agencies, seminaries and denominations for two residential sessions and two online sessions over the course of four months.
Each Foundations participant will have the opportunity to apply for a $5,000 grant to support innovative approaches within his or her institution.
Learn more »
---------------------
"Pruning for Sustainable Design" by L. Gregory Jones - Alban Weekly for Monday, 22 February 2016
"Pruning for Sustainable Design" by L. Gregory Jones
We often associate growth with adjectives like thriving, transformative, generative and sustainable. If we want Christian institutions and Christian communities to be signs of God's reign, surely they will be marked by consistent growth, won't they?
Memphis' Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare faced this question a decade ago. Gary Shorb, the system's CEO, decided the answer was "no." To become more mission-driven as a church-related health system, Shorb's institution needed to decide what to stop doing and reallocate its resources.
This reallocation of resources was based on discerning the "soul" of the organization -- the heart of its mission -- and clearly identifying the needs of its primary constituents and community. Health system leaders decided to sell assets, including some rural hospitals.
Methodist Le Bonheur did not simply end relationships or cut programs that were no longer effective. It also sold assets and ended programs that were themselves worthwhile but that, after careful evaluation, were determined to be no longer at the center of its work. As Shorb put it, "Sometimes you have to shrink to grow."
The missional focus, in turn, became education, children's hospitals and the development of the system's Congregational Health Network. The innovative Congregational Health Network has helped establish relationships throughout the greater Memphis community to connect, as Methodist Le Bonheur Senior Vice President Gary Gunderson puts it, the "healing institutions" of Methodist Le Bonheur with the "health institutions" of local congregations.
The Congregational Health Network has helped Methodist Le Bonheur become a more generative organization, because it has enhanced the networks connecting people throughout Memphis with networks of services from midwives to hospice. It has also enabled a more proactive and holistic focus on health throughout the community.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. James Dubik, now a consultant for and board member of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management, advises institutional leaders to evaluate carefully what shouldn't change before deciding what can change.
Dubik has considerable experience guiding change -- he helped lead the Army through one of the most sweeping transitions in U.S. military history. In that process, before he was ready to advise what ought to change, Dubik had to describe the "soul," or essence, of the Army. That soul shouldn't change. Everything else, he says, is up for grabs.
Read more »
MONEY, SUSTAINABILITY, MANAGEMENT
L. Gregory Jones: Pruning for sustainable design
To enable growth, a leader needs to understand an institution’s “soul” and be willing to prune anything that doesn’t contribute to its thriving.
We often associate growth with adjectives like thriving, transformative, generative and sustainable. If we want Christian institutions and Christian communities to be signs of God’s reign, surely they will be marked by consistent growth, won’t they?
Memphis’ Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare faced this question a decade ago. Gary Shorb, the system’s CEO, decided the answer was “no.” To become more mission-driven as a church-related health system, Shorb’s institution needed to decide what to stop doing and reallocate its resources.
This reallocation of resources was based on discerning the “soul” of the organization -- the heart of its mission -- and clearly identifying the needs of its primary constituents and community. Health system leaders decided to sell assets, including some rural hospitals.
Methodist Le Bonheur did not simply end relationships or cut programs that were no longer effective. It also sold assets and ended programs that were themselves worthwhile but that, after careful evaluation, were determined to be no longer at the center of its work. As Shorb put it, “Sometimes you have to shrink to grow.”
The missional focus, in turn, became education, children’s hospitals and the development of the system’s Congregational Health Network. The innovative Congregational Health Network has helped establish relationships throughout the greater Memphis community to connect, as Methodist Le Bonheur Senior Vice President Gary Gunderson puts it, the “healing institutions” of Methodist Le Bonheur with the “health institutions” of local congregations.
The Congregational Health Network has helped Methodist Le Bonheur become a more generative organization, because it has enhanced the networks connecting people throughout Memphis with networks of services from midwives to hospice. It has also enabled a more proactive and holistic focus on health throughout the community.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. James Dubik, now a consultant for and board member of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management, advises institutional leaders to evaluate carefully what shouldn’t change before deciding what can change.
Dubik has considerable experience guiding change -- he helped lead the Army through one of the most sweeping transitions in U.S. military history. In that process, before he was ready to advise what ought to change, Dubik had to describe the “soul,” or essence, of the Army. That soul shouldn’t change. Everything else, he says, is up for grabs.
Mission-driven Christian institutions are generative and sustainable because they can name and focus on their telos, their soul. With that clear sense of purpose, institutional leaders can more wisely decide what needs to be pruned and what needs to grow to enhance the institution’s generativity and sustainability.
But many institutional leaders leap too quickly at chances for unchecked growth in size and programs. And, indeed, there are moments when growth is needed, such as in the effort to create scalable results or during an institution’s early years.
Who would not have wanted to contribute to the growth of Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank, or the spread of church-related higher education in the U.S. in the 19th century, or the multiplication of local affiliates of Habitat for Humanity?
The amazing fruitfulness of such organizations, elegant in their design and sustainable over time, has contributed to significant development of human, intellectual, network, service and financial capital. Their flourishing has also contributed to the emergence and cultivation of local, regional and broader ecosystems.
Yet Methodist Le Bonheur’s experience also points to the critical importance of pruning.
In John’s Gospel (15:1-2), Jesus evokes the image of pruning for Christian life, and this practice is crucial for organizations as well. Pruning involves getting rid of those things that are broken, are sinful, have died or no longer advance an institution’s mission. Jesus talks about the wheat that in falling to the ground eventually bears much fruit (John 12:24).
Too many individual organizations cling desperately to a life that has already run its course, when they might be able to be re-purposed for new life in the broader ecosystem. Leaders of large institutions such as Methodist Le Bonheur have to attend to their whole ecosystem as well as the organizations within their institution.
Jesus’ image of pruning also suggests that we may need to remove some things that are otherwise healthy for the sake of even greater faithfulness and effectiveness. Healthy rosebushes need to be pruned for the sake of even greater growth, beauty and creativity. So also with institutions.
In 2000 the Mormon church decided to transform its thriving junior college in Idaho, Ricks College, into a four-year baccalaureate institution, to be called BYU-Idaho. As Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring narrate the story in their recent book, “The Innovative University,” church president Gordon Hinckley was convinced that the church needed to offer young church members more opportunities for higher education. The conversion of Ricks College seemed to be a better and more cost-effective strategy than creating a brand-new institution.
Hinckley faced a series of tough choices -- reviewing and reducing the number of disciplines, majors and courses; converting the campus to a year-round curriculum; and, notably, eliminating an enormously successful intercollegiate athletics program.
The pruning was born from a clear sense of mission: Hinckley believed that the Mormon church needed to be more intentional about overinvesting in young people, and some costs, such as athletics, detracted from providing a high-quality education.
BYU-Idaho has developed over the past decade as an innovative model for higher education, providing higher quality education at a lower cost per student than Ricks College had previously been able to do. It is offering baccalaureate rather than associate-level degrees, and making them available to significantly more young church members than the Mormon church had previously been able to serve.
But none of these initiatives would have been possible if Hinckley hadn’t insisted on pruning as an integral part of his vision of sustainable design.
It takes significant leadership to recognize the importance of pruning for the sake of future growth, beauty and creativity. It is challenging to prune even a single rosebush, a small department within an organization or an organization within a larger institutional ecosystem. It is even more challenging to prune long-established, larger institutional ecosystems like Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare or Ricks College.
The commitment to pruning gives a large institution the right issues on which to focus, but it is also crucial to have the right people to work on them.
Christensen’s research on “disruptive innovation” has shown that for innovation to be implemented in established institutions, a critical tool is a “heavyweight team” led by someone with “substantial organizational authority” and made up of “experts who represent all of the necessary organizational functions and can speak for their departments without feeling beholden to them” (“The Innovative University”).
Both Methodist Le Bonheur and BYU-Idaho developed such teams for implementation, and have ensured that they maintain senior-level leadership focused on integration and fulfillment of the institutional mission.
For example, Gary Gunderson was a senior leader directing the Interfaith Health Program at the Carter Center who was recruited to become senior vice president for health and welfare ministries at Methodist Le Bonheur. He was key to the development of the Congregational Health Network. Kim Clark was dean of Harvard Business School -- and a widely respected leader in higher education and innovation -- who was recruited to become president of BYU-Idaho.
Both have helped to maintain a focus on the institution’s soul amidst dynamic innovation, enabling pruning and growing to occur together. In so doing, they have allowed capacities such as generative organization and sustainable design to be established integrally, as a part of the DNA of the institution, and not dependent solely on the vision of a particular leader or board.
Dubik describes the same process in his assignment as head of transformation of the Army.
He was a two-star general appointed by his superiors to lead a change process, and was essentially “walled off” and protected to be able to work on those processes. The Army created a “heavyweight team” with senior-level leadership to discern what needed to be pruned and what needed to be fed so the institution could work on the right problems for its adaptive challenges.
In each case, the heavyweight team focused on the design and implementation of the innovation within the organization. The executive leadership needed to oversee the heavyweight team and simultaneously pay attention to the larger institutional ecosystem.
In addition to seniority and credibility, the heavyweights must be people of great character and courage. It takes courage to hold together the dynamics of traditioned innovation, identifying honestly and clearly the soul that should not be changed, as well as those components in need of pruning. And it takes courage to follow through and act on the conclusions that have been drawn.
That is why courage is so closely linked to both truthfulness in discernment and perseverance in execution.
The heavyweights must also be people of humility. They need to have a deep appreciation for the soul of the institution, the tradition that has given life to all that has gone before, even as they undertake the challenge of pruning for the sake of future growth, beauty and creativity.
This humility is a reminder that each Christian institution bears witness to the reign of God, but in its own partial way; it can never, and ought never, aspire to do it all. Such personal and institutional humility invites the networks of relationships, personal and institutional, that are so critical to generativity and sustainability, and that are marks of, and contributors to, the trait of interpretive charity.
Sustainable design requires that we remain focused on the telos of our Christian institutions, the mission that brought them into being and gave them life. The more clearly we discern the end, the more effective will be our focus on pruning and growing faithfully, and the more faithful will be our development of those traits that are important for discerning when to prune and when to grow, in service to God.
