Planning: Undoing the Gordian Knot

INTRODUCTION

The blog has been dark for a couple of days, but not for want of trying. This one has been hard to write. It is all about untying the knot that often exists around mission statements and strategic plans. I have been wrestling with a couple of issues: first the traditional choardic “lenses” used for planning don’t fit the needs of a church quite as well as they do other types of organizations I have worked with; second, they have never been as clear as some other models I have used, and, finally, I suspect that they over complicate the problem. To that end, I am working to integrate the ideas embedded into the chaordic lenses into a workable framework for a church.

PART I: THE MISSION STATEMENT

Why does everyone groan when the topic of a mission statement comes up? One simple reason - it is a paaaain-ful process. The task forces shanghaied to do this work often take an inordinate amount of time and expend great effort, most often based on the unsupportable belief that it a mission statement is so central to the church, it requires painstaking care to develop and create. I have seen committees wrestle for months or even a full year on a mission statement. Often surveys are taken or there are extensive interviews. A lot of research happens. There is lots of wordsmithing and focus on individual words freighted with meaning. At the end of the day, the statement is usually bloodless, it appears in print periodically and most people forget it. Certainly no one ever uses it. Moreover, because new or fringe people didn’t labor over every word, they do not get all of the subtle meanings conveyed by the statement. This same sort of complicated process often occurs with strategic planning. Committees, surveys, church meetings and all sorts of effort can go into creating the strategic plan. A church can spend way to much time talking about what it is going to do rather than doing it. Moreover, the marginal improvement on the mission statement based on this time commitment is mot much better than one that could have been created less than an hour.

Fortunately it doesn’t have to be that hard. You can arrive at a mission statement and strategic plan very, very quickly if you have a handle on some basic principles and know how to structure the meeting. If done properly, everyone in the room already has all of the information they need to create the statement and the plan. Church groups are, by their very nature, pretty homogeneous in terms of the attitudes, beliefs and values of the people who have gathered. Not only that, but they know each other and have history together. That type of solidarity makes creating the mission statement and the strategic plan pretty simple.

So here is the recipe for a mission statement:

1. Gather your Board, minister and Committee on Ministry and, if you like, the chairs of your various committees. Do a check in and a brief explanation of the purpose of the meeting -that is: To come up with a mission statement for the church. If any important stakeholder groups are not represented in the group, make sure that you invite one or two from those groups.
2. Identify the ten or so biggest needs that the church meets in the lives of its parishioners and in the world. (Note is is important to figure out what needs the church is meeting in the world beyond its four walls.) Don't spend a lot of time on this - when it seems you are simply refining the list, it is time to stop. Given the people in the room, it will be accurate enough.
3. Narrow that list of ten or so down to at most four. This is usually done by grouping like things together and coming up with a word for each of those clusters of needs. For example, Connection, Significance, and Personal Growth. This part is fun, and now you have a very clear idea as to why your church exists! It is there to meet those needs in your lives and in the life of your community.
4. Craft a simple, simple statement that a reasonably intelligent fourth grader would be able to understand and repeat to tell the world why your church is there. For example based on the above words, you could end up with something like this: “We are a people connected to each other and the world around us, a people who seek to make a significant difference by thought, word and deed, and who seek to fulfill our human potential individually and collectively." Yours will be more artful because it will be a group effort and it will grow organically from your discussion.
5. Congratulate yourself on coming up with a mission statement and break out the champagne. The only trick now is to use it almost ever Sunday – recite it in the words of gathering, the chalice lighting, prior to the offering whenever it makes sense in your community (though it should be ritualistically included almost always in the same spot in the order of service). You should decide as a group where in the service this will go. Get to the point that everyone who is committed to the community has memorized it and everyone who is new hears it when they visit.

PART II: THE STRATEGIC PLAN

If you have time in your meeting, you can go on to do the strategic plan. There are two parts to the strategic plan: the work you must do because of your size and the work that is your own because of the particular nature of your community.

Prior to this phase of the meeting it is important that people understand the different sizes of church (Cell/Family/Pastoral/Program/Corporate/Mega) and the characteristics of each one. You orient them by having everyone read something before they come or have someone prepared to present on these stages and their most important traits. Have some discussion until there is a consensus in the room as to what size of a church you have. It should not be an option to say that you are sort of this size and sort of that size...you have to land in the type that you most closely resemble. (Remember your church type is more like probability cloud than rungs on a ladder - if you are a pastoral sized church, it is likely that 10-20% of your structure and patterns of relating are similar to a family sized church and about the same percentage is reflects a program sized church.)

