Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

I'm starting a larger conversation and some general guidance around confidentiality practices and norms in The Episcopal Church. So let me offer this blog post, Leadership Confidence and Confidentiality (http://www.ecfvp.org/posts/leadership-confidence-and-confidentiality/) as one more open-ended question, or series of questions: Who has found some good norms for confidentiality? Who has figured out some helpful and healthy practices around confidentiality? What are they, and how do they work? How are they introduced and how is a culture of respect and shared confidence built in that community? How are boundary violations dealt with, and is it possible to weave a thread of grace and forgiveness through the whole? Where we continue to struggle is: At its most basic level, St. George’s Policy is supposed to preserve strict confidentiality around sensitive information, mostly financial information – such information that, as the policy states, “shall be safeguarded against disclosure, loss, defacement, and tampering.” But the policy tries to move, all the same, to cover “conversations of an official nature that happen in small groups, committees, staff meetings, or Vestry meetings.” It further states that “once consensus emerges around an issue and a decision is clearly made using Roberts’ Rules of Order that the members present will respect the process … and not seek to undue or discuss the matter, except to educate the wider public and congregation about said decision.” It’s at this latter point – in the shift from ensuring confidentiality around pledge information, say, to setting up a wall around how people talk about what just happened at that vestry meeting – that the document and the Policy, in general, breaks down. Is it asking too much, I wonder? Is it shutting too much down? Should it be opened up in such a way as to allow, even encourage conversation? Is it shutting down even healthy and potentially helpful modes of communication? A link to our policy is below. Do you have a policy to share? Email it to editor@episcopalfoundation.org

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