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Monday, February 22, 2016
In his introduction to Imagining the Small Church, Steve Willis writes, "This book boasts no ten or fifteen steps to a successful small church. Instead, I hope to encourage you to give up on steps altogether and even to give up on success, at least how success is usually measured. I also hope to help the reader imagine the small church differently; to see with new eyes the joys and pleasures of living small and sustainably." The joys and sorrows Willis helps us see through the compelling stories of faith in the small church put flesh and bones on the possibilities that lie ahead for congregations in the future as well as the here and now.
Buy the book »
Ideas that Impact: Sustainability
"Finding a Sustainable Financial Model for Christian Institutions" by David L. Odom
Rather than fretting about growing revenue streams or cutting costs, it's time to create new models for Christian congregations and related organizations. That starts with knowing how to read a balance sheet.
Read more »
MONEY, NEW ECONOMIC MODELS, SUSTAINABILITY
Finding a sustainable financial model for Christian institutions
Rather than fretting about growing revenue streams or cutting costs, it’s time to create new models for Christian congregations and related organizations. That starts with knowing how to read a balance sheet.
Pastors and denominational executives have fretted about how ministries will be funded in the future. These leaders sometimes express the concern by discussing ways to diversify revenue streams or reduce the percentage of the budget devoted to staff.
Increasingly, leaders feel like the financial model for Christian congregations and related institutions needs some reformation. What is needed to move from fretting to creating new models?
The good news is that Christian leaders are not alone with this concern and question. In the last two years, a similar concern has surfaced in higher education. Last month, Inside Higher Ed released its 2013 Survey of College & University Business Officers. (link is external) From it we learn that:
Only 27% of business officers express strong confidence in the viability of their financial models over five years -- and that drops to 13% over 10 years.
Six in 10 CFOs disagree with the statement that "reports that a significant number of higher education institutions are facing existential financial crisis are overblown.”
More than half -- 57% -- agree that new spending at their institutions will come from reallocated dollars rather than new revenue.
College presidents and business officers now know what many pastors have been feeling for 20 years.
In my experience with congregations and institutions, leaders most frequently focus on the financial model that accountants trained me to call the “income statement,” in which the income and expenses for the month, the year and the previous year are listed and compared with the budget.
The income statement provides important operational information. In large organizations like the hospital and universities where I have worked for 20 years, the income statement related to my projects is the only financial information I could regularly review.
Reforming the financial model requires a review of the “balance sheet” where the assets and liabilities are detailed. The assets are what generate the income and increase the financial worth of the enterprise.
When I was president of a small ministry, one of our stakeholders reviewed the financial statement and told me that he did not care to look at all those numbers. He wanted to know how much cash we had in the bank. Having been lovingly trained by the accountant, I replied that we did monitor cash flow, but that a more helpful number might be the General Fund balance found on the balance sheet. This number represented the uncommitted cash in the bank. I learned that this senior executive in a huge Christian institution could not read a balance sheet.
For Christian ministries, the view of assets has to be more complete than what is captured on financial statements. The assets that could be keys to determining a new financial model could come from the networks of people or organizations which engage with the ministry, the services that the ministry has the people and expertise to provide, and the intellectual property that is needed for others to do ministry. Perhaps we need an expanded balance sheet that quantifies these assets alongside the financial capital.
The “lower half” of a balance sheet details the liabilities. Here the current obligations of the ministry are named, particularly those related to past events. Think about it in terms of a loan. The borrowing of money is a past event that creates a current obligation to pay. The loan balance and interest are listed as liabilities.
Assets and liabilities are impacted by the environment, in the same ways that offering plate contributions have always been impacted. For example the regional and national economies, the religious landscape, and the demographics of donors and participants can each and all shift in ways to increase or reduce the capital available in terms of time, money and even imagination.
Next week, I will share some questions that can help frame a conversation within a ministry about the financial model. Some days I wish Christian institutions and congregations could leave such worries to the accountants. However, developing and testing new models requires a variety of gifts that nearly all leaders will need to engage.
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"Three Keys to Sustainable Design" by Brendan Case
The more audacious an institution's animating purpose, the greater its danger of substituting grandiose posturing for the unglamorous grit of lasting change. That danger is acute indeed in institutions driven by the Gospel's promise of cosmic redemption, which might explain why Christian leaders seem to struggle to put their transformative ideas into practice in the communities that so desperately need them.
Read more »
MANAGEMENT
Three keys to sustainable design
Fast Company’s design blog offers tips that Christian leaders can use to cultivate to execute good ideas.
The more audacious an institution’s animating purpose, the greater its danger of substituting grandiose posturing for the unglamorous grit of lasting change. That danger is acute indeed in institutions driven by the Gospel’s promise of cosmic redemption, which might explain why Christian leaders seem to struggle to put their transformative ideas into practice in the communities that so desperately need them.
A recent piece on Fast Company’s design blog brought together innovative business leaders to reflect on the structures that have allowed them to cultivate what author Matthew E. May has called the elegance of “effortless effectiveness” within their organizations.
Here are three practices springing from this conversation for leaders seeking to ease the friction of putting ideas into action.
1. Model the future
Karl Heiselman, the CEO of Wolff Olins, stressed the need for organizations to develop “prototypes,” models for future projects. Interestingly, Heiselman emphasized that prototypes are storytelling aids, tools that allow organizations to “build a narrative for themselves, a story that answers the question ‘where will we be in 3 to 5 years?’”
For a Christian leader seized with a vision for a new outreach or grand partnership, a pilot program or soft launch can offer the means for narrating -- for herself and for her community -- the uncertain passage from present reality to glorious future.
2. Burst your bubbles
The intensity and passion of creating something means that the designer experiences his work very differently from later participants. When designers become insulated from participant experience, ensconced in a “bubble” of self-congratulation, the result could be a horrible mismatch between expectations and results.
Joe Gebbia, CPO and co-founder of Airbnb, observed that when he had his engineers sit “next to the customer service reps who would have to deal with what they’d made,” the results were often hilarious: "Engineers are just like, ‘Oh my god, this thing I built that I thought was amazing is horrible for users!”’
The Christian leader’s best gauge of success is the lived experience of those who work with or live among their programs and services, so cultivating a steady stream of feedback “from the front” and learning on the go are key tools for shaping elegant design.
3. Plan to be surprised
Gebbia also “pointed out that the challenge of innovation often simply comes down to a physical challenge: That is, creating a culture where people feel ‘closely packed’ -- a living room type scale that fosters useful but serendipitous interactions.”
Likewise, Greg Jones commends an organizational shift from the rigid, hierarchical silos typical of large corporations to what Wired magazine founding editor Kevin Kelly calls the “loosely coupled, permeable, center-less” configurations of thriving cities. This highlights the need for an open organizational ecology, which can burst the bubble of an individual team’s insular thinking and offer fresh insight to re-vitalize stagnant or rutted ideas.
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Continue Your Own Learning & Development
Foundations of Christian LeadershipA formational program offered by Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Through Foundations of Christian Leadership, Leadership Education at Duke Divinity aims to help Christian leaders explore their gifts and cultivate the practices that are essential for spurring transformation within Christian organizations. The program is best suited to those who have been in a leadership position for fewer than five years. Join up to 30 participants from nonprofit organizations, congregations, mission agencies, seminaries and denominations for two residential sessions and two online sessions over the course of four months.
Each Foundations participant will have the opportunity to apply for a $5,000 grant to support innovative approaches within his or her institution.
Learn more »
---------------------
MONEY, SUSTAINABILITY, MANAGEMENT
L. Gregory Jones: Pruning for sustainable design
To enable growth, a leader needs to understand an institution’s “soul” and be willing to prune anything that doesn’t contribute to its thriving.
We often associate growth with adjectives like thriving, transformative, generative and sustainable. If we want Christian institutions and Christian communities to be signs of God’s reign, surely they will be marked by consistent growth, won’t they?
Memphis’ Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare faced this question a decade ago. Gary Shorb, the system’s CEO, decided the answer was “no.” To become more mission-driven as a church-related health system, Shorb’s institution needed to decide what to stop doing and reallocate its resources.
This reallocation of resources was based on discerning the “soul” of the organization -- the heart of its mission -- and clearly identifying the needs of its primary constituents and community. Health system leaders decided to sell assets, including some rural hospitals.
Methodist Le Bonheur did not simply end relationships or cut programs that were no longer effective. It also sold assets and ended programs that were themselves worthwhile but that, after careful evaluation, were determined to be no longer at the center of its work. As Shorb put it, “Sometimes you have to shrink to grow.”
The missional focus, in turn, became education, children’s hospitals and the development of the system’s Congregational Health Network. The innovative Congregational Health Network has helped establish relationships throughout the greater Memphis community to connect, as Methodist Le Bonheur Senior Vice President Gary Gunderson puts it, the “healing institutions” of Methodist Le Bonheur with the “health institutions” of local congregations.
The Congregational Health Network has helped Methodist Le Bonheur become a more generative organization, because it has enhanced the networks connecting people throughout Memphis with networks of services from midwives to hospice. It has also enabled a more proactive and holistic focus on health throughout the community.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. James Dubik, now a consultant for and board member of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management, advises institutional leaders to evaluate carefully what shouldn’t change before deciding what can change.
Dubik has considerable experience guiding change -- he helped lead the Army through one of the most sweeping transitions in U.S. military history. In that process, before he was ready to advise what ought to change, Dubik had to describe the “soul,” or essence, of the Army. That soul shouldn’t change. Everything else, he says, is up for grabs.
Mission-driven Christian institutions are generative and sustainable because they can name and focus on their telos, their soul. With that clear sense of purpose, institutional leaders can more wisely decide what needs to be pruned and what needs to grow to enhance the institution’s generativity and sustainability.
But many institutional leaders leap too quickly at chances for unchecked growth in size and programs. And, indeed, there are moments when growth is needed, such as in the effort to create scalable results or during an institution’s early years.
Who would not have wanted to contribute to the growth of Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank, or the spread of church-related higher education in the U.S. in the 19th century, or the multiplication of local affiliates of Habitat for Humanity?
The amazing fruitfulness of such organizations, elegant in their design and sustainable over time, has contributed to significant development of human, intellectual, network, service and financial capital. Their flourishing has also contributed to the emergence and cultivation of local, regional and broader ecosystems.