A. The Work You Have to Do

The work you have to do is based on the size of the church you are. For example if a pastoral sized church is all about communication, leadership and incorporating new people, you have to include a statement in your strategic plan about each of these areas. For more information, click here.

Next you are going to ask yourselves some questions. First you want to know what your church would be like if it was firing on all cylinders in each of the areas you have to be focused on in a church of your size. Here you want to ask 1) What would it feel like? 2) What would it look like? 3) What structures would be in place behind the scenes? 4) What are the values that drive this? These are the questions of the individual, the behavioral, the structural, and the cultural from the last article. Discuss these questions. Everyone should be taking notes at this point to remember important parts of the discussion.

The Goals That Are Your Own.

Now we come to the stuff your church should do.

Looking above, you recall that you identified the three or four basic needs your church meets. In our hypothetical church, the needs were: Connection. Significance. Personal Growth. Again you want to ask what it would be like if the church as firing on all cylinders. Again you want to ask:

• What would it feel like?
• What would it look like?
• What structures would be in place behind the scenes?
• What are the values that drive this?

These are the questions of the psychology, behavior, the structure, and the culture from the last article and can be diagramed like this:



You could even use this diagram in your discussion. Put the major need on top and the observations to each question in each quadrant.

The next question is the hard one: What negative feelings, behaviors, structures or values are we dealing with that keep us from embodying the ideal we just articulated? It is time to get really honest. This is the shadow side of the church community and perhaps even a few individuals in it. Unless you deal with it the plan has no chance of success.

Creating Your Plan.

You should now have 3 or 4 areas that arise from the nature of the size of your church and 3 or 4 that are based on the needs you meet among yourselves and in your community.

After you discuss each area in turn, you can then begin to structure your strategic plan. This a great time to break into small groups and give each group the task of writing up one of the needs that must be met to progress and the one that is specific to your church and the needs your church in particular meets in its current and potential members. Using the area of “Connection” from above, you might come up with the following:

We want each person to feel deeply connected to at least a few others in the church, connected to the mission of the church, and that they are doing something constructive to make the world a better place. We want to have this type of compassion and concern as a core value and will design specific pathways to
that end. We will support a culture that encourages connection by creating structures that allow us to meet in different kinds of settings and cause us to deepen our connections. As much as possible, we, as leaders will commit to modeling behavior that is supportive of creating connection both in terms of what we do and what we refrain from doing. We give one another permission to remind us of this goal. As a community, we recognize that one of the things that tears at our ability to create connection is unkind criticism of others behind their backs. We resolve to change that behavior in constructive ways.

Note that this statement contains what you hope people will feel based on shared values with an eye toward culture and structure and a discussion of behavior. (In other words it address all four quadrants.) It also identifies the shadow and how you hope to deal with it.

It is critical to identify how you want people to feel, because is the connection between their need and the church structure and programing that is absolutely critical to their commitment to and involvement with the church.

The last thing to do is to have each group add a matrix for measuring success for their group's portion of the plan. Every plan must have some tools to measure progress. The measurement tool should have a way of gauging the feelings of the individuals, the behavior of the community, the creation of successful structures and the growth in values. For some of these, before and after questions or surveys are almost always useful. There are other creative ways to do this as well.

To bring this to a close, you would then bring the groups back together to simply share their work. No comments, no judgments, just sharing.

You now have the backbone of your strategic plan. The next step is to get a small group of volunteers together to edit the statements created by the various groups and circulate it for comment to the people at the meeting and others.

Now that was painless and fun and it didn’t take six months. What a relief. Let’s move on to implementing the strategic plan.

If you jumped into the middle of this discussion, you can begin at Bullfrogs In Wheelbarrows.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Unruly Organizations

Introduction

Before we look at the specifics of managing chaordic organization, it is important to dig into and understand some important aspects of the churches and unruly organizations. We like to think that if we simply find the right rules or structures or hit upon just the right formula, we will have a church that works. Unfortunately, churches are inherently messy. The share many of traits common to social groups. Now there are many ways of looking at social groups, but one that I particularly like and find very useful is set out below. I believe that understanding these concepts will help as we move into the discussion of managing a chaordic organization.

