Managing Congregations in a Virtual Age

John W. Wimberly, , John W. Wimberly

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506472638
• eBook ISBN: 9781506472645
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

In Managing Congregations in a Virtual Age, John W. Wimberly Jr. draws on the experience of the business community, and on a diverse group of skilled pastors and rabbis, as he lays out the opportunities and challenges of working from home for congregations and staff, offering principles and best practices for successfully managing remote workers and ministries.

The move toward working from home is part of a rapidly changing work environment for employers and employees alike. Large parts of the business world have mastered managing their staff, located around the country and the world, virtually. For many faith communities, however, the sudden move to working from home amid the Covid-19 pandemic involved significant upheaval. Fortunately, various forms of technology and productivity tools can make this shift easier.

Wimberly focuses on how congregational leaders can ensure accountability and productivity, create a sense of staff as a team, help older staff members learn how to work from home, and determine what hardware and software staff members and the congregation need to support effective communication.

This comprehensive guide will serve congregations well into the future, even as technology and circumstances change.

1

Managing People

Increasingly, seminaries offer a class devoted to leadership, a well-researched and much-written-about topic. They should. Clergy are leaders in their congregations, larger faith communities, and hopefully, local communities. But how many seminaries have classes on management? If they do have such a class, how many students choose it as an elective? As surely as clergy serving a congregation must be leaders, they also need to be managers.

Some people are born managers, and that God-given talent may be enough for many situations. But even natural managers are wise to read and think about best practices for managers. For those who are not natural managers, the lack of management knowledge and skill will derail a career and the life of a congregation—every time.

While thousands of great books have been written on leadership, and many clergy avidly devour them, precious few helpful books on management are available. The best, in my opinion, is the short book Managing by Canadian management expert and professor Henry Mintzberg. Given that it was written in 2009, the book’s only shortfall is understandable: it has too little information about the way technology has affected the task of management. We will attempt to fill that hole in this book.

The difference between leadership and management is relatively straightforward. Leaders lay out visionary direction for a congregation, while managers do the nitty-gritty work of getting a congregation from point A to point B to realize the vision. The thoughts of leaders sometimes seem to drop out of the heavens; the thoughts of managers rise out of the realities of the congregation’s daily life. For example, Martin Luther King Jr. cast the vision. Fred Shuttlesworth, Diane Nash, and others organized a movement.

Some larger congregations have the financial wherewithal to hire a business manager, and very large congregations often have a designated “executive pastor” who frees other pastors on the staff from many administrative duties. Even in these congregations, though, lead or senior clergy must manage the overall program of the congregation as well as a core staff team and a core group of lay leaders. There is no escaping the task. The management principles in this chapter will help clergy and lay leaders alike, regardless of their position on a church staff or the size of their congregation. Whether one is a pastor managing a small staff in a pastoral-size congregation, a layperson managing a team of volunteers, or a senior pastor with five staff reports, the techniques needed to be an effective manager are remarkably similar.

A major premise of this book is that management is management—whether the manager is working with a staff on-site, remotely by phone or written direction, or virtually with the help of video technology, smartphones, and email. Each of these management scenarios has its own peculiarities, but they all rely on the same basic principles. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on management per se before we move to virtual management in chapter 3.

The Tyranny of Monday Morning

I like to talk with congregational lay leaders and clergy about the “tyranny of Monday morning.” As clergy, we experience a spiritual and emotional “high” as we lead Sunday worship, coming close to our God and congregants in a powerful, mystical way. I have led lots of groups, retreats, and community meetings but have never experienced anything comparable to the power of worshiping God. Sunday afternoon we bask in the glow of the Sunday-morning experience. Even when my favorite sports teams lose on Sunday, the defeat does not bring me all the way down. But then comes Monday morning! On Sunday, we lead beautiful worship services that lift us toward the heavens. On Monday morning, we descend from the mountaintop to plow the fields in the valleys where ministry happens.

During my years as a pastor, I liked to get into the office around seven o’clock in the morning, before my secretary, janitor, or anyone else arrived. In the silence of my office, I could go over the attendance sheets from the pew pads, looking for the names and contact information of Sunday’s visitors. I could look at my schedule for the week ahead. I could pull up the lectionary and read the Scripture passages for next Sunday’s sermon.

Less than twenty-four hours from Sunday’s worship, I moved from the sublime to the mundane matters that make or break a ministry, matters requiring management skills. Managing the life of the congregation seized control of my agenda and life. The toilet that leaked in the men’s bathroom has to be fixed, I thought, and do not forget to remind the janitor that members are complaining on Sundays about insufficient toilet paper in the bathrooms. The bulletin for next week must be created. A staff meeting needs to be led. The budget has to be reviewed. The associate pastor needs a new printer (Why did he tell me instead of ordering it himself?). Plans need to be made to cover for the secretary’s upcoming vacation. The Monday-morning list went on and on and on.