Yet Methodist Le Bonheur’s experience also points to the critical importance of pruning.
In John’s Gospel (15:1-2), Jesus evokes the image of pruning for Christian life, and this practice is crucial for organizations as well. Pruning involves getting rid of those things that are broken, are sinful, have died or no longer advance an institution’s mission. Jesus talks about the wheat that in falling to the ground eventually bears much fruit (John 12:24).
Too many individual organizations cling desperately to a life that has already run its course, when they might be able to be re-purposed for new life in the broader ecosystem. Leaders of large institutions such as Methodist Le Bonheur have to attend to their whole ecosystem as well as the organizations within their institution.
Jesus’ image of pruning also suggests that we may need to remove some things that are otherwise healthy for the sake of even greater faithfulness and effectiveness. Healthy rosebushes need to be pruned for the sake of even greater growth, beauty and creativity. So also with institutions.
In 2000 the Mormon church decided to transform its thriving junior college in Idaho, Ricks College, into a four-year baccalaureate institution, to be called BYU-Idaho. As Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring narrate the story in their recent book, “The Innovative University,” church president Gordon Hinckley was convinced that the church needed to offer young church members more opportunities for higher education. The conversion of Ricks College seemed to be a better and more cost-effective strategy than creating a brand-new institution.
Hinckley faced a series of tough choices -- reviewing and reducing the number of disciplines, majors and courses; converting the campus to a year-round curriculum; and, notably, eliminating an enormously successful intercollegiate athletics program.
The pruning was born from a clear sense of mission: Hinckley believed that the Mormon church needed to be more intentional about overinvesting in young people, and some costs, such as athletics, detracted from providing a high-quality education.
BYU-Idaho has developed over the past decade as an innovative model for higher education, providing higher quality education at a lower cost per student than Ricks College had previously been able to do. It is offering baccalaureate rather than associate-level degrees, and making them available to significantly more young church members than the Mormon church had previously been able to serve.
But none of these initiatives would have been possible if Hinckley hadn’t insisted on pruning as an integral part of his vision of sustainable design.
It takes significant leadership to recognize the importance of pruning for the sake of future growth, beauty and creativity. It is challenging to prune even a single rosebush, a small department within an organization or an organization within a larger institutional ecosystem. It is even more challenging to prune long-established, larger institutional ecosystems like Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare or Ricks College.
The commitment to pruning gives a large institution the right issues on which to focus, but it is also crucial to have the right people to work on them.
Christensen’s research on “disruptive innovation” has shown that for innovation to be implemented in established institutions, a critical tool is a “heavyweight team” led by someone with “substantial organizational authority” and made up of “experts who represent all of the necessary organizational functions and can speak for their departments without feeling beholden to them” (“The Innovative University”).
Both Methodist Le Bonheur and BYU-Idaho developed such teams for implementation, and have ensured that they maintain senior-level leadership focused on integration and fulfillment of the institutional mission.
For example, Gary Gunderson was a senior leader directing the Interfaith Health Program at the Carter Center who was recruited to become senior vice president for health and welfare ministries at Methodist Le Bonheur. He was key to the development of the Congregational Health Network. Kim Clark was dean of Harvard Business School -- and a widely respected leader in higher education and innovation -- who was recruited to become president of BYU-Idaho.
Both have helped to maintain a focus on the institution’s soul amidst dynamic innovation, enabling pruning and growing to occur together. In so doing, they have allowed capacities such as generative organization and sustainable design to be established integrally, as a part of the DNA of the institution, and not dependent solely on the vision of a particular leader or board.
Dubik describes the same process in his assignment as head of transformation of the Army.
He was a two-star general appointed by his superiors to lead a change process, and was essentially “walled off” and protected to be able to work on those processes. The Army created a “heavyweight team” with senior-level leadership to discern what needed to be pruned and what needed to be fed so the institution could work on the right problems for its adaptive challenges.
In each case, the heavyweight team focused on the design and implementation of the innovation within the organization. The executive leadership needed to oversee the heavyweight team and simultaneously pay attention to the larger institutional ecosystem.
In addition to seniority and credibility, the heavyweights must be people of great character and courage. It takes courage to hold together the dynamics of traditioned innovation, identifying honestly and clearly the soul that should not be changed, as well as those components in need of pruning. And it takes courage to follow through and act on the conclusions that have been drawn.
That is why courage is so closely linked to both truthfulness in discernment and perseverance in execution.
The heavyweights must also be people of humility. They need to have a deep appreciation for the soul of the institution, the tradition that has given life to all that has gone before, even as they undertake the challenge of pruning for the sake of future growth, beauty and creativity.
This humility is a reminder that each Christian institution bears witness to the reign of God, but in its own partial way; it can never, and ought never, aspire to do it all. Such personal and institutional humility invites the networks of relationships, personal and institutional, that are so critical to generativity and sustainability, and that are marks of, and contributors to, the trait of interpretive charity.
Sustainable design requires that we remain focused on the telos of our Christian institutions, the mission that brought them into being and gave them life. The more clearly we discern the end, the more effective will be our focus on pruning and growing faithfully, and the more faithful will be our development of those traits that are important for discerning when to prune and when to grow, in service to God.
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Monday, February 22, 2016
In his introduction to Imagining the Small Church, Steve Willis writes, "This book boasts no ten or fifteen steps to a successful small church. Instead, I hope to encourage you to give up on steps altogether and even to give up on success, at least how success is usually measured. I also hope to help the reader imagine the small church differently; to see with new eyes the joys and pleasures of living small and sustainably." The joys and sorrows Willis helps us see through the compelling stories of faith in the small church put flesh and bones on the possibilities that lie ahead for congregations in the future as well as the here and now.
Buy the book »
Ideas that Impact: Sustainability
"Finding a Sustainable Financial Model for Christian Institutions" by David L. Odom
Rather than fretting about growing revenue streams or cutting costs, it's time to create new models for Christian congregations and related organizations. That starts with knowing how to read a balance sheet.
Read more »
MONEY, NEW ECONOMIC MODELS, SUSTAINABILITY
Finding a sustainable financial model for Christian institutions
Rather than fretting about growing revenue streams or cutting costs, it’s time to create new models for Christian congregations and related organizations. That starts with knowing how to read a balance sheet.
Pastors and denominational executives have fretted about how ministries will be funded in the future. These leaders sometimes express the concern by discussing ways to diversify revenue streams or reduce the percentage of the budget devoted to staff.
Increasingly, leaders feel like the financial model for Christian congregations and related institutions needs some reformation. What is needed to move from fretting to creating new models?
The good news is that Christian leaders are not alone with this concern and question. In the last two years, a similar concern has surfaced in higher education. Last month, Inside Higher Ed released its 2013 Survey of College & University Business Officers. (link is external) From it we learn that:
Only 27% of business officers express strong confidence in the viability of their financial models over five years -- and that drops to 13% over 10 years.
Six in 10 CFOs disagree with the statement that "reports that a significant number of higher education institutions are facing existential financial crisis are overblown.”
More than half -- 57% -- agree that new spending at their institutions will come from reallocated dollars rather than new revenue.
College presidents and business officers now know what many pastors have been feeling for 20 years.
In my experience with congregations and institutions, leaders most frequently focus on the financial model that accountants trained me to call the “income statement,” in which the income and expenses for the month, the year and the previous year are listed and compared with the budget.
The income statement provides important operational information. In large organizations like the hospital and universities where I have worked for 20 years, the income statement related to my projects is the only financial information I could regularly review.
Reforming the financial model requires a review of the “balance sheet” where the assets and liabilities are detailed. The assets are what generate the income and increase the financial worth of the enterprise.
When I was president of a small ministry, one of our stakeholders reviewed the financial statement and told me that he did not care to look at all those numbers. He wanted to know how much cash we had in the bank. Having been lovingly trained by the accountant, I replied that we did monitor cash flow, but that a more helpful number might be the General Fund balance found on the balance sheet. This number represented the uncommitted cash in the bank. I learned that this senior executive in a huge Christian institution could not read a balance sheet.
For Christian ministries, the view of assets has to be more complete than what is captured on financial statements. The assets that could be keys to determining a new financial model could come from the networks of people or organizations which engage with the ministry, the services that the ministry has the people and expertise to provide, and the intellectual property that is needed for others to do ministry. Perhaps we need an expanded balance sheet that quantifies these assets alongside the financial capital.
The “lower half” of a balance sheet details the liabilities. Here the current obligations of the ministry are named, particularly those related to past events. Think about it in terms of a loan. The borrowing of money is a past event that creates a current obligation to pay. The loan balance and interest are listed as liabilities.
Assets and liabilities are impacted by the environment, in the same ways that offering plate contributions have always been impacted. For example the regional and national economies, the religious landscape, and the demographics of donors and participants can each and all shift in ways to increase or reduce the capital available in terms of time, money and even imagination.
Next week, I will share some questions that can help frame a conversation within a ministry about the financial model. Some days I wish Christian institutions and congregations could leave such worries to the accountants. However, developing and testing new models requires a variety of gifts that nearly all leaders will need to engage.
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"Three Keys to Sustainable Design" by Brendan Case
The more audacious an institution's animating purpose, the greater its danger of substituting grandiose posturing for the unglamorous grit of lasting change. That danger is acute indeed in institutions driven by the Gospel's promise of cosmic redemption, which might explain why Christian leaders seem to struggle to put their transformative ideas into practice in the communities that so desperately need them.
Read more »
MANAGEMENT
Three keys to sustainable design
Fast Company’s design blog offers tips that Christian leaders can use to cultivate to execute good ideas.
The more audacious an institution’s animating purpose, the greater its danger of substituting grandiose posturing for the unglamorous grit of lasting change. That danger is acute indeed in institutions driven by the Gospel’s promise of cosmic redemption, which might explain why Christian leaders seem to struggle to put their transformative ideas into practice in the communities that so desperately need them.
A recent piece on Fast Company’s design blog brought together innovative business leaders to reflect on the structures that have allowed them to cultivate what author Matthew E. May has called the elegance of “effortless effectiveness” within their organizations.
Here are three practices springing from this conversation for leaders seeking to ease the friction of putting ideas into action.
