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Congregational and Leadership Assessment CENTER Workshop |
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Congregational and Leadership Assessment CENTER Workshop |
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The Rev. David Hubner, Beverly Smrha, the Rev. Mark Gallagher and other members of the UUA Assessing Our Leadership (AOL) team presented information on two new tools available from the UUA for assessing the effectiveness and performance of the overall congregation and its lay and professional leadership.
"We too often do assessments at the wrong time," Hubner warned. In times of difficulty, congregations tend to use evaluations to assess one person instead of the system. Sometimes it's done deliberately to get rid of a minister. The team wanted, instead, a tool for assessment that would be fair, under control and effective.
The AOL tool grows out of a seven year process with the participation of the CENTER program (the UU Ministers Association continuing education organization), the Department of Ministry and the UUA field staff. A review and renewal guide was published in 1998; the current tool replaces that and extends it.
The team worked under the assumption that ministry is the work that the whole congregation does, but is at the same time sensitive to the professional responsibilities and roles of ministers and directors of religious education. Smrha added that "everyone of us has a responsibility to develop trust, to be effective and to be held accountable."
The overall purpose, then, of the new tool is to help congregations as systems work better, the team agreed. The team wanted a tool that is efficient and that doesn't take too much energy and time to use.
The tool assumes an annual review of some components of the congregational system, with a larger process every three to five years. The tool includes educational material, explaining the rationale and assumptions behind its methodology. The basic questions it asks help to determine what the congregation was trying to accomplish and how well the congregation did in that attempt.
Questions and answers followed, focusing on issues like effective Committees on Ministry, the relationship of the assessment tools to salary decisions, the effect of conflict on a congregation's goals and the existence of a number of different assessment tools produced by different UUA committees with somewhat different assumptions: an MFC evaluation tool (just released), the AOL tool, a congregational self-assessment packet, and others.
The Assessing Our Leadership tool is available now at http://www.uua.org/ministry/ (information for ordering by mail; online availability is expected soon) and the Congregational Self-Assessment Packet will soon be available at http://www.uua.org/promise/.Reported by Jone Johnson Lewis
General Assembly 2001 · Program Grid
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