The State of the Congregation
by
Rev. Joy Atkinson
Presented to the Unitarian
Society of Santa Barbara
©2008 by Rev. Joy Atkinson
The State of the Congregation
At this time of year, around the time that the president
of the U.S. gives a State of the Union Address, many of us interim ministers
are thinking about a State of the Congregation address, since sometime in
January is usually the mid-point in a congregation’s interim year—a good time
to publicly assess where the congregation is and where it might be headed. I
want to apologize in advance to any newcomers here today, because today’s
sermon is a very practical, internally focused, interim sermon that does not
have the spiritual, theological, social, aesthetic or emotional themes that we
usually strive for in a sermon.
On my first Sunday
in this pulpit, I unpacked a suitcase of items symbolic of the tasks of an
interim minister. One of those items was a mirror. Today, I am metaphorically
holding a mirror up to you. The special advantage that we interim ministers
have is that we are already “pre-fired” before we start, so in some ways we are
freer to call and name what we see, without the sugar-coating that a State of
the Union address often contains. That in fact is part of our responsibility—to
speak the truth as we see it.
I
want to start with some good news: a strength: This is a very vibrant and
active congregation, with a great many good things going on—worship services,
concerts, adult and children’s classes, social justice projects, pastoral care
to one another, a new building project about to be launched and a new minister
about to be found. You have here a very diligent and capable staff, and many
very dedicated volunteers who often quietly carry out the day-to-day and
week-to-week work that keeps this congregation going—unsung heroes who edit the
newsletter, who print and send it out, those who chair or serve on committees,
the Board, the Program Council, Religious Education Council, the various task
forces, those who come here faithfully on weekdays to help the staff in a
myriad of ways, who teach our children, who offer adult classes, who help
maintain the building—the list goes on and on. And yet, as I see it, this great
strength is also something of a challenge— getting enough volunteers for the
committees especially, so that the congregation can continue to function
smoothly. People are very busy these days, and it isn’t always easy to find
volunteers for specific tasks or slots on committees. We interrupt this
sermon for a brief commercial message: if you would like to become more
involved, to serve on a committee perhaps, please speak with me or someone on
staff, and we will help get you “plugged in.”
Here’s
more good news—another strength I see here: your past is largely past. I
don’t want to spend much time making this point, since I already made it last
fall in my history sermons. This congregation has overcome some serious
challenges, in particular some significant divisions over the relationships
with a couple of your more recent past ministers. If you missed my sermons
about your history, you can read copies or get tapes of those services. Just to
briefly re-iterate: my sense is that you have essentially healed well from your
rifts on the 1990s, and that this congregation is in a very good
place—forward-looking and generally hopeful about its future. This is not to say that there are no more
residual feelings or divisions of opinion about past ministries, but I would
say that you’ve come through some challenging times as well as any congregation
I’ve seen, and I have seen quite a few, especially in my long-time role as a
member of the Pacific Central District’s Conflict Management Team (now called
the Healthy Congregations Team). In that context, as a congregational conflict
consultant, I have seen conflicts in congregations that would make your hair
stand on end!
Here
is yet more good news, and a challenge: last year, you conducted a very good
capital campaign to upgrade and improve this beautiful set of buildings and
grounds you are so fortunate to have here. You raised around $1.7 million in a
relatively short period of time. The challenge is that you need to raise
$300,000 more to complete this project. You will be hearing more about this
soon, but here’s another commercial message: If you have not yet made your
special pledge to this campaign, now is the time, and if you have, and you can
add to it to help reach the $2 million goal, now is the time! Perhaps by the
time your ministerial candidate comes at the end of April, you can proudly say
that you’ve closed the gap.
Now back to our regularly scheduled sermon: I want to reflect for a
few minutes on what I’ve learned so far about how this congregation operates:
Last June, at the General Assembly in Portland, Oregon, in preparation for my
coming here to serve you in your interim year, I met around a lunch table in
the Exhibit Hall with your Director of Administration, Nancy Edmundson, your
then Board President Patricia Reilly, and several other members of the
congregation. At that time, I was informed that this congregation has a
somewhat different governance structure. In all the previous congregations I’ve
served, both as an interim and as a settled minister, the governance structure
was pretty much the same: an elected Board of Trustees made many of the major
decisions concerning the operations of the congregation—for example, hiring of
all staff except for the settled minister, who in our denomination is called by
a vote of the whole congregation. Also,
the Board in most of our congregations is the body that makes the major
decisions between congregational meetings, and the committees are charged by
and answer to the Board. In some of our congregations, especially the larger ones,
a new governance model has been imported from the corporate world and put into
operation: Policy Governance. In this model, most of the day-to-day decisions,
even some major ones like hiring personnel, are made not by the Board but by a
small coordinating team, consisting of the minister or ministers and two or
three lay leaders-. This structure is designed to free the Board from
micromanaging, so it can make broader policy decisions.