1. Model the future
Karl Heiselman, the CEO of Wolff Olins, stressed the need for organizations to develop “prototypes,” models for future projects. Interestingly, Heiselman emphasized that prototypes are storytelling aids, tools that allow organizations to “build a narrative for themselves, a story that answers the question ‘where will we be in 3 to 5 years?’”
For a Christian leader seized with a vision for a new outreach or grand partnership, a pilot program or soft launch can offer the means for narrating -- for herself and for her community -- the uncertain passage from present reality to glorious future.
2. Burst your bubbles
The intensity and passion of creating something means that the designer experiences his work very differently from later participants. When designers become insulated from participant experience, ensconced in a “bubble” of self-congratulation, the result could be a horrible mismatch between expectations and results.
Joe Gebbia, CPO and co-founder of Airbnb, observed that when he had his engineers sit “next to the customer service reps who would have to deal with what they’d made,” the results were often hilarious: "Engineers are just like, ‘Oh my god, this thing I built that I thought was amazing is horrible for users!”’
The Christian leader’s best gauge of success is the lived experience of those who work with or live among their programs and services, so cultivating a steady stream of feedback “from the front” and learning on the go are key tools for shaping elegant design.
3. Plan to be surprised
Gebbia also “pointed out that the challenge of innovation often simply comes down to a physical challenge: That is, creating a culture where people feel ‘closely packed’ -- a living room type scale that fosters useful but serendipitous interactions.”
Likewise, Greg Jones commends an organizational shift from the rigid, hierarchical silos typical of large corporations to what Wired magazine founding editor Kevin Kelly calls the “loosely coupled, permeable, center-less” configurations of thriving cities. This highlights the need for an open organizational ecology, which can burst the bubble of an individual team’s insular thinking and offer fresh insight to re-vitalize stagnant or rutted ideas.
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Continue Your Own Learning & Development
Foundations of Christian LeadershipA formational program offered by Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Through Foundations of Christian Leadership, Leadership Education at Duke Divinity aims to help Christian leaders explore their gifts and cultivate the practices that are essential for spurring transformation within Christian organizations. The program is best suited to those who have been in a leadership position for fewer than five years. Join up to 30 participants from nonprofit organizations, congregations, mission agencies, seminaries and denominations for two residential sessions and two online sessions over the course of four months.
Each Foundations participant will have the opportunity to apply for a $5,000 grant to support innovative approaches within his or her institution.
Learn more »
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"Managing a Team: What can Congregational Leaders Learn from a Scientist?: A Faith & Leadership" interview with Mohamed Noor - Alban Weekly for Monday, 15 February 2016
"Managing a Team: What can Congregational Leaders Learn from a Scientist?: A Faith & Leadership" interview with Mohamed Noor
Biologist Mohamed Noor says that the management aspect of his job as a Duke University professor causes him to lose more sleep than any other area, including activities such as teaching, seeking grants, publishing papers and getting experiments to work.
Why? Partly, he said, it's because graduate training doesn't prepare scientists for management. And management is important, because a laboratory really isn't a physical space -- it's a team of people.
In an interview with Faith & Leadership, Noor shared the following advice and observations for people who are new to managing a team.
Communicate with the people you supervise
Fairly recently, I started a process where every week I meet with every single person in the lab individually. I have a half-hour block slotted.
I don't necessarily use the whole half-hour block, but it's slotted so that -- "Here's a time when you know you can find me, I know I can find you, and we can go over what things we're doing." I have a system for online questions or comments, and I update it every week, so that way when they come, it's not, "Oh my gosh, what's he going to ask me?"
I use Google Docs. They can see it. They can edit it. They can add things to it. They can look online and see, "Oh, this is what we talked about last time. Here's something he added from last week that he wants to look into, so I'll come ready to answer the question." It's also good for me. They come prepared, I'm prepared, and everybody's ready to go and talk about what they need to do.
Those have saved my life. Because what happens is the graduate student comes into your office, and they largely expect you to be able to remember exactly where the last conversation you had with them left off.
But I have four Ph.D. students, I have two postdocs, I have two technicians, and I have a million other duties that are completely unrelated to any of them. I can't just snap my fingers and pick up where I left off with any one of them, so it really helps to have a lot of notes where I can say, "Give me one second."
I flip to that and I'm like, "Oh yeah, last time we were together we talked about this, this, this, this, this. OK, go ahead." It makes it so our meetings are much more efficient.
Be cautious in hiring, especially in the beginning
You're used to being part of this very dynamic group, and you show up at your new lab and here's this empty room. It's all too easy to then just start grabbing a bunch of people and say, "Oh, this person seems really good. Oh, this person seems really good." Getting too many people too quickly is a recipe for disaster.
It's much better to let it grow a little more organically, a little bit more slowly, and have people more staged. Don't feel like you need to fill up the room.
It really helps, too, to interview as rigorously as you can. Have people in your lab talk to the interviewees. Now, some people get a little bit fearful of this, and they say, "What if somebody in my lab says something bad and they don't come?"
On the other hand, if the person in your lab says something bad and they don't come, maybe there's a reason that that person isn't a good match. Maybe the "bad" thing that they said was something like, "He likes to supervise this closely," and that person didn't like that. That's not bad. That just means that maybe we're not as good a match as it seemed.
"Managing a Team: What can Congregational Leaders Learn from a Scientist?: A Faith & Leadership" interview with Mohamed Noor
Biologist Mohamed Noor says that the management aspect of his job as a Duke University professor causes him to lose more sleep than any other area, including activities such as teaching, seeking grants, publishing papers and getting experiments to work.
Why? Partly, he said, it's because graduate training doesn't prepare scientists for management. And management is important, because a laboratory really isn't a physical space -- it's a team of people.
In an interview with Faith & Leadership, Noor shared the following advice and observations for people who are new to managing a team.
Communicate with the people you supervise
Fairly recently, I started a process where every week I meet with every single person in the lab individually. I have a half-hour block slotted.
I don't necessarily use the whole half-hour block, but it's slotted so that -- "Here's a time when you know you can find me, I know I can find you, and we can go over what things we're doing." I have a system for online questions or comments, and I update it every week, so that way when they come, it's not, "Oh my gosh, what's he going to ask me?"
I use Google Docs. They can see it. They can edit it. They can add things to it. They can look online and see, "Oh, this is what we talked about last time. Here's something he added from last week that he wants to look into, so I'll come ready to answer the question." It's also good for me. They come prepared, I'm prepared, and everybody's ready to go and talk about what they need to do.
Those have saved my life. Because what happens is the graduate student comes into your office, and they largely expect you to be able to remember exactly where the last conversation you had with them left off.
But I have four Ph.D. students, I have two postdocs, I have two technicians, and I have a million other duties that are completely unrelated to any of them. I can't just snap my fingers and pick up where I left off with any one of them, so it really helps to have a lot of notes where I can say, "Give me one second."
I flip to that and I'm like, "Oh yeah, last time we were together we talked about this, this, this, this, this. OK, go ahead." It makes it so our meetings are much more efficient.
Be cautious in hiring, especially in the beginning
You're used to being part of this very dynamic group, and you show up at your new lab and here's this empty room. It's all too easy to then just start grabbing a bunch of people and say, "Oh, this person seems really good. Oh, this person seems really good." Getting too many people too quickly is a recipe for disaster.
It's much better to let it grow a little more organically, a little bit more slowly, and have people more staged. Don't feel like you need to fill up the room.
It really helps, too, to interview as rigorously as you can. Have people in your lab talk to the interviewees. Now, some people get a little bit fearful of this, and they say, "What if somebody in my lab says something bad and they don't come?"
On the other hand, if the person in your lab says something bad and they don't come, maybe there's a reason that that person isn't a good match. Maybe the "bad" thing that they said was something like, "He likes to supervise this closely," and that person didn't like that. That's not bad. That just means that maybe we're not as good a match as it seemed.
Read more »
EDUCATION, MANAGEMENT, TEAM MANAGEMENT
A scientist's advice on managing a team
Managing a laboratory was one part of his job that Duke University biology professor Mohamed Noor wasn’t taught in graduate school. But he hopes to share what he has learned about management to help others.
Update: Noor has published a handbook called "You're Hired! Now What? A Guide for New Science Faculty." (link is external)
Biologist Mohamed Noor says that the management aspect of his job as a Duke University professor causes him to lose more sleep than any other area, including activities such as teaching, seeking grants, publishing papers and getting experiments to work.
Why? Partly, he said, it’s because graduate training doesn’t prepare scientists for management. And management is important, because a laboratory really isn’t a physical space -- it’s a team of people.
In an interview with Faith & Leadership, Noor shared the following advice and observations for people who are new to managing a team.
Communicate with the people you supervise
Fairly recently, I started a process where every week I meet with every single person in the lab individually. I have a half-hour block slotted.
I don’t necessarily use the whole half-hour block, but it’s slotted so that -- “Here’s a time when you know you can find me, I know I can find you, and we can go over what things we’re doing.” I have a system for online questions or comments, and I update it every week, so that way when they come, it’s not, “Oh my gosh, what’s he going to ask me?”
I use Google Docs. They can see it. They can edit it. They can add things to it. They can look online and see, “Oh, this is what we talked about last time. Here’s something he added from last week that he wants to look into, so I’ll come ready to answer the question.” It’s also good for me. They come prepared, I’m prepared, and everybody’s ready to go and talk about what they need to do.
Those have saved my life. Because what happens is the graduate student comes into your office, and they largely expect you to be able to remember exactly where the last conversation you had with them left off.
But I have four Ph.D. students, I have two postdocs, I have two technicians, and I have a million other duties that are completely unrelated to any of them. I can’t just snap my fingers and pick up where I left off with any one of them, so it really helps to have a lot of notes where I can say, “Give me one second.”
I flip to that and I’m like, “Oh yeah, last time we were together we talked about this, this, this, this, this. OK, go ahead.” It makes it so our meetings are much more efficient.
Be cautious in hiring, especially in the beginning
You’re used to being part of this very dynamic group, and you show up at your new lab and here’s this empty room. It’s all too easy to then just start grabbing a bunch of people and say, “Oh, this person seems really good. Oh, this person seems really good.” Getting too many people too quickly is a recipe for disaster.
It’s much better to let it grow a little more organically, a little bit more slowly, and have people more staged. Don’t feel like you need to fill up the room.
