Alban Weekly from The Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, United States "PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS: A Brooklyn Church Temporarily Shuts Down Its Hunger Ministry in Order to Sustain It" for Monday, 12 December 2016
Faith & Leadership
A Brooklyn church temporarily shuts down its hunger ministry in order to sustain it
CLOSING ALLOWED FOR A REORGANIZATION OF THE MINISTRY by: Genine Babakian
On a recent Wednesday evening in Brooklyn, diners streamed in for the weekly meal at Greenpoint Reformed Church. Dozens of guests, many elderly, grabbed a cup of coffee and sat down to wait while volunteers put the finishing touches on the evening repast in the kitchen.
One worker tossed a mound of kale with orange marmalade dressing while her salad partner chopped organic apple slices to uniform perfection. Giant trays of meatballs were pulled from the oven, making room for the garlic bread going in. The first course -- a steaming kettle of potato leek soup -- was carried to the serving table, where four volunteers were at the ready with ladles and tongs.
Serving fresh, healthy food is a priority.
Photo courtesy of Greenpoint Reformed Church
"This is the best meal in town," said Jayson Conner, a longtime volunteer at the Greenpoint Hunger Program, who was directing traffic and making sure that everyone got a plate before he started eating his own meal.
But that wasn't always the case. Six months ago, the Greenpoint Hunger Program was struggling for survival -- a victim of its own success. Overwhelmed by the rising tide of clients, the staff and volunteers were pushed beyond capacity.
They scrambled for funds and worried about running out of food. Some weeks, they had nothing but tomato paste to hand out to food pantry latecomers. And while a small but committed army of volunteers continued to show up week after week, the cracks in the system were deepening. There was bickering in the ranks, among clients and volunteers.
Near the breaking point, the Rev. Ann Kansfield decided to take a radical step: shut down the hunger ministry for two months to reboot and rethink the program. It meant angering some volunteers and turning away hundreds of hungry people. But, Kansfield said, things couldn’t go on the way they were.
“We started as a band of people in a church, and the program was small enough for us to manage,” said Kansfield, who has served as pastor at Greenpoint Reformed Church since 2003. “But it wasn’t scalable.”
Trying to meet community needs
Shortly after Kansfield took up residence above the church, people started ringing her doorbell, asking for food.
A predominantly working-class Polish neighborhood, Greenpoint is not an obvious location of food insecurity, but many of its elderly residents have a hard time making ends meet.
The Rev. Ann Kansfield uses the iPad system.Photo by Genine Babakian
“Greenpoint has a 36 percent poverty rate,” Kansfield said. “Some of the elderly residents have to choose between buying medicines or buying food.”
And although it is just across the river from midtown Manhattan, the neighborhood is fairly isolated. The only subway line that serves Greenpoint is the G train, the only line in all of New York City that does not enter Manhattan. There is also limited access to social services.
So when the church received an anonymous grant to serve the neighborhood, they decided to start a weekly soup kitchen and food pantry. The Hunger Program was launched in 2007.
Volunteers fill food orders for clients in the revamped food pantry. Photo by Genine BabakianIn one sense, the program was wildly successful. Clients poured in after the recession hit in 2008, followed by Hurricane Sandy, which took a heavy toll. Within the first four years of the program, the number of people coming to the pantry doubled every year.
“We started as a small church thinking we’d be feeding 25 people, but before we knew it, we were serving up to 800 every month,” Kansfield said. “I had to figure out a way to feed them.”
Greenpoint Reformed Church was overwhelmed by the needs of its community, yet it responded by doing less. Would your organization respond in the same way? Why or why not?
But the escalating number of clients overwhelmed the loosely organized, ragtag system, and the lack of rules for volunteers and clients added even more stress.
“When you are a church, you often feel like you have to say yes to everything,” Kansfield said. When certain clients asked for more food or visited the pantry when it wasn’t their appointed day, for example, some of the volunteers would oblige them -- a practice that was noticed by those who did not get special treatment.
“We were crying out for boundaries,” Kansfield said.
In addition, the chef who made the weekly meal committed suicide, a devastating loss that the Hunger Program volunteers did not have time to process and mourn. The vacancy she left -- together with stretched funds and declining morale -- had an impact on the quality of the food.
The joy of meeting a need disappeared, replaced by stress. Kansfield found herself hating to be around the church on Wednesdays and Thursdays, when meals and food were distributed.
