Most congregations require an annual evaluation of the minister. This is a worthy requirement, but it must be framed and conducted well to be useful rather than (at best) frustrating or (at worst)counterproductive.  Below are some suggestions to get the most out of the process. (A PDF of this post, suitable for printing and sharing with your lay leaders, is available here.)

Make sure the right people are in the room. What body should conduct the review? Sometimes this information is outlined in the minister’s letter of covenant/call or in the congregational by-laws. If it isn’t, the group of lay leaders that works most closely with the minister (with input as appropriate from others) should facilitate this conversation.

Be clear about the purpose of the review. What does everyone involved hope to accomplish? The review will be an exercise in fruitlessness, maybe even frustration, if it’s being done merely to check off a box.

Frame the conversation in terms of mutual ministry. Ministry is collaborative, not performative. How are pastor and parish in this together? Where have we helped each other grow or made each other stronger this year? What do we need from one another in the coming year?

Set helpful metrics. What mile markers will tell us how well we are living into God’s call? (Having a functional mission statement makes these criteria much easier to establish.) The wrong metrics prompt focus on surface rather than substantive issues.

Look backward and forward. What have we noticed and what do we hope for? Examining – though not lingering in – the past can be a springboard for promising conversations about what lies ahead.

Welcome the opportunity to minister in the midst of the review. Framing the conversation in terms of mutual ministry allows the participants to check in with one another, not just as fellow constituents of the church but also as people.

Use feedforward for constructive feedback. How can we leverage difficulties into positive changes? Useful criticism starts with what we’ve learned and where we are now, then looks ahead to what we can do differently.

Agree on intervals and means for feedback through the year. Concerns and celebrations don’t need to wait until the formal review. What are the logical times of year for all parties to touch base with each other, and what’s the most helpful way to go about that?

Re-covenant as needed. What about the covenant we’ve been operating under needs to change? As shifts happen, intentional tweaks to how minister and congregation relate to each other need to be made.

Below are some questions that could be useful toward the ends named above.

This past year

At the beginning of last year, what did we believe God had called us to do and be together? In what ways did we live into that? What obstacles did we encounter, and how did we navigate them? What did we learn?

Where did we notice God at work most powerfully in our ministry together this past year? When were we most energized and engaged?

How have we grown as minister and congregation since the last review?

As individuals, how are we doing spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically?

This coming year

What do we believe God is calling us to do together in the coming year? What are some first steps in living toward that vision? What obstacles do we anticipate?

How can we create even more space for the Spirit to move in, among, and through us this year?

What changes do we need to make to address obstacles that remain from last year or that we anticipate for the coming year? What resources and leadership do we need to overcome these challenges?

What are our self-care plans for the coming year? How can we support and hold each other accountable?

In what areas do we want to grow as minister/disciples? How might we go about that? How can we support and hold one another accountable?

Specifically for the minister

How well does your position description match what you actually do? What do you need to stop doing? What needs to be updated in your position description to make it more accurate?

How well does your compensation align with your needs and responsibilities? What adjustments need to be considered?

Loose ends

Coming out of this conversation, what follow-up is needed? Who will do it, and by when?

Which aspects of this conversation need to remain confidential? How do we define confidential?

Last week I shared discussion questions to help a congregation understand what exactly its church size is and how this size relates to 1) expectations placed on the pastor and 2) the ways newcomers are welcomed and included. These reflection points are important because they help leaders pinpoint why the numbers aren’t increasing – or why they rise, only to be bumped back down. But much more than that, the accurate assessment of size enables a congregation to consider what God is calling it to do and be and to make needed cultural and structural shifts toward those ends. Here, then, is part two of the discussion guide.

Opportunities

Who comprises our community? A demographic study could be helpful for gleaning this information. Even better, take a prayer walk or drive around your immediate community, making an effort to notice who your neighbors are. Once you have identified your neighbors, ask them about their concerns.

What organizations meet the needs of the different populations? According to the different populations and service organizations, what needs are not currently being met? There’s no need to re-invent the wheel. Where might there be opportunities to come alongside agencies or churches doing good work? Where are the gaps your church might consider filling? (Hosting a panel discussion with representatives from city leadership and/or the service sector is one way to get at these questions. Talking with social workers and school counselors is another.) Think in terms of physical, spiritual, relational, mental, and emotional challenges.

Assets

What resources for ministry do we have at our disposal? Consider but don’t limit your thinking to money on hand and the physical plant. Other assets include spiritual leadership, ministries/programs, relationships/contacts/spheres of influence, special skills/knowledge, work ethic, and the willingness to try something new.

Capacity

What is our capacity for ministry? Every congregation has a sweet spot in which members feel a healthy sense of urgency and deep engagement but aren’t in danger of burnout. What is your congregation’s capacity in terms of relationships, leadership, energy, finances, and physical space?

• In which areas have we maxed out our capacity?

• What do we need to give up to create more capacity?

• In which areas do we still have capacity left to use?

Represent the different areas of capacity with pie charts or thermometers, then color in the percentages.

