Dan Hotchkiss

My next book, due out in the spring of 2008, will be called “Ministry Together: The Art of Governance in Congregations.” Or not–I would welcome any thoughts you may have about a better title. Why “Ministry Together”? Well, consider the alternatives:

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.

Q: Our board spends too much time reviewing and approving work that should be done by staff and committees. We know we shouldn’t micromanage, but we can’t seem to help it. How can we change?

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.

The envelope please! Runner-up for Most Influential Book as rated by American clergy is…

“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.