Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Cluster Development: Forward, Together

Adapted by Carrie Stewart, Southwestern Conference, Southern Region Communications Task Force Member from a presentation created by Southern Region Staff.

“Although churches be distinct, and therefore may not be confounded one with another, and equal, and therefore have not dominion one over another, yet all the churches ought to preserve church communion one with another...” 
- Cambridge Platform, Chapter XV, Of the Communion of Churches One with Another, Section 1.

Cluster development is a key part of the work underway as the Districts in the Southern Region continue our work to establish a system to build and nurture dynamic congregations in strong relationships with each other. This work draws from the writings of the Cambridge Platform, which states that churches should cooperate in the following ways:

1. Mutual care and support for the good of the congregation and the advancement of the Faith.
2. Consulting with one another in regard to a church's experience, process, or practice.
3. Admonishing one another.
4. Sharing Elders and professional staff
5. Giving recommendations to members who wish to move to another congregation.
6. Giving financial support to churches in need.
7. Sending Elders to the neighboring churches to introduce themselves. 
8. Sending Elders to plant new churches.

Examples of what this cooperation might look like includes collaboration on and examples of practices, processes, policies, and procedures, having a greater social justice presence in a community, having joint leadership trainings, board retreats, teacher trainings, and other events, starting and supporting satellite congregations, sending elders who are experts in different areas between congregations, and supporting youth and young adult programming where critical mass may not exist.

What is a cluster? A cluster is a group of Unitarian Universalists working together in a deep, mutually covenantal relationship that gives individuals and congregations an opportunity to practice our shared Faith.  Clusters are intended to be logical, reasonable, and mutually beneficial.

A cluster is NOT a structure simply for the sake of structure, a bureaucracy, or mutually exclusive (a person, group, or church may belong to more than one cluster organization). It is not comprised of coerced relationships (You must “opt-in”), and they do not exist as the “New Districts”.

Geographic clusters are groups or congregations who are located in some proximity to each other.
Networks are groups or congregations who have particular characteristics or needs in common.

It requires time and intentionality to develop a cluster. The continuum of Cluster Development includes: 

No affiliation - Congregations and Unitarian Universalists have no affiliation with one another whatsoever. Congregations or Individuals may not be aware there are other churches or groups with whom they may affiliate. Congregations at this phase may or may not participate in the larger Association. 
Regional Staff can assist to
  • Bring resources to the congregation from the UUA
  • Help the congregation understand their relationship with the UUA
  • Invite the leaders of the congregations to leadership experiences
  • Introduce the leaders in the congregation to other leaders of nearby congregations to begin relationships


Beginning Affiliation - Groups of professionals, generally Ministers and/or Religious Educators, gather on a regular basis to offer collegial support to one another. No other groups or individuals are gathering at this time. If a congregation does not have any religious professionals, they are not present at these gatherings. Congregational leaders are aware that their professional staff are meeting in this manner and are thus aware that there are other congregations in proximity.  
Regional Staff can assist to:
  • Introduce area professionals to the group and connect professionals to one another. 
  • Introduce other groups together and provide ideas for reasons to meet. 
  • Speak at professional retreats about faith development or associational affairs.
  • Invite leaders to Leadership Experiences. 
  • Encourage collaboration between professionals which have benefits outside of their own professional group.


Moderate Affiliation - Religious Professionals gather for more than collegial support. Coordinated efforts exist to provide programming and ministry to congregations. Groups of Lay Leaders meet around common goals or projects (e.g.  Social Justice chairs organizing joint public witness opportunities, Presidents gathering for study and leadership training.)Coordinated efforts take the form of events hosted by one congregation but put on jointly by all participating congregations. Successful practices and programs are shared between congregations through Elders.
Regional Staff can assist to:
  • Help with budgeting for events and ministries
  • Handle registration for events
  • Assist with publicity for events
  • Aid in communicating with the UUA
  • Act as “talent” or assist in locating talent for events
  • Encourage Elders to find opportunities to deepen their ministry together
  • Invite leaders to Leadership Experiences.
  • Provide resources for formalizing the cluster's structure and procedures.


Formal Affiliation - The cluster is a formal entity unto itself. The cluster has obtained 501C-3 status and may collect dues from its member congregations. The cluster is run by a board and may have several teams or task forces that provide programming. The cluster is active in the broader community.
Regional Staff can assist to:
  • Connect the cluster with those in the UUA who can assist with legal issues.
  • Assist with events in the manner prescribed previously. 
  • Partner with clusters to provide large-scale programming and events.
  • Partner with the cluster's Elders to provide health to the system and high-quality collaboration and communication between congregations.


Elders are necessary to the process of building Clusters as they typically gather for the sake of mutual support and furthering Unitarian Universalism. Elders move between and among congregations or groups, spreading wisdom and maturity through the system and tend to be in relationship to more than one congregation or group and thereby enhance and deepen the relationships between those congregations or groups. Elders, along with regional staff, ministers, religious educators and congregational leaders, together have an opportunity to live into our shared ministry values through cluster development work.



Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Southern Region Roundtable: Leaders freed up to change the world

By Margie Manning, Southern Region Communications Task Force

As you have read in this space over the last year, the Boards of Trustees of the four Districts in the UUA Southern Region, working in shared ministry with our Congregational Life and administrative staff, have been focused on preparing the Region for the important votes we will take at our April 17-19, 2015 Annual Assemblies.

Driving this work is the conviction we share that we can become a more effective association and a more vibrant faith movement by dissolving district governance and formally establishing a system to build and nurture dynamic congregations in strong relationships with each other.

When the presidents of the four boards gathered in Boston in early November for the District Presidents Association, we set aside some time to talk about why the changes we are making feel relevant to our faith and how it is moving forward. Here’s a transcript of our roundtable discussion.

Question: What's wrong with district governance?

Mark Anderson, The Southwestern Unitarian Universalist Conference, a District of the UUA: Four years ago we met in Orlando and developed the Orlando Platform. We gave up co-employment of staff. We suspended our ends in favor of the UUA ends. In the Southwest, in August we permanently did both of those. They had been trials and we felt the need to go ahead and formalize that we weren't going back. We no longer set a vision for our district, and having 20 visions for where the UUA was going, was not the right answer. Having a single vision feels like the right answer to me…so having a district governance body no longer makes sense. We've spent the last three years trying to figure out what we're doing and what we figured out is the right answer is we are getting rid of ourselves.
DeAnn Peterson, Mid-South District: I think the question is a little bit wrong, in that it's not broken. What is becoming more evident and more clear is that [consolidation of regional operations, finances and staff] does a much better job of supporting congregations in a more financially responsible way, in economies of scale. You can build the faith because it's more ministry-based than government-based.
Margie Manning, Florida District: We have people who are passionate about Unitarian Universalism, who we've got sitting on boards, not making decisions, because there's very little to decide, but spending a lot of time on not making decisions, when their talents could be out there serving our congregations. That's where I believe a lot of their passions call them to be.

Question: Who will run things if we don't have districts? Who's in charge?

Denise Rimes, Southeast District:
We have a very dedicated and very bright board of trustees for the UUA. In terms of helping oversee and monitor the use of our assets, the UUA board is well equipped to do that. In terms of setting global ends and keeping us focused on those global ends, the board of trustees of the UUA is very well equipped to do that. By and large, our staff has done the vast majority of programming for the past several years; even though some of us are still program boards, the staff has certainly done yeoman's work on programming and they're very well equipped to do that. So in some ways, our district boards were pretending to be adding value to work that's being done extremely well by others. Here are all these amazing resources, people sitting on district boards, whose gifts and talents could be much better utilized, We can redeploy those resources because we have a very well-equipped UUA board and a very well-equipped staff to take care of all those things that district boards once did.

Question: Why not establish a regional board?

Mark
: That was an idea the four boards discussed, but we saw boards as an idea that outlived their usefulness. We'd been stuck, and creating a new board that would start out stuck was a bad idea. MidAmerica [the region comprised of the former Central Midwest, Heartland and Prairie Star Districts] has a single board that is doing linkage work with the staff. We set up a different structure for that linkage work, but I expect that linkage work to happen.

Question: What are Elders going to do that is a function not being served right now?

DeAnn:
There's an opportunity here for lay leaders to support the staff and support the congregations and support the faith in the way that boards often did on the side when they weren't doing governance, because they served as that middle leadership. The staff would ask for help - "What do you think about doing this?" - and it was often the boards that would be the place to go. There's still that role of advisement, spots for leaders to go when they want to seek leadership positions outside their congregational walls, and to promote connections between congregations, to build the faith. That is too big and too precious for the staff under current financial conditions to be able to do all of it. There's a huge role for volunteers and lay leaders to help that process.
Margie: Many of our congregations have done a very good job of growing leaders, but once a leader has gotten to the point that they have done just about everything there is to do in a congregation, it's time for fresh leadership to move in. But you don't want to lose those skills that have been cultivated. And there's an opportunity to build those connections between congregations by sharing this valuable, talented, educated, well-trained leader, and in turn helping other congregations grow leaders, grow the power of Unitarian Universalism in their own congregations. That's where I see the real value of Elders.Denise: And they enhance the connections to the broader faith, beyond congregational walls, as we create these opportunities for Elderhood and Elder leadership.
Mark: There's plenty of work to go around. The boards as boards - at least in the Southwest - we have not had time to do the work. We have seven Congregational Life consultants in the Southern Region; they don't have the time to do all the work there is to be done. Hopefully, the Elders will be able to step up, fill those holes and do the work that needs to be done in support of the vision of the UUA board and of the staff. The place I see it is in Central Texas. Natalie Briscoe is the staff person in charge of helping midwife the formation of a Central Texas Cluster and before I became president of the district that was an interest of mine. We have Elders in Central Texas that are stepping up to do that work and Natalie or I will be support for them and provide advice, but the Elders will be the ones actually doing the work. In young adult work, it's very hard for non-young adults to start a young adult group, because they are not young adults. At 42, I have no idea what would get a group of 20-somethings together and bond them but I could advise a group on how to structure themselves to do that. As someone in Central Texas, I have no idea what the Arkansas Cluster needs. The Elders in Arkansas are the ones who understand best what Arkansas needs in terms of a Cluster. So a lot of my answer goes back to Cluster development and enhancement work.

