Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

This is third post in a three part series, read Part 1: Unburdening the Vestry here and Part 2: The Difference Between Vestry and Congregation here. 

Decentralized leadership and shared authority, as I’ve written in previous posts, are critical to healthy congregations. Key to all of this is trust, through and through. And that means we’re not talking about bylaws or policies and procedures; we’re talking about the hard and yet grace-filled work of human relationships.

Early on in this conversation, the congregation, vestry, and I realized that a system in which authority is dispersed, in which vestry and congregation exercise different areas of concern, and in which the common good is always bigger than our own individual interpretation requires recruiting and, in some cases, hiring competent, gifted, and spiritually and emotionally mature persons whose sole motivation is the building up of the entire body – those who are with us, even the ones who are present only occasionally, and leaving space for those not yet a part of the body. It’s important to identify key leaders who, because of their job description or, better, by their very nature, keep the borders porous, nurture the relationships and, if necessary, speak truth and heal the divisions as well as be a source of trust for the entire body.

Thus one of the principles we used in turning our parish bylaws into a leadership Rule of Life, of sorts, focused on staff. We’re entrusting “the daily management of the congregation to the rector and staff,” we wrote. “We believe this is healthy for the spiritual lives of those vestry persons who do not wish to be overwhelmed with church business, and it lays down the expectation that the congregation will hire competent, professional persons to carry out St. George’s defined mission.” This is not such a big idea for program sized churches, but it’s a quantum leap for family and pastoral sized congregations.

Churches aren’t the wealthiest institutions on the block these days, but the mainline institutional church has assets, like it or not, and some of those assets can be freed up or liquidated if there is an apparent, tangible benefit such as hiring, say, a parish administrator to help coordinate that motley crew called ‘church’. Also churches are organized around an incredibly compelling mission and can offer very flexible schedules. Churches are in a unique and, some may say, enviable position to recruit entrepreneurial, creative people who care very much about their neighborhood and building up the common good. It’s also a good thing that we begin to bring on parish staff people who are not, already, church members.

The role of parish staff is the role we expect our key lay leaders to play, as well – those who are elected and those ‘organic’ leaders. We pay very close attention to someone’s motivation for stepping forward into leadership, paid or otherwise. Frankly, that person needs to have gifts in building and keeping relationships. I was going to use the term “communication” but, honestly, I’ve grown weary of hearing complaints and/or strategies about effective communication. That word, I fear, has become such a catch-all for what too many people associate with traditional leadership in a volunteer organization. Instead of being about sharing updates or news, communication all too often becomes about power and direction: who was at the meeting? who had the power to make that decision? who gave them that power?

The staff and leaders of the congregation in a decentralized system have no dog in the hunt, as the saying goes, with the exception of ensuring that even the most marginalized voice is heard. They are spiritually and emotionally mature to remember that even the juiciest parish gossip is not worth repeating, and they have some distance from the overall system that they are not easily sucked into conflict.

When I think about this balance and agenda-free leadership style, I’m thinking of our parish administrator at St. George’s, Valley Lee. We’ve been very fortunate to bring on board a very gifted neighbor. She’s a member of this community and she’s highly involved in local causes – even helping with church functions, from time to time – but she’s not a member of the church. She’s dearly beloved and enjoys the flexibility of her schedule, not to mention the opportunity to participate in something bigger than her, something which really is changing lives and improving her neighborhood. When she’s in the office, parishioners and neighbors drop in to say “hello” and a big part of her role is sharing hospitality and the ministry of presence. She very much embraces the mission of the church and is invested in it, including an investment in the lives of the people who make up this diverse body, and by doing what she does in the way she does it she models, for us, how to facilitate, not control.

The most amazing part of the story is that she was right there in our neighborhood, driving past this church, not wanting to get involved in “churchy” stuff but wanting to improve her community and family’s life for all these years.