Stopping in their tracks
Kansfield made some changes that eased the situation. Hiring a part-time seminarian brought some relief. They scaled back food pantry visits to one Thursday a month, rather than weekly -- a practice many pantries follow. That offered some breathing room, but it did not last long.
In the spring of 2016, the seminary student was moving on. That gave Kansfield and her team the opportunity to draft a job description for the program manager -- something they had never done before -- and think about the skills they needed to bring more order to the program.
They found a capable candidate in Joan Benefiel, a local sculptor with an eclectic résumé and applicable skills.
If one only measured the Greenpoint Hunger Program in terms of numbers, it was a success; if measured in terms of sustainability, it was a failure. How do you measure success and failure? Could you adopt different metrics?
But hiring a new manager was not enough to fix a broken system. Kansfield gathered her volunteers and announced they would be closing down for two months over the summer.
“We called it a working sabbatical,” she said.
After giving two weeks’ notice, they closed in June. Some of the volunteers were angry and left the program. Others -- like Conner -- were distraught.
“It nearly killed me,” said Conner, who is so involved in helping the community that he’s learned some Polish to communicate with clients who do not speak English. But he was among those who rolled up their sleeves and tried to figure out how to make the program sustainable.
Kansfield, for her part, tried to keep volunteers in the loop as much as possible.
Have you ever faced such anger? How did you respond?
They had plenty of work to do during those two months off. They cleaned out the kitchen and got it up to code. They installed locks on the cabinets -- not to prevent theft, but to keep people from depositing their discarded goods and adding to the clutter. They visited other food pantries and investigated best practices. They drafted volunteer guidelines.
They found a professional chef on Craigslist, who volunteers every Wednesday, creating an impromptu menu with the goods at hand.
“We made a list of what we wanted to change. We wanted rules. An orientation for volunteers. We wanted everyone -- clients and volunteers -- to obey the rules; we wanted to adopt an inventory process; we wanted to treat people fairly but not be pushovers,” Kansfield said.
Benefiel was grateful for the time she had during the reboot to visit other pantries throughout New York City. They received a $25,000 grant in January, which helped provide a financial cushion for the project.
When she spoke to their program managers and told them about Greenpoint’s temporary closure, many of them were actually jealous, she said. Jealous of the time to think.
“Once you are in the middle of things, it is hard to stop and take a look at what you are doing,” Benefiel said.
Taking a break to fix what’s wrong can be a good strategy, said Paul Bloom, a social marketing expert at Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship who wrote a book on scaling for social ventures.
Do you anticipate that you will face the issue of scaling one of your projects? If so, how could you address it before you reach the breaking point?
“Failure stories can be more instructive than success stories,” he said. “Stopping in your tracks is a good idea to do some strategic thinking and planning -- a very sound way to approach it.”
Changes bring order to chaos
One of the changes Benefiel introduced was a digital inventory and registration system.
To receive food, clients give their name, address and age. While visitors do not have to show need in order to get food assistance, the new system does keep track of the frequency of visits as each guest checks in.
Volunteers check in clients in the sanctuary.Photo by Genine Babakian
And to avoid favoritism, the system separates clients from those who fill the orders. With the system’s mobile app, pantry guests are able to shop digitally, making selections on a hand-held screen.
Another important element, Benefiel said, was keeping the barriers to service and volunteering low.
“Some organizations spend an hour on intake with one client, while others take a name and that’s it,” she said. “We are on the less-invasive side, and I wanted to keep the same approach.”
But the working sabbatical was not without repercussions. The program lost volunteers, as well as donors. They had to pull out of their CSA membership for the year, losing access to that weekly source of fruits and vegetables.
There have been plenty of bumps in the road, Kansfield admits with characteristic good humor. A week after the digital system was introduced, for example, a glitch in the app sent food pantry volunteers scurrying to fill orders.
“You fix one vulnerability and you expose the next one,” Kansfield said, with a laugh. “You think you’re going to change everything with this one fix, but then … wait, there’s more!”
Clients slowly return
When the Hunger Program reopened in August, it had far fewer clients and volunteers than it had earlier in the year. By October, they were cooking weekly dinners for around 60 people, and more of the regulars were starting to come back.
Conner believes that that number will continue to rise as word gets out around the neighborhood. He was among the first volunteers to return when the program reopened.
“I was so happy, I cried,” he said, during one of the recent evening meals, where he was greeting all the guests and making sure they had enough to eat. “These are my people.”