Question: What will be different about Clusters as we move into our new relationships?

Mark:
I think we're going to have more active Clusters with both meanings of the word “more.” There will be numerically more Clusters that are active. And, the Clusters that are active will become even more active. I'm hoping throughout the region, throughout the country, we'll see churches working together to support each other more in the ways that they need it.
Denise: Clusters will be the way that our leaders - the people who would have been on boards - can get as involved and truly make a difference by virtue of having closer contact, more intimate contact with congregations nearby or with similar affinities.
DeAnn: And to do work outside specific congregational walls, to do the work that needs to be done in the world.

Question: What about the 5th Principle, which speaks to the democratic process?  How is the congregational voice going to be heard?

DeAnn:
This is going to require some commitment from the congregations and specifically on the delegates from the congregations to be more informed active participants in the General Assembly. Before, we were in a fictional democratic process, but we were not good at informing and making sure that delegates were good representatives of our congregations and that needs to be built. There's a huge opportunity for us to toss aside the fiction and build the reality of sending good, strong, well-informed delegates that bring it back to the congregations to do the work that's accomplished at General Assembly. Those are words I haven't had a chance to say before - to build a better delegate.
Margie: Democracy has rights and responsibilities. It's not all just, I have the right to vote, but I don't have any responsibility to educate myself about what I'm voting for. You have that responsibility in greater society and you have that in your dealings in Unitarian Universalism.
Denise: I think the concept of Elders and particularly of Clusters is so much more grassroots and there's power in numbers. That's a way to aggregate that power, and to think about and talk about and learn about the issues and make the change that you want to see in your community and the world.
Mark: For congregations and Clusters that are really interested in continuing that democratic process, Clusters are a good way to do it. It will vary from Cluster to Cluster. I think there will be Clusters run by people with passion. There are others - North Texas is one of them - North Texas Cluster's board is a representative board, people on that board are elected out of the congregations and represent the congregations on that board. There's room for representative democracy within the Clusters if that's what the Clusters value.

Question: How are all these changes going to serve our faith and help us make a difference in the world?

Mark: The leaders we've been sending up to do governance work are now going to be freed up to lead us in changing the world.
Denise: Governance work is inwardly focused: How are we going to spend our money, manage the staff, or whatever it is we did as boards. This will free us up from a lot of that inward naval gazing. What will be left is all the work that's out there to do.
DeAnn: I can think of specific examples. One of the things we've been doing in the Mid-South is making sure congregational presidents know each other and can talk to each other. When you strengthen a congregational president and they know how to handle stewardship or how to help difficult people, you strengthen the lives of those who come into the congregation. We've got UUA consultants who are all about abundance and we could have lots of those kinds of facilitated conversations across lots of congregations, to work on abundance. Getting youth together across a region - not just a district but a region - to work on things. Social justice groups - so it's not just North Carolina during Moral Mondays, but all of Atlanta goes to Raleigh to help out with Moral Mondays. The Mississippi congregations – with not one minister there - helping that group to have fantastic Sunday services when they are all lay led because they Skype into Jake Morrill's congregation on a Sunday morning. So much work, so many specifics.
Margie: I’m thinking about my personal venture into Elderhood with the Florida youth group. It's so much more powerful to go and sit with a group and talk, rather than invite them to a board meeting and have them be an agenda item.... The one-on-one or several-on-several interactions that will come out of this through Elder connections or Cluster connections, the idea that we're putting our passions to work  - the natural consequence will fuel excitement for Unitarian Universalism.
Denise: I think we're at least for now unstuck. I think we were stuck, we were doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results, and you know what that defines: insanity. So I'm hoping this will work, we have every intention it will work, but at least, at the very minimum, we're unstuck, and even if we have to make some major adjustments, if we get more people to pay attention and get more input, we will have accomplished something I think.


The Southern Region Communications Task Force includes Margie Manning (Florida District), Carrie Stewart (SWUUC), Kirk Bogue (MidSouth), and Chris Reid (Florida), working in shared ministry with Kathy McGowan (Congregational Life Staff member), and Christine Purcell (Communications/IT Specialist).