Understanding Your Congregation as a System: Congregational Systems Inventory (CSI)

Speed Leas is a nationally known consultant to religious organizations and an educator of church leaders, including pastors, laity, and church executives. For more than three decades, he has worked full-time as a teacher and consultant to ecclesiastical groups throughout the U.S. and Canada. He has an extensive background as a management consultant to churches and has earned a special reputation as an authority on conflict. His experience with conflicted congregations, judicatories and church agencies places him in a preeminent position in the nation. From this work and his research, he has written eleven books and numerous articles and monographs, and has given hundreds of seminars and lectures.

George Parsons, senior consultant with The Alban Institute, is a Presbyterian minister who has served local congregations. He also has advanced degrees in counseling and psychology, and training in conflict management and organization development. George has been working with Richard Pascale (at Stanford University) for the past five years consulting with multi-national corporations on problem solving and organizational restructuring. It is out of the work with Pascale that the congregational systems inventory has been developed.

Speed and George collaborated on this work, first by developing an inventory that was given to clergy and congregations on the West Coast. They revised the inventory (and some of theory) twice as they administered it to a wide variety of congregations across the country before publishing it in this form.