Volunteers and clients are returning for meals. Photo courtesy of Greenpoint Reformed Church
Across the hall from where Conner was helping with the evening meal, Benefiel was in the sanctuary getting ready for the food pantry the following day. A band of volunteers was sorting sacks of onions, potatoes and carrots. Bins of rice occupied the front rows of pews, while boxes and bags of fruits and vegetables filled the back ones.
In spite of the occasional snag, Rob Dorler -- a volunteer at the food pantry since February -- said he thought everything was more orderly under the new system.
A resident of the community, Dorler has been with the Greenpoint program since before the reboot, and he thinks the decision to shut down was sound, even if the transition wasn’t worry-free.
Three months in, Kansfield thinks that everyone -- staff, volunteers and clients alike -- is thankful for the change. And new volunteers continue to pour in. But more importantly for Kansfield, her sense of joy in overseeing the Hunger Program has returned. “I love being around on Wednesdays and Thursdays now,” she said.
“I never would have thought that managing a soup kitchen requires every last ounce of skill and brains that I have,” she said. “It is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
Questions to consider
- Greenpoint Reformed Church was overwhelmed by the needs of its community, yet it responded by temporarily doing less. Would your organization respond in the same way? Why or why not?
- If one only measured the Greenpoint Hunger Program in terms of numbers, it was a success; if measured in terms of sustainability, it was a failure. How do you measure success and failure in your ministry? Could you adopt different measures to more accurately assess what is going on?
- The Rev. Ann Kansfield risked angering volunteers, donors and clients by temporarily closing the hunger ministry. Have you ever faced such anger? How did you respond?
- The dilemma Kansfield faced was one of scaling -- taking a small project and growing it exponentially. Do you anticipate this issue in one of your projects? If so, how could you address it before you reach the breaking point?
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT: COMMUNITY MINISTRY
Knowing your community, defining your missionGetting to know the community that your congregation will focus on is a critical step in defining your mission. To start, work on getting answers to several key questions: What are the primary issues in your community? How do the people in the community want the church to respond to those issues? And probably most important: do the people in your community actually want the ministry you are proposing? Your congregation will be most successful if you can answer yes to this question.
It is pretty easy to stay within the four walls of the church and make assumptions about the lives of the people in the broader community. It is more difficult to actually build relationships with community residents and grow in your understanding of their needs and desires. It takes more time, too.
There are tremendous advantages, however, to building your congregation’s ministries on what the community says it wants. If you take the time to build these relationships, your congregation will focus its efforts on meeting unmet needs rather than duplicating what other groups are already doing. You will also have a strong foundation for sustaining your programs; strong relationships with your community make it easier to recruit participants and volunteers and raise money.
Sunny Kang, pastor of Woodland United Methodist Church in Duluth and a partnership advocate for the Self Development of People Committee (PCUSA), describes a process that one of his churches used to get to know the community:
A church I was pastor of did research for six months before we opened our doors to the community. We talked to the kids at the high school next door to the church and asked them, “What is the problem in the community, what can we do to help, how can we serve you?” They were real reticent at first, but eventually they did tell us “there are a few things you could do.”
We ended up opening the church to kids during lunch because there were 450 students in two of the lunch periods and the school could only accommodate 200 of them. So 200 to 250 kids had to leave the school building every day for lunch, even in 20-below-zero weather in the winter. So we opened our building and served lunch. It started slowly at first, but grew so that we had 250 to 350 kids in the church building every day during the week. Too many churches say, “We think the people in the community need this,” and they impose their value system on the people. Community residents often end up saying to the church, “Who asked you to do this?” You need to keep asking—is there a market for what we say the community might need?
So how can you get to know the community? I am not necessarily defining community as a geographic area, though many congregations are focused on a neighborhood, town, or region. Your community might be a certain group of people—for example, people living with HIV/AIDS. Here are some strategies to help you connect with the people your congregation aims to serve.
Connect with key leaders of the community on a one-to-one basis and build relationships with them. They will be able to introduce you to others you need to know and will help educate you on the needs and desires of the community. Start by asking them to teach you about the community. Everyone likes to share what he or she knows. Key leaders could include:
- political leaders
- denominational staff
- pastors of other churches
- law enforcement officers
- staff at the neighborhood public school
- leaders of other congregations
- program specialists in the program area that is your focus (for example, youth development, family counseling, or chemical dependency treatment)
Connect with the community through your church members. Members of your church may live in the area you aim to serve or work in professions that would provide needed contacts. For example, if your downtown church wants to provide an outreach to the business community through the congregation, business leaders in your church could help you accomplish your goal.
