Dan Hotchkiss

Congregational budget-makers frequently divide into two
camps that approach the task in different ways. The first camp is
likely to include children of the Great Depression, experts in finance,
elementary school teachers, and persons anxious about their own money
situation. Their first priority is to make sure that the budget
balances and that the congregation makes no plans or commitments it is
less than 100 percent certain it can meet. They squint over budget
sheets like bookkeepers of old with their bright lamps and shoulder
garters—I call this camp the Green Eyeshades.

The second camp typically includes young clergy, upscale
decorators, Baby Boomers, college professors, and commission
salespeople. They firmly believe that with God (or even without God)
all things are possible. They say, “We are a congregation, not a
business.” This camp can be identified at budget meetings mostly by
their absence. When shanghaied into talking about money, they glaze
over. Staring at a distant sunrise, they float over the surface of
numerical reality—I call them the Rose-Colored Glasses.

Read the rest of this article at Alban.org.

The Alban Institute has published an excerpt of my new book, Governance and Ministry: Rethinking Board Leadership in this week’s issue of the Alban Weekly e-newsletter (click here to subscribe):

Religion transforms people; no one touches holy ground and stays the same. Religious leaders stir the pot by pointing to the contrast between life as it is and life as it should be, and urging us to close the gap. Religious insights provide the handhold that people need to criticize injustice, rise above self-interest, and take risks to achieve healing in a wounded world. Religion at its best is no friend to the status quo.

Organization, on the other hand, conserves. Institutions capture, schematize, and codify persistent patterns of activity. A well-ordered congregation lays down schedules, puts policies on paper, places people in positions, and generally brings order out of chaos. Organizations can be flexible, creative, and iconoclastic, but only by resisting some of their most basic instincts.

No wonder “organized religion” is so difficult! Congregations create sanctuaries where people can nurture and inspire each other—with results no one can predict. The stability of a religious institution is a necessary precondition to the instability religious transformation brings. The need to balance both sides of this paradox—the transforming power of religion and the stabilizing power of organization—makes leading congregations a unique challenge.

A special risk for leaders is that a congregation can succeed so well at organizing that it loses track of its religious mission. Congregational life becomes so tightly ordered that it squeezes out all inspiration. The challenge of organized religion is to find ways to encourage people to encounter God in potentially soul-shaking ways while also helping them to channel spiritual energy in paths that will be healthy for them, the congregation, and the world beyond. Religious leaders who write bylaws would be well advised to do so, as theologian Karl Barth admonished preachers, with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, holding realism and idealism in a salutary tension.

Read more on the Alban Institute site…

Charge to the minister
For the installation of Tess Baumberger
Unity Church, North Easton, MA
March 22, 2009
by Dan Hotchkiss

Tess, I’m glad you’ve come to Easton. Traditionally, the “charge to the minister” includes wise, oracular advice to the new minister from an old one. Sadly, I have no such advice to offer; if I did, I would long ago have followed it myself.

I don’t need to tell you what a charming, admirable bunch this congregation is. I don’t need to say how hard and effectively they have prepared for this day. They’ve been preparing for 10 years: renovating Holly House; stepping up financially; stepping out into the community; growing a new cadre of leaders; taking on the parking and the steeple; right up to the thorough, thoughtful labors of the ministerial search committee.

Unity church has prepared hard and well. And so have you. Your life, your education, your careers—have readied you to be here, standing with this congregation at the threshold of a question.

And the question is: For what?

This moment points beyond the comfort of a friendly group of people with sound principles housed inside a jewel. This moment asks,

“What difference will we make to our community?”

“Whose lives will we transform, and in what way?”

“What is our faith calling us to do and be?”

These are not questions to be answered in a day. So Tess, I charge you to be patient with this congregation, which has become so good at projects, when they get anxious in the face of puzzling spiritual questions, questions about purpose, meaning, and identity. I charge you to forgive them when they jump too quickly to an answer when it would be better to sit quietly a while amid the questions.

I charge you to be patient with your congregation.