Social Holons

Arther Koestler coined the term holon. A holon is a system that is a whole in itself as well as a part of a larger system. This has direct applicability to churches. There is a truth that is so basic it will seem childish – but it is a critically important concept to truly internalize and understand.

A church is system comprised of individuals.

The individuals in the church are one type of holon and and the church itself is quite another and how these two interact is as the heart of virtually every issue facing any church. Let's explore this difference and its implications.

The human beings in the church could be considered sentient holons. A living being is made of up constituent parts – atoms, molecules, cells, organs and so on. Let’s take a goose for example. If the goose flies away, virtually ever part of the goose moves with it – except perhaps a couple of feathers. The constituent parts of the system do not get a vote in what happens. A sentient holon acts as one unit.

Contrast this with a social holon. Compared to the sentient geese holons, the flock of geese is an very different type of holon. Geese flock together because it serves a purpose. If it didn’t serve a purpose, the organization simply wouldn’t exist. Every goose in the flock knows why it is there and what its role is. It also recognizes its own kind – geese don’t flock with deer. A fancy way to say this is that there is a common “inter-subjective"reality of "goose-ness" that all geese share. However, there are times when, for whatever reason, some geese will drop out of a flock and let the others go on. Each individual holon with thin the group is self-existent, autonomous and, in higher order animals, self-determining. This type of system could be called a “social holon.” Sentient and social holons are found throughout nature. They are built into the fabric of our world and they function in remarkably analogous ways up and down the chain of life.

This brings us to the critical point - every social holon exists as an aggregate of individual holons held together by 1) the internal motivations or drives of the individuals in the group, 2) the gathering of the individuals in a physical environment which will support them as a group, 3) a discernable structure to their relationships, and 4) an “intersubjective” commonality – what could be called a culture. If any one of these pieces goes too badly wrong, the social holon simply ceases to exist. In the animal world, the creation of social holons is largely driven by biology and instinct. In humans, it is driven by biology, instinct and self-reflective consciousness. That self-reflective consciousness means that human beings have the ability to create intentional social holons.

Thus, every human social holon has four critically important aspects.

• The individuals that comprise it.
• The physical resources and characteristics of the collective.
• The structural organization of the gatherine.
• The intersubjective cultural perspective the individuals share.

To map this, it might look like this:

A successful chaordic organization must function well in each of these four quadrants. Functioning well means different things in each quadrant.

Individuals

For the social holon to survive, enough individuals within the holon must be getting what they need from the group. It is vitally important that leaders understand both the stated and unstated needs that drive the individuals within the group. Almost all groups have both stated shadow reasons that bring people together. For example, a stated reason might be to change the world. A shadow reason might be that people are getting enthused by the drama of the community. Both may be true and that is OK as long as everyone is clear what is going on and dealing with the darker underbelly. Thus, leaders have to ask deep questions that uncover the authentic motivations that people in the community hold in common.

These conversations require a lot of self inquiry and real honesty. It is hard for someone to say about themselves, “You know, I came from an alcoholic family and one of the reasons I am part of this system is because it meets my need for chaos.” Or “I am a fearful person and change terrifies me and I know that the reason I am part of this church is because it is simply set up not to change. I can count on it being stagnate” Doing this shadow work as a church is absolutely essential. When any social organization is stuck in bad patterns, it is almost always these shadow motivations that are to blame. People are getting something out of the stuckness or the social holon would simply fall apart or change.

The great thing about being authentic in this way is that you can identify one or two dominant themes on the shadow side. By identifying them, and giving them a name and voice, you automatically empower yourself to recognize the dynamic at work. More importantly, these shadow sides also contain tremendous constructive energy in groups. They can be turned into positives. For example, if you have a church that seems to thrive on chaos, you can turn that into a postive part of the mission of the church For example, you might officially recognize that part of the purpose of the church is to be enthusiastically engaged it vital change. If you have a church that is fearful of change, you can state that one of your goals will be to make the church a safe, stable place and sanctuary for everyone who enters its doors. Either is a completely valid choice and either is clearly appropriate for that stage in the church’s life because that is the shadow side that it absolutely must deal with to fulfill its purpose for existence. The church that takes either of these roads is making decisions about what kind of a church it will be and the kind of people it will attract. The important thing is to be honest not only with your aspirational goals, but also with the shadow goals. Once you are honest, you can make progress.