Convergence 

What is God nudging us to consider? Given what you have noticed and prayerfully considered, what is your congregation’s mission in the coming months and beyond?

Are we the right size for taking this on, or do we need to size up or down? You have discussed your church’s size, culture, and expectations. Now it’s time to lay those over the vision God has given you and see where there’s alignment and where changes need to be made.

If church size needs to change size to fulfill calling, in what ways can we begin to function at that size? The system will always bump your congregation back to the size it was if you don’t make infrastructure changes first. Given what you know about various church sizes, what might those changes include? Think in terms of pastoral/staff leadership, lay leadership, inroads for newcomers, and procedures. If you can articulate the why for making these shifts – your mission – you will have a much easier time executing them.

“How can we grow our church?”

This is the question that haunts a clergyperson’s dreams, whether it wells up from the minister’s own mind and heart or is voiced by laypeople every time they look at attendance and giving patterns. It’s not necessarily a bad question. It does make a couple of big assumptions – that we need to grow and that we are in agreement about what growth looks like – unless it comes at the tail end of discussions about the congregation’s culture and God-given purpose.

Boiled down to its essence, a church’s size is based on two factors: the role of the pastor and the way newcomers enter the system. (Descriptions of the various size designations are available here.) Ministers can use questions and storytelling around these two dynamics to help leaders begin to understand how the church works and what might need to change for growth to occur.

Pinpointing the church’s actual size

• How many members does our church have? What is weekly attendance? How do we define regular attendance?

• What do you love about the size of our church?

• What limits does our church size put on us?

• What is your favorite story about this church that relates to its size?

Understanding ministerial functioning

• What is the role of our pastor(s) – from pastor’s point of view and people’s?

• What engages and energizes our pastor?

• What would our pastor like to do if there was time/energy?

• What leadership support does the pastor have? Need?

 Examining systems of welcome and inclusion

• What is our system for recognizing and welcoming newcomers?

• How do we follow up with visitors?

• How do these systems relate to our size?

• When is the last time a visitor came 3+ times?

• How did our newest members know they wanted this to be their faith community?

These prompts are designed to help laity get up on the balcony and see the congregation from a new perspective. Next week I’ll share questions around discerning mission that can bring another level of awareness, such that the congregation can consider whether and in what way(s) it needs to grow to live toward its vision.

In his book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, positive psychologist Adam Grant offers his thoughts on how to champion new ideas. (If you haven’t read the book, I recommend it. He backs up his suggestions with engaging stories and with hard data.) In one of his illustrations, he talks about one CEO’s approach to helping his company get unstuck: telling his executives to brainstorm ideas for putting the company out of business. For two hours these leaders named all the paths to shuttering the doors, their energy building all the while. And when the executives were out of ways to kill the company, the CEO turned the tables and asked the gathered body to come up with ways to insure against these realities. Now understanding that it would be lethal not to take risks, the executives felt the urgency of innovation.

I wonder if congregational leaders would benefit from a similar exercise: “how could we kill this church?” Get all the options out on the table. (Maybe even think about which ones the church is already – or has considered – doing and what the loss would be to the community if your congregation closed.) Then consider what the opposite approach to each might be.

The goal would not necessarily be to take on all of those opposite approaches – they would need to be weighed against the energy and purpose of the congregation – but to move from a mindset of “we can’t afford to change” to “we can’t afford not to change, and we have some ways forward.” This exercise could help communicate the need for urgency to the participants’ minds and hearts and could illuminate some of the opportunities in challenge, two of John Kotter’s strategies for moving people out of complacency.

Consider using this approach, then, next time a visioning process for an individual ministry or the congregation as a whole yields the standard answers. I’d love to hear what ideas are gleaned and what shifts are made.

Do you have a case of the shoulds? (I have a chronic condition that I struggle to keep in check.)

“I should finish this sermon before I go to bed.”

“I should visit my homebound member, even though I saw him two weeks ago.”

“I should count my calories more closely.”

“I really need to marinate on my response some more, but I should send this email reply now anyway because my board chair is expecting it.”

“I should go to that third evening meeting this week, regardless of whether I have much to add to the discussion.”

“I should tackle that pile of dirty clothes in the floor.”

I should…I should…I should. 

Now, there are a few worthwhile shoulds. I should eat more veggies. I should make an appointment with the dentist. I should be kind to everyone I meet. But in most cases, this is how I’d describe that big pile of should:

Originality: How do I know what I’m capable of if my life is ruled by shoulds?

Understanding: How will I grasp who I am, what my call is, and where others are coming from if I’m too busy doing shoulds?

Leisure: How will I ever get time to rest and re-center if I’m playing whack-a-mole with shoulds?

Deeper connections: How will I ever create time and space for knowing and being known by God and my loved ones if there’s always – and there is – one more should to check off the list?

Shoulds are loud, persistent, confidence-kicking tyrants. Next time a should pops into your head, ask:

Who says I should do this?

Why is it important to that person that 1) this get done and 2) that I do it?

What do my head, heart, and gut tell me about this should?

How will fulfilling this should help me be the minister, family member, friend, or person God has called me to be?