Join community organizations or boards. If a group of people from the community is working on an issue you would like to address, consider joining the group. As you work side by side, you will hear community concerns articulated over and over again. You will also build new relationships with community leaders; for example, a crime task force for the neighborhood or town you hope to serve would be a great place to connect. Always ask: What can the church do to support the neighborhood?
Attend community meetings. When community members get together for discussions or celebrations, make sure there is at least one member of your church in attendance. You may want to consider building a portable booth for community events to promote the visibility of the congregation.
Walk around the community. There is no substitute for seeing the people of your community and their needs with your own eyes. If you are open to spontaneous conversations, you will learn a great deal from people you meet on the street. Find out where people “hang out” in your community—it could be the neighborhood park or the diner in your rural town. If your community is not geographically based, just plan on being in attendance whenever the people of your “community” get together. It might be a national conference on a particular topic or a denominational gathering.
Gather the opinions of the community. If the people you want to serve have a positive impression of the church, they may be willing to participate in a survey or focus group. Invite some folks over for dinner at the church and ask them what they think. Brief door-to-door surveys might also do the trick. Try to find a volunteer who has the expertise to help you develop a survey. For instance, there may be someone in your congregation who has worked with focus groups. Also, your local neighborhood organization or United Way might be able to advise you on how to design a questionnaire. Questions for surveys or focus groups should focus around the questions: What do you see as the major issues for this community? How would you like to see this church respond to those issues? How can the church serve you?
Taking a big dream and molding it into a mission can be exhausting work. In my experience, the dream stage is more fun, because working on the mission brings home the stark reality of just how much work needs to be done. But try to think of it this way: developing the mission gives “legs” to your dream, helping people outside of your congregation understand what it is you are trying to do. As more people understand your dream and become committed to making it a reality, this helps the dream take flight.
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Adapted from Starting a Nonprofit at Your Church, copyright © 2002 by the Alban Ins
titute. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2008, the Alban Institute. All rights reserved. We encourage you to share Alban Weekly articles 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 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 Alban Weekly does not fall within this scope, please submit our reprint permission request form.Read more from Starting a Nonprofit at Your Church »
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Faith & Leadership
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, ARTS & CULTURE, SOCIETY
L. Gregory Jones: Renewing community in a networked society
Renewing community in a networked society
“Middle-ring” relationships have receded in the new social patterns of American life. We need imaginative Christian leaders to develop institutions that can support and sustain the community we now lack.A large-church pastor is worried about the health of his church. Small groups seem to be working fine, and the overall worship is fine. What is missing, though, is the sense that the congregation is a community capable of moral and spiritual formation.The pastor's worry reflects far more than the circumstances of one congregation, or even of congregational life more generally. It reflects the disappearance of the crucial "middle rings" that are central to healthy communities that nurture and sustain vibrant personal life.
Middle rings are what Marc J. Dunkelman describes in his book “The Vanishing Neighbor(link is external)” as the heart of community in American life. Inner rings describe our most intimate relationships, with families and close friends; outer rings describe casual acquaintances. Middle-ring relationships are the people with whom a person “is familiar but not intimate, friendly but not close.” They are central to fostering a sense of vitality as well as nurturing those “meaningful disagreements” that shape a healthy body politic.Typically, this middle ring comprises no more than 150 people, because of the limits of our brains. For much of American history, our middle-ring relationships have been formed through a “townshipped” model. This was as true for congregations as it was for our broader civic ecology.
Dunkelman notes, though, that profound changes in American life have transformed the ways we navigate and imagine the rings of our lives. Dunkelman highlights three broad categories of changes that are upending American community: the technological and economic revolutions of the last 60 years, the explosion in American mobility and the evolution of our lives at home.
These changes have affected the inner and outer rings, in many ways actually enhancing them. For example, social mobility has made people more reliant on intimate relationships, whether family members or close friends. Indeed, studies of cellphone usage show that the majority of our calls are to three to five people in our most intimate, inner rings.
The digital revolution makes it easier for us to maintain connections to casual acquaintances in our outer ring of relationships. It also makes it easier for us to establish new acquaintances through affinity groups and to connect even more broadly via social media. These outer-ring relationships can mobilize significant movements, such as the tea party on the right or the Occupy movement on the left.