Note: Ideally each leader is asking themselves these questions on a personal level. All of us participate for mixed motives and understanding what those motives are will help us engage authentically and mindfully with the community as a whole.

Environmental

Every church has a physical location, certain resources, and a collection of individuals who are already there. You can point to things in the world and say that these particular people and things are the outward manifestations of the church. It is important to recognize that these physical realities do put real constraints on a church. Indeed, most church leaders are painfully aware of these constraints and often these constraints drive decisions. That does not have to be the case, but it is foolish to ignore them and it will put certain constraints on what the organization can do.

Structural

A church is typically comprised of a series of structures. The people in the group are organized in certain ways. There are almost always formal structures (such as governance bodies, committees, task forces, RE classes, and so on). There are also the informal structures which consist of friendships, informal groups and thought leaders. How these work together can have a tremendous impact on whether the church is doing well or not. You might have every official group of the church headed in one direction and one informal group that is working against it and as a result, you have major problems. Understanding these structural issues is essential to managing a chaordic organization. Structures must fit the organization and further, not impede, its purposes.

Cultural

The church is comprised of principles and values that create the intersubjective shared values. This has to do with the way members treat each other and the norms and rules that govern interaction. Who is included and excluded and what behavior is acceptable and unacceptable. Here the question is what is appropriate and inappropriate. Again, there will be express values and shadow values. For example, we might espouse to be a loving community, but the cultural norms tolerate unkind criticism.

Obviously much more could be written about each of these but I believe, we have introduced the concepts sufficiently to move on.

In our next piece, Planning: There's the Hard Way Then There's the Easy Way, we will look at the way chaordic organizations become successfully self-organizing an self-governing.

To start this series at the beginning, go to Bullfrogs In Wheelbarrows.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Getting the Frogs Into the Wheelbarrow

If leading a UU church is a lot like pushing frogs in a wheelbarrow, progress comes only if the frogs stay put as we move forward. If we are constantly trying to get the frogs back into the wheelbarrow, we are doomed to frustration and burnout. However, if they stay in the wheelbarrow on their own, then the entire enterprise works. In short, for a church to develop, the frogs have to see some wisdom in being in the wheelbarrow.* Like the -little guys in our picture, some UUs are a bit suspicious of the wheelbarrow and we have to use some skillful means to get them to hop on board and stay there.

As mentioned in the first article of this series, Bullfrogs in Wheelbarrows, UU churches tend to be chaordic organizations. Such organizations are largely self-organizing and self-governing. They do not operate best through hierarchies of authority but through networks of individuals. What makes them work is a clear shared purpose, ethical operating principles and responsibility distributed through nodes. The organizations are powered from the periphery and unified from the core.

What Type of Church.

The first issue in managing our wheelbarrow is identifying the stage of the church's development. Is your community a Family, Pastoral, Program or Corporate sized church? (See Why Size Matters.) Sometimes the conclusion is obvious. Sometimes, particularly for pastoral sized churches that want to be program churches, it can be remarkably difficult to honestly assess. However, if we are going to get all the frogs to stay in the right wheelbarrow, we have to identify the right wheelbarrow. One reason congregational leadership is difficult is because one group is building one kind of an organization and another is building another. For example, you might have people who are continually concerned about procedures, but until you get to a corporate sized church, the overdoing of procedures is typically a sign of the breakdowns of relationships between individuals or cells within the church. Once people understand that a pastoral and program sized church is largely about maintaining right relationships, you can begin to focus on the real issue and hopefully begin to dissipate the conflict while building a healthy church.

Implications for Strategic Planning.

Once the church leadership is in agreement about its size it knows what to focus on. The strum and drang around strategic planning becomes much less painful, the clouds part and you know what you as a church need to be focused on. The key strategic tasks of the church will center around the developmental work of the church at that stage. For example, a pastoral sized church requires a solid leadership team that is happy, effective and personally fulfilled by their work. These people are often in personal relationship with the minister who acts as part mentor, part pastor and part teacher. Another key to the pastoral sized church is healthy communication among leaders and with the congregation with a minimum of drama and crisis. Creating pathways for newcomers into the community is another key issue.

Since these are a few of the key developmental issues of a church this size, the strategic plan absolutely and unequivocally has to address these issue as matters of primary focus. This is not to say that the church is limited to these goals, but that the strategic plan has to address these and they must be a center of focus for the work of the church.