You are valuable, you are beloved, just as you are. You don’t have to earn it.

Contrarian 1: “I’m not so sure that starting this new ministry is a good idea. It will take a lot of financial and people resources that we don’t have to spare, and we can’t be sure that it will move us forward. Can you give examples of other churches that have tried this and had success?” 

Contrarian 2: “This new ministry isn’t needed. What we’re doing now is perfectly fine. Even if we did try something new, this particular idea is doomed to fail. I’m only thinking of the church when I say I can’t support this initiative.” 

If you’ve spent any time in congregational ministry, you’ve dealt with these two contrarians. Both of them can be very frustrating, especially when it seems so clear to you that change is needed and that there’s a solid plan for said change. There’s an important distinction between these two contrarians, though, and being able to identify and manage it could mean the difference between the congregation getting behind the change or staying mired in complacency.

The first contrarian is a skeptic, a logical thinker. Skeptics are cautious. They can help refine ideas. They can be brought on board to new initiatives with more facts. Skeptics might slow down processes, but their need for details can help churches guard against trying to do all the things. And once skeptics are convinced of a plan’s merit, they can become big cheerleaders and hard workers.

The second contrarian is what John Kotter calls a NoNo. NoNos don’t want change and will never support new ideas. In fact, a NoNo will actively work – loudly or behind the scenes – to undermine any change. When NoNos ask for more details, they are looking for selective facts to support their positions, not information to help them process the proposal. Many a NoNo has killed small-scale changes and ministry action plans coming out of a visioning process.

Last week I wrote about the importance of true urgency, and one of Kotter’s tactics for creating urgency is dealing with NoNos. Kotter says that NoNos will let the air out of congregational urgency if you spend time and energy try to convince them to get behind the coming change. On the other hand, they will gain power if you simply ignore them. Here, then, are some constructive ways to deal with NoNos:

Pray. Pray for the NoNo, for the situation, for discernment, and for your relationship and interactions with the NoNo.

Distract them. Identify their talents and recruit them to ministries (far away from the one they’re trying to kill) in which they can put their skills to good use and feel positive about their contributions.

Use positive peer pressure. Find someone who is a big proponent for the new ministry idea and is respected by the NoNo. Assign this person the task of neutralizing the NoNo’s negativity anytime the NoNo voices it. If this person can use humor gracefully, great! If not, the person can gently remind the NoNo – and more importantly, others who are listening – why the change-in-progress is important for mission fulfillment.

Remove them from leadership. This is really tough to do with volunteers and should only be attempted if the two tactics above don’t work. Sit down with the NoNo and at least one other congregational leader. (You might also want to give your judicatory leader a heads-up in advance.) Express that since all the voices have been heard and all the options have been explored, and the congregation has subsequently decided to move forward with the initiative, it’s essential that lay leaders be focused on how to implement it most effectively. If the NoNo is not willing to be solution-focused, you would be happy to help the NoNo find a different way to use gifts and skills in service to God.

It just takes one NoNo, even one working diligently at the fringes, to bring innovation to a grinding halt and make your vocational life miserable. Don’t let a NoNo keep you and your congregation from living toward God’s vision for your ministry.

Two-plus weeks into the new school year, our family is slowly getting into a groove. One big adjustment has been the loooooong afternoons. (My son got home from preschool around 4:00. At the end of his pre-K day, we’re pulling into the driveway by 2:20.) One of the gifts this “found” time offers is an opportunity to read. While L watches an episode of Nature Cat – the four-year-old’s equivalent of an evening at a NYC comedy club, judging by his laughter – I sit beside him and knock out a chapter in a book on systems theory, business, leadership, or practical theology.

I just finished A Sense of Urgency by John P. Kotter, a quick read that defines urgency and why it’s so important to organizational life. Urgency is an awareness in the head and heart that something must soon change for our church/business/institution to keep moving forward and that I have a role to play in creating that change. Urgency is the foil to complacency, which convinces us that things are fine as they are. True urgency is different from false urgency, which is driven by anxiety and characterized by busywork that has little to no impact.

I probably don’t have to convince you that a sense of urgency is very much needed right now in the church and in the world. Complacency keeps us from fulfilling our mission until that purpose is out of reach – or at least requires digging ourselves out of a sizeable hole. False urgency makes us think we’re doing something until we realize that all our busywork has actually been guzzling our energy and distracting us from moving toward our goals.

How, then, do we create real urgency as pastoral leaders? Here are Kotter’s tactics, reinterpreted for clergy.

First, feel a sense of urgency yourself and act out of it.

• Focus on your specific call to ministry and on the mission of your congregation. Run everything you do through those filters.

• Look for ways to shift or eliminate tasks and meetings that don’t relate to  personal or congregational mission. Unrelated “doing” likely falls into the false urgency category.

• Tell others what you are doing and why. “Here’s how I’m spending my day. Here’s how those actions move us closer to our vision.”

• Leave no open/loose ends. At the end of meetings, get clarity about who is doing what and by when.

[Note: much of ministry is “soft,” such as making pastoral care visits and dealing with contrarians. That doesn’t mean these tasks are not urgent. It is important, though, to connect these undertakings to the bigger picture.]