Laura A. Hill, professor at the Harvard Business School, has studied first-time managers. More than a few of them said something like this: “I thought I would be gaining control when I became a manager. Instead, I found that I was being controlled by my job!”1 So it is for clergy. We had a lot of expectations about what leading faith communities would be like. Few of us, I wager, envisioned the tyranny of Monday morning.

Our management responsibilities as clergy make it challenging to remain focused on the bigger, macro issues at the heart of effective leadership—even to manage the implementation of strategic priorities. As a pastor whose congregation engaged in three strategic-planning processes over my thirty-year tenure at Western Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, I always felt challenged to retain strategic focus as a leader while making sure the staff and I tended to all the management tasks. Instead of building and expanding a house as clergy and lay leaders, too often, we are putting out fires that threaten the frame of the house.

In my discussions with clergy, I hear the time spent on managing the mundane to be a recurring frustration. We want to lead. We want to be change agents. But we find ourselves enmeshed in the everyday details of managing programs, people, buildings, and finances. The management needs of the congregations we serve are not going away, however. The only way to improve the situation is to become better managers.

Busting a Myth about Managers

So what do most of us conjure up when we imagine the master manager? Before I started studying management, I believed, like many others, that outstanding managers are cool, calm, collected individuals who sit in their offices making data-based, strategic plan–oriented decisions. Managers are in control—of budgets, employees, strategies, and so forth. They create order out of chaos, setting up orderly systems to make sure that chaos never rears its ugly head again in their realm. Or so I thought.

Mintzberg, Hill, and other management scholars spend literally entire days following top managers around. What they have found is that these women and men are almost the opposite of the stereotype. When describing the actual, rather than the mythological, daily activity of managers, scholars use terms like brevity, fragmentation, interruptions, surprises, and dashing around all the time. Sounds like the day of a clergyperson to me!

Understanding that the stereotype of the calm manager is not only misleading but fundamentally wrong is key to becoming an effective manager. It will also reduce our guilt about not having everything under control. Management is not about eliminating chaos but about being in the middle of it and helping an organization move toward its goals. Too often we see phone calls, emails, texts, and meetings as pulling us away from work. The effective manager, however, sees them as essential work.

Mintzberg and others have found that given the inevitable chaos in most organizations, the skills needed to be a great manager are more about the mental approach to management than management tricks. Rabbi Ed Friedman talked about the need for clergy to be a nonanxious presence in their congregations.2 While I have never been convinced there is such a thing as a “nonanxious” human being, clergy certainly can aim to be a low-anxiety presence in their congregations. Lowering the anxiety level in our congregations around management and other issues can have a huge positive influence.

Being nonanxious does not mean being in control, however. It means not being hyperanxious when things are out of control. As described by Friedman and, in different terminology, by Mintzberg, non- or less-anxious managers will not overreact to surprises, miscalculations, or disorder by becoming hyperanxious or unnerved. Instead, managers who have their anxiety levels under control will be able to think clearly and problem solve.

I have been proud of the US religious community during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the crisis, for perfectly understandable reasons, the anxiety of the American populace went through the ceiling. From what I saw, the response of the religious community was not overly anxious. For example, when it immediately became clear that in-person worship was not possible, congregations managed the movement to online worship experiences relatively calmly and quickly. Yes, figuring out the technology took a lot of running around, head scratching, and consulting. However, such efforts in a time of chaos were a sign of effective management.

In times of crisis, such as COVID-19, great managers methodically and calmly incorporate as many differing viewpoints as feasible into the decision-making process. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals makes this point about Lincoln. In the midst of the most chaotic upheaval in the nation’s history, Lincoln calmly (at least outwardly) sought out as many voices, friendly and opposed, as possible before making decisions. His calm pursuit of the best approach was key to managing and leading what many considered an unmanageable nation.

Amid the chaos of COVID-19, economic collapse, and massive protests of racial injustice, congregations have provided a calm, stable, often virtual space for their members and others. They did so even as they reconfigured and managed their organizational lives. Talking with congregational leaders, I have sensed that part of their success is the result of a new openness to try strategies that they might not have embraced in other times.

One thing we can learn from congregations’ responses to the pandemic is that great managers are not birthed in MBA programs. Management is learned on the job. Yes, a person seeking to manage effectively should read books and articles on the subject by scholars like Friedman, Mintzberg, and Hill. However, ultimately, anything learned in a book must be relearned in the soil of one’s ministry. We learn to manage by managing and mismanaging. We do something right and remember it for the next time. We make mistakes and learn from them. The important things we learn probably have more to do with intangibles, such as anxiety and interpersonal interactions, than tangibles, such as spreadsheets and financial reports.

