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A Holy Conversation at St. John's United Church
As St. John’s United Church in Halifax, Nova Scotia, prepared to call a new pastor last year, there was a growing sense within the congregation that they needed a strong leader who could help them refresh what they were to be about as a church. When Linda Yates arrived in October 2005, she agreed with that assessment.
St. John’s is one of six United Church of Canada congregations within a two-mile radius. As an older, center-city congregation, it faces what one lay leader describes as the “big building-small congregation” syndrome. Soon after becoming the congregation’s pastor, Yates realized that St. John’s was projecting a large deficit that must be addressed if the congregation were to survive.
As she began to think about a process that would be most helpful for St. John’s, Yates—who says she became aware of Alban Institute books while she was in seminary—turned to Alban’s Holy Conversations: Strategic Planning as a Spiritual Practice for Congregations as a resource.
Forming the Futuring Team
Yates recalls that one of the things she gleaned from the book by Gil Rendle and Alice Mann is the importance of finding the right people to lead a congregational planning process. As a result, she recruited Brian Jay, a member of the congregation whom Yates describes as “very well trusted” and “an absolute natural leader.” He also has “all kinds of strategic planning training from private enterprise and from the corporate world,” she adds.
Yates and Jay developed a presentation to share with the congregation during the annual meeting in March 2006. The presentation, which utilized information from Holy Conversations, included a proposal to form a futuring team. The congregation unanimously approved the proposal, and within a month a team was in place with Jay serving as its chair.
A serendipitous opportunity emerged when Yates discovered that Mann would be leading an event at the nearby Tatamagouche Centre on planning approaches and strategies for revitalizing congregational life. Four members of St. John’s futuring team participated in Mann’s event.
Jay describes the experience, which was part of the team’s internal training process, as helpful. “The four of us came away with some good ideas and concepts,” he says.
Yates contends that the experience was a necessary step. It was a “very concentrated piece,” she says. “And it allowed us to be away together, which I think was important.”
The futuring team has continued to use Holy Conversations as a guide—augmenting it with other resources and the knowledge and experience of team members. The book’s flow chart, according to Jay, is providing an overall map for the congregation’s planning process.
Jay estimates that the team is about halfway through the necessary internal data gathering. Using an appreciative inquiry approach, team members have conducted 60 one-on-one interviews with members of the congregation and hope to complete 40 more interviews this fall. The team will gather external data later in the process, which Jay anticipates will continue for another year.
Positive Changes
Yates says she already sees some positive effects from the futuring process. “Now that we’ve moved into the appreciative inquiry piece, I’m trying very hard to reflect that in sermons and our activities at church,” she shares. “I think that already there is a huge increase in terms of even just attendance. The energy is better. There are a lot more possibilities people are talking about.
“I think there are also relationships being built that weren’t built before between people and groups and the whole congregation. Trying to figure out what people do and who does what well is building relationships, which I think all by itself is a great life-giving thing for a church.”
But along with positive change, Jay notes, comes anxiety. “Whenever there’s a group looking at possible changes,” he explains, “that upsets a group who worry about change.”
To help manage that anxiety, as well as to keep the congregation informed about and engaged in the process, the futuring team has planned a series of “lunch-and-learn” sessions for the fall. Initial plans call for the sessions to include a presentation on things the team is learning; a process to help discover the congregation’s learning and faith styles; a “wall-of-wonder” exercise to help the congregation reflect on its history; and a World Café experience.
Ultimately, Jay hopes that the process will produce something that will be worthwhile and that will help St. John’s address the things that need to happen in the next five years.
In addition to what he and the team are discovering about the congregation, Jay says he has learned the importance of having a planning committee with a lot of “intelligence built into it.” Given the complicated and involved nature of a planning process, he said, it is critical to have committee members who are capable of educating themselves about concepts and resources, who can present well to large groups, who have some experience with long-range planning, and who can think outside the box. It also is important, he adds, to engage people who understand that this type of planning is “all wrapped up in the Holy Spirit.”
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