Second, communicate facts about the need for urgency in ways that speak to others’ heads and hearts.

• Create spaces for storytelling. Data is important, but narrative is convincing.

• Get an outsider’s perspective. Talk to the church’s neighbors. What are their gifts? Needs? Views of the church? Or bring in a panel of people who serve the community. In what areas do their needs for partners and the church’s resources meet?

Third, seize opportunities that come with challenges.

• Reframe problems. Don’t deny the issue, but also note how it creates new possibilities.

• Do things you can’t do during times of stability. Stability breeds complacency. Challenges shake up our perspectives and force us to act.

Fourth, deal with naysayers.

• This is a huge issue in churches that merits a blog post on its own. Stay tuned for part 2 on creating urgency, coming next week.

“Can I get your mocha started for you?”

The barista had a smile on her face and a cup at the ready. I hadn’t even placed my order yet, but I’ve been to Panera on so many Sunday mornings that she could anticipate my request.

I felt a little giddy, I’ll admit. I’ve arrived! I’m a regular.

I haven’t been a “regular” anywhere since seminary. Back then I spent every Wednesday night – karaoke night, mind you – at Trackside Tavern. (Once I went, bag of saltines in hand, because I felt like death but couldn’t stand to miss.) While there were plenty of folks who came to karaoke once in a while, there was a core community that participated weekly, come hell or high water. Occasionally they would greet me with a chorus of “Baby!” – the name I often went by then because one of my good seminary/karaoke friends was Laura – as I walked in. Sometimes the bartender would plop a cider in front of me before I even greeted her. I didn’t always have to choose my own karaoke songs, because others would put in requests for me. (Ironic, since I have a terrible voice.)

That experience of community was special because I felt seen. Remembered. Included. It was an opportunity to show care for others as well. To cheer them on fiercely when they sang. To bear witness to difficulties in their personal and professional lives in between performances.

This is what congregations do at their best. They don’t just say hello and hand promotional coffee mugs to newcomers, they recall visitors’ names and a bit about them on their subsequent Sundays. They don’t just ask guests about the same job/hobby/favorite team week after week but invite them to connect that interest to the life of the church.

Some congregations – bless their hearts – don’t do any of this well. They don’t see (or at least greet) visitors, which makes remembering and including impossible. Some see and even remember guests, but never find a way to include them. Some see and include but don’t really remember much about individuals, making inclusion feel more utilitarian than truly welcoming. For a community to grow, it must attempt to do all three things.

But why do seeing, remembering, and including matter?

In the early years of our marriage, my husband and I worked a week of junior high church camp together. Each time we had roughly the same crew of counselors. At the end of year four, all the camp staff was gathering for a celebratory, we-survived-six-days-of-teen-drama picture. One of the counselors handed me his camera so I could take the group photo.

I was on one side of the camera. Everyone else was on the other side. I’ve never – before or since – felt so invisible. So forgotten. So left out.

I took the picture, shoved the camera back at the counselor, and disappeared to bawl my eyes out. I never worked another week of camp. (As you can tell, this is still a sore spot ten or so years later.)

This is what happens to church folks who fade away. They feel unnoticed, unremarkable, unwelcome. They may never be brave enough to try another congregation.

If your church isn’t greeting visitors, start there with some equipping and encouragement on how to do so. If they’re further along, help them see the importance of remembering and including and give them some ready-made tools for that work.

We can all do better. As followers of a Christ who saw the invisible, remembered the marginalized, and included us all at the expense of his own life, we must do better.

“What are y’all talking about?”

“What does that mean?”

“What road is this?”

“Is that the Taj Mahal?”

My 4-year-old son is learning to satisfy his irrepressible curiosity by asking questions. He practices a lot. Sometimes I won’t be finished responding to one query before he lobs another. My husband and I counted approximately 541,092 questions on the 3.5-hour trip from our home to Atlanta last week. Actually, double that, because almost every unique inquiry was followed up by his request to repeat the answer.“What’d you just say?” (Yes, we’ve had his hearing checked.)

His questions get tedious, but I do my best not to discourage them. My parents always made time for mine. I knew I’d found a church home as a teenager when my Sunday School teachers and youth minister let me challenge what they told me. And I make a living asking coaching questions of clergy who want to make positive changes in their personal and professional lives.

My brain, my faith, and my livelihood run on questions. That is why it really pains me when people preface their wonderings with, “Maybe this is a dumb question, but…” or worse yet, not feel comfortable making their inquiry at all.

If you’re wondering whether your question is worth asking – without any qualifying – here is an assessment:

• Are you genuinely curious?

• Does your question invite rather than shut down discussion?

• Are the time and venue right, to the best of your understanding, for your question?

(Note that right time and venue don’t necessarily have to do with making your hearer(s) comfortable. Sometimes it’s important to ask well-planned questions that raise anxiety.)

If you responded to these bullet points in the affirmative, then go forth and ask boldly!

