By Revs. Dennis Daniel & Sydney Wilde
2. Committees
a) Some of the church’s committees have become quite small, with few members attending meetings. In the first two months we were here, no meeting we attended except the Board and the Worship Associates had more than five members present; several have had no more than three. As a consequence of this pattern, those few people work alone, make decisions alone, and the committee becomes an expression of their personal ways of doing things. As individuals exercise more and more authority over a particular area of church life, they develop a proprietary interest and resist recruitment of new members to the committee. New folks therefore don’t feel an invitation to participate. Those with long experience on a committee also tend to think in terms of getting jobs done, as opposed to taking the time to build friendships, and they would rather do things themselves than have to train someone new. Recently we have attended meetings where more members were present, one of them quite large, but we still worry about those smaller committees.
b) The Council structure may need overhauling. It is more appropriate to a larger church, where there is a need to keep in touch with many different bodies and to coordinate efforts. Councils tend to spend a great deal of time listening to reports rather than planning, delegating and working. It may be that the councils actually act like committees in this church; if that is the case, the requirements for membership by election or as liaison from a subcommittee may need to be reconsidered.
3. Volunteerism
The following message was recently posted on the UU Ministers’ Chat Line. I reprint it for your consideration with permission from the author:
"The purpose of the church these days is to send forth the members in ministry. Longer standing members see making coffee and taking care of building and grounds as ministry. Most people 50 years of age and younger do not. They want to be used up in a noble cause, because so much of their lives are mundane and lack that ‘vertical’ dimension. If you put them on committees when they first come in, they'll leave. If you expect them to fix coffee, sweep floors, rearrange chairs, they'll leave. If you want them to be part of social change by attending another workshop or auditing the procedures of a congregation, they'll leave. They want meaning and purpose in their lives. They want their spirituality to make a tangible, relevant difference in the lives of others. Select them, train them, and then send them forth to build houses for the poor, start micro-lending banks in third world countries, adopt elementary schools, teach children to sing religious songs and songs of other cultures, mentor others' spiritual growth, raise money for worthy causes, visit the sick in hospitals, bring hope to those in jail, etc. They want to be used up for a noble purpose and care little what institution propels them that way. You will unleash the human spirit and the world (and their lives) will be transformed." Brent Smith (Tulsa, Oklahoma)
Here at First Unitarian Church, we see a few people wearing many hats. It’s hard to get an exact count, but our guess is that outside of RE only about 50 members take care of almost all the business of the church, and many of them are serving on three or four committees. The general rule is that the smaller the church, the higher the proportion of members who do various jobs. In a congregation of 200-225 we would expect 100-125 worker bees. If what we observe is correct, some questions need to be asked; to wit, has the recruitment system broken down? Are personality factors keeping people from volunteering? Are we asking people to do the wrong things, as Brent Smith suggests? Is the Many Hats phenomenon really a problem? Have we reached a cultural impasse which makes it impossible for a church to function as a democratic institution, so that we must rely on paid staff to do what volunteers did in the past?