2006 Expanding the Interdependent Web: Congregation Leadership for the Digital Age

Speakers: Dr. Angela Merket, Rev. Dr. Kenneth Brown

Prepared for UUA.org by: Margy Levine Young, Reporter; Jone Johnson Lewis, Editor

Dr. Merkert, Congregational Services Director of the Central Midwest District, and Rev. Brown, District Executive of the Central Midwest District and Pacific Southwest District, respectively. This session described their vision of transformational leadership, listing the key qualities that leaders need to have.

Transformational leadership is mission-driven, asking the question "What am I called to do and be, here and now?" It also casts a vision that challenges the congregation to move forward. The leader must practice discernment, beginning with what needs to be done and what is right for this congregation now.

One important quality of transformation leadership is that you practice "radical hospitality," not in the sense of PR and marketing work, but of truly being open to the stranger in terms of our generosity and vulnerability. This comes from Father Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt's book, Radical Hospitality: Benedict's Way of Love (Paraclete Press, 2002), by two Benedictines.

Another quality is that you embrace leadership as faith-based work, modeling living in right relationship in community. A congregation is the spiritual discipline of living in community. This may involve speaking the truth in love, and even enforcing policies that exclude people, but you won't have a safe, engaging community if people don't feel both physically and emotionally safe.

Valuing results more than activity is also a vital leadership quality. We can get caught in process, which is an important part of building engagement and commitment, to the point that we never get results. Process became almost more important than results over the last few decades, but we need to hold ourselves accountable as leadership that gets things done.

In this work, we can never be sure of outcomes, and we must be willing to take risks in situations of complexity. Chaos can be good when it leads to positive change, because change can be messy. A leader can't completely avoid risks if we are looking for transformation. When we have taken a risk, we need to look back to determine whether the risk was worth the loss of safety and how it works. Sending a questionnaire out to your congregation doesn't work to assess the results of a program; instead, we need conversations about what happened. We need to make it okay for staff and committees to work within their mission and budget, including taking risks, even when the risks don't work out.

Risks can involve going to a second service, building new space, adding staff, or changing the way you raise money. Merkert and Brown gave the example of challenging congregations to dedicate one Sunday offering a month to a local social agency. Some congregations were concerned about the loss of income. One had abolished the Sunday offering entirely, and used this as a way of re-introducing it. All found that taking this risk worked out; the congregations ended up with increases in their offerings that more than made up for the amount that they donated to outside agencies.

Leaders focus on opportunity, rather than problems. Boards should look at the opportunities that are out there for going forward with the mission and vision of the congregation, rather than solving immediate problems. Ideally, committees and staff do the day-to-day work of the church, leaving the Board to look at the bigger picture.

Shared leadership means thinking of "we" rather than "I." Many people should be empowered to the work of the congregation, rather than retaining the power in the Board. This can involve cultural change in many congregations. Committees and staff need to be empowered to do their work without running back to the Board every time they do something; they should each have a mission and a budget and can do their work within them, while being held accountable for their choices.

Finally, a transformational leader is aware of the congregation's history and style, but doesn't hold onto that history. While understanding the congregation's culture, you can honor it and name it, but move forward with changes to the culture where it stands in the way of the congregation's mission and vision. Perhaps your congregation had a bad experience with going to two services, and is trying it again. While recognizing, naming, and honoring people's experience, you can still make change, explaining that you'll check in with people to see how the change is going. However, the decision-making must still rest with the leadership.

Another important topic is board governance styles, and Brown and Merkert identified five styles. Program style means that the Board is in charge of everything, usually in a small congregation. As congregations grow, boards frequently move to a portfolio model, where committee chairs make up the board. In the liaison model, board members have specific responsibilities but aren't chairs, so they concentrate more on Board work. Policy style boards focus on the policy and bigger vision rather than day-to-day issues. The political style addresses issues or projects by organizing to achieve a person's or group's position. Your governance needs to fit with your congregation's structure. If style and structure don't match, they may fight each other rather than working together.

Revs. Brown and Merkert handed out a matrix showing how we have changed over the millennia. The matrix comes from The Millennium Matrix, by M. Rex Miller (published by Jossey-Bass in 2002). Miller identifies the period of 1500-1910 as the "Print-Reformation" period, 1950-2010 as the "Broadcast-Celebration" period, and the period starting in about 2010 as the "Digital-Convergence" period. (The date of 2010 is approximate; we have already begun this move.) The matrix describes us in terms of how we believe, know, see beauty, work and trade, and live together. He suggests that as we move into the Digital Age, our congregations are still in the Print Era. This has to do with how we share information within our own congregations as well as how we make ourselves visible in the larger world.

Many congregations find that new members are coming in from their web sites. How is your web site constructed? Is it designed for your current members or potential members, or both? We need to think about who our communications are for, how they look, and how they are disseminated. Our web sites tend to be extensions of our print communications. Our challenge is to recognize that evidence suggests that the Web is the way that people find our congregations and learn about UUism, especially younger people. Some congregations are streaming the audio of their services and the main listeners are the elderly who can't make it to church. (First Society in Madison, WI , streams their sermons.)

If we put our sermons and services on the Web or add email communications to the way that our community works, what does it mean to be in community? We need to avoid the impersonal isolation that can be an outcome.

The district staff has created an audio CD of short essays for lay leaders about how to run a congregation, called "Drive Time Essays." Our congregations can do the same kinds of things, offering CDs of sermons, talks, and music to your visitors. Some congregations have thought about using more multimedia in Sunday services, which has been an effective to include youth and young adults in services.

For more information about Revs. Merkert and Brown's vision of transformation leadership, see their blog at www.viewfromthemountains.blogspot.com . They have articles about policy-style boards and adapting the Policy Governance model to work with your board, as well as a bibliography. The InterConnections section of the UUA web site includes articles about leadership and governance styles. Rev. Merkert is leaving the district staff but has teamed up with Rev. Brown to create a consulting team to create the same types of workshops that they presented at GA.

Unitarian Universalist Association
25 Beacon St. | Boston, MA 02108 | 617-742-2100