Shake up in Pacific Central District

Yesterday, several lay leaders in the Palo Alto congregation received an email letter from the board of the Pacific Central District (PCD) stating that the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) had “unilaterally” decided to terminate the employment of the district executive, Cilla Raughley. Today, I received an email letter from the UUA’s Director for Congregational Life, Terasa Cooley, confirming that as of February 11, “Cilla Raughley will no longer be serving as District Executive in the Pacific Central District.”

Since this is a personnel matter, it should be obvious that the UUA is not going to divulge the particulars of why Raughley’s employment is being terminated — they will have both legal and ethical obligations to maintain confidentiality. The PCD board will also be required maintain confidentiality on the specifics of Raughley’s termination. So playing guessing games about “what really happened” is a waste of our time.

It is pretty clear from the two letters that the PCD Board and the UUA don’t see eye to eye on this matter. This is an inherent problem with the co-employment arrangement used with district executives — every district executive has two bosses, the district board and the UUA. From my perspective, I believe co-employment can work only if both co-employers communicate carefully about goals for the employee and ways to measure those goals; at a bare minimum, annual reviews by both co-employers are essential, along with a format for discussing discrepancies in the annual reviews, and a way for coming to agreement on new goals for the coming year — that’s at a bare minimum. To the best of my knowledge, this kind of intentional communication is not part of the co-employment process for districts and the UUA — which opens the door for the kind of disagreement we’re seeing between the PCD Board and the UUA.

I’m also seeing something else at work here. In general, it is difficult to hold districts (or the UUA) accountable to stated goals. This is a common problem in the nonprofit world. Unlike the for-profit world, where we can look at the bottom line to see if a company is doing well or poorly, it is difficult to come up with metrics that accurately measure performance of a nonprofit. This means that it’s hard to say whether a nonprofit is doing well, or poorly.

Even so, it is clear that the Pacific Central District is a declining district. In addition to the obvious decline in membership, my own feeling is that the level of services provided in the Pacific Central District is the lowest of any of the five districts I have worked in. How bad is the decline? Opinions differ. Is this the sole responsibility of the District Executive? In his book Good Boss, Bad Boss, organizational theorist Robert Sutton says that bosses account for about 15% of total organizational performance, or a greater percentage in small organizations. So clearly there’s more going on here than can be accounted for by one person’s performance. Yet as Sutton goes on to say, just as bosses get most of the credit when things go well, inevitably bosses wind up taking most of the blame when things go badly.

The real question facing us now is not whom to blame, but: What are we going to do about it? Pointing fingers of blame is a waste of everyone’s time, and I hope those who want to play that game have the grace either to stop, or to remove themselves from district activities. Instead, here’s what could be done to move in a positive direction:

  • All congregations in the district should engage in a period of reflection on the duties and the responsibilities (not just the rights) of congregational polity. Though it has many faults, Conrad Wright’s book Congregational Polity is one resource to use for this process. Ministers may wish to preach on this topic, and we ministers should make this a topic for our spring meeting.
  • Based on a renewed understanding of congregational polity, PCD ministers and lay leaders should give more time and attention to strengthening the entire district; this is especially true of our larger congregations, since small congregations are too often on the edge of disaster.
  • The entire Pacific Central District should establish achievable and measurable goals towards the district’s stated mission: “to provide services and resources to congregations that will grow the District in terms of its membership, the deepening of our faith, the effectiveness of our structures, and the power of our service to the wider world.”
  • Every district program should be re-thought in terms of these measurable goals, and programs that do not move us towards the district’s mission statement should be rebuilt, or eliminated.
  • PCD congregational ministers should spend some portion of their work weeks in service to the district, and congregational lay leaders need to make sure their ministers have the time to do this.
  • Congregational lay leaders should feel they too have a responsibility to serving the district, and even devote some of their precious volunteer hours to that end.
  • Before a new district executive is hired (or if one is hired; see below), the PCD Board and the UUA need to have careful and open conversations about terms of co-employment, perhaps including the establishment of a regular schedule of staff reviews and goal-setting.

Finally, I would not rule out the possibility of eliminating the Pacific Central District entirely. Given the level of dysfunction that seems to exist in this district, given that the districts to the north and south of us function better and offer more services for the same money, maybe it’s time to get rid of Pacific Central District. Personally, I’m all for being absorbed by Pacific Southwest District.

