Final Session With Rendle Focuses on Skills Leaders Need to Lead

Click here to listen to Part I of this workshop.

Click here to listen to Part II of this workshop.

Rev. Dr. Gil Rendle

(Nov. 2, 2001 - Portland, OR) - In the final section of his keynote address at the fifth UJUA Large Church Conference, the Rev. Dr. Gilbert Rendle discussed some of the skills needed to exercise effective leadership in congregations. He talked, first, about the role and responsibility of leaders to provide an environment for adaptive work. He said, "You will face adaptive work, where learning and new skills are needed…and you have to stop doing things long enough to learn something. You have to learn the power of attention. You can set the agenda, and say, 'I know we have to do this, but let's talk about this for while without trying to have to solve it. So you need to find the one or two key adaptive questions facing your congregation, and call attention to [these questions] and ask them to work on this for a while. Congregations have a notoriously short attention span, and can't stay focused on an issue for very long, unless leadership brings people back and says, 'let's focus on this for a while. In doing this, we find a rhythm for working on adaptive issues, without it becoming the central issue we have to face. So we set the agenda and regulate the stress. We encourage a certain amount of anxiety, and make sure that there isn't too much. We make sure we don't do adaptive work the minute everyone walks in the door.

"When you go home after all this conversation and you have all these things you want to convey, you will have answers to questions people haven't yet raised, thank you very much. So who are the people wanting to participate in this kind of conversation and do it responsibly? When you raise an issue, you can be guaranteed that two percent of the congregation will agree with you, no matter what. And two percent will disagree with you, no matter what. And that four percent of the congregation will take up most of your time, and they can't help you move ahead. You need to form the learning core from the twelve percent on either side of those poles. Those people will have some concern and interest in how you engage in the discussion. The rest of the people will want to come to worship and to the programs, and they don't want to engage in these questions. And you don't want to spend your energy trying to engage them."

The Rev. Judith Walker Riggs and delegates from the West Hartford Universalist church consider aspects of making congregational change

Leadership in a congregation that wants management:
The leaders of congregations, said Rendle, are often trying to produce change in systems that can't reward them for the change they need. "So the leader has to remain poised (or, as Edwin Friedman describes it, "the non-anxious presence." ) You need to stand in the system and modulate the bumps and bruises of others, and not be anxious. You take your anxiety outside the system and have it cared for there. There is a price to be paid for helping the congregation go through change, and you can not be nurtured in the system you are trying to change. If you do, you will make it uncomfortable and it will react. You must have colleagues outside they system who can understand and be accountable and not just say, 'you're right,' or you see a therapist or counselor. Family members at home are not outside the system -- so leaders need to take care of themselves.

"Learn how to get on the balcony and take others with you. This means getting enough perspective to see the bigger picture. The opposite of balcony space is reactive space. Reactive space is about making a to do list, and then throwing it away when you get to work and see what is awaiting you there. And then you lose the bigger picture. More often than not, we deal with the urgent, and not the important. So leaders need to go to the balcony to see the patterns.

"[In coming to this conference] you have signed up for a time to get away from reactive space, to look at things through a different lens and see congregations in a different way so that you can ask, 'how does this inform what we hope to do at home?' Peter Senghe, who does work with systems theory and corporate dynamics, finds that corporate leaders don't have the time to do the study they need - action is informed by the next quarter and profits and losses. Senghe says, 'the only thing you can't afford to do in such a pressured environment is to get on the balcony and see what you really need to do. We need to not only get on the balcony, but take others with us.

"The congregations in this room came as teams, and you have captured a picture together, and because you are here on the balcony as a team, the conversation will change. So you need to figure out who else needs to get on the balcony and talk about these things. It is the role and responsibility and skill of leadership to get people out of reactive space. We are action-oriented people, but leaders need to get out of reactive mode.

"We need to learn the difference between being descriptive and being evaluative. Leaders learn how to work descriptively, not evaluatively. When someone gives you a description, you can talk about it, and work with it. If you are being evaluative, you do not negotiate, you do not continue the conversation, you must react out of your reptilian brain…the only thing left in the reptilian brain is an off/on switch known as the flight/fight reflex. So when someone gives you evaluative information, you either move to try and combat it, or you run away. Descriptive information that engages the brain is thoughtful and narrative. Descriptive work lets us keep people in the conversation. Descriptive work is some of the hardest stuff we do, because evaluation keeps leaking in.

"In the cycle of value systems that we go through, every generational value system is developed in response to the one that existed before. So we can talk about the fact that the GI generation's success was marked by the congregation they needed to reorder, and was met by the children who said, 'thanks, but that's sterile, go away.' Each generation is critical of the one that came before. Tom Brokaw's book, "The Greatest Generation," has people telling stories of what they did and saying, I don't think our kids are up to the task.' It is fundamentally evaluative language.