Last week I had a front-table speech for Brian McLaren’s early-morning keynote to a room full of clergy cohort conveners. When he dove into his very meaty content, I was glad I was already 2/3 of the way through my coffee. He had some challenging words for faith leaders who are very concerned with the direction of our congregations, denominations, and/or country. In these chaotic, divisive times, McLaren said, we must be intentional and honest about our pastoral approach. In choosing our tack, we have four choices:

Offend no one. We can limit our preaching and teaching to “safe” topics. (I imagine this list of subjects is pretty short!) McLaren noted that we will nevertheless discover new ways to offend people every week, because the Gospel is political.

Go where the wind blows. We can listen to what the people in our care want to hear, then echo it from the pulpit. McLaren warned that there is grave danger in this approach, as our constituents are being tugged by opposing forces, not all of which are in line with the Gospel. We might find ourselves espousing – or at least leaving unchallenged – convictions that are contrary to the core of who we are and what we believe.

Push the congregation. We can prod our parishioners on the core issues of the dignity of all people, stewardship of the planet, caring for the poor, and ushering in peace – what McLaren considers the four core issues of faith. This is a bold move for those of us who pastor purple churches and/or who worry about making ends meet if our congregations can’t tolerate our stances.

Lead by anxiety. We can share our concerns about the fissures in our culture from a personal perspective, such as “I am worried about the normalization of bullying in our country.” (This is permission-giving for people to acknowledge their own concerns in a safe container, not a handing-off of our own worries.) After we have surfaced the tensions, we can discuss with our members what a faithful, corporate response might look like.

I have talked with many ministers who are mulling how to navigate our charged climate. What does it look like to be faithful both to our personal beliefs and to our call to the setting we serve? How do we exercise our prophetic voices in ways that our people can hear? How do we model ways of listening deeply to one another? How do we balance our desire to be engaged – even activist – citizens with our responsibilities as pastors?

I have struggled with these same questions as a guest preacher and a clergy spouse in a more-red-than-purple congregation. I found Brian McLaren’s framework helpful for making a more conscious decision about my own approach. Maybe there’s a nugget in there for you too.

Last week I shared my positive experience with a congregation that worked with me so that I could live into my dual calling as pastor and parent. Since then I have heard from several clergy: those whose churches who have made similar efforts and those who have left congregational ministry or are considering doing so because their churches want them to compartmentalize their pastoring and parenting selves.

Sometimes congregations simply don’t know how to support the pastor-parent. Below I have shared a few ways a church can reduce parenting stress so that the pastor can better focus on ministry. For the unconvinced, I have thrown in some notes on how these actions benefit the congregation as a whole – beyond having a grateful and less frazzled leader.

If your church has a daycare or preschool, offer a reduced rate to the minister. Side benefit: the minister will undoubtedly be more involved in the school and will be a more informed and enthusiastic evangelist for it in the community.

Allow flexibility in work arrangements, such as permitting the minister to work from home or bring a child to work as needed. Side benefit: though it may seem counterintuitive, ministers will likely be more available and productive if they are not spending time and mental and emotional energies on arranging emergency childcare.

Set up a rotation of church parents/grandparents to help the minister’s child(ren) participate in worship – or to care for young children during worship, if there’s no formal nursery. Side benefit: the church will develop more cross-generational communication and investment.

Provide childcare for evening and weekend meetings that the minister must attend. Side benefit: other parents with young children will now be able to participate in those meetings when childcare is a given.

Help the minister manage the congregation’s expectations of the minister’s family. Side benefit: the graciousness extended to the pastor’s children and significant other can reinforce or help establish a church atmosphere in which everyone feels safe to be their true selves before one another and God.

What would you add to this list?

In summary, congregations need not be afraid to call pastor-parents. In addition to their many gifts, these ministers bring a deepened investment in the church as their child(ren)’s faith community, an instant means of connection with parents and grandparents in the church, and a unique perspective on hospitality toward and the spiritual formation of young families. For pastor-parents to call upon these “extras,” though, the congregation must demonstrate its willingness to welcome both aspects of the minister’s identity.

I was in congregational ministry for over ten years before my child came into the world. During that decade it was sometimes necessary for my husband (a pastor in another denomination) and me to negotiate conflicts between our calendars, but we were both free for the most part to work odd hours, commit to all ministry-related trips we wanted, and sleep off church-induced stress and exhaustion.

That freedom came to a full stop when our son was born four years ago. Suddenly I had to become much more thoughtful about my time and energy usage. While my call to ministry was (and is) as strong as ever, I now had a calling to parenthood as well, and my baby’s dependence meant that I had to figure out how to operate pastorally in a new way.

I was between church positions during my pregnancy, but I was ready to begin looking again soon after L was born. I was extended a call to a part-time ministry in a congregation that was a great theological fit when L was two or three months old. After much hand-wringing, I turned it down because there were big red flags about the position’s flexibility. Not long thereafter I accepted an offer to a congregation that went out of its way to work with me on my office hours, provide me with reduced-price daycare, and set up Sunday evening childcare. This church got the best I had to offer as an experienced minister/new parent because of this extra effort.