Yet Dunkelman argues that such movements are not capable of addressing our yearning for the sustainable community found in middle-ring relationships. Those relationships have receded in the new social patterns of American life, leaving us feeling fragmented and isolated, even with healthy inner- and outer-ring relationships. We are missing a sense of community; in Dunkelman’s memorable image, the middle rings have become missing rings.
The danger in such a diagnosis is to become nostalgic and wistful, longing for “the good old days” of townships and community. But there is nothing that accounts for a longing for the good old days quite as much as a bad memory. Those forms of community were far from perfect, and wistfulness is likely to lead us to imagine a time that never was. Nostalgia for “townships” would be as counterproductive as it would be ineffective.
But it would be equally dangerous to ignore the challenges we face or to assume that we can adequately address those challenges through inner- or outer-ring relationships. The large-church pastor rightly senses that something is missing in the congregation he serves. Young adults also rightly sense that current institutions are failing them and us, and that new patterns are needed. But we are unsure what to do next.
Why? Dunkelman points to the pervasiveness and depth of the challenges:
A transformation of American community has come to affect everything from our propensity to innovate to our capacity to care for one another. It has disrupted our social institutions as much as it’s thrown a wrench into our politics. Without notice, a quiet revolution over the course of several decades upended the foundation that girded the very pillars -- government, businesses, banks, schools -- in which the public has lost faith. Its effects, which explain nearly every frustration listed above, run deep and wide.
Can we chart a future that is adaptive to the deep trends of our culture and nurtures middle-ring relationships?
Charting such a future will be challenging. As Dunkelman notes, we need to be honest with ourselves: “Simply reinforcing flailing institutions that have worked for decades, or tinkering at reforms around the edges, won’t fix our problems.” Those institutions aren’t working anymore in the ways we need them to.
Yet Dunkelman is also hopeful: “If we take a fresh look at what a networked society does and doesn’t do well, we can map out a plan to develop institutions that compensate for what we now lack.”
We will need the fresh imaginations of leaders of Christian institutions, and Christian leaders of institutions, in order to map out such a plan. Nurturing such imaginations will require clear-eyed diagnoses like Dunkelman’s, as well as the cultivation of “border crossing” relationships across sectors and across other divides among us.
And here senior pastors might be exceptionally well-positioned to provide vision and leadership -- IF we embrace the realities of a networked society AND offer a “traditioned innovation” approach to community and institutions.
Congregations and other forms of Christian community can and should gather people across divides, focus on forming relationships that bear witness to the fullness of God’s reign, and embrace issues across sectors and institutions that, sadly, currently exist more as silos than as networks (including the church).
The Fresh Expressions(link is external) movement is one example of a Christian experiment that is helping to renew middle-ring relationships. Some of these fresh expressions have emerged out of larger congregations, addressing the gap between intimate small groups and the rather anonymous outer ring of the whole congregation; other fresh expressions are entrepreneurial startups in which hybrid forms of face-to-face and online gatherings connect people to each other in new ways. And yet others are crossing boundaries to work across sectors to serve and renew neighborhoods, especially in underserved areas.
Diagnosing our challenges without lapsing into nostalgia is critical, as is recognizing that we do not currently have the institutions we need to support and sustain middle-ring community. As we sow seeds of new and renewed forms of community through creative experiments and transformed imagination, let us also develop and renew institutions so those seeds will grow into full blossom.Read more from L. Gregory Jones »
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Developing lay leaders for community ministry
Faith & Leadership
MISSIONS & EVANGELISM, LAITY, ROLE IN CHURCH
Joy Skjegstad: Developing lay leaders for community ministry
Connecting with people and institutions outside the walls of the church isn’t a job for professional staff alone, says the author of “7 Creative Models for Community Ministry.”Congregations do amazing things in their communities. From tutoring programs and legal clinics to health care and food drives, I've seen the way churches can help meet community needs. The stakes are high. Our communities -- urban, rural and suburban -- are facing tough issues. Churches can help. But they have to do it in ways that are careful, effective and sustainable.Strong lay leadership is critical for those ministries. Rather than launching and running them with paid staff alone, churches can empower lay leaders to add the gifts, perspectives and hours of labor that are needed to truly serve the community well. Strong lay leadership can also keep ministry sustainable and growing even when the professional staff changes.
I’ve spent many years helping churches develop and launch new ministries, and I can attest to the importance of strong lay leaders. One church I served was located a few blocks from an elementary school that was the lowest-performing school in the state. Out of conversations within the church and with people at the school, a reading skills tutoring program was born.
