Congregations almost always say they want to grow, but I’ve come to doubt that many really do. The more accurately people picture how a congregation changes when it grows from family-sized to pastoral, program, corporate and beyond, the more clearly they see that growth means losing the worshiping community they know and love and trading it in for one where they will feel—at least initially—like strangers.

Ministries of service to others pose similar challenges. Like outreach to potential members, serious service to the needy requires donors and volunteers who understand that the church or synagogue exists for others at least as much as it exists to serve its members. Casual generosity will support casual service—sustained social responsibility requires a revolution in most congregations’ understanding of their purpose.

… read the rest of “Funding for Today and Tomorrow” at the Alban Institute site.

“How is your model different from the Carver model?” Since Governance and Ministry came out, I hear this question now and then, especially from people in the United Church of Canada, the Mennonite Church, and the Unitarian Universalist Association, where John Carver’s Policy Governance is widely known.

I have benefited from John Carver’s writings and agree with him on many things, for instance:

• Boards should focus primarily on long-range, big-picture matters,
• Boards should record their most important decisions in written policies.
• Boards should delegate substantial day-to-day management authority so decisions can be made away from the board table. In organizations with staff, it makes sense to delegate management authority to the staff leader.
• Boards should exercise effective oversight of those to whom it has delegated authority without involving themselves too much in management.

Where Carver is well-known, you don’t need to say much more than this for some people to peg you as a Carverite—not because any of this is original with Carver or unique to him, but simply because people who know the “Carver model” may not know much about the broader conversation about nonprofit governance. Especially in churches and synagogues, where “normal” decision-making practice tends to be quite chaotic and diffuse, there is a tendency for any good advice to sound like any other, simply because it is so different from what we’re used to.

I appreciate Carver’s contributions to thinking about governance and have benefited from the clarity of his thinking. But I have some disagreements with him, and some reservations about the use of his model in congregations. Here are some areas of difference:

• Carver relies heavily on the distinction between ends and means—what we intend to accomplish versus how we are going to do it. I agree that this is a useful distinction, but do not agree that decisions can be clearly classified one way or the other. Like many clear distinctions, this one is a polarity or spectrum, not a set of pigeonholes. This may be especially true in congregations, where “how” we do things is a major part of “what” we want to accomplish.
• Carver’s seems to me to picture an organization as a machine that can be programmed to follow a set of rational directions. I take a more systemic or organic point of view. The official rules governing decision-making account for very little of what happens even in well-ordered groups. The special nature of a congregation, with its overlapping constituencies and multiple relationships among people, make systemic and organic metaphors especially useful.
• Carver states in many places that “chief executive performance is identical to organizational performance.” This may be a useful fiction in some organizations, but in a church it is can be quite pernicious, both because “performance” is so difficult to define and measure, and because the job of a senior clergy leader is only partly to lead the organization. Clergy contribute a great deal through their personal ministry, and congregations succeed or fail for many reasons–clergy performance being only one of them.
• The separation of board and staff functions in Carver, while clear, seems to me less than ideal. I have never seen a board that could discern mission or cast vision without participation—nay, leadership—from staff leaders. In the book I define a zone of overlap between the board and staff that includes both discernment and strategy. While it needs to be clear what bucks stop where, only a shared process can produce the wide support such decisions require.
• Like me, Carver says the board is a fiduciary for the organization’s “true owners.” But Carver’s “owners” are always human beings. If there are members, they must be the owners. For me, the true owner of a congregation is its mission. The board’s core responsibility to to ensure that the congregation serves its mission; likewise, when members vote, they vote not as owners, but as fiduciaries for the mission.

I am a grateful reader of John Carver’s writings and respect the effort some congregations have made to follow Policy Governance as closely as they can. My approach is similar in some ways, different in others.

Perhaps the most important difference of all is that my “model” is not a model at all. Congregations are different, and they can and should govern themselves in a variety of ways. I’m always delighted when my readers and consulting clients invent wildly unexpected variations on the basic themes of Governance and Ministry.

One of the interesting things about Governance and Ministry is the interest it has generated across the religious spectrum–I’ve heard from Southern Baptists, Catholics, and Orthodox Jews as well as Unitarians, Episcopalians, and the United Church of Christ. Most recently, I enjoyed reading a recent post by Art Scherer of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.

Dan

… 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.

Every denomination that practices “congregational polity” does so a little differently, and each seems to discover its own sticking points. For Unitarian Universalists, one persistent quandary is how to recognize and support professional ministry outside the most standard parish settings. UU ministers have long served as chaplains, community organizers, educators, and in other community roles, but for some reason the denomination finds it challenging to talk about how such ministries fit into the overall scheme.

Back in 1995, when I was director of ministerial settlement  (now called “transitions”), I wrote a think piece, “Defining Community Ministry,” for the UUA Department of Ministry. Since the paper was cited in Kathleen Parker Sacred Service in Civic Space: Three Hundred Years of Community Ministry in Unitarian Universalism (Meadville Lombard Theological School, 2007), I have had several requests for copies. I had lost track of mine, so I asked Kathleen for a copy of hers, which she kindly provided. Unfortunately it was so enthusiastically annotated by a previous owner (who thought, among other strange things, that “Hotchkiss was against the SLM”!) that I was reluctant to re-release it till I got around to scanning, OCR’ing, and cleaning it up. That work is now done. I welcome any thoughts you may have.

I did finally get around to it, and here it is: . I have no idea how well it holds up in the light of current conversations, but it seemed worthwhile to save it for the record.

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.