Breakthrough collaboratives achieving tangible improvements

I have been thinking about how to bring about significant improvement in churches. Operating strategically, through the School of Formation, and being impatient for progress by nature I want to help make a difference rapidly to the practice of ministry, especially in austerity when the need for churches to serve their communities is even greater.

I thought about providing training to encourage and enable local ministry teams and certainly have not ruled this out. However training teams to lead and enable others to improve ministry feels a touch top down, remote, and slow. What is needed is a rapid  improvement model at least I think it is.

The collaborative breakthrough model is well-known in bringing about rapid improvements in health care.  I’m thinking about trying to apply it to help improve how churches in Somerset support their communities as they face the consequences of the economic austerity measures being applied by the government.

If anyone has experience of using the breakthrough approach in church settings or of using it in health care and has lessons to share please get in touch.

Having fun with figures

I’ve been working this week on a directed learning pack for new Church Treasurers. The aim is to help with the preparation of the annual accounts needed for PCC meetings and APCMs.  The case study is set in January and you are the new Treasurer inheriting some papers and a set of activities and costs. The task is to produce a receipts and payments account and a statement of assets and liabilities for the year just ended.

Working through the exercise, testing it out with others, making sure the question is framed in such a way that those completing it can work out the answer and get the figures in the right place, is what I have been doing.

Hardly ever has life been such fun! Seriously there is something delightful when the figures balance!

Charles is Handy

Yesterday I took a session with some of the curates in the diocese and we looked at Charles Handy’s Gods of Management. He writes of four types – Zeus who rules with thunderbolts and sprays of gold and has minions who extend his reign. Apollo, who builds a set of role occupiers to keep a steady predictable organisation, where ‘tomorrow is the same as yesterday’, Athena who is a problem solving god and offers a ‘luxurious’ type of management and finally Dionysius who is a person centred god. Question is which god might reflect, or be useful to the church.

Interesting that we wanted tomorrow to be different to yesterday in the church, but how does that square with Jesus being the same yesterday, today and forever?

Being ourselves given to the community

In a workshop last Saturday, we had been also been looking at the experience in Exile and the challenges of living in a strange land.

I asked groups from rural churches to think about their hopes for the future. Recalling the returning exiles  were disappointed I asked them to be as realistic as possible.

One group said they were not going to compromise their faith in a largely secular land, rather they were going to both make a noise that God is still here in rural villages and to give themselves even more fully to serving others in the life of the rural community.

Making a noise in a strange land and giving yourselves to others spoke to me about people who feel confidently taken hold of  by God, blessed by God, and both opened outwards, as the bread that is broken and given in communion to those alongside whom they live.

Rural churches 5+ multi-benefices : Love your priest

I have been listening over the last several months to clergy each having 5 or more parishes. Among the topics discussed have been

 - Being the absent spiritual leader

- Developing a scattered lay ministry team

- Coping with a dearth of people willing to serve in church leadership

- Keeping ones own spiritual gifts alive

- Handling rejection

The role of priest with 5 or more parishes is very different  from a single Church or even a benefice of three Churches. Priests are more thinly spread and so their ministry has to be one involving more oversight and enabling the Church to be the Church.

As one said to me recently I just cannot be in six places at once and feel guilty when I fail to do the impossible.  Another spoke of being heavily criticised for not being perfect.

Priests in these challenging ministries  seem to me to be in need of the recognition and indeed in need of love from their congregations. Do we as lay people and as congregations show our appreciation sufficiently often to those who have given their whole lives to be our priests?

Churches in relationship

I’m working with one parish at the moment which is very strong on being a distinctive Church rooted in the village. Sounds great and yet the Church seems less clear on what it means in practice to be a Church in relationship with those other Churches in the benefice.

This led me to think about the kinds of relationship we may have in everyday life and whether there may be something to learn from the range of such relationships about being both a village Church and a Church in a benefice.

The range that came to mind is

- We have no idea about each other as we are strangers

- We cannot remember each other’s names though we think we have met before

- We pass the time of day when we meet by chance

- We exchange small talk at organised social occasions

- We know we could call on each other for help though rarely do so and then only in small ways

- We collaborate on something mutually beneficial or in the service of others

- We meet deliberately to share something about our lives, to listen to each other and to be together for the sake of being together

- We have a closeness giving liberally one to the other, sometimes sharing adversity and sometimes joy

I’m sure this range could be challenged and strengthened. It would be interesting to discuss it with a parish and to consider where it would place itself now and in the future.

Church development planning

Over the last few months I have run seven seminars on church development planning for teams of three people from parishes/benefices with the aim enabling them to lead a local planning process. Over 100 people from some 75 parishes came. The event have been well received and plans are starting to be developed.

The church development planning processes involves looking at the journey of faith in the parish so far, looking at the communities served by the Church, looking at how God has gifted the Church, creating a vision of the journey ahead and deciding the immediate steps on that journey.