It really helps, too, to interview as rigorously as you can. Have people in your lab talk to the interviewees. Now, some people get a little bit fearful of this, and they say, “What if somebody in my lab says something bad and they don’t come?”
On the other hand, if the person in your lab says something bad and they don’t come, maybe there’s a reason that that person isn’t a good match. Maybe the “bad” thing that they said was something like, “He likes to supervise this closely,” and that person didn’t like that. That’s not bad. That just means that maybe we’re not as good a match as it seemed.
Separate the personal and the professional
When you’re starting off as a new faculty member, it’s very easy to remember being part of the group and being part of the team. But you’re actually their boss now. You may think casual jokes and a little teasing are very innocent, but for them it’s not at all innocent, because it’s not in a symmetrical relationship.
It’s good to take a step back, keep a little bit of a buffer between you and everybody else in the lab, and very much think about what you say before you say it. And never say anything when you’re mad, like, “Go away.” Throw something in your office or something like that when nobody else is there.
The analogy I use for that is there’s an invisible hammer you’re carrying, and if you start swinging it around, you could hit somebody and have no idea. I’ve definitely made that mistake many times. I probably still make it, but hopefully less.
Block off personal time
Another important thing is to block off a little time for yourself or for anything family-related. It’s not like my family ceases to exist; they need time, too, and there’s times when I want to go to my kid’s baseball game.
Another thing that I started doing is I blocked off lunch every single day. If I didn’t do it, it might very well get scheduled away. I make it so that nobody can put an appointment there. I say, “No, I will have lunch.”
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EDUCATION, MANAGEMENT, TEAM MANAGEMENT
A scientist's advice on managing a team
Managing a laboratory was one part of his job that Duke University biology professor Mohamed Noor wasn’t taught in graduate school. But he hopes to share what he has learned about management to help others.
Update: Noor has published a handbook called "You're Hired! Now What? A Guide for New Science Faculty." (link is external)
Biologist Mohamed Noor says that the management aspect of his job as a Duke University professor causes him to lose more sleep than any other area, including activities such as teaching, seeking grants, publishing papers and getting experiments to work.
Why? Partly, he said, it’s because graduate training doesn’t prepare scientists for management. And management is important, because a laboratory really isn’t a physical space -- it’s a team of people.
In an interview with Faith & Leadership, Noor shared the following advice and observations for people who are new to managing a team.
Communicate with the people you supervise
Fairly recently, I started a process where every week I meet with every single person in the lab individually. I have a half-hour block slotted.
I don’t necessarily use the whole half-hour block, but it’s slotted so that -- “Here’s a time when you know you can find me, I know I can find you, and we can go over what things we’re doing.” I have a system for online questions or comments, and I update it every week, so that way when they come, it’s not, “Oh my gosh, what’s he going to ask me?”
I use Google Docs. They can see it. They can edit it. They can add things to it. They can look online and see, “Oh, this is what we talked about last time. Here’s something he added from last week that he wants to look into, so I’ll come ready to answer the question.” It’s also good for me. They come prepared, I’m prepared, and everybody’s ready to go and talk about what they need to do.
Those have saved my life. Because what happens is the graduate student comes into your office, and they largely expect you to be able to remember exactly where the last conversation you had with them left off.
But I have four Ph.D. students, I have two postdocs, I have two technicians, and I have a million other duties that are completely unrelated to any of them. I can’t just snap my fingers and pick up where I left off with any one of them, so it really helps to have a lot of notes where I can say, “Give me one second.”
I flip to that and I’m like, “Oh yeah, last time we were together we talked about this, this, this, this, this. OK, go ahead.” It makes it so our meetings are much more efficient.
Be cautious in hiring, especially in the beginning
You’re used to being part of this very dynamic group, and you show up at your new lab and here’s this empty room. It’s all too easy to then just start grabbing a bunch of people and say, “Oh, this person seems really good. Oh, this person seems really good.” Getting too many people too quickly is a recipe for disaster.
It’s much better to let it grow a little more organically, a little bit more slowly, and have people more staged. Don’t feel like you need to fill up the room.
It really helps, too, to interview as rigorously as you can. Have people in your lab talk to the interviewees. Now, some people get a little bit fearful of this, and they say, “What if somebody in my lab says something bad and they don’t come?”
On the other hand, if the person in your lab says something bad and they don’t come, maybe there’s a reason that that person isn’t a good match. Maybe the “bad” thing that they said was something like, “He likes to supervise this closely,” and that person didn’t like that. That’s not bad. That just means that maybe we’re not as good a match as it seemed.
Separate the personal and the professional
When you’re starting off as a new faculty member, it’s very easy to remember being part of the group and being part of the team. But you’re actually their boss now. You may think casual jokes and a little teasing are very innocent, but for them it’s not at all innocent, because it’s not in a symmetrical relationship.
It’s good to take a step back, keep a little bit of a buffer between you and everybody else in the lab, and very much think about what you say before you say it. And never say anything when you’re mad, like, “Go away.” Throw something in your office or something like that when nobody else is there.
The analogy I use for that is there’s an invisible hammer you’re carrying, and if you start swinging it around, you could hit somebody and have no idea. I’ve definitely made that mistake many times. I probably still make it, but hopefully less.
Block off personal time
Another important thing is to block off a little time for yourself or for anything family-related. It’s not like my family ceases to exist; they need time, too, and there’s times when I want to go to my kid’s baseball game.
Another thing that I started doing is I blocked off lunch every single day. If I didn’t do it, it might very well get scheduled away. I make it so that nobody can put an appointment there. I say, “No, I will have lunch.”
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Monday, February 15, 2016
Mobilizing Congregations is an in-depth look at the power teams bring to congregational work.
After helping readers understand the difference between teams and committees, Wimberley shows how congregations using teams are able to mobilize members across generations for both short and long term tasks.
Here readers will find both the theory and practice of making a successful transition to a congregation doing its work through highly motivated, efficient teams.
Buy the book »
From the Alban Archive
"Designing a Staff Team for Ministry" by Susan Beaumont
Whether you're working from the ground up to build an organizational structure where none existed or working with a broken structure inherited from a predecessor, four basic design features need to be addressed and resolved.
Mobilizing Congregations is an in-depth look at the power teams bring to congregational work.
After helping readers understand the difference between teams and committees, Wimberley shows how congregations using teams are able to mobilize members across generations for both short and long term tasks.
Here readers will find both the theory and practice of making a successful transition to a congregation doing its work through highly motivated, efficient teams.
Buy the book »
From the Alban Archive
"Designing a Staff Team for Ministry" by Susan Beaumont
Whether you're working from the ground up to build an organizational structure where none existed or working with a broken structure inherited from a predecessor, four basic design features need to be addressed and resolved.
Read more »
Designing a Staff Team for Ministry
Whether you’re working from the ground up to build an organizational structure where none existed or working with a broken structure inherited from a predecessor, four basic design features need to be addressed and resolved.
1. Division of Labor
How is the work that needs to be accomplished going to be divided among the available workers? And how will those divided tasks be grouped together?
In a structure with a horizontal orientation, staff functions are added on the same organizational level as the needs of the community grow. Jobs are grouped at the same level of the hierarchy according to processes or functional needs of the community.
The advantage of a horizontal structure is that people stay well connected to the vision of the leader. There isn’t much that goes on without the knowledge or involvement of the primary leader.
Of course, this is also the weakness of a horizontal structure. The size of the organization will be limited by the oversight capacity of its primary leader as the leader struggles to keep pace with the number of direct relationships that must be managed. This type of structure also struggles with communication barriers between functional areas. Each functional area tends to develop a silo mentality, seeing itself as distinct from each of the other functional areas.
A second division of labor option is to take a vertical approach to design. An organization with a vertical orientation might also be thought of as a tall organization. This type of design builds checks and balances into the system by adding levels of oversight. A disadvantage of vertical organizations is that they tend to be slower at decision making, and they do not develop critical decision-making skills at lower levels of the organization. The taller the structure, the longer it takes to work change through the system.
A third option is to take a spatial approach. This approach groups leaders and workers according to geographical locations or according to the natural groupings of constituents being served. The strength of this type of structure is that it allows leaders to respond very effectively to the unique needs of their constituency groups. Organizations with spatial structures tend to be very flexible and adaptable. A disadvantage is that they may have built-in redundancies. In an effort to serve the needs of their unique constituencies, leaders often reinvent functions and processes already offered in other areas of the organization.
Ultimately, the choice that a leader makes about the division of labor on the staff team should be reflective of the mission of the congregation. As you make decisions about the division of labor on your staff team you need to consider what is unique about your context, the constituencies that you serve, and the values that you embrace.
2. Integrating the Work
Integration refers to the extent and means by which an organization holds together its various parts and helps them work together to accomplish a shared goal. The primary ways that an organization’s design can contribute to the coordination of work efforts is through mutual adjustment, direct supervision, and the standardization of processes (drawing on the work of Judith Gordon, Organizational Behavior: A Diagnostic Approach).
The third major dimension of organizational design that should influence your staff-team design is the extent to which you desire centralized or decentralized decision making. In a centralized structure decision making is limited to the top post(s). In a decentralized structure the responsibility for decision making is disseminated throughout the organization.
Certain organizational designs will reinforce a centralized approach to decision making. The more vertical the organization, the greater the degree of centralized decision making. The flatter an organization, the greater the degree of decentralization. Why is this? The layers of an organization are decision-making repositories. The middle levels of organizations exist primarily to handle out-of-the-ordinary decision making and problem solving. When we reduce the number of levels in the structure, employees at all levels are forced to take on more decision-making responsibility.
4. Managerial Span of Control
The fourth and final dimension of organizational design is the managerial span of control. What is the optimum number of people and functions that a supervisor can oversee effectively? This question is basically concerned with the volume of interpersonal relationships that a supervisor can reasonably expect to maintain. The answer is different for every organization and for different parts of the same organization, so there is no easily prescribed answer.
As you consider the span of control for any individual manager, you need to consider both the number of formal and informal relationships that the supervisor is likely to have. This is important because the number of potential interpersonal relationships between a manager and subordinates increases geometrically as the number of subordinates increases arithmetically. Managers have to handle three types of relationships among their direct reports.
First, they manage the one-on-one relationship between themselves and the direct subordinate.
