… you might want to listen to this public radio interview with my niece Samira Hotchkiss Mehta about the pre-teen phenomenon Twilight and the Mormon worldview of its author:

http://interfaithradio.org/SamiraMehta

Interesting in its own right, and in my unbiased opinion, possibly an early glimpse of an up-and-coming public intellectual at work.

Planning efforts often fail, and one important reason is that leaders underestimate the time it takes for causes to produce effects. Your planning process may discern, for instance, that your mission calls you to invite more people than your current space will hold. But if you build a bigger sanctuary, you will produce dust, noise, and disruption for a long time before producing any seating space. If you add a second service you’ll immediately double your capacity–but in the process lose some people for whom “seeing everyone” or “feeling intimate” is a priority. If you add a service with a different worship style, your first result may be a dispute about God’s attitude toward snare drums on the one hand and pipe organs on the other.

In general: the first sign of success in planning is that people get less happy. Planning teams, staff leaders, and governing boards need to temper their enthusiasm–widespread these days–for “measurable results,” for a simple reason: if all goes well, the score will go down before it rises.

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…

Around the board table, each leader brings a point of view rooted in subcultures he or she belongs to. Subcultures of sex, race, age, and nationality are often recognized. The Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator can help a group to acknowledge and “normalize” such differences. We have barely yet begun to see how powerful our occupational subcultures have become. Each person around the table has learned at work how to behave in groups. Those learnings came with powerful rewards and punishments and exert great power, especially when they go unrecognized.

I didn’t know that as a young minister, but now I do. As a consultant I often ask, “What is your work?” At first I expected some resistance. What I often find instead is that my question opens up a rich exchange about strong and different convictions about how groups get things done, and how that kind of diversity might be a good thing.

… read more of All I Really Needed to Know I Learned at Work

Years ago a bright Yale student asked me how I would describe the difference between a church and any other charitable group. I gave the sort of answer most of us might give: I emphasized the church’s unique life-transforming mission and its special responsibility to treasure and transmit precious traditions across generations.It was a good answer–but today I am afraid I’d have to add that of all nonprofits, congregations as a group are the most cautious and least willing to accept risk in order to fulfill their mission.

Read more of The Stewardship of Risk.

Few projects excite and galvanize a congregation more than a new building or a major renovation. People complain about construction delays, capital campaigns, and the general din and dust, but their blood pumps, their wallets loosen, and their enthusiasm rises. Lyle Schaller went so far as to generalize that congregations that build capital are happier than those that spend it. Most congregations in the midst of a construction project illustrate his point: as they convert their members’ cash into real estate, their spirits rise, peaking at the dedication service.

But what happens then? Usually there is a period of euphoria. Occasionally a congregation goes on from strength to strength without a pause. More often, though, there is a letdown, a period of slump in finances, in program, in morale: the post-construction blues.

Read more about The Post-Construction Blues.

Most congregations engage in social ministry to some degree, and most feel that their efforts could be better. But planning for ministries that seek to serve or influence the world beyond the sanctuary can be challenging. Because the world’s needs are so large and complicated, outreach efforts are especially vulnerable to criticism. How, then, to have a positive, constructive conversation?

One way to begin is to pose good questions and invite people to discuss them while a planning team takes notes. Make it clear that the purpose is not to critique your current ministries or to make decisions about the future. Decisions can wait for another time. At the outset you want to get people thinking more creatively about the basic reasons for the congregation’s community-outreach ministries.

Read more about Planning for Community Ministry

Some time ago, I created a financial self-evaluation tool for churches. I’ve been testing it informally ever since, and welcome further feedback and suggestions. If you use it, I hope you will post a comment here that will help me to improve the Snapshot.

Some questions you might address include:

• How well do the “benchmarks” scale up and down to churches of different size?
• What changes would be necessary to make this tool useful for synagogues?
• How does the process play out in your board, finance committee, or other leadership group? Does the concept of “satisfaction level” work for you?

Dan