"So when we talk about the differences in our congregations, how do we do this descriptively and not evaluatively? When you talk about what it means to be humanistic, how do you find a vocabulary that describes this to people? Leaders need to learn descriptive language ourselves. All of us have that bias and we have to work through it. When we [at the Alban Institute] do conflict work, we have to listen across the congregation, and then [everyone in the congregation] wants to read the report, and find out who's right…and that's not where our reporting is or should be.

Conference participants explore the feeling of creative tension during the Friday keynote presentation

"One of the things you will find is that change doesn't come from the center of the congregation, it comes from the edges. The people at the center are filled with learned behavior and tend not to be creative. When people come across the edge in a boundary, they tend to offend, because they don't know how to say things. We need to honor people at the edges, not make them disappear. [But] at the same time that change comes from the edge, health comes from the center. Leaders need to work at health at the center - making sure there is a healthy core of leaders at the core, working with differences, and making sure that others can hear this, and modeling it for the rest of the congregation. Civility has always been a group experience. Individual exchanges are uncivil not because people are less gracious, but because they are following the behavior. In a real way, the role of leaders in bringing change in adaptive times when we are working through these differences, is critically important."

Rendle then turned his attention to responding to questions from the conference participants. One participant asked Rendle to respond to the g Rendle responded, "Often in our assumptions, we have confused consensus as agreement. We often work with congregations who work on consensus, and what they mean is that they wait till everyone agrees. And so if someone disagrees, they can stop the process. Consensus in many contexts has come to mean doing full listening, and understanding all the issues before we move ahead." He described the 'Five finger exercise,' which is designed to weigh the feelings of a group of people during a process without forcing consensus. After a discussion, the facilitator asks what the sense of the group is about an issue, asking them to hold up from five to one finger, depending on their agreement/comfort with an issue. This process is an oversimplified version of how consensus works. But what it acknowledges is that there may only two people in a large group that want a process to stop. You acknowledge that there are only two people, thank them for their input, and you move on. You are trying to help people find their place in the conversation, and then you move on. This is not forcing agreement, but acknowledging that there are places that are not easy, but that we are still going to move on. We have to stop being so sensitive to complaints. You can not go to a congregation on any day without someone being unhappy about it. In this environment, there will be some people who have questions, and you need to get them into the dialogue. You also need to stay in touch with people who do not agree, and find out what their information is. You don't dismiss them. If people continue to disagree, I try to listen a second or third time to their point. If they have not moved off of it, I will stop listening - there are some people who like to disagree. If we lead by consensus, it means building identity that is common, but not making everyone happy.

Allison Miller, Young Adult Sunday coordinator, Michael Tino, Young Adult/Campus Ministry Coordinator, Shikarro Sampson, Large Church Conference Administrator, and Stefan Jonasson, Large Church Conference Coordinator, share a moment of relaxation at the conference.

Another participant asked Rendle to differentiate between evaluation and descriptive behavior. He responded that description is also about ownership and asks the question: 'can I own what we are talking about.' So part of using this effectively is finding a more personal and neutral level. We need to speak in "I" statements, from a personal perspective. "This is," said Rendle, "not about making everyone's life nice and neat, but owning the process in which you live."

One person asked Rendle to define the difference between positions and interests. Positions, he said, are non-negotiable; interests are. He said, "We need to stop trying to persuade people with positions, because they will not move. And those with interests are more likely to move. Positions are conclusions we have come to. When people have come to conclusions, they are the most difficult to work with, and we need to go back and try to understand the interests people have."

And in conclusion…
Rendle said, "I would like to offer a couple of things to you in conclusion. One is that I do not know a more interesting and optimistic time to be involved with faith communities. It is a time of ferment, and it is absolutely confusing and messy, and I hope you will begin to enjoy it. One of the insights from [the writer/educator] Bruggermann is that he says the responsibility of leaders is to manage the hopes and fears of the communities we are part of, so that we can have the necessary conversations in order to move ahead."

In the next day of the conference, Rendle said, "there will be ideas, strategies, models. Take everything that looks good to you, and try it. Part of the danger of models is that we assume that we have to use them as they are. Alban has never seen a model that doesn't work some place. But it doesn't work for you until you own it and shape it to your needs. You get to experiment, and there will be failures along the way. We have a fundamental assumption that everything must work or we are bad leaders, but that is not true. We aren't here to find the right answer, but to set ourselves free, as the people of creation that we are. Thank you for your work, and your attention, and I wish you well."

As Redle existed the stage to enthusiastic applause, the Rev. Stefan Jonasson, conference chair, took the stage to lead people through the next stage of the process, which involved a learning experience with congregational teams.

The fifth Large Church Conference, "Changing Congregations, Changing Cultures" continues at the Portland Hilton through Sunday, November 4. In addition to the team learning process, Saturday's focus for the conference will be on learning through workshops designed to help leaders work for change in their congregations.

Reported for the web by Deborah Weiner; formatted for the web by Julie Albanese.