Feedback from one parish has been

‘We held a successful on Saturday, but found that we needed a few hours more to complete the full agenda.  We’ve produced a wonderful village map and decades frieze (soon to go up in the Church), and also did some  community profiling.  However we ran out of time at that stage, prior to compiling of the tasks and their assignments.  But we fully intend to have the second session soon.’

Besides producing a plan the process also grows relationships amongst the Church and its understanding of those around it.

Multi-benefice decides to move to single parish

A benefice of three churches has decided to examine the implications of moving to a single parish, a new legal entity which involves a process to abolish the existing PCCs and creating one to cover the whole benefice. Approaching me for advice on ministry and structure ( but not legalities)  I had a conversation with the ‘planning group’.

Some of the factors to consider are:

- Trust and transparency over money, particularly money given or raised specifically for church buildings and fabric. The role of ‘Friends Groups’ for each church building, able, under PCC direction, to receive and spend money is a possibility and an open and easily understood accounting system is crucial.

- Intentional relationship building, so that more and more people in each village, are friends with those in other villages. This fosters the sense of being one Church that has a number of places of worship.

- Reframing the role of church warden as  members and leaders of teams. Two local church wardens per church building responsible for the welcome to Church, preparing the church for worship and stewardship of the assets seems ideal. However practical help from other local members of the congregation would share these onerous responsibilities and free time for churchwardens to develop a specialist role for the whole new parish. For example in one parish a church warden co-ordinates all matters on fire regulations.

- Having a team or group structure that enables ministry to take place across the new parish as a whole. For example  perhaps an outreach team, a youth team and a discipleship team. Ensuring each team meets regularly with the PCC to share progress and receive advice will prevent the PCC feeling it is just a ‘rubber stamping body.’

-  Attention to detail on the pattern of worship so that special, occasional services and amendments do not come as a surprise to anyone, especially church wardens. Regular meetings and a spirit of collaboration between churchwardens and those leading worship helps a great deal.

- A local lay and clergy ministry team for the parish that shares with the clergy overall responsiblity for the week by week  work of the parish. Meeting and praying together weekly the local ministry team could review the worship that has just taken place, plan that which is taking place next, make sure that those in need of pastoral are visited, and be a sources of new ideas .

There is nothing particularly new in any of these ideas. However such organisational/structural change is a very visible sign of change for Church members, many of whom perhaps look to the Church for stability in a changing world and so to come face to face with change and the worries it brings.

Leading change and taking people with you through what may to many feel like a dark valley is not easy. Jesus calls us to lead by service, by getting alongside people and walking and talking with them. Perhaps we who lead change before we start to try to change things need to consider through bible study and prayer the ways in which Christ helped people to embrace change with all their heart, mind and strength.

In Residence

I approach my first ‘being in residence’ in the Cathedral. It begins next Tuesday. I’m not entirely sure where the term originates but it means that I am responsible for all the services during the next two weeks. I don’t take them all but I need to be informed about them and make sure someone is able to be there. It’s quite a responsibility! But more than that, it is an interesting concept ‘being in residence’. When I worked as a parish priest I was always assumed to be there – no-one really thought I would be away apart from the odd holiday. This would be impossible in a Cathedral and the thing I like about it is that ‘being in residence’ can model a team approach. There will be times when I shall need to ask my colleagues, lay and clerical, to be at an event, take the service or introduce someone, because I shall not be able to be there and others will cover for me, but during this two weeks, I or someone I appoint will be there. In some parishes this is left to the vicar most of the time and only in emergency is someone else in charge – a one man minister, you might say. I will take over from the Dean on Tuesday and when I come to the end of the two weeks another colleague will take over. Cathedrals can be places for team work.

Managing time – Are lay people volunteers?

I ran a managing time course yesterday for curates in another diocese. Delegation came up as an issue and the term volunteer was used for lay people. I have come across and indeed used it myself often. This time it jarred. Thinking about it on the spot with the curates, I also linked it to my other work on helping Churches develop plans.

I ventured that if a Church sees itself as either helping the priest with his or her work or sees planning in a business model, involving forming vision, developing strategy, writing project or action plans, then it often ends up looking for people to volunteer to do the work.

However if a Church sees itself as first growing members relationship with God and each other, and looks for how God has already gifted members and spots what people feel  passionate about or are called towards, the vision and plans that emerge are qualitatively different, and committed Christians step forward in love and service.

Of course sometimes clergy and church leaders do need to look for people to volunteer for gaps that unexpectedly have arisen. Gap filling and volunteer seeking does not however feel the best strategy in the long run.

Investing more time in relationship building, and gifts and vocation discernment that mobilises lay people seems more in keeping with what it means to be Church.

Volunteers may walk away when the going gets tough. Committed Christians living out their calling and vocation are more likely to continue.

Time spent growing commitment rather than searching for volunteers seems time well spent to me.