Thus, the goals of a pastoral sized church would include at least: creating and sustaining a committed and joyful group of leaders, having excellent communication within the church, and creating ways to help newcomers enter and continue on their spiral of engagement. These would be fleshed out with particulars appropriate to the church in that situation.

In putting together the particulars, the church leadership would first have to assess how the church is doing in each of these key areas. This "assessment" should not be drawn out or involve surveys and studies. Usually the leaders of the church know the realities of the church in these key areas and it is simply a matter of saying what is to create a common base. The way to surface this in the discussion is to explore what is working in the area being examined, what isn't and whether everyone agrees with the general assessment. So, taking leadership development, the questions would be "What are we doing well with leadership development?" "What isn't going so well?" "Does anyone have a major disagreement with the picture we just painted?"

Conclusion.

If this work is being done properly then the frogs are much more likely to stay put. Everyone in the church has a common language about the size of the church and what a church of that size is "supposed" to be doing to develop in a healthy way. All of this makes leadership much easier and allows the leaders to work with wayward frogs in a that honor their independence but keep the focus on the work that the community has to be doing. For the frogs who are happy to be in the wheelbarrow, there is an increased sense of purpose and real accomplishment as the deepest needs of the church are met.

Once the frogs are in the wheelbarrow and we have a grasp of the issues, we are ready to go to work. In our next article we will look at the topic of Unruly Organizations.
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* For those who feel that the references to frogs in this article are demeaning to people or to frogs please don't get your knickers in a knot until you read the upcoming post on the perils of pluralism in our UU churches.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Why Size Matters

In 1983 Arlin Routhage wrote a nifty pamphlet that has become the standard analysis used by church consultants anywhere. The pamphlet is entitled "Sizing Up a Congregation" (available on-line). Anyone involved in leadership is wise to read at least the section of the pamphlet that applies to their churches.

Routhage breaks down congregations into four sizes: Family, Pastoral, Program and Corporate. These break down largely along the lines of size and structure. For example, many family sized churches cannot afford and do not have a pastor. Program sized churches need critical masses of people and lay leaders to function. The numbers are clearly up for grabs and you can get into all sorts of arguments of the “angels on the head of a pin” variety over where these breaks occur. Below is one model (mine) and you will see it differs from Routhage’s numbers. My numbers have some good research behind them but are admittedly as arbitrary as anyone’s.

Note that I added “Cell” at the bottom and “Mega” at the top to Routhage’s list.

Most church consultants would agree with those additions.

So what is the point of all of this? Well, this is really a developmental model. Churches grow through these stages. Indeed, they have to grow these in sequence. It simply is not optional to skip from a Family sized church to a Program sized church in the same way as it is not optional for an infant to go from pre-verbal communication to formal-operational logic (to borrow some language from Piaget).

A Tool for Understanding.

Using a developmental model helps us understand the dynamics and potential of our own church. For example pastoral sized churches often rush into “doing program” rather than simply doing an exceptional job of being a pastoral sized church.

Let's focus on the development of a pastoral sized church for a moment. Leadership shifts from the founders to pastor (a difficult transition in any church but all the more so in our anti-authoritarian environment)*. Old decision makers are finding that they don't have the control that they once did and if fights emerge that drive newcomers away, the church will not develop as it should. Moreover, the focus of a pastoral sized church is the pastor. The pastor becomes the major reason new people join the church and the pastor is intimately involved in every aspect of church life - from finances to worship. The Pastor will be grooming leaders but is leading primarily by relationship. There are typically a number of cells that can either cooperate or end up in tension, but these revolve around the pastor who has taken the place of the "parents" of the family sized church. Communication between leaders and laity is vital.

Just as is true with the Pastoral sized church, certain dynamics of leadership are at each wave in this developmental progression. These dynamics have the potential of either decimating initiatives if they are resisted but can be used to great advantage if they are understood. Leaders who understand these developmental structures, and cooperate with them, will be far more effective leaders just as parents of a four year old who understand what four year old’s are supposed to be doing developmentally level will be far better parents.

How This Helps.

This model of church development gives us two very important pieces of information:

1. It tells us what is possible in our church.
2. It tells us what our issues are and what we have to be doing.

No. 1 keeps us focused and guilt free. In recent non-profit board retreat I attended, one of the members said that we had to develop the ability to say “no” so that we could say “yes.” That has become a mantra for us on that Board. When people come along and tell the leaders that they should be doing X, then we can subject that to the question, is X “stage appropriate”. This understanding allows us to focus on what we need to do in the moment and allows us to provide a rationale as to why were are doing certain things but not others.