Volunteers from our church went into the school each week to work one-on-one with students. The result was that, on average, students were improving their reading scores by two grade levels each year they were in the program.
Lay leaders played critical roles in designing the program, recruiting and training the volunteers, working with the school to set it up, promoting the program in the church and the community, and evaluating progress. When I left my job at the church several years later, the program continued without a hitch, largely because of the passion, skills and investment of lay leaders.
What could your congregation do to develop lay leaders in community ministry? Here are a few thoughts.
Create a culture of service. In my experience, the churches that are most effective at community ministry have made service a way of life. Great ideas often spring up in a climate where generosity is emphasized and there is regular teaching on our call to service as Christians.
In addition to preaching and teaching, many ministries of your church can incorporate the call to serve -- youth service projects, small-group studies, an advocacy focus for women’s ministry, to name just a few. Make service a theme you always come back to.
Engage leaders in the community. Community ministry leaders are most effective when they understand the issues, assets and struggles of the people who live in the neighborhood. By going out into the community to listen, your leaders will be more informed and possibly more motivated to respond to the needs and opportunities that they see.
Form a small group to start a “listening process” in your community. Group members can conduct short interviews with institutional representatives such as school personnel, law enforcement officials, and business and nonprofit leaders, as well as informal leaders who may not have titles but who know a great deal.
Interviews should focus on three short questions: What are the top concerns in this community? Who is addressing them? How can our church help?
Invite leaders to develop ideas. This can be difficult for staff-driven organizations, but it’s important to invite laypeople to come up with new ministry ideas to respond to the needs and opportunities in the community. Staff may be used to asking for input late in the process, but they should understand that lay leaders are often much more engaged when brought to the table early on and, as a result, are more willing to put in the hard work to launch a ministry. They are also much more likely to be “evangelists” for the ministry in the congregation, drawing in other laypeople as volunteers.
The role of staff in this situation is to help lay leaders shape their ideas to fit the church’s mission, vision and values and then to develop a plan for moving forward.
Create opportunities. If you really want to develop leaders, give them something to lead! Lay leader involvement ought to be much more than rubber-stamping staff efforts. Empowered lay leaders strengthen ministry by bringing their many gifts and perspectives to it.
Laypeople can serve in many roles, including leading planning processes; serving as liaisons to community organizations; planning events; speaking; writing; posting on social media; working on a website; recruiting and leading teams of volunteers; handling logistics like setup, tear-down and transportation; leading a prayer effort; and raising money.
Set clear roles and goals. Choose a few straightforward goals to pursue each year. Be focused and be strategic; a goal like “Involve 50 percent of all church members in volunteering” might not be realistic, but “Recruit 50 volunteers for three pilot projects” or “Teach about service and justice through small-groups ministry” might be both motivating and attainable.
Developing job descriptions for lay leaders is another essential step. These descriptions should specify the leaders’ volunteer duties, when they are expected to serve, where, and how often. Volunteers are more likely to come through for you when they know what’s expected.Read more from Joy Skjegstad »
UPCOMING ONLINE COURSE: SOURCING INNOVON
Chances are good that your institution needs to change in some way if it's to thrive (or even survive). You know it. You embrace the idea. But you don't know what to do, or even where to begin.Join visual anthropologist and filmmaker Marlon Hall and a community of other Christian leaders for this five-week online course (January 30 - March 1, 2017) as we move step-by-step through the process of learning from a community, which is the foundational step to engage in innovative ministry.
Sourcing Innovation will provide you with the skills to lead innovation to improve the common life. You will learn to examine your community to determine:
Where you want to engage;
With whom you want to engage;
How to develop meaningful partnerships with those people; and
What to do with what you learn.
Learn more and register »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Starting a Nonprofit at Your Church by Joy SkegstadA large and growing number of congregations are setting up church-based nonprofit organizations in order to operate community development or educational programs. Once formed, the nonprofit structure allows for new opportunities for accessing additional funding and drawing new collaborative partners and volunteers into the ministry. Joy Skjegstad outlines the step-by-step procedures for setting up a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization connected to a congregation using simple, easy-to-understand terminology and plenty of examples from churches that have already taken on this task. Whether a congregation is setting up new program or has an established nonprofit that needs to be restructured or redefined, congregations will find helpful guidance in this practical, experience-based book.
Learn more and order the book »
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