One final note: I’m going to moderate all comments. Comments that get into personalities or try to delve into personnel issues will not be approved. I will favor comments that focus on the bigger issues confronting the Pacific Central District, and the UUA more generally; e.g., the rights and responsibilities of congregational polity vis a vis the districts. And I’ll close comments on this post in a week or so. So please be nice, and please think hard and seriously about the relationship between congregational polity and the districts.

Playing the numbers game, pt. 2

Which is really the largest Unitarian Universalist congregation?

With the majority of congregations reporting membership and attendance figures, I looked at the online list of congregations to see which are the three largest congregations, measured in terms of average attendance (although Unitarian Universalists tend to measure size of congregation by number of certified members, experts on congregational growth at the Alban Institute recommend measuring average attendance).

Here are the top five congregations as measured by the size of their attendance:

  1. First Unitarian Church (Portland, OR), 1068 average attendance, 1041 members.
  2. All Souls Unitarian Church (Tulsa, OK), 914 average attendance, 1900 members
  3. Unity Church Unitarian (Saint Paul, MN), 774 average attendance, 859 members
  4. First Unitarian Church (Rochester, NY), 687 average attendance, 955 members
  5. All Souls Church, Unitarian (Washington, DC), 646 average attendance, 878 members [corrected from original post]

Thus, by the standard definition of a mega church (average weekly attendance of over 2,000), there are no Unitarian Universalist congregations that even come close to mega-church size. Just to remind you, there have been Unitarian megachurches in the past:— the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society in Boston in the 1850s, Theodore Parker, minister (possibly the first megachurch anywhere); the Liberal Religious Fellowship in Prague in the 1930s, Norbert and Maja Capek, ministers; People’s Church in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, Preston Bradley, minister.

For the record, here are the top five Unitarian Universalist congregations in terms of membership (note that two of these congregations have not reported average attendance, which I find very curious):

  1. All Souls Unitarian Church (Tulsa, OK), 1900 members, 914 average attendance
  2. Unitarian Church of All Souls (New York, NY), 1529 members, no reported average attendance
  3. First Unitarian Society (Madison, WI), 1463 members, no reported average attendance
  4. The First Unitarian Church of Dallas (Dallas, TX), 1097 members, 457 average attendance
  5. First Unitarian Church (Portland, OR), 1041 members, 1068 average attendance

A list of Bay Area congregations, listed in order of average attendance, appears below.

Continue reading “Playing the numbers game, pt. 2”

Um, dominos fall; is that good?

Seth Godin is a marketing expert whose advice I value highly. Along with Jay Conrad Levinson’s Guerilla Marketing series, Godin’s book Purple Cow has been central to how I think about “marketing” Unitarian Universalism.

Marketing people have a tendency to go off the deep end, however, and I’m beginning to think that’s where Godin has gone. His latest marketing initiative is called The Domino Project. He says he’s going to “reinvent books,” primarily (it seems) by building an online community through his blog that will be a built-in market for his new book, and then publishing the book directly through Amazon.

I find this to be intensely uninteresting. My partner has been writing, printing, and selling her own books for a dozen years; she knew her market in advance, cultivated them, and maintains personal connections with them. She learned that Amazon has a tendency to exploit people: they lower the selling price of a book by cutting the amount that goes to writers and publishers and at the same time increasing their own profit margin. Half of what Godin seems to be proposing in his Domino Project is what good authors have been doing for years, and the other half seems to be promoting an exploitative corporation.

Worse yet, from my point of view, all Godin seems to be doing is coming up with ways to market his own books. None of this applies to the kind of marketing I’m doing all the time. In short, Godin has pretty much lost me — so now he’s gone from my blogroll, having been replaced with the Guerilla Marketing blog.

Buds

As Carol and I went for a walk this evening, we passed by trees with swelling buds. Every so often I caught the scent of flowers blooming. This while the bulk of the United States east of the Rockies is being clobbered by a huge winter storm.

Update, 2/2: Headline on this morning’s edition of the San Mateo County Times, printed over photos of winter weather: “Aren’t you glad you live in California?”

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The joys of pop fiction

Recently, I’ve been making my way through P. G. Wodehouse’s books. (You know, Wodehouse, the guy who wrote those books about Jeeves, the butler, and Bertie Wooster, the gentleman of negligible intellect for whom Jeeves worked. Yes, they were books before they got abducted by British television, and magazine serials in the old Saturday Evening Post before they were books.)