No. 2 gives us a model for organizing ourselves. Routhage and others help us understand what we should be doing with our human, financial, social and cultural capital (more on that later). If we are a pastoral sized church, we need to focus on the work that a pastoral sized church needs to do. Every initiative, every action of leadership, every group within the church can be seen as fitting into that puzzle. This tells us exactly what our work is to be – to create the very best family/pastoral/program/corporate church we can create. We don’t need to worry about the developmental stages except our own.

The good news is that if churches do their developmental work properly at each stage, the next stage will transcend and include the good lessons learned. If not, then the church at the next stage will exhibit pathologies which will limit growth and the ability to work effectively in the world.

Remedial Work.

Oftentimes, if a church is having chronic problems at one stage, it is because it is either failing to address the new realities or it has failed to do the work it needed to do at a prior stage. We have addressed the first issue above - it involves getting the leadership to focus on what needs to be done at that particular stage of development.

Some church issues may be rooted in the past. For example, a dysfunctional pastor (or laity) can create bad dynamics at the pastoral stage that go on to effect the program sized church. For example if the transition of leadership from the founders to the pastor did not occur as it should have, the foundation for leadership in the program sized church simply isn't in place. Oftentimes these churches require the organizational equivalent of therapy. They need to go back to do the developmental work that was not done when it should have been. One way to gage whether this is a problem in your church is to look at Routhage’s pamphlet with ruthless honesty and ask if his descriptions of healthy function are accurate to the history of your community.

Next in the Series: Getting The Frogs Into The Wheelbarrow.

To start this series at the beginning, go to Bullfrogs In Wheelbarrows.
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1. See, Robert Latham’s Moving on From Church Folly Lane for an excellent treatment of this pastoral to program transition.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Bullfrogs In Wheelbarrows

One friend of mine likens church leadership to pushing bullfrogs in a wheelbarrow. It is probably not as bad as all that, but Unitarian Universalist churches present some very interesting leadership issues. The culture of our churches frequently reflects at least some of the the following core values:

• Individual autonomy and self direction
• The importance of taking everyone’s view into account
• Curiosity about human thought
• High, but relativistic, moral values
• A commitment to social justice
• Radical egalitarianism

In short, we are typically strong minded individuals who have banded together around a few key values: among them inclusion, justice, and exploration. While this makes for a terrific group of people, it can lead to very interesting organizational challenges. Our autonomy can clash with a need for organization. The importance of taking everyone’s viewpoint in account can result a paralysis in making decisions or decisions that satisfy the lowest common denominator. Our egalitarianism can undermine leadership and result in not deferring to people with knowledge and life experience.

The next few posts use a few key concepts to suggest some useful tools in leading a church in a culture as diverse as ours. Hopefully at the end of this series people will have a few new ways of looking at their role as leaders and have some practical tools to apply to church leadership.

The first concept to introduce is the notion of the chaordic organization. The Wikipedia entry for “chaordic” states:

The portmanteau chaordic refers to a system that blends characteristics of chaos and order. The term was coined by Dee Hock.

The mix of chaos and order is often described as a harmonious existence displaying characteristics of both, with neither chaotic nor ordered behavior dominating. Some hold that nature is largely organized in such a manner; in particular, living organisms and the volutionary process by which they arose are often described as chaordic in nature. The chaordic principles have also been used as guidelines for creating human organizations -- business, nonprofit, government and hybrids -- that would be either hierarchical nor anarchic.

This seems a relatively accurate description of most of our churches – neither hierarchical nor anarchic. Simply having a concept to apply to the type of organization we are in can be helpful. Knowing that we are "choardic" means that we don't have to feel guilty about not having enough structure and not being effective in a linear sort of way. Those types of expect ions go with certain structures and our churches - so long as they are chaordic - will never reflect those characteristics, nor should they. Taking the "ought" out can help us not focus on things we cannot change and focus on strategies that will be effective for our type of organization.

Many living systems live in the band of the chaordic and there is some evidence that these organizations, when functioning well, can be among the most dynamic, healthy and effective. Those organizations that rely on compete control often lack flexibility and adaptability. Those that are ordered tend towards perpetuating institutional values. Those that are completely anarchic tend to fall apart. However, that sweet spot between order and chaos can create a climate of excitement and joy as well as real growth and creativity.