Second, they must manage their relationship with the group as a whole.
Third, they manage the interpersonal relationships that unfold between members of their team.
Considering the span of control requires thought about the level of contact that a particular group of subordinates need. Employees that need more oversight will of course need to work for managers that have fewer direct reports. Greater one-on-one contact time is required for roles that have a greater level of ambiguity in design. Greater one-on-one contact time is generally required for staff members who are newer on the job. Supervisors who oversee these types of employees need to have fewer direct reports.
Jobs at lower levels of the organization tend to be more specialized and less complicated than jobs higher in the organization. Supervisors at lower levels of the organization can generally oversee the work of more employees because the jobs they are overseeing are less complex. At higher levels of the organization roles tend to become much broader and less specialized. Overseeing jobs at this level requires a much greater scope of knowledge and information. The higher you go in the organization, the fewer the number of direct reports that can be supervised effectively.
Finally, the ease of communication between the leader and subordinates will determine the number of direct reports. If some of the employees that the leader oversees are located at another physical site or work on a different schedule or come from a different cultural background, it may be difficult to establish easy lines of communication. Reduce the number of direct reports that an employee is responsible for if the lines of communication between supervisor and subordinate are difficult for any reason.
5. What’s the ‘Right’ Answer for Your Organization?
When it comes to the tricky work of staff-team design there are few right answers or formulas to follow. The four design features presented here are intended to provoke dialogue among the leaders of a congregation about what might work best in their setting. Ultimately, the leadership of a congregation is the only group that can decide whether the staff-team configuration is appropriate or not. Is it working well? Why? Does it seem broken? What might be changed to make it more effective? In all likelihood, the conversations about staff-team design will be more beneficial than whatever chart is drawn to depict that design.[Adapted from a forthcoming book on leading staff by Alban consultants Susan Beaumont and Gil Rendle. Copyright © 2007 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved. For permission to reproduce, go to our permissions form.]
________________________________________
Featured Resources:
Congregational Leadership in Anxious Times: Being Calm and Courageous No Matter What by Peter L. Steinke
With anxiety intensifying and penetrating more and more areas of our lives, leaders cannot be as anxious as the people they serve. Steinke inspires courage in leaders to maintain the course, unearth secrets, resist sabotage, withstand fury, and overcome timidity or doubts. His insights, illustrations, and provocations will carry leaders through rough times, provide clarity during confusing times, and uplift them in joyous times.
How Your Church Family Works: Understanding Congregations as Emotional Systems by Peter L. Steinke
Drawing on the work of Bowen, Friedman, and his own many years’ counseling experience, Steinke shows how to recognize and deal with the emotional roots of such issues as church conflict, leadership roles, congregational change, irresponsible behavior, and the effects of family of origin on current relationships. Psychologically sound, theologically grounded, and practically illustrated with case studies.
Healthy Congregations: A Systems Approach by Peter L. Steinke
In this follow-up to How Your Church Family Works, Steinke takes readers into a deeper exploration of the congregation as an emotional system. Learn ten principles of health, how congregations can adopt new ways of dealing with stress and anxiety, how spiritually and emotionally healthy leaders influence the emotional system, factors that could put your congregation at risk, and more.
Designing a Staff Team for Ministry
Whether you’re working from the ground up to build an organizational structure where none existed or working with a broken structure inherited from a predecessor, four basic design features need to be addressed and resolved.
1. Division of Labor
How is the work that needs to be accomplished going to be divided among the available workers? And how will those divided tasks be grouped together?
In a structure with a horizontal orientation, staff functions are added on the same organizational level as the needs of the community grow. Jobs are grouped at the same level of the hierarchy according to processes or functional needs of the community.
The advantage of a horizontal structure is that people stay well connected to the vision of the leader. There isn’t much that goes on without the knowledge or involvement of the primary leader.
Of course, this is also the weakness of a horizontal structure. The size of the organization will be limited by the oversight capacity of its primary leader as the leader struggles to keep pace with the number of direct relationships that must be managed. This type of structure also struggles with communication barriers between functional areas. Each functional area tends to develop a silo mentality, seeing itself as distinct from each of the other functional areas.
A second division of labor option is to take a vertical approach to design. An organization with a vertical orientation might also be thought of as a tall organization. This type of design builds checks and balances into the system by adding levels of oversight. A disadvantage of vertical organizations is that they tend to be slower at decision making, and they do not develop critical decision-making skills at lower levels of the organization. The taller the structure, the longer it takes to work change through the system.
A third option is to take a spatial approach. This approach groups leaders and workers according to geographical locations or according to the natural groupings of constituents being served. The strength of this type of structure is that it allows leaders to respond very effectively to the unique needs of their constituency groups. Organizations with spatial structures tend to be very flexible and adaptable. A disadvantage is that they may have built-in redundancies. In an effort to serve the needs of their unique constituencies, leaders often reinvent functions and processes already offered in other areas of the organization.
Ultimately, the choice that a leader makes about the division of labor on the staff team should be reflective of the mission of the congregation. As you make decisions about the division of labor on your staff team you need to consider what is unique about your context, the constituencies that you serve, and the values that you embrace.
2. Integrating the Work
Integration refers to the extent and means by which an organization holds together its various parts and helps them work together to accomplish a shared goal. The primary ways that an organization’s design can contribute to the coordination of work efforts is through mutual adjustment, direct supervision, and the standardization of processes (drawing on the work of Judith Gordon, Organizational Behavior: A Diagnostic Approach).
- Mutual adjustments are the informal but direct communication links that develop between individuals within the organization. For example, the youth director and children’s director meet over coffee once a week to talk about family dynamics that are impacting students in both of their ministries. The amount of mutual adjustment within a staffing structure is as much a function of the culture of an organization as its design. However, a poor organizational design can prevent natural communication links from developing by creating arbitrary barriers.
- Shared direct supervision creates linkages within your system. When a supervisor has direct responsibility for two or more employees, the grouping of employees that he or she supervises will form natural linkages to one another. If the youth director and children’s director both report to the same supervisor, they are more likely to coordinate their work, either in joint meetings with that supervisor or informally, because both are operating from the same set of shared expectations. Each of these direct reports receives consistent messages about vision, approach, and outcomes because each goes back to the same source.
- Standardization of work processes. Two functions within your congregation that share the same database are more likely to develop natural linkages with one another than two functions that develop their own systems. Likewise, two functions that share a common leadership development pool will form natural points of connection. For example, if the youth director and the children’s director both engage the same processes for tracking attendance and participation, their work will more naturally align because both will be operating with a shared set of data.
The third major dimension of organizational design that should influence your staff-team design is the extent to which you desire centralized or decentralized decision making. In a centralized structure decision making is limited to the top post(s). In a decentralized structure the responsibility for decision making is disseminated throughout the organization.
Certain organizational designs will reinforce a centralized approach to decision making. The more vertical the organization, the greater the degree of centralized decision making. The flatter an organization, the greater the degree of decentralization. Why is this? The layers of an organization are decision-making repositories. The middle levels of organizations exist primarily to handle out-of-the-ordinary decision making and problem solving. When we reduce the number of levels in the structure, employees at all levels are forced to take on more decision-making responsibility.
4. Managerial Span of Control
The fourth and final dimension of organizational design is the managerial span of control. What is the optimum number of people and functions that a supervisor can oversee effectively? This question is basically concerned with the volume of interpersonal relationships that a supervisor can reasonably expect to maintain. The answer is different for every organization and for different parts of the same organization, so there is no easily prescribed answer.
As you consider the span of control for any individual manager, you need to consider both the number of formal and informal relationships that the supervisor is likely to have. This is important because the number of potential interpersonal relationships between a manager and subordinates increases geometrically as the number of subordinates increases arithmetically. Managers have to handle three types of relationships among their direct reports.
First, they manage the one-on-one relationship between themselves and the direct subordinate.
Second, they must manage their relationship with the group as a whole.
Third, they manage the interpersonal relationships that unfold between members of their team.
Considering the span of control requires thought about the level of contact that a particular group of subordinates need. Employees that need more oversight will of course need to work for managers that have fewer direct reports. Greater one-on-one contact time is required for roles that have a greater level of ambiguity in design. Greater one-on-one contact time is generally required for staff members who are newer on the job. Supervisors who oversee these types of employees need to have fewer direct reports.
Jobs at lower levels of the organization tend to be more specialized and less complicated than jobs higher in the organization. Supervisors at lower levels of the organization can generally oversee the work of more employees because the jobs they are overseeing are less complex. At higher levels of the organization roles tend to become much broader and less specialized. Overseeing jobs at this level requires a much greater scope of knowledge and information. The higher you go in the organization, the fewer the number of direct reports that can be supervised effectively.
Finally, the ease of communication between the leader and subordinates will determine the number of direct reports. If some of the employees that the leader oversees are located at another physical site or work on a different schedule or come from a different cultural background, it may be difficult to establish easy lines of communication. Reduce the number of direct reports that an employee is responsible for if the lines of communication between supervisor and subordinate are difficult for any reason.
5. What’s the ‘Right’ Answer for Your Organization?
When it comes to the tricky work of staff-team design there are few right answers or formulas to follow. The four design features presented here are intended to provoke dialogue among the leaders of a congregation about what might work best in their setting. Ultimately, the leadership of a congregation is the only group that can decide whether the staff-team configuration is appropriate or not. Is it working well? Why? Does it seem broken? What might be changed to make it more effective? In all likelihood, the conversations about staff-team design will be more beneficial than whatever chart is drawn to depict that design.[Adapted from a forthcoming book on leading staff by Alban consultants Susan Beaumont and Gil Rendle. Copyright © 2007 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved. For permission to reproduce, go to our permissions form.]
________________________________________
Featured Resources:
Congregational Leadership in Anxious Times: Being Calm and Courageous No Matter What by Peter L. Steinke
With anxiety intensifying and penetrating more and more areas of our lives, leaders cannot be as anxious as the people they serve. Steinke inspires courage in leaders to maintain the course, unearth secrets, resist sabotage, withstand fury, and overcome timidity or doubts. His insights, illustrations, and provocations will carry leaders through rough times, provide clarity during confusing times, and uplift them in joyous times.