And I charge you, Tess, to disappoint them.

I’ve asked around, and just between the two of us, they have high expectations of you, for good reason.

But as you may know, congregations really don’t select ministers, they construct them out of pieces of their old ones. Unity Church wants a minister as wise and lovable as Holly Bell, as musical as Bonnie Devlin, as youthful as Eric Cherry, as intellectual as Jay Deacon and as physically attractive as Dan Hotchkiss.

And you’re all those things, except you’re not. You’re Tess. And so I charge you to look at yourself in the mirror every morning to confirm that you are not the sum of the projections and the expectations and the hopes this church invests in you.

You’re Tess. You can fall short. You can say no. You can punch out. You can refuse to take responsibility for what is not yours. It is not your job to be the minister they want. It is to be the minister you are. And so if, in addition to being lovable and musical, and vigorous and intellectual and beautiful, they sometimes find you bookish, pushy, passive, lazy, or eccentric like certain of your predecessors, that’s their problem, not yours.

It’s more than a problem, it’s an opportunity for ministry. When you disappoint your congregation you offer them a chance to learn that no one can stand in for God. All you can do is walk beside them and help focus their attention on what seems to matter most in every moment. Given what I know about who you are and who they are, I feel certain that will be enough.

The stewardship committee at my church asked me to say a few words recently in behalf of the annual fund drive. It was interesting, having the chance to speak as a lay member. Here is what I found myself saying:

When Chris asked me to speak this morning, she suggested I might talk about how I became a Unitarian Universalist and why I support this church financially. The first question I can answer easily-I was born a Unitarian, and grew up in a active UU family. I remember the first day I went to church in a sport jacket. Mrs. Bourland, who told stories to the children, greeted me: “Why Danny, you look like the president of a bank.” She meant it as a compliment-and I stored it up as part of the encouragement that every child deserves, and that UU children generally get.

Why do I plan to pledge to the Middleboro UU Church? So far as I can tell, this year’s fund drive is not especially sexy or dramatic. Our gifts will go for heating oil, construction paper, disability insurance, tuning, vacuum cleaners, pew repairs, books, snow shoveling, choir practices, hospital visits, children’s stories, rug replacement, counseling sessions, and light bulbs. All the ordinary things that go into sustaining this extraordinary place, this special group of people.

If there is any special drama in 2009, it is in the atmosphere of economic worry. No one is untouched. I feel lucky that so far, the recession has nibbled me around the edges-”paper” losses, kids and stepkids who need extra help. For some of you, I know, the hurt is more immediate, the fear more pressing. If that’s you, I hope you stick around, because I know how helpful it can be to be part of a congregation when the floor falls out of your life. I’ve been there. In fact, one of the reasons I plan to pledge is to make sure this church is here for people who-for whatever reason-won’t be able to give much at all next year.

Like you, I’ve had easy days and hard, and especially on the hard days I’ve been glad to be a Unitarian Universalist. April 15, 1997 was a bad day for me; I lost my job, and it was pretty devastating. I was slouching down Main Street to drop off my tax return, when like magic-or a miracle-a pale blue Volkswagen pulled up beside me, stuffed with men on their way to the Men’s Breakfast of the UU congregation I belonged to then. They scooped me up and took me to a restaurant where I had breakfast with eight guys, each of whom had been fired at least once. I felt buoyed by their support, I felt warmed by their care, I felt connected. And I knew I’d be OK. It was not the first or the last time I have been glad for a community that has faith in people and holds you tight even when you might feel inclined to slink away.

This year-knock on wood-I have a job. And so with Susan, I’ll do what I can to help make sure this church is here for everyone who needs it. And if you can, I hope you’ll do the same.

By law, board members are supposed to put the best interest of the church above all personal considerations — but how is that even possible? Board members in most churches play many other roles throughout the church, and many board decisions affect them and those they love. Potential conflicts of interest arise whenever a board member plays multiple roles. In churches, multiple roles and relationships are the rule, not the exception.