A successful chaordic organization will have the following characteristics.

• It is now powered from the periphery but unified at the core
• It is based on clarity of shared purpose and principles
• It enables and empowers its constituent parts
• It is durable in purpose, but malleable in form and function
• It has distributed power, rights and responsibility
• It should liberate and amplify ingenuity, initiative and judgment
• It is compatible with and fosters diversity, complexity and change; and
• It restrains power and embeds authority in persons vested with accomplishing the tasks.

So how do chaordic organizations mange to move forward in intentional and deliberate ways? What tools are available to leaders to help them break down the complexities of an organization like this and make sense of it? How do stakeholders and constituencies work best together to further the interests of the community as well as meet their own needs? These and other questions will become the topics of he next few posts.

Next in the series. Why Size Matters


© 2007. Matthew W. Wesley. All rights reserved.

The Big Mistake

In my last blog entry I wrote about our denomination’s difficulty in addressing the needs of those who are “spiritual but not religious”. In fact, this group is not particularly new. While this group is a substantial percentage of the populations now, it traces it heritage back to the New England Transcendentalists. One of these, Ralph Waldo Emerson was a famous UU…at least in our time. While we enthusiastically claim him as one of our patron saints today, Emerson had a rough go of it in his own day. His ideas were not particularly embraced with open arms and he was a lightening rod for controversy throughout his adult life.

His Harvard Divinity School Address of 1838 was a manifesto for what was to become the Transcendentalist movement. It was an immediate sensation and it almost instantaneously polarized ministers and laity in the Unitarian Church. Between that address and 1885, a debate raged in the Unitarian church between liberal Christian traditionalists who espoused the Enlightenment understanding of the Christian gospel expressed in social action (represented by Theodore Parker), and the Transcendentalists who sought to ground theology and political action in personal experience and a sense of union with the cosmos.

In 1885, three years after Emerson’s death, the debate ended with a near total victory going to the Christian side of the debate. As is often the case, the "winners" co-opted a good deal of the intellectual capital of the vanquished faction – such as a notion of universal religion. However, the Unitarians steadfastly refused to accommodate any form of inner mysticism in favor of a strict rationality and outward focus.

Those in the United States who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” are the direct cultural and intellectual heirs of Emerson and the Transcendentalist movement. Could it be that had the tent of Unitarian Universalism been large enough to embrace the notion that spirituality is not merely a matter of mind, and even action, but also of something deeper and more primal – something mysterious – we might be living in a very different church today? It just might be that those in our culture whose hunger for a spiritual reality is not satisfied by consuming the cheapjack wares in the markets of New Age cranks and charlatans would have found a home with us and the peace they seek. Perhaps it is not too late.

© 2007. Matthew W. Wesley. All rights reserved.

Guest Blogging

Greetings!

Perhaps you have a piece or two that you think would be useful to other UUs but you really don't want to start your own blog. Naked SAMADHI is here to help!

If have some material you think is appropriate, please feel free to send it along to me (with copyright notice on the bottom – see mine for a sample form). Submissions can range from book and movie reviews, to rants and raves, to a perspective on spiritual practice, to perspectives on lay ministry.

I take a look at your work and perhaps post it (no promises). If I do post it, you will get a byline. If necessary, I will to some simple for mating. Any images you use should be forwarded as separate attachments as well as embedded in the text. If you submit three or four thoughtful pieces, and are so inclined, I will be happy to invite you to be a guest blogger which will allow you to post whenever the fancy strikes. Just to keep up appearances, and because a guy has to have some standards, please take a look at the following before submitting:

1. Content: We expect our posts to be thoughtful and promote a focus on spirituality, healthy church dynamics, church history, and so on. The only things that are off limits are political discussions and general UU material that can be found elsewhere (though I am happy to consider adding links to such sites on your recommendation). This does not mean that you can't be funny, clever or irreverent - just be brilliant. If you have questions about what type of material is acceptable, poke around and it should be fairly obvious.
   
2. Look and feel. It is important that the visuals of the site be maintained and so if you can find your own visuals, so much the better. If not forward the piece to me and I will scout around. Photos should be interesting and colorful and have a professional appearance.

Other than that, let's have fun and work to the change the world one post at a time!

Thank your for your interest. I look forward to hearing from you.

Warm regards,

Matt