How Your Church Family Works: Understanding Congregations as Emotional Systems by Peter L. Steinke
Drawing on the work of Bowen, Friedman, and his own many years’ counseling experience, Steinke shows how to recognize and deal with the emotional roots of such issues as church conflict, leadership roles, congregational change, irresponsible behavior, and the effects of family of origin on current relationships. Psychologically sound, theologically grounded, and practically illustrated with case studies.
Healthy Congregations: A Systems Approach by Peter L. Steinke
In this follow-up to How Your Church Family Works, Steinke takes readers into a deeper exploration of the congregation as an emotional system. Learn ten principles of health, how congregations can adopt new ways of dealing with stress and anxiety, how spiritually and emotionally healthy leaders influence the emotional system, factors that could put your congregation at risk, and more.
---------------------
"Shared Ministry is Good for All Congregations" by Judith Urban
Shared ministry refers to what some people would call volunteerism in everyday life-activities, such as helping out in a child's classroom, working on a political campaign, giving time delivering flowers in a hospital, or doing unpaid work for a charitable organization. The term service is often used to refer to the work of volunteerism. The term shared ministry refers to a particular type of volunteering -- all the many ways members of a congregation serve their faith community and the wider community.
"Shared Ministry is Good for All Congregations" by Judith Urban
Shared ministry refers to what some people would call volunteerism in everyday life-activities, such as helping out in a child's classroom, working on a political campaign, giving time delivering flowers in a hospital, or doing unpaid work for a charitable organization. The term service is often used to refer to the work of volunteerism. The term shared ministry refers to a particular type of volunteering -- all the many ways members of a congregation serve their faith community and the wider community.
Shared Ministry Is Good for All Congregations
The idea of shared ministry has been with us long enough for many to think that they actually do it! Some do, of course—and one of them is Judith Urban, whose new book,New Life through Shared Ministry, can help your congregation change the way it does ministry. A deeply practical book, it moves effortlessly from the conceptual to the actual steps needed to put an effective shared ministry system in place.
Shared ministry refers to what some people would call volunteerism in everyday life—activities such as helping out in a child’s classroom, working on a political campaign, giving time delivering flowers in a hospital, or doing unpaid work for a charitable organization. The term service is often used to refer to the work of volunteerism. The term shared ministry refers to a particular type of volunteering—all the many ways members of a congregation serve their faith community and the wider community. The statements typically made about shared ministry are such things as “People are invited into ministry, they share their gifts in performing their ministry, and the congregation has many ministry opportunities available to its members.”
Shared ministry creates a congregational culture in which each member is invited to participate in ministry and helped to do so through proven systems and processes. It brings new life and energy to the congregation. Members learn that all people have gifts and all are called to use them in building the reign of God. Shared ministry creates the environment in which this can actually happen.
Shared ministry has the potential to turn a congregation around. A faith community concentrating on building a culture that pays great attention to the gifts of all its members—that nurtures their growth and development and supports them in a systematic way—will find itself attracting more members and carrying out its unique mission more effectively than previously imagined possible. Let’s look at some scenarios in which shared ministry can help solve a problem.
Loss of Membership
Congregations that have lost a large part of their membership through the aging and death of many of their members, changed demographics, and various internal problems often look at the future bleakly. Denominational leaders and pastors may assume these congregations will continue to spiral downward and that the job of their leaders is to preside over a slow but inevitable demise. In some cases, this may be a realistic appraisal. But in others the potential exists for this struggling faith community to rediscover its historical roots. The faith community can reclaim its original energy and regain passion for the mission it now sees for itself. To accomplish this requires that the leadership delve into the history of the parish and note what gifts those early members brought to the life of the community. Similarly, the parish needs to make a concentrated effort to discover and nurture the gifts of its members, to research the needs of the surrounding community, and to draw out the potential hidden in the people yet to be invited to participate.
Stuck on a Plateau
Some congregations can reach plateaus on which they linger and then begin a downward slide, with loss of members and burnout among those left behind. A shared ministry system will encourage such a parish to revisit its purpose, expectations, and ways of doing things. In reimagining itself through this process, a congregation can find new meaning, direction, and energy to revitalize its identity.
Growing Pains
A congregation may experience growing pains. As more and more people come to such a church, it struggles to keep up under trying circumstances, such as inadequate staff numbers, cramped physical space, and ineffective ways of doing things. In this situation shared ministry offers a way to cope with these challenges by establishing new ways to invite members into ministry, designing creative processes to organize and support them, and adapting the role of paid staff to equip more and more members for participating in the church’s work.
Loss of a Key Leader
One might assume congregations that seem successful by most measures have no need to change the way they do things. But I have observed that even these faith communities can face challenges. A leadership vacuum occurs when certain people leave. A new pastor may experience difficult challenges in encouraging more active participation from lay members. Building a system of shared ministry will help to bring about this increased involvement by parishioners.
Entrenched Lay Leaders
Sometimes lay leaders may be so competent and stay in their positions for such a long time that it is difficult to bring along potential new members to grow into the leadership roles. Issues of who “owns” the ministry of the faith community can arise. It may be impossible for new leaders to follow in the footsteps of these longtime superheroes. This situation may also mean that nothing is in place for bringing new members into ministry and making them feel not only welcomed but also important contributors to the community. Shared ministry can help to change this culture into a sharing one.
Complacency
Getting too comfortable with the status quo may cause leaders to fail to notice and prepare for changing needs. Failure to constantly assess leadership turnover and to plan for future eventualities may cause volunteer ministry to shrink alarmingly. Shared ministry promotes a system where no one person or group owns a ministry; instead, the entire congregation owns all the ministries collectively. A plan is in place for creating feeder systems to provide new leaders as the need arises.
Drop in Financial Giving
Frequently a congregation will experience both a lack of volunteer ministers and a drop in financial contributions at the same time. Another key benefit of shared ministry is that the more people are involved in volunteer work in the organization, the more financial contributions increase. People who feel a strong connection to the work of their faith community, who experience partnerships with staff members, and who are encouraged to play significant roles in the planning and decision-making process will often increase their financial support as well.
Fixation on Hospitality
While it is true that hospitality is an important issue in many churches, hospitality alone will not necessarily achieve ministry participation. The shared ministry system enables a congregation to build processes that not only welcome new members but also help people identify their gifts and how they can best use them in the church. Shared ministry deepens and extends the hospitality theme by helping newer members become involved in small ministry groups in which they can begin to develop relationships as they contribute their gifts to the work of a ministry and thereby feel more a part of congregational life.
Building a New Congregation
A congregation just beginning its life has a wonderful opportunity to build in this comprehensive system right from the beginning. Shared ministry presents a proven method of gathering the gifts of all members, building ways to design ministries, creating new ministries, and supporting existing ones. It fosters mutual respect and sharing in the work of the church, according to God’s direction.
______________________________________
This article is excerpted and adapted from New Life through Shared Ministry: Moving from Volunteering to Missionby Judith A. Urban. Copyright ©2013 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved.
_____________________________________
NEW BOOK!
New Life through Shared Ministry: Moving from Volunteering to Mission by Judith A. Urban
In New Life through Shared Ministry, Judith Urban creates a pathway for building a shared ministry system. She assists readers in transforming their congregation into one where members are invited into volunteer ministry; people are matched according to their gifts and interests with ministry opportunities; volunteers are offered support, training, and appreciation; and all grow to spiritual maturity through that ministry. This comprehensive guide is based on Urban’s consulting, training, and planning with shared ministry directors and teams the past 12 years, her experience building a shared ministry system in a congregation, and her own studies in the field of volunteer management.
______________________________________
ALSO OF INTEREST
This week – Featured Resources 30% off
Member discounts do not apply | Discount taken in shopping cart
ONLINE ORDERS ONLY | Valid through May 5, 2013
Beating Burnout in Congregations by Lynn M. Baab
What is burnout? What causes congregational volunteers to burn out? How can congregations become oases of peace and nurture while still carrying out their mission and ministry? After reflecting on these important questions and dozens of interviews with congregational volunteers, Baab suggests, “We must not fear burnout; instead, we need to do a better job coming alongside people as they experience burnout and help them figure out what they are learning.”
Designing Worship Together: Models and Strategies for Worship Planning by Norma de Waal Malefyt and Howard Vanderwell
This book draws on more than two decades of collaborative worship planning by pastor Howard Vanderwell and musician Norma deWaal Malefyt of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, offering thoughtful, field-tested processes and tools for planning, implementing, and evaluating life-enriching weekly worship. The authors enter into the trenches of weekly congregational life with this book, offering helpful insights into the process of how worship services are planned and led.
Choosing Partnership, Sharing Ministry: A Vision for New Spiritual Community by Marcia Barnes Bailey
Craig Satterlee helps congregations learn to articulate their convictions about the Christian faith and share them in a nonthreatening manner. This prepares them for broader conversation about how people’s faith convictions shape both their lives and the congregation’s worship, life together, and mission .
Congregational Fitness: Healthy Practices for Layfolk by Denise W. Goodman
When serious conflict surfaces in a congregation, lay people are usually stunned. They feel frightened, angry, and helpless. Congregational Fitnessexplores why congregations are prone to conflict and describes healthy behaviors lay people can practice to manage conflict constructively. Goodman argues that since it is members of the congregation who carry on from one pastor to another, it is important for them to know and practice positive behaviors continually, rather than reacting out of emotion and anxiety to an unexpected situation.
____________________________________
Time to brush up your leadership skills?
Broaden your mind, increase your confidence, and gain skills and tools you will use every day:
Leading Adaptive Change
Leader: Susan Beaumont, Alban senior consultant and author
July 23-25, Simpsonwood Conference Center
Atlanta, GA
Dealing with Congregational Discord
Leader: Susan Nienaber, Alban senior consultant
July 30 – August 1, Roslyn Retreat Center
Richmond, VA
Dealing with Difficult Behavior
(repeat of February 2013 event)
Leader: Susan Nienaber, Alban senior consultant
September 17-19, Fransiscan Renewal Center, Scottsdale, AZ
Motivating and Equipping Leaders and Volunteers: Understanding Personality Type in Your Congregation
Leader: Linda Rich, Alban consultant
November 12-14, Holy Family Retreat Center
West Hardford, CT
____________________________________
Copyright © 2013 the Alban Institute. All rights reserved. We encourage you to share articles from the Alban Weekly with your congregation. We gladly allow permission to reprint articles from the Alban Weekly for one-time use by congregations and their leaders when the material is offered free of charge. All we ask is that you write to us at alban@div.duke.edu and let us know how the Alban Weekly is making an impact in your congregation. If you would like to use any other Alban material, or if your intended use of the Alban Weekly does not fall within this scope, please complete our reprint permission request form .