While it is true that caring for wee ones consumes a lot of time and focus, parents can be great pastors. And congregations can promote excellence in ministry (and in parenting) by understanding the following:

Some (many? most?) pastor-parents see ministry and child-rearing as dual callings. They are committed to doing both well. A church can make living toward both purposes much easier…or much harder.

Pastor-parents are better able to focus on ministry if they aren’t always worried about their child(ren) or about how congregants view their parenting. The childcare arrangement that works best for the pastor’s family – whatever it looks like – is usually best for the congregation, even if it’s not what the church members would have chosen for themselves or for their minister.

Every minister will have a different pastor-parent style. Some will want or need to bring their child(ren) on pastoral care visits or to evening meetings. Others might choose to build in more separation between pastoring and parenting.

Pastor-parents typically welcome the congregation’s help and parenting wisdom. We can’t do it all, and we don’t know it all! Criticism of the minister’s child-rearing style and especially of the child(ren) is never welcome, however, and can harm the pastor-parishioner relationship.

The church is not just a pastor-parent’s workplace, it is also the PK’s faith community. Just like with any other family in the pews, pastor-parents will invest more in the church if the church invests in their children.

Congregational ministry is one of the only callings in which the leader is evaluated primarily on a weekly take-your-child-to-work day. Bear that in mind when a minister’s kid has a meltdown on the front row during the sermon, and respond with compassion both to the child and to the concerned/embarrassed pastor-parent.

Next week I will offer a part two to this post, noting some ways your church can support the pastor-parent, thereby deepening the pastor-parish relationship and giving the minister opportunity to lead with a full heart.

Your [insert committee here] chair has just suggested that a survey be sent out to take the congregation’s temperature around that committee’s area of ministry. You groan inwardly, because your experience with surveys is that they tend to solicit personal preferences more than information that can be used to shape the ministry’s direction.

It’s true that surveys can muddy the waters if they are not executed well. But surveys can help clarify the church’s needs because they ask the same questions of everyone, yield responses from a range of congregants, and collect a lot of written information. Here, then, are some tips for making your survey as useful as possible.

Identify the goal(s) of the survey. What does the committee hope to gain from this exercise?

Ask questions that elicit the most helpful responses. How will the questions focus respondents on the church’s needs rather than the survey-taker’s preferences? What information will be most useful to the committee? What kinds of survey questions will draw out that information?

Decide on the right number of questions. What survey length will be comprehensive enough to get needed information but not so long as to discourage people from taking it? What is the proper balance between multiple choice/rating questions and free-response questions?

Provide multiple means for taking the survey. Utilizing electronic and hard copy options will allow church members to complete the survey no matter what their comfort level with/access to technology and attendance patterns are.

Determine the best window for survey distribution. Don’t send out the survey in the midst of active conflict or while everyone is on vacation. Do send it out so that the committee has ample time to process the returns before making important decisions. Ensure that the survey is available for a long enough time that everyone will see it and have a chance to respond, but not so long that people will put off filling it out.

Be clear about who will see the survey responses and how the responses will be used. Transparency about the handling of the survey will build trust in the committee and send the message that the congregation’s input is important.

Use the survey in tandem with – not in place of – congregational conversations. Surveys can be conducted before churchwide discussions, and the survey responses can help shape those events. Surveys can also be used as follow-up after congregational conversations.

What wisdom about surveys would you add to this list?

In developing the approach to ministerial searches that is rooted in hospitality, I put together a meeting structure that weaves together the elements of discernment and the business that teams must attend to. It builds in intentional spaces and means of attending to the Holy Spirit as teams go about the work at hand. This outline can be utilized for a range of congregational processes.

Preparing to perceive God’s guidance

• Create an atmosphere for discernment. Prepare the gathering space in a way that is conducive to worshipful work.

• Set aside distractions. Ask, “What does each of us need to turn over to God before we can focus on the work at hand?”

• Worship together in your gathering space. Invite everyone to name where they have seen God at work this week.

• Refine the question for discernment.

  • Ask each team member to give an overview of progress that has been made on agreed-upon actions.

  • Celebrate this progress and build in support for actions that are incomplete.

  • Identify what the team needs to focus on in this meeting. Parse which pieces are matters for discernment and which can appropriately be accomplished through decisions.

  • Clarify the question(s) for discernment that is/are now before the team.

• Pray for indifference. Pray as Jesus did: “Not my will but Thine be done.”

Listen for the wisdom of God

• Gather relevant data. Invite team members to share the details of work done since the last meeting.

• Discuss the data. Encourage each team member to share what they notice from the data presented. Ask clarifying questions. Name what the team doesn’t yet know but needs to know. Listen deeply to one another.

• Pray for wisdom. Acknowledge that the team has done what it can in terms of collecting and evaluating the data. Ask God to move in that new awareness.

• Make friends with silence. Wait on the Lord. Use spiritual disciplines to tune into what God might be saying.

Consider and commit to what God is inviting the team to do

• Identify the resolution that seems (resolutions that seem) to be emerging. Get every concern on the table. Refine every idea that bubbles up.

• Work toward agreement. Start from points of commonality: “What is it that we all seem to be hearing clearly?” Dig deeper on points of resistance: “Tell me more about your hesitation.” Use your team’s previously agreed-upon means of coming to agreement.

• Test the agreement. Let the resolution rest. If your team isn’t able to sleep on it, take a break and then discuss how team members are feeling in their heads, hearts, and guts about the proposed way forward.

• Take action. Make detailed plans for action steps. Who will do what? How, and by when? What support and/or accountability is needed?

Reflect on how God is at work in the process as a whole

• Before adjourning, check in on how the team felt it worked together today and what adjustments to process need to be made.

• Wonder aloud, “What is God up to?”

Discernment: we talk about it. We encourage the people in our care to engage in it. But even so, sometimes we’re not sure exactly how to define it or how to wade into it. This post offers a starting point.

Decisions are intellectual exercises. People gather information from a number of sources, evaluate it, and create actions and a timetable based on the outcomes of their analysis. When people make decisions, they seek to control the outcome. Discernment is an attentiveness – cultivated in the head, heart, and gut – to God’s work in the world so that we might join God in those efforts. Wisdom about the matter for discernment unfolds in God’s time and through many of the same sources upon which decisions are made, plus some that might be discounted when acting purely on logic. Below are some of the key elements of discernment.

Create an atmosphere for discernment. Consider the location, room arrangement, and touchstones that would make your space most conducive to listening for the wisdom of the Holy Spirit.

Set aside distractions. Name and turn over agendas and worries that could keep you from focusing on God’s yearnings.

Worship in your space. Read scripture. Pray. Sing. Remember and acknowledge that God wants good for you.

Refine the question for discernment. You are more likely to get a clear response if your question for God is finely-tuned.

Pray for indifference. Indifference means that, because you trust God’s intentions, you will refrain from nudging the outcome in one direction or another.

Gather relevant data. Use every resource at your disposal, including but not limited to hard data, conversations with others, scripture, individual and collective memories, pro/con lists, imagination, intuition, feelings, and your senses. No data source is off limits in discernment, because God speaks in a number of ways.

Discuss the data. Name what you have discovered through gathering the data – especially the surprises.

Pray for wisdom. Ask God to weave the data together and to help you step back and view the interwoven whole.

Make friends with silence. We are so unaccustomed to silence that when we do experience it, we often feel uncomfortable with it. Start with short spans of silence (30 seconds or so) and build capacity from there. In doing so, you give God a bigger opening. Wait on God to speak.

Identify the resolution that seems to be emerging. What are you hearing?

Test the resolution. Ask God for confirmation that you have discerned correctly. (See criteria for identifying, “is this God?”) Tweak the plan as needed.

Take action. Honor the faithfulness of God by moving forward boldly with the action you have discerned.

While this outline is for individual discernment, you can tweak it at any point to involve others.

Just before Ash Wednesday, I posted what I was giving up – or at least attempting to – for Lent: shame, inaction, defensiveness, withdrawal, and despair. All of these weighty realities were negatively affecting my relationship with God and my interactions with others, and my denial had been so thoroughly obliterated by the political and cultural battles of the last election cycle that it was high time to wrestle with each of these monsters.

Every one of the monsters, I realized, was the result of self-absorption. I didn’t want to hurt, didn’t want to be challenged, didn’t want to give up my sense of security. There are so many people who don’t have the luxury of avoiding hurt, challenge, and insecurity, and so my Lent was an exercise in growing my ability to center their concerns. I wrote a piece about what I learned and how I responded to these gleanings for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s Patheos blog.

But if my Lenten discipline was just an experiment, a temporary shift in focus, then I was not truly willing to be formed, I was not actually interested in growing toward others and God. And if I go back to the way I operated before Ash Wednesday, then I can no longer claim to be a faithful minister or a follower of the gospel. I cannot forget what I have read and heard about the plights of others over these 40 days. I cannot pretend that I didn’t discover parts of myself that need redemption. I cannot ignore that if I believe God is self-giving love, then I must do my human best to embody that same love, comfort be damned.

So hold me accountable, will you? Call me out when needed. Tell me how I can help. I promise I will keep listening, expanding my heart, and trying to do better.

Jesus’ disciple went to the authorities and asked,

What will you give me…

What monetary reward?

What recognition?

What reassurance?

What relief?

…if I betray Jesus to you?

if I take you to him when he is most vulnerable?

if I deny his divinity?

if I ignore his teachings and his example?

if I turn my back on his love for me?

I do this every day.

I betray Jesus

for the love of wealth

for the love of power

for the love of security

for the love of comfort

for things and feelings that are fleeting and fake.

And yet, fully knowing that I will turn on him

– even as I say, Surely not I? –

Jesus invites me to his table,

feeds me with the bread of life,

and offers me the cup of the covenant, saying,

Drink from it, all of you.

I guess “all” truly does mean all,

thanks be to God.

I guess I’d better start living like it.

Tomorrow is the first day of Lent, the season of preparing ourselves for the good news of Christ’s resurrection, with all that it means for us. Lent is a prime time to clear away – with God’s help – the obstacles that keep us from growing in our relationships with the divine and with humankind. Often that spring cleaning involves taking on a particular discipline, whether giving up a distraction or adding a spiritual practice. Both are great means of creating more space in our lives for love. I think I’m going to tweak those approaches a bit and focus on the barriers themselves, using different means to try to shrink them.

Shame. As Brene Brown so helpfully names, shame is a feeling of unworthiness. It is different from guilt, which is regret about an action or an omission. God has fearfully and wonderfully made me. God has fearfully and wonderfully made everyone else too, including people I do not know, like, agree with, or understand. I will seek to be more attentive to when I feel shame and when I use shame as a tactic against others.

Inaction. I have always liked to think of myself as someone who does her part to help others. In the past month – as circumstances for a number of populations have become more dire – I’ve realized I have not been doing nearly enough. I will ask God to open me to opportunities to be generous, vulnerable, and bold…and to kick me in the pants to take those opportunities.

Defensiveness. My mind screams “I’m a good person!” when someone challenges me on what I believe and how I live out those tenets. The truth is, I’m a privileged person, one who has unwittingly perpetuated a number of isms. I will engage in intentional learning about the shortcomings I’m aware of – and, no doubt, unearth more in the process. Not to feel shame, mind you, but in knowing better, to do better.

Withdrawal. It is really, really hard right now to resist pulling my head and my limbs into my shell. In some of the spaces I inhabit, very human opinions are given the weight of gospel, and the outflowing strategies are heralded as salvific. It does not feel safe to share from my heart, or even from my greater comfort center – my mind. I will effort to stay present, because conversation is one of our greatest hopes for unity.

Despair. It feels like every day another heavy, wet blanket is layered onto my tired body. Things are changing so quickly in our country and world, and (to my mind) not in a way that reflects God’s yearning for creation. I will pray continually for hope, using the scriptural phrase, “I believe, help my unbelief!”

What discipline(s) will you take up for Lent?

In several of the communities that I value, there are intense discussions happening about the nature of safe space. Whose sense of safety are we protecting? It’s an important question, one that is rooted in the reality of privilege. All of us are socially located at the intersection of our gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and other factors. Those of us with more privilege are accustomed to others deferring to our safety. I have been wrestling a lot lately with the nature of my privilege as a white, straight, cisgender, Christian, middle class person and the ways my obliviousness to that privilege has harmed others. I want to do better. I must do better. I am grateful for courageous voices that are calling me out, even if the new awareness they spark makes me uncomfortable. After all, what change was ever catalyzed by comfort?

The interactions that are urging me to examine both my innermost self and her outward manifestations are complicated. Listening and speaking can both be shut down quickly, hence the discussions about what makes space safe, and for whom. So what are some of the conversational skills that can help us hang in with one another in the midst of these tough, revealing conversations? Here are some of the thoughts I’ve had from my location as an ever-learning, trying-but-still-stumbling person of privilege:

Clarifying rather than (or at least before) advocating. Most of us speak to be understood before seeking to understand. Reversing that order – asking before telling – can stop a lot of arguments before they start.

Challenging rather than shaming. When we share our own perspectives, what is our goal? Is it to inform, to help our conversation partner grow (challenging), or to make him/her feel bad about her/his status or opinion (shaming)? Information and challenge can strengthen relationships. Shame rarely does that.

Defaulting to belief rather than doubt. Assume that the person saying something hard to hear is telling the truth.

Using “I” rather than “you.” “I” statements (“I feel angry when…” as opposed to “you make me angry”) are basic communication skills, yet we rarely use them. Starting a sentence with “you” tends to put hearers on defense. “I” signals I’m about to talk from my experience.

Avoiding exceptionalism. Don’t leap to self-defense when someone calls out privilege. Instead, take a moment to consider whether that person might be right.

Striving for unity rather than uniformity. We will never all agree. That is ok. But we can look for shared values and purpose to rally around. And in doing so, we will better get to know one another, our histories, and our points of view.

What would you push back on, delete from, or add to this list?

God of all creation,

you made the world we know out of a dark and formless void.

Before your breath swept across the face of the waters,

there was no light.

No sky.

No land.

No way of marking time.

No vegetation.

No animals.

No humans.

You made everything out of nothing, out of chaos.

And it was all good.

On behalf of everyone whose life feels out of control this morning,

who wonders how anything good could come out of such mess,

we pray to you this morning.

Where there is fear, let there be courage.

Where there is discord, let there be unity.

Where there is sickness, let there be healing.

Where there is oppression, let there be liberation.

Where there is loneliness, let there be connection.

Where there is worry, let there be peace.

Where there is want, let there be enough.

Use us, your people, to bring about all of this good,

because in your blueprint,

you bestowed upon humankind responsibility for all living things.

Prompt each one of us,

whether we are the leader of the free world

or have no formal position of power,

to use the skills and influence you have given us

in ways that make your world a place that is more just

more interdependent

more joyful

more beautiful

more sustainable.

These things we ask in the name of Jesus,

who came to redeem the brokenness in all that you made,

and by the power of the Spirit, which recreates us on a daily basis. Amen.