Here,
I was told, the governance takes place with yet another model: a tri-cameral
system that includes the Board, a Planning Council which deals with Long
Range plans, and a Program Council which oversees all programs. Three circles were drawn on paper to
illustrate this structure. I understand that when this congregation moved into
this new structure a few years ago, there were many efforts to educate people
in how this would work and how it differs from the previous, more conventional
structure. Many, I’m told were still confused after these efforts, and as I
stared at the three circles and listened to the description of how it works, I
confess that I was also puzzled, and I became even more so later, when I saw
another diagram. Well, now that I’ve been here for about five and a half
months, and have participated in many committee meetings, Board meetings, and
in the Program Council and Long Range Planning Committee, I find that how you
actually operate does not appear to be the same as the structure you
adopted. In fact, with one notable
exception, your structure looks very much to me like the conventional one, in
which basically the Board and congregation as a whole make the major decisions.
The exception is the Program Council, which is empowered to create, support,
oversee and grant funds to programs—such as Worship and music, Religious
Education classes and various groups and activities such as men’s and women’s
groups, pastoral care, social justice and the like. The Program Council,
however, is also ultimately accountable to the Board, though its existence does
free up the Board to focus on other things besides programs.
Now
the Planning Council, that third circle, supposedly a third governing
body, which is called the Long Range Planning Committee, seems to be operating
like any other committee of the Board, and not like a governing body at
all. Right now, that Committee is in
the process of updating the 5-year Long Range Plan, at this mid-point in the
plan’s life—two and a half years from when the congregation adopted it. The Long Range Planning Committee is also
working on a revision of the Staff Development Plan (which I will say more about in a few minutes). But all of the
good work of this important Committee is slated to come before the Board this
spring, for Board approval, which is just the way I’m used to Long Range
Planning Committees working. So as I see it this congregation works more
through perhaps a mildly bi-cameral structure, in which one body besides
the Board—the Program Council—does have some limited governing power. But the
Board and the congregation still has the final say on a great many issues—on
all the major ones, as is typical in Unitarian Universalist congregations. It’s as if you tried to create a different
model a few years ago, but somehow you mostly drifted back into “default mode,”—you
went back to your old and more typical structure, like a copy machine
re-setting itself to the simplest, most basic setting after you’ve used it to
do some complicated tasks.
If
this is all too confusing, that is, which group governs, which reports to
which, which makes which decisions, or if your eyes are beginning to glaze over
with all this talk of structure and governance—not to worry! What I basically
want to impart today us that despite the fact that this governance structure
doesn’t operate the way it was first expected to, it is not a problem, as far
as I can see. The structure works. And one of the rules we interims go by is a
simple one: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I am just reporting to you what
I see, like that mirror. There will be some effort soon to re-work your Bylaws
to more closely reflect how you actually operate.
The
Staff Development Plan, which is now being re-examined by the Long Range
Planning Committee, which involves bringing on an associate minister at 3/4
time, a music director at 2/5 time, and a Director of Religious Education at
2/5 time, all by the year 2010. was too ambitious, given current trends. This
plan was originally based on some projected growth in numbers and income that
has not materialized yet. In fact, there has been some moderate shrinkage
since this plan was adopted as a guideline back in 2006. Before I came here, I
had always thought of the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara as a large
congregation (that is its reputation), and at various points in your past you
were in that category. A large congregation, according to the Unitarian
Universalist Association, has 550 or more members, although some authorities on
church dynamics would say that that number should be the head count on Sunday
morning, not the membership number—a very different number in most of our
congregations, including this one. Attendance is usually about half of the
membership-on-the-books number.
In
actuality, this is a high-end mid-size congregation, with 450 members right
now, which still makes it among the larger congregations in our small
denomination. I sense that some of the members here still think of this as a
large congregation. This phenomenon puts me in mind that old Aesop fable: A frog sees a bull feeding in a meadow. She thinks, “I
could be as big as the bull, if I just puff up my wrinkly skin.” So she puffs
herself up and asks her children: “Am I not as big as that bull?” They say:
“No.” She puffs herself up again even more and says to her children: “How about
now?” and they say: “You’re not even close.” The third time she puffs herself
up so hard, that her skin bursts open and she explodes. The obvious moral: Be
careful about puffing yourself up too much!
