Summit Meeting Brings District Leadership Together

Prepared for UUA.org by: Deborah Weiner, Reporter

Ft. Worth, June 22, 2005

"Welcome to the Summit," said UUA District President Connie Hass Zuber to a ballroom of denominational leaders gathered together at the Fort Worth Ashton Hotel. The evening meeting held on the eve of the start of the 2005 General Assembly invited UUA District Presidents, district staff, UUA executive leadership staff, and members of the UUA Board of Trustees together to talk about how all can work, cooperatively, to lead the Association.

"Whatever the job title you wear tonight, your needs compliment the needs of everyone else in the room," said Zuber. "This is a chance to enhance our relationships of people who are elected, called, and hired. We will put together a recipe, understand the ingredients, authorize some bakers...this is part of the right relationship we need to be in ...to reconnect, synchronize, build capacity, focus. This is the path moving from institutional maintenance to being fully alive together."

Zuber, along with UUA Trustee-at-Large Tamara Payne Alex explained that the evening's agenda called for the group to consider several questions and then continue working to develop commonly shared answers to allow the work of the districts and the larger Association to be more deeply connected to the core values affirmed for the Association.

Eva Marx and Eric Kluz, who serve respectively as Trustee and President of the Ballou Channing District, continued with an explanation of how the idea and structure for the evening's summit had evolved.

Marx related, "It was four years ago that I attended my first District Presidents Association meeting as the President from the Ballou Channing District. I was in awe at the wealth of information being shared...the goldmine of knowledge and experience, the avenues available for learning about congregational concerns and successes. But I wondered why the District Presidents Association wasn't consulted more...and the answer was that the DPA was viewed by the UUA's Board of Trustees as a support group, without official standing in the UUA. It might have been that there was no official standing of that group – bylaws or powers – but the District Presidents Association had the potential to be more than a support group.

"Making the DPA President a regular observer at Board of Trustees meetings was a big step in strengthening continuity and establishing a direct channel of communication between the DPA and the Board of Trustees," Marx said. "Now, the President of the DPA also joins Board working group meetings and offers the perspective of district presidents. Playing the role of official scribe for the published meeting notes of each Board meeting gives the DPA president an opportunity to express their voice and enhance mutual understanding. "

Kluz pointed out that representatives of the DPA were invited to participate in the selection of the UUA's Director of District Services one year ago, and to rethink the formula for financial support of the UUA. It culminated in the realization that "fixing the district funding formula is the tip of the iceberg in understanding how to offer programs and services..."

The DPA sent a letter to the Board of Trustees last November, said Kluz, saying that the DPA had spent time and energy thinking about programs and services. They asked, "What is the working definition of the purpose of a district in the language of the Association's vision, mission and purpose?" That, explained Kluz, is the question this group is called together to discuss this evening.

Kluz, who also serves as Vice President and incoming President of the DPA, explained that the letter which the DPA had sent to the Board asking, among other things, 'why are we in Association with one another,' was referred to a working group comprised of 2 district presidents, 2 trustees, Moderator Gini Courter, and Harlan Limpert, Director for District Services. "We want to list all the potentials and possibilities of our ministry," said Kluz.

Each table gathered in Fort Worth (6 to 8 people at each table) was asked to split into two groups and reflect on these questions:

What is our unique ministry in this world?

What is it that we are called to do together?

Among the responses were these:

• we are a place where people can come together from different perspectives...we uniquely are able to bring people together who have had different backgrounds.
• we provide a place for people of many perspectives to come together and do the work of justice.
• we exist to develop opportunities for the liberal religious experience to grow
• we provide spiritual transformation and transcendence
• we offer radical manifestations of that truth – that we are all loved, we are all worthy
• we are called to offer much closer alignment between districts, boards and the larger Association

The larger group was then asked to reflect on this question:
"What would happen if Unitarian Universalism left the world?"

The responses, remarkably in alignment with one another, included these:

• a voice for justice would be lost
• there would be lonely islands of religious liberalism without the power of collective voice
• The capacity of loving transformation, hopeful reconciliation and seeking justice would be diminished
• the pluralistic religious world view would be diminished...advocacy for the individual search for truth and meaning would be lost
• We would lose a voice for justice and safe place for diversity of all kinds
• the interdependent web of existence would lose a champion
• the human spirit would have to reinvent to give the world a future of peace and tolerance
• we would lose our brand of aggressive public witness and advocacy and our unique place for nourishment and identity in the world
• we would be led to re-envision a faith to help individuals engage deeply with themselves, each other and the world.

Following a break, Harlan Limpert, UUA Director for District Services and Burton Carley, Trustee from the Southwest District, spoke to the representatives. Carley shared his experience of being a trustee and the ways in which that experience had evolved. He said, "When I came on as a Trustee I could not imagine serving two full terms. I was talked into running and after my first year I wanted to leave. I just ran, happily, for my second term.

"Something happened. There is a spirit moving among us that has to do with maturation of our spiritual institution. People are less reactive, more mature, ready to think outside the box; hungry for spiritual depth; they have an interest in moving out into the world and doing ministry differently than the way we thought about it in the past. I hear a need for people to form deeper relationships than we have done in the past – this is an example...having us not talk about 'us' and 'them.' There is no UUA somewhere else, we are the UUA. An interest in re-imaging the ways in which we do our relationships is driving so many things, and this is one of them, and I am happy to be part of what I see as a renewal of our faith, and our reclaiming of our identity as a religious people. How should the Board of Trustees, and the staff and the districts, be in better relationship together? That is what we are trying to imagine."