Look around the board table: John and Frieda work for the same company; Frieda’s daughter  babysits for Susan’s grandson; Susan has belonged for years to Peter’s study group; Peter, who has been assistant treasurer for 30 years, is married to the choir director. Then there’s the pastor, who stands in multiple relationships to everybody. Even in a relatively healthy church, an “organization chart” that tried to capture all such formal and informal links would resemble an unusually messy cobweb.

No wonder that on many boards it’s awkward to begin talking about conflicts of interest. Relationships around the table already bristle with potential conflicts, so anyone who tries to raise the subject risks a defensive response. That’s one reason boards put off this important conversation. Another is the belief (often against official doctrine) that church people are naturally well-meaning, moral people, making it offensive to suggest they might need rules to keep them on the straight and narrow. Nonetheless, a church governing board, like any nonprofit board, is mandated by law to keep its stewardship unsullied by conflicts of interest. In legal language board members are fiduciaries (from the Latin fides, faith).

Read the rest…

Comparisons are useful but tricky. New Testament writers compare the church to a human body, a herd of sheep, a bride, and a vineyard. Synagogues are often likened to a house, a tent, or an extended family. None of these analogies is meant to be exact or literal—a church may act in some ways like a herd of sheep, but a wise leader doesn’t plan on it. Poets do exaggerate sometimes.

In the same spirit of poetic license, it may at times it may be useful to compare the clergy leader of a congregation to a corporate CEO, its members to customers or stockholders, or its staff to the employees of a charity. We can draw many useful analogies between congregations, other nonprofits, and businesses, but ultimately congregations need ideas and language of their own. It is easy to say that “the church should run more like a business,” without recognizing that in some respects the church should and does run very differently.

Read the rest…

Tags: Board governance

Q: Our minister has announced his retirement. During his long ministry, we have avoided most of the conflict about homosexuality raging in our national church. How can we look for a minister without dividing our congregation?

A: Right now, several North American religious groups are sharply split about how and whether to accept gay clergy. If your denomination is divided, you understandably want to protect your congregation from following suit.

Over the years, your church may have welcomed some openly gay people warmly, even though some members consider their behavior unbiblical or wrong. As long as your minister stayed put, you could live with the inconsistency.

Read the rest…

When churches plan, one of the things they often plan to do is grow. They have their reasons: the Great Commission, for one, and the fact that spreading the gospel is a main point of the congregation’s purpose. But when you get past polite chit-chat, other motives will assert themselves.

For clergy, church growth is a career move. I can’t criticize this—my first church grew, and I’ve collected dividends on that achievement ever since. It was only partly my achievement. Nonetheless, let me be the first to say that I have benefited, and one of the reasons I encouraged growth was that I hoped and expected to reap benefits down the road.

Read the rest…

“Conflict of interest” is an ugly phrase, but it’s time to say it, lay it on the table, and deal with it as a normal part of life. Everybody who is not a hermit manages conflicting interests all the time. Congregations’ awkwardness and silence on the subject only makes us vulnerable.
Many congregations accept practices that in other contexts we would question. For example, when the driveway needs re-topping, why deal with someone we don’t know when good old Tom of Tom’s Blacktop sits right here at the board table? We know he’ll give us a good price (don’t we?). In any case, if we suddenly quit using him, he’d be upset…

Read more about “Conflicts of Interest” www.alban.org.

Reporting on a ravaged Mississippi town on the Gulf coast, the Associated Press said that “Katrina clobbered the rich and poor alike.” A cliché repeated often enough slips past the brain into the heart. We like the idea that in times of disaster all stand equally in awe before the powers that beset us. The proud are leveled, and the humble are (at least relatively) raised up.

In truth, though, precious little affects rich and poor alike. Wealth confers huge advantages, including the ability to drive away ahead of hurricanes, insure vulnerable property, and find comfortable shelter. Poverty wears people down even in fair weather; when the storm comes it kills a lot more of the poor. The rich have more to lose, and may feel more surprise, but the worst actual damage falls to the poorest.

Read more about “Pretending to be Equal” on the Alban Institute website.