One of the things I had to learn when I first became a solo pastor was that I was totally micromanaging our congregation’s wonderful janitor, Gaston Paige. My anxiety level was high as we started a major feeding program for the homeless, inviting about three hundred people into the church each morning for breakfast. I was terrified things would not run well, our members would turn against the program, and we would have to shut the program down, depriving our guests of a healthy meal and crucial social services. With an overwhelming number of start-up issues to tend to, rather than inviting Gaston more deeply into the decision-making about how to clean the kitchen and large dining area, I started issuing him instructions. Gaston, much smarter than I, did exactly as I instructed instead of following his own instincts and knowledge about how to get the job done. The rooms got cleaned, but the process took far more time than was necessary. I finally realized that Gaston needed to manage the cleaning, and I needed to support him. Once I figured that out, Gaston and I began to build a relationship of trust and friendship that lasted thirty years. To be clear, I kept making suggestions, and Gaston kept rightly rejecting most of them. But over time, I realized he was the expert, not me. Our management relationship became a team dialogue rather than a managerial monologue. The effectiveness of a lower-anxiety approach to cleaning taught me a lesson I applied to other challenges as time went by. I also learned that to manage was not to be in control. In the chaos of starting a large feeding program for the homeless, I discovered that the key was staying focused on the vision (providing a good meal in a safe, caring space).

Who and What Are We Managing?

Focusing obsessively on problem-solving is a seductive management temptation. However, problems flow from issues in the system from whence they come. If we do not deal with the source of the problem—the system—the problem will just keep coming back. A congregation is a large system with multiple systems within it. A typical congregation will have subsystems, such as staff, leaders, participants in programmatic areas (spiritual growth, mission, worship, and the like), demographic groups (younger people with families, retired people, youth and children, and so forth), and perhaps groups of members who form what amounts to a system around particular theological or political views. Effective management requires a broad understanding of the overall system, the subsystems, and how they interact. Effective managers possess broad knowledge of the complete system, understanding the way the pieces of a system interact and impact each other. They are experts at helping the parts of the system work together to achieve the greater purposes of the congregation. An effective manager connects the dots within the system so staff and volunteers understand their work in relation to the greater purpose.

For example, consider two subsystems that exist in almost every congregation: maintenance/cleaning and education. An effective manager understands that without clean, well-maintained rooms, the morale of the teachers and students will be undermined, and parents will be unhappy. Therefore, the manager makes sure the maintenance and cleaning staff listen carefully to the needs of the teachers and then do the work requested. The effective manager also recognizes that maintenance and cleaning staff are the experts at cleaning and ensures they have the tools and supplies they need.

The manager will be sure to connect the work of both the teachers and the maintenance staff to the larger purpose of the congregation. For many congregations, a primary purpose is to attract families with children. To achieve such a purpose, the classrooms need to be safe and clean. When I have been asked to give congregations advice on how to attract families with children, the first thing I ask is, “Are your classrooms attractive, safe, and clean?” If not, families will go elsewhere. Managers add value when they know and help others know how maintenance and teaching work together to create a congregational system that is appealing to families with children.

One way to frame managers’ jobs in a congregation is to think about the many discrete areas where they will need to develop expertise. Management scholars use different names to describe these key areas of managerial expertise, but I will use the following interconnected categories:

• • people
• • information
• • resources
• • workflow
• • performance
• • culture

The rest of this chapter is about the “people” category. As managers, we can keep the financial books in order and hit many performance measures. However, if we do not manage people well, it won’t make much difference.

People

Managing people is always the most challenging and rewarding part of being a manager. It’s challenging because every person requires a slightly different approach from a manager; it’s rewarding because few things are more satisfying than seeing a staff person or volunteer develop and succeed. In this section, we will discuss a few of the many things to consider when managing people. When we get to managing people virtually, we will see how the task increases in difficulty.

Hiring

Leigh Bond, senior pastor of Beargrass Disciples of Christ Church in Louisville, Kentucky, summarized his key management strategy succinctly: “Hire all-stars.”3 Indeed, finding talented, highly motivated, hardworking, creative individuals to work as staff should be a high priority for any congregation. I always warn congregations, “Don’t hire someone just to fill a hole, because if you hire the wrong person, the hole will become an abyss!” High-quality staff, obviously, make the management task much easier. The problem is simple: How does one find and recognize them?

My father, a Presbyterian pastor, readily acknowledged that he made several bad hires for the associate pastor position at churches he served. He hired some wonderful individuals to serve as associate pastors but watched in dismay as they turned out to be low performers or bad fits....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Managing People
• 2. Managing Information, Resources, Workflow, and Culture
• 3. Staff Teams in a Virtual World
• 4. Virtually Managing a Congregation’s Program and Life
• 5. Life at Home and in the Workplace in a Virtual World
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Recommended Resources