Category: English

Staff Structure in Congregation

I have concluded that “a staff member reports to a committee” is one of those things that you can say in English but that makes no sense. . . . Committees simply cannot supervise paid staff, because they are not present when the work is done, and it is too difficult for them to speak with one voice. A staff member deserves a boss who works at least as many hours a week as he or she does. Others can participate in the evaluation process or in making policies about staff treatment. But a congregation that wants to remain sane will set its staff up as a single team and hold it responsible for sustaining its own working relationships.

via Leading Ideas: A Resource for Church Leaders.

The problem with this thought from “Leading Ideas: A Resource for Church Leaders” is that the only person that fits the description “a boss who works at least as many hours a week as he or she does,” creates a situation in most congregation where the senior pastor is the staff supervisor, which is not necessarily the optimal situation for the senior pastor.

Addiction

Addiction is any compulsive, habitual behavior that limits the freedom of human desire. It is caused by the attachment, or nailing, of desire to specific objects. The word behavior is especially important in this definition, for it indicates that action is essential to addiction.

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There is a vast difference between doing these things because we freely choose and doing them because we are compelled. In the first case, the motivation is love; in the second slavery.

From Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

The Religious Landscape in America

Here, I will look at few issues addressed in the book After the Baby Boomers and/or the US Religious Landscape Survey. Those issues caught my attention when I read those originally two years ago, but it is not an attempt to represent either reading, far from it. I decided to write them down randomly as an invitation to further speculations rather than trying grasp them in any fullness. Continue reading The Religious Landscape in America

The Hidden Lives of Congregations

Israel Galindo’s book, The Hidden Lives of Congregations: Discerning Church Dynamics, is in three parts. The first two address the congregation and the forces behind it. The third part is about being a leader in a congregation. When reading it in one setting Galindo seems to repeat him self somewhat when it comes to the third part, as he tries to apply the first two parts to the function of pastoral leaders. Continue reading The Hidden Lives of Congregations

Leaders who Last

Margaret Marcuson addresses leadership in congregations in her book, Leaders who Last, starting with the claim that to sustain leadership we must stop controlling others, and start the difficult task of managing ourselves (3). She continues in a similar fashion, reminding us that pastoral ministry does only bring to us the peace of mind we enter the ministry with in the first place (6). Continue reading Leaders who Last

Managing the Congregation

When I decided almost five years ago to study about theology and church management, I expected something in line with Shawchuck and Heuser’s book, Managing the Congregation. I was hoping for practical answers, figures and lists with various answers to all kinds of complicated situations. I thought I would study various ways of labeling and structuring congregations, I even anticipated learning various ways of quality control measurements. After four years of studies in the States I finally get the opportunity to read about all this, and what a disappointment. The authors are surely doing their best, but their answers are no answers. The book does not try to deal in any serious way with the question what the church is, or why, and even the subtitle presents an understanding of the church that is ambiguous to say the least.

The book is written in 1996, so it is post-Berlin Wall but pre-9/11, and it is relevant to keep in mind. Another thing worth mentioning is that it is 387 pages with indexes and not only has 18 chapter, but those eighteen chapters are organized into 202 sub-chapters or sections. One could actually claim that this is a bureaucratic book about the danger and death that is unavoidable consequence of bureaucracy.

Vocabulary: Primary and Secondary Sources

Primary Sources are original records created during the time period under study, or, after events occurred in the form of memoirs and oral histories. They reflect the individual viewpoint of a participant or observer and are often referred to as the raw data used by historians to interpret the past. Examples of primary sources would include diaries, letters, newspaper articles written at the time of an event, novels, poems, artifacts, original scientific experiments etc.

Secondary Sources are works that interpret or analyze historical events or phenomena. Secondary sources often base their theories or arguments on the direct evidence presented in primary sources. Examples of secondary sources would include criticisms or interpretations of literary works, books about historical events, textbooks, interpretations of scientific research etc.

via Primary Sources | Library – University of Calgary.

First Call Congregations

The emphasis of the new project, “Vocation of First Call Congregations,” was to study the characteristics of congregations that do a good job supporting first call pastors as they start their ministry following completion of their seminary education.

via Vocation of First Call Congregations – Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Merit of sources

When looking at merit of historical sources, there are five criteria that are of most importance.

  • Multiple Attestation – Do we have many independent sources?
  • Dissimilarity – Do our sources seem to support the writers agenda? If not its better!
  • Language and Environment – Does the language and the environment fit the setting it is supposed to fit?
  • Coherence – Does what we are researching fit what we already know?
  • Post-Enlightenment World View – Does it fit what we know about reality? For example, people don’t rise from dead.

Vocabulary: Co-Dependency

“Co-Dependency” is a term used for a systematic deficiency in relationships in which a person either subordinates his or her life to another’s or uses his or her life to control or dominate another’s.

From Clinical, Clerical, and Congregational Co-Dependency by Donald R. Hands (Action Information, September/October 1990)

In his writing Rev. Hands uses a co-dependency graph, where distance, differentiation, and individuation are on one axis, and relationship, connectedness, and closeness are on the other.

  • When Y is min, and X is min – Nothing matters
  • When Y is max, and X is min – I matter, and you don’t
  • When Y is min, and X is max – You matter, I don’t
  • When Y is max, and X is max – I matter, you matter

Why It’s Not An Affair?

Patricia L. Liberty has written an excellent short paper on why sexual contact between a pastor and a parishioner is never justified.

Since the ministerial relationship is professional in nature, it is inappropriate to call a sexual encounter an affair. Affair is a term used to describe a sexual liaison between peers, or equals. In addition, the term affair focuses attention on the sexual nature of the behavior rather than the professional violation. It also places equal responsibility for the behavior on the congregant. Since clergy have a responsibility to set and maintain appropriate boundaries, those who are violated by clergy’s inappropriate sexual behavior are not to be blamed even if they initiated the contact.

via Why It’s Not An Affair by Patricia L. Liberty.

