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

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.

It’s handy to have the most important folders at the top of the list, not only to make them easy to find but to keep them in view so that I don’t forget the projects and clients they represent. One handy way to do this is to begin the file name with a special character. Some special characters are allowed in Outlook folder names but not in the names of folders or files in the Windows file system. The period can be part of a Windows folder name so long as it is not the first character. All special characters sort to the top of the list except the hyphen and single quote, which are ignored in sorting by both systems. The oddball in the bunch is the double quote, which Outlook puts between the exclamation point and the number sign, but Windows ignores.

To save others the work of figuring this out, here is a table of the special characters available directly from the English keyboard layout:

BoardSource. Many resources available at www.boardsource.org.

Carver, John, and Miriam Mayhew Carver, Reinventing Your Board: A Step-by-Step Guide to Implementing Policy Governance. revised edition (San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2006).

Chait, Richard, William P. Ryan, Barbara E, Taylor, and BoardSource (organization), Governance As Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005).

Easum, William M., and Thomas G. Bandy, Growing Spiritual Redwoods (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1997).

Friedman, Edwin H., Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue, The Guilford Family Therapy Series (New York: Guilford Press, 1985).

Heifetz, Ronald A., Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994).

Leader to Leader Institute. Many resources available at www.leadertoleader.org.

Long, Edward Le Roy, Patterns of Polity: Varieties of Church Governance (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2001).

Owen, Harrison, Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide, 2nd edition (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1997).

Steinke, Peter L., Healthy Congregations: A Systems Approach, 2nd edition (Herndon, VA Alban Institute, 2006)

Warren, Richard, The Purpose-Diven Church: Growth Without Compromising Your Message & Mission (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing, 1995).

Weisbord, Marvin Ross, and Sandra Janoff, Future Search: An Action Guide to Finding Common Ground in Organizations and Communities, 2nd edition, updated and expanded edition (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2000).

Dan

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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

Ministry Apart. This approach has a long history, and takes many forms. Ministry Apart happens any time the division of labor between staff and board becomes a rigid absolute. The most obvious is when the lay governing board sits back in their chairs, arms folded, to judge–oops, “evaluate”–the clergy leader. The flip side of that coin is the clergy-dominated church where lay leaders’ only role is to help the clergy. A third kind of Ministry Apart is where board runs the church as though it didn’t have a staff at all, while the minister carves out a life of his or her own writing books, sitting on denominational or community committees, or doing pastoral counseling. The advantage of Ministry Apart is that the clergy don’t need much organizational leadership skill beyond staying out of other people’s turf, and the board does not need to learn how to be a board. Most board members already know how to be managers and workers, so this makes things easy. The downside, of course, is that sooner or later people step on one another’s toes, or it turns out that lay leaders hold clergy responsible when things don’t go as planned. Without an ongoing structure for connecting the ministry of clergy with the ministry of lay boards, the collision can be sudden and destructive.

Ministry in Tandem. My older brother Ralf was an inventor from an early age. As a teenager, he built a bike with a 6-foot banana seat and three sets of pedals so up to six riders could share the work. As the little brother, I regularly got to be one of the riders. That experience comes to mind when I watch congregations that have adopted some forms of the “shared ministry” idea. As on Ralf’s bike, everyone’s job description is pretty much the same, giving a great deal of forward thrust when everyone cooperates. There were even three sets of handlebars (though only one of them worked for steering). The disadvantages–both for the bike and the congregation–include awkward steering, a brittle ride easily thrown off by bumps in the road, and the potential for individuals to covertly resist the pedaling of others while seeming to be helping out. When everyone has the same job description, it is hard to make decisions, to change course, or to hold individuals accountable.

The middle path, then, as I see it, is Ministry Together. The core premise is that partnership works best when the parties have clear, separate roles. If it is clear which decisions I will ultimately make, I can consult with others without worrying that I’ll give away my power to act. Unlike Ministry Apart, where role boundaries are rigid, or Ministry in Tandem, where they are fuzzy, Ministry Together connects autonomous individuals and groups in a network of mutual accountability.

A: You have a lot of company. Most boards criticize themselves for “micromanaging” and rightly so. This happens because tiny issues are more interesting and understandable than large ones, and more gratifying to address because they can often be solved quite quickly. Preference for micro-issues is so universal that C. Northcote Parkinson formulated it into one of his famous laws: “The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.”

What can be done? Boards slip into triviality for two main reasons: because they don’t know how to delegate and because they don’t know how else they would spend their time. A third reason is that some people are so used to boards that deal with trivia they don’t recognize the problem.
Read more of Ask Alban: Re-inventing Boards that Bore.

“Ladies and gentlemen, will it be a book on spiritual practices? Biblical studies? The ever-popular ‘How to Blame Lay Leaders’? No, the topic of the second most important book this year is [drum roll] congregational administration!”

Who’d have thought it? For many seminary students, the course on administration is a pothole on the road to glory as a preacher or a pastoral caregiver. We all know great and successful clergy who never say “administration” without wrinkling their noses.

Read more of A Discerner’s Guide to Congregational Governance.