Archive of past issues of the Alban Weekly.
---------------------
Continue Your Own Learning & Development
Church KPIs: What are they are how can you track them?An archive webinar from The Church Network
Did you miss last week's webinar presentation by Tammy Bunting about the ways that Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can help your congregation stay true to its mission and pursue its vision? Through The Church Network's on-demand archive of past webinars, you can still learn from Bunting's experience and wisdom.
Learn more or watch now »---------------------
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STAY CONNECTED:
The idea of shared ministry has been with us long enough for many to think that they actually do it! Some do, of course—and one of them is Judith Urban, whose new book,New Life through Shared Ministry, can help your congregation change the way it does ministry. A deeply practical book, it moves effortlessly from the conceptual to the actual steps needed to put an effective shared ministry system in place.
Shared ministry refers to what some people would call volunteerism in everyday life—activities such as helping out in a child’s classroom, working on a political campaign, giving time delivering flowers in a hospital, or doing unpaid work for a charitable organization. The term service is often used to refer to the work of volunteerism. The term shared ministry refers to a particular type of volunteering—all the many ways members of a congregation serve their faith community and the wider community. The statements typically made about shared ministry are such things as “People are invited into ministry, they share their gifts in performing their ministry, and the congregation has many ministry opportunities available to its members.”
Shared ministry creates a congregational culture in which each member is invited to participate in ministry and helped to do so through proven systems and processes. It brings new life and energy to the congregation. Members learn that all people have gifts and all are called to use them in building the reign of God. Shared ministry creates the environment in which this can actually happen.
Shared ministry has the potential to turn a congregation around. A faith community concentrating on building a culture that pays great attention to the gifts of all its members—that nurtures their growth and development and supports them in a systematic way—will find itself attracting more members and carrying out its unique mission more effectively than previously imagined possible. Let’s look at some scenarios in which shared ministry can help solve a problem.
Loss of Membership
Congregations that have lost a large part of their membership through the aging and death of many of their members, changed demographics, and various internal problems often look at the future bleakly. Denominational leaders and pastors may assume these congregations will continue to spiral downward and that the job of their leaders is to preside over a slow but inevitable demise. In some cases, this may be a realistic appraisal. But in others the potential exists for this struggling faith community to rediscover its historical roots. The faith community can reclaim its original energy and regain passion for the mission it now sees for itself. To accomplish this requires that the leadership delve into the history of the parish and note what gifts those early members brought to the life of the community. Similarly, the parish needs to make a concentrated effort to discover and nurture the gifts of its members, to research the needs of the surrounding community, and to draw out the potential hidden in the people yet to be invited to participate.
Stuck on a Plateau
Some congregations can reach plateaus on which they linger and then begin a downward slide, with loss of members and burnout among those left behind. A shared ministry system will encourage such a parish to revisit its purpose, expectations, and ways of doing things. In reimagining itself through this process, a congregation can find new meaning, direction, and energy to revitalize its identity.
Growing Pains
A congregation may experience growing pains. As more and more people come to such a church, it struggles to keep up under trying circumstances, such as inadequate staff numbers, cramped physical space, and ineffective ways of doing things. In this situation shared ministry offers a way to cope with these challenges by establishing new ways to invite members into ministry, designing creative processes to organize and support them, and adapting the role of paid staff to equip more and more members for participating in the church’s work.
Loss of a Key Leader
One might assume congregations that seem successful by most measures have no need to change the way they do things. But I have observed that even these faith communities can face challenges. A leadership vacuum occurs when certain people leave. A new pastor may experience difficult challenges in encouraging more active participation from lay members. Building a system of shared ministry will help to bring about this increased involvement by parishioners.
Entrenched Lay Leaders
Sometimes lay leaders may be so competent and stay in their positions for such a long time that it is difficult to bring along potential new members to grow into the leadership roles. Issues of who “owns” the ministry of the faith community can arise. It may be impossible for new leaders to follow in the footsteps of these longtime superheroes. This situation may also mean that nothing is in place for bringing new members into ministry and making them feel not only welcomed but also important contributors to the community. Shared ministry can help to change this culture into a sharing one.
Complacency
Getting too comfortable with the status quo may cause leaders to fail to notice and prepare for changing needs. Failure to constantly assess leadership turnover and to plan for future eventualities may cause volunteer ministry to shrink alarmingly. Shared ministry promotes a system where no one person or group owns a ministry; instead, the entire congregation owns all the ministries collectively. A plan is in place for creating feeder systems to provide new leaders as the need arises.
Drop in Financial Giving
Frequently a congregation will experience both a lack of volunteer ministers and a drop in financial contributions at the same time. Another key benefit of shared ministry is that the more people are involved in volunteer work in the organization, the more financial contributions increase. People who feel a strong connection to the work of their faith community, who experience partnerships with staff members, and who are encouraged to play significant roles in the planning and decision-making process will often increase their financial support as well.
Fixation on Hospitality
While it is true that hospitality is an important issue in many churches, hospitality alone will not necessarily achieve ministry participation. The shared ministry system enables a congregation to build processes that not only welcome new members but also help people identify their gifts and how they can best use them in the church. Shared ministry deepens and extends the hospitality theme by helping newer members become involved in small ministry groups in which they can begin to develop relationships as they contribute their gifts to the work of a ministry and thereby feel more a part of congregational life.
Building a New Congregation
A congregation just beginning its life has a wonderful opportunity to build in this comprehensive system right from the beginning. Shared ministry presents a proven method of gathering the gifts of all members, building ways to design ministries, creating new ministries, and supporting existing ones. It fosters mutual respect and sharing in the work of the church, according to God’s direction.
______________________________________
This article is excerpted and adapted from New Life through Shared Ministry: Moving from Volunteering to Missionby Judith A. Urban. Copyright ©2013 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved.
_____________________________________
NEW BOOK!
New Life through Shared Ministry: Moving from Volunteering to Mission by Judith A. Urban
In New Life through Shared Ministry, Judith Urban creates a pathway for building a shared ministry system. She assists readers in transforming their congregation into one where members are invited into volunteer ministry; people are matched according to their gifts and interests with ministry opportunities; volunteers are offered support, training, and appreciation; and all grow to spiritual maturity through that ministry. This comprehensive guide is based on Urban’s consulting, training, and planning with shared ministry directors and teams the past 12 years, her experience building a shared ministry system in a congregation, and her own studies in the field of volunteer management.
______________________________________
ALSO OF INTEREST
This week – Featured Resources 30% off
Member discounts do not apply | Discount taken in shopping cart
ONLINE ORDERS ONLY | Valid through May 5, 2013
Beating Burnout in Congregations by Lynn M. Baab
What is burnout? What causes congregational volunteers to burn out? How can congregations become oases of peace and nurture while still carrying out their mission and ministry? After reflecting on these important questions and dozens of interviews with congregational volunteers, Baab suggests, “We must not fear burnout; instead, we need to do a better job coming alongside people as they experience burnout and help them figure out what they are learning.”
Designing Worship Together: Models and Strategies for Worship Planning by Norma de Waal Malefyt and Howard Vanderwell
This book draws on more than two decades of collaborative worship planning by pastor Howard Vanderwell and musician Norma deWaal Malefyt of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, offering thoughtful, field-tested processes and tools for planning, implementing, and evaluating life-enriching weekly worship. The authors enter into the trenches of weekly congregational life with this book, offering helpful insights into the process of how worship services are planned and led.
Choosing Partnership, Sharing Ministry: A Vision for New Spiritual Community by Marcia Barnes Bailey
Craig Satterlee helps congregations learn to articulate their convictions about the Christian faith and share them in a nonthreatening manner. This prepares them for broader conversation about how people’s faith convictions shape both their lives and the congregation’s worship, life together, and mission .
Congregational Fitness: Healthy Practices for Layfolk by Denise W. Goodman
When serious conflict surfaces in a congregation, lay people are usually stunned. They feel frightened, angry, and helpless. Congregational Fitnessexplores why congregations are prone to conflict and describes healthy behaviors lay people can practice to manage conflict constructively. Goodman argues that since it is members of the congregation who carry on from one pastor to another, it is important for them to know and practice positive behaviors continually, rather than reacting out of emotion and anxiety to an unexpected situation.
____________________________________
Time to brush up your leadership skills?
Broaden your mind, increase your confidence, and gain skills and tools you will use every day:
Leading Adaptive Change
Leader: Susan Beaumont, Alban senior consultant and author
July 23-25, Simpsonwood Conference Center
Atlanta, GA
Dealing with Congregational Discord
Leader: Susan Nienaber, Alban senior consultant
July 30 – August 1, Roslyn Retreat Center
Richmond, VA
Dealing with Difficult Behavior
(repeat of February 2013 event)
Leader: Susan Nienaber, Alban senior consultant
September 17-19, Fransiscan Renewal Center, Scottsdale, AZ
Motivating and Equipping Leaders and Volunteers: Understanding Personality Type in Your Congregation
Leader: Linda Rich, Alban consultant
November 12-14, Holy Family Retreat Center
West Hardford, CT
____________________________________
Copyright © 2013 the Alban Institute. All rights reserved. We encourage you to share articles from the Alban Weekly with your congregation. We gladly allow permission to reprint articles from the Alban Weekly for one-time use by congregations and their leaders when the material is offered free of charge. All we ask is that you write to us at alban@div.duke.edu and let us know how the Alban Weekly is making an impact in your congregation. If you would like to use any other Alban material, or if your intended use of the Alban Weekly does not fall within this scope, please complete our reprint permission request form .
Archive of past issues of the Alban Weekly.
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Continue Your Own Learning & Development
Church KPIs: What are they are how can you track them?An archive webinar from The Church Network
Did you miss last week's webinar presentation by Tammy Bunting about the ways that Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can help your congregation stay true to its mission and pursue its vision? Through The Church Network's on-demand archive of past webinars, you can still learn from Bunting's experience and wisdom.
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