Limpert, former Human Resources Director for the retailing mega-firm Target said, "When I last worked at Target, they had 1600 stores. When I started, they had 46. I don't claim credit for this...but we had come up with ways to increase sales and make money. The store manager made us pledge that we would not share our creative ways of increasing sales with the next Target store. And we accepted that...but it wasn't too much later when one of the leaders raised the question of 'what the hell are we doing?' WalMart, K-mart and Target all began in October of 1963. The leader said the people we are competing against was not the Target down the street, but the other retailers.

"We were stuck in a paradigm...And getting un-stuck is part of what led to the company growing as much as it has. The work we are doing here is so much more important than what Target has done, but we sometimes also get stuck in our own paradigms that hold us back.

"I would like us to think about how we might get out of them. To give you an example: we have a number of openings on our district staff. One is in Ohio Me adville. Being a responsible person, I think we need to talk to the district president, and post this job, and look for someone to fill this opening. Someone said, "why don't we think of more creative ways to meet the needs of the congregations?" So we thought and said, there is this great DE in St. Lawrence, Tom Chulak, who could do great stuff in Ohio Me adville, and maybe we could restructure the money and the finances, and have better stuff happening. And what was cool is that this didn't come out of illness or disease or financial problems...it came out of health and a desire to do something different and maybe more effective. We don't know what we are going to do, but it's an exciting conversation."

Limpert continued, "We want you to spend fifteen minutes at the same tables [at which you are now seated], and give some thoughts to a question:

What could the unique role of the districts be in enhancing our Unitarian Universalist ministry in this world? (What could districts do more of, or do differently, or if there were no districts, what would we lose in our ministry?)

****************

After a period of reflection, Moderator Gini Courter came to the microphone. She said, "Why did we spend this evening together? This conversation is essential to what we want to do and where we need to go in the future. The Board, the District Presidents, the field staff, meet infrequently. To sit together is important...and if we are to have authentic partnerships, they start happening here, together. The opportunity is the same as for all of us: we can grow and change, or die. The UUA Board, administration, committees, are trying to move into a space of open partnership – we meet together and talk, and try to solve things together."

Courter went on to give examples of a partnership that is "in fits and starts excellent...a little kludgey at first: the relationship between the GA planning committee and the Board is an example: we are meeting together and trying to develop a partnership. The prior relationship was mediated by the board liaisons on the planning committee...and the staff and the president and the moderator. People didn't talk to one another...this is triangulation, it is not authentic, it is inefficient. We work with people who have agendas in a hierarchical system...the religious right, conservatism. I am not suggesting we want this, but we can't afford glacial speed. We need to be faster and more flexible. We need to have more ad hoc partnerships...the days of consultations where we then send people to the table are gone. We don't have the time and we don't have the resources.

"We have gotten emotionally mature as a faith community," said Courter, "and this is cool. We are not teenagers any more. Today we are forty two years old...and if we feel like maybe we are starting to make adult decisions and have more trusting relationships, maybe there is a reason for this.

"The goal is renewal of our faith in authentic spirit and partnership. We need to knock over barriers. One is turnover of elected leadership...how do we orient folks and move forward. If we can figure out how to do this, we can help our congregations and move forward. On the UUA Board, it used to be that if you learned one thing, you didn't need to know anything else...the goal was getting elected. We have to hit the ground and never stop learning...it's a world that moves very fast. We need to get unstuck, that is critical.

"One of the problems we have going forward is that we have a great time and then we have to figure out what to do next." Courter said, "I would like us to authorize a team to:

• collect information
• propose solutions (to the question of what districts could be)

"Authorization is key, she said. "The UUA board can easily authorize. The district staff knows how to organize. The APF is staff-driven and the authorization is easy. The DPA is now learning how to empower your executive committee to come to the table and speak for you. You can say, 'we are going to elect leaders and chose someone and lead on our behalf.'

"We want to leave here saying that we are going to put together a team to talk about what came out of the cards that you filled out tonight, but also we want to acknowledge that the DPA identified a problem about more equitable funding to the districts, and we ask, how are we going to do this? The Board wants to move to generosity-based funding So what ways can we adopt and be creative together and grow this faith in leaps and bounds? We want to build relationships locally. If we were looking at the team, there would be a couple of representatives from the DPA, a couple from the Board, a couple from the district staff, and a couple from the APF committee.

"So," concluded Courter, "There are two models: we can continue to meet once a year and know that we won't do this in a shared way, or we can be fast and flexible and do work and stay in touch with all of us – a tiger team – something faster than glacial. How does this sound? Does it scare you, or are we good? We should have the team together before we leave GA. Connie and Eric will get two people. Harlan will work with the district staff. We need to have two people from the APF committee, one from the Board and one from the District presidents. And we need someone from stewardship and development. Ned Wight will get the Board people. We will do all this before we leave Fort Worth.

"Harlan will field names. My commitment is that we will take all the information gathered on the cards you filled out tonight, and we will publish them broadly to all who are gathered in this room. And we want this forwarded to those from represented groups not in the room. And when we meet next year, we will meet and meet to celebrate success."

Courter's remarks, and the process those gathered in the room had experienced, drew enthusiastic applause. Stay tuned: there are changes afoot in the way the Association's leadership relates, group to group, one to another. As Courter said, change is in the air "and we want to grow this faith by leaps and bounds." To which all the leaders present for this summit would surely say, "amen."

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