The real reason I’m reading P. G. Wodehouse is escapism, pure and simple: his books are worlds of delightful fantasy, with no particular relationship to reality, where everything turns out just fine in the end. But if you ask me, I’ll tell you that the reason I’m reading his books is because he’s such an excellent English prose stylist, and I’m reading him in hopes that I can learn to write better. Both are true statements, but the second statement is the kind of truth that’s so faded that it’s barely there at all.

Yet even though there is so little of substance in Wodehouse’s books, once in a great while, to my vast surprise, he actually has something to say that is more than mere gossamer fiction fantasy. When I read the following passage in the novel Picadilly Jim (Arrow Books ed., 2008, p. 85), I had to read it twice, because it actually said something of substance:

…But his father’s reception of the news of last night’s escapade and the few words he had said had given him pause. Life had taken on of a sudden a less simple aspect. Dimly, for he was not accustomed to thinking along these lines, he perceived the numbing truth that we human beings are merely as many pieces in a jig-saw puzzle, and that our every movement affects the fortunes of some other piece. Just so, faintly at first and taking shape by degrees, must the germ of a civic spirit have come to prehistoric man. We are all individualists till we wake up.

As I thought about this passage, a strange vision came to my mind: Ayn Rand and P. G. Wodehouse in a sort of literary fight club….

…They come out of their respective corners and meet in the middle of the ring, literary knuckles bared. Wodehouse says, “I published nearly a hundred books.” Rand sneers at this pathetic jab, and replies, “Yes, but they were drivel; my big serious novel has sold nearly 7 million copies.” Wodehouse winces; he feels this blow keenly; but he rallies, saying, “Yes, but I was knighted.” Rand reddens in anger, and replies, “I repeat, you wrote drivel, mindless musical comedies in sticky-sweet prose. Whereas I promoted a serious philosophy, an ethical egoism that rejects the ethic of altruism.” Wodehouse smiles faintly, pauses, and says, “Ah yes; so you did: we are all individualists till we wake up.” It’s a knockout blow: Rand grunts in pain, clutches her head, and hits the canvas, out like a light.

A little louder, please

A couple of evenings ago, Carol and I happened to be walking along the platform of the San Mateo Caltrain station on our way home. A woman sat on one of the benches, talking on her cell phone while waiting for a train.

“Tell her that you’re not going to have to talk with the D.A.,” she said in a clear, penetrating voice.

On the next bench over, another woman huddled into her jacket.

“No, tell her that the D.A. isn’t going to press charges,” she said, louder this time. “Just tell her that, OK?”

We walked by. In a low voice, I said, “That’s not the kind of conversation I’d want to have in public.” Carol chuckled.

Fantasy worlds

Back when we were children, one of my sisters had a book called The Lonely Doll. The author, Dare Wright, illustrated the story with photographs. She used a doll she had had since she was a child, and two teddy bears given to her by her brother, Blaine. The book was reissued a few years ago, and I remember picking it up in a book store and leafing through it. Looking at the photographs as an adult, they seemed a lot more psychologically intense than I had remembered, especially the one of the big teddy bear, named Mr. Bear in the story, spanking Edith the doll. The photographs made the toys seem eerily lifelike.

I found Dare Wright’s autobiography in a used bookstore today. It turns out that Dare Wright had an unusually strong fantasy life as an adult. Her friend Dorothy was present when her brother Blaine went to the FAO Schwartz store in Manhattan to buy Dare a teddy bear:

“Blaine got drunk and weird, as he always did when he drank,” she recalled. “In we went. But when he saw all the bears together, he said it would be terrible to separate them because they would be lonely. With that he directed the saleswoman to pack up the entire lot, all their Steiff bears, hundreds of dollars of bears. Dare’s apartment in those days was just around the corner. We walked over there, carrying all those damn teddy bears.”

Dorothy found the spectacle of a grown-up brother and sister sitting on the floor surrounded by teddy bears, telling stories in imaginary bear voices, disturbing. Soon, Dare added Edith [her childhood doll] to the party — and urged Dorothy to join in. Making no effort to hide her disdain, Dorothy refused.* (The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright, by Jean