Myers-Briggs

The main problem has to do with the uncritical, theologically naive, rigid, and overly confident manner in which Myers-Briggs categories are often employed in various church settings. Church people, particularly the clergy, are taking MBTI results as the gospel truth and blithely using them to make employment decisions, to establish leadership styles and regulate staff relationships, and to advise people about everything from marriage roles to prayer techniques.
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Why is it that so many in the Christian church, with its long and rich history of understanding persons in the most profound way possible -as living souls and as creatures made in the image of God should fall into the trap of allowing for a moment those theologically enduring and wondrously mysterious understandings to be displaced by something as superficial as a grid of sixteen suspiciously artificial personality types woven out of a questionable and all-too-fashionable theory of human temperament?

via Theology Today – Vol 49, No.3 – October 1992 – EDITORIAL – Myers-Briggs and Other Modern Astrologies.

Multitasking

Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.

via The Autumn of the Multitaskers by Walter Kirn.

Family Systems Approach to Premarital Work

We advocate the use of a family systems approach to premarital pastoral work, involving exploration of the families of origin of the intended spouses. Family systems theory argues that a marriage is like a merger of two corporations, each having its own stockholders; thus, adequate preparation for marriage involves coming to terms with the realities of one’s family of origin and that of one’s intended spouse. Exploratory techniques include genograms, house tours, family photo albums, and discussions of the rules and rituals in the respective families. Leaving father and mother is the central prerequisite to marriage.

via You Must Leave Before You Can Cleave: A Family Systems Approach to Premarital Pastoral Work.

This article does not fit well into the marriage culture in Iceland. Having said that, its focus on family of origin work, differentiation, and different views on relationships is valuable.

The Miracle Question

There are various catch-all solution to be found out there. The miracle question, pioneered by Steve de Shazer could be seen as one of them. However, it is merely an attempt to be a shortcut to get right to the core of the problem in therapy. The therapist asks the client to imagine what the world would be like if the problem he presented to the therapist would disappear by a miracle over night.

One might wonder whether this is very far from the Secret or Joel Osteen, and surely I am not sure.

You can read about Solution focused brief therapy which is the fancy name for the Miracle Question.

Biblical Therapy or Biblical Counseling or Biblical Whatever

David Winfrey wrote an interesting article in Christian Century, January 23, 2007. In the article called “Southern Baptists reject ‘pastoral counseling’- Biblical Therapy” he addresses a change in practices by Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The change is to reject psychology as a tool for counseling and focus solely on the Bible as know-it-all information about human behavior. What is more, the pastoral counseling model that is being rejected for Biblical counseling was partly pioneered in Southern Seminary by Wayne Oates, according to David Winfrey. Vicki Hollon is quoted in the article saying:

Their movement away from science reveals a lack of faith, or at least a fear that somehow science is outside the realm of God’s creation and domain.

What is of special interest is that this rejection of scientific methods, and a move towards the Bible as a some kind of an ultimate handbook of all human behavior is a relatively new phenomena. Its origins are after mid-20th century, and it seems that it is getting stronger in the beginning of the 21st century.

Meaning of Equal Access

Gene Outka wrote the article “Social Justice and Equal Access to Health Care” in 1974. It is still as relevant now as it was then. In it Outka reminds us that:

Health crises seem non-meritarian because they occur so often for reasons beyond our control or power to predict.

The claim that some are to be treated differently based on merit or virtues, forces us to come to a conclusion that some people are more than others. Such a conclusion calls us to give all human beings a price tag.

If one agrees, for whatever reasons, with the agapeic judgment that each person should be regarded as irreducibly valuable, then one cannot succumb to a social productiveness criterion of human worth.

Therefore, concept of merit or virtues, are useless.

Finding our way into the future

Unless we are able, as Christians, to discover ways of conducting our life and our mission that differ radically from the Christendom form of the church that has dominated throughout most of Christian history, we shall be doomed in the future to be part of our world’s problem, and not its solution.

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Perhaps if ecumenism was less concerned about the union of tired, old institutions and more concerned about the calling of the Christian movement in the world as a whole, ecumenicity itself would be more vital to all who take this faith with some degree of seriousness.

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We Christians, who have imposed ourselves and our faith on so many, for so long, must now earn the right to explain the reason for our hope.

Finding Our Way into the Future by Douglas John Hall.

Religious Life

In her article “Creating a Spiritual World for Children to Inhabit,” Karen-Marie Yust talks about children’s formation and the role of practices, rituals, and ideas. She addresses especially how repetition enforces learning. She takes a helpful example.

An African American toddler boy who repeatedly watches cartoon videos in which the “good guys” with light-colored skin always beat the “bad guys” with dark-colored skin concludes from this observation that light-skinned people are good and dark-skinned people are bad. (A Caucasian child comes to a similar conclusion.) When he is four or five and becomes aware of his own skin color, he will likely experience a tension between his sense of himself as good and his cultural observation that dark-colored skin belongs to bad guys. His white peers will also be more likely to label him as bad when trouble erupts on the playground.

This also applies to gender-images. As part of the childhood culture those experiences that they see in “the adult world” are then “played out” or “tried on.” And here comes the connection to the Religious Life.

When adults act as if religious education is mainly a tool for children’s moral development, children quickly catch on to the irrelevance of religious culture for the grown-up world. They have no incentive for committing themselves to a particular spiritual identity on adolescence if faith is portrayed by adults as something one shed with childhood.

(The Article appeared in Family Ministry, Vol. 18, No. 4, Winter 2004)