Now I don’t think members here try to puff
this congregation up to look big, like that poor deluded frog. Rather, some
people here seem to remember and a “golden age,” long gone, when the membership
and attendance numbers were for a while quite a bit beyond what they are
now. How large is it possible for this congregation to grow, and sustain that
growth? How much give is there, really, in this frog’s skin? Here’s a sobering
statistic: nationally, card-carrying Unitarian Universalists comprise only
about 1/10 of 1% of the US population. So, on average, in a city of say
100,000, there would only be about 100 UUs. Clearly, Santa Barbara and the
surrounding area (excluding Goleta where there is another UU congregation which
you helped to start), with a bit over 100,000, already has a significantly
larger number of UUs than the national average. That itself is an
accomplishment. Can you grow even larger? I think you can, with some concerted
effort, and, when you have a new settled minister and an upgraded building, I
think you may well grow. I would say that our whole Unitarian Universalist
movement can and should grow larger. But there may be some natural limits to
this growth— a fact to be aware of as you plan for your future. For now, it
looks as if the original plan to increase staff to the levels hoped for can’t
happen on that optimistic schedule, and may have to be pushed out a couple or
more years into the future.
In some of the literature I read about this congregation
before I arrived, I saw that you think of yourselves as standing on four
important pillars: The great pillars of Worship, Pastoral Care, Religious
Education and Social Justice. I had not seen the functions of a congregation
put quite that way before, and when I first thought about it, it seemed like a
pretty complete picture of what constitutes the main purposes of a
congregation: (I light these four pillar candles to represent the pillars.)
1.
Worship—to
come together to celebrate and explore the issues of the day and of your
personal lives
2.
Pastoral
Care—to care for one another’s pastoral needs in rough times
3.
Religious
Education—to offer religious education and learning opportunities for all ages
4.
Social Justice—to work together in the local
community and in the world at large to promote justice and equality, to help
heal and make this world a better place for all people.
What else is there? Why else
do people come to churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, congregations? As I
thought about this, I realized that there is actually a fifth pillar,
I’ll call it the silent, central, and sacred pillar, represented by this fifth
candle, and for some if not most of the people who join religious institutions
it IS centrally important. This fifth pillar is:
5.
Social
connection, community, being together. (This is social connection beyond
pastoral care to those in need—the glue that holds a religious community
together.)
Community and connection is
such a basic human need, that it is perhaps understood to underlie all the
other pillars. But I think it should be mentioned and attended to as another
pillar—this basic need and longing to be with other people, especially people
who share a set of values and ideals, and who wish to work together to make
them real. This reading from our hymnal by Kenneth
Patton expresses this human longing:
We arrive out of many singular rooms, walking over the branching streets. We come to be assured that our brothers and sisters surround us, to restore their images on our eyes... Our eyes reclaim the remembered faces; their voices stir the surrounding air. The warmth of their hands assures us, and the gladness of our spoken names. This is the reason of cities, of homes, of assemblies in the houses of worship. It is good to be with one another.
Yesterday morning, your Director of
Administration Nancy Edmundson, your Consulting Minister for Religious
Education, Rev. Melitta Haslund, and I offered a leadership training workshop
here. For one part of it, member Don Bushnell took us through an appreciative
inquiry process, in which we envisioned our peak experiences of being here in
this congregation. I’ve only been here a little while, but what came
immediately to my mind were a couple of events: one was the Service Auction
last fall and the other was the Martin Luther King march and rally, which took
place this past Monday. One of these events was to raise funds, the other to
express our commitment to social justice. But just as important as raising
money or marching for a social cause is the sense of community that such events
foster. The auction, with its pirate
theme, was fun, with members frolicking, being silly together and clearly
enjoying one another. And the Martin Luther King march was also a bonding
experience, in which many of us, adults and children together, walked proudly
behind the Unitarian Society banner—some 50 or so of us out of just a few
hundred marchers. It is my sense that you need more opportunities like this
here—events that help form bonds, that enhance connection, that strengthen this
central pillar, this “glue” of community, which holds it all together in a wide,
wide embrace. It IS good to be with one another, and that is a large part of
what a congregation like this one all about.