Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

This is the first post in a three part series, read Part 2: The Difference Between Vestry and Congregation and Part 3: Entrusting and Empowering Parish Staff.

Early on, I was exhausted by vestry meetings. They were long, tedious and oddly disconnected from the bigger mission.

On a nine-member vestry (three, three-member classes for three-year terms) there were nine subcommittees. This made for nine monthly reports, most of which had little actual follow through, and had the downside potential of making nine chiefs. To be fair, a good friend of mine has had measured success with making this model work: she’s convinced her parish leadership to see themselves as ‘captains’ and to raise up a crew. Still, she says, there are those ‘committees of one’.

It wasn’t fostering shared ministry, delegated authority, and positive relationships. Simply put, it wasn’t fostering health. Plus, the idea of buttressing such a system with my own time and energy was not going to grow anything but the skills of daily management – skills which, in turn, had no direct impact on growing the congregation or expanding the mission of The Episcopal Church in our immediate community.

The problems were twofold, and both reinforced the other. For one, it effectively made the vestry the be all and end all of the congregation. If decisions were to be made or power exercised, it all happened (or didn’t) at the vestry table. Beyond electing members of the vestry once a year, there was no defined ministry role for the congregation. For another, it focused mission on issues of maintenance. There was an outreach subcommittee, but that was the only one among the nine that had anything to do with looking outside, and even then it was exclusively defined as taking care of those, they thought, unlike us.

I began to introduce a different conversation, first with the vestry. I began to introduce principles of shared ministry and, in part because we were having an honest and heartfelt conversation, the members of the vestry really got into it. It didn’t hurt that many of them had served on prior vestries and had seen the same issues and arguments, year after year. They were tired. And they were able to name in a safe group with trusted leadership that they had had enough of those endless, small games we play. Not everyone did, mind you, but enough to get started.

Having a conversation and growing organic change are two very different things, however. In order to codify this we began to look at our parish By-Laws. This may be a sticky wicket because by-Laws do seem far too legalistic. I shared one organizing principle: Perhaps By-Laws are for a congregation what monastic orders call a Rule of Life, I said. Together with the vestry, that became our first principle: “We believe by-Laws are the way congregations learn to order our common life and prioritize our mission according to the precepts in the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” we wrote.

From there, we were able to get specific and start naming healthy practices of leadership, not just expectations of management. Together over the next six months, we began to write Principles of the By-Laws. One of the first things we named was “unburdening the Vestry from the near-daily management of the church.” “A healthy vestry, we believe, is one vital key to an overall healthy congregation,” we wrote.

That was step one, and it took a while itself. In future blog posts, I’ll write about our other principles of shared ministry and delegated authority, all of which are the tools we’ve used to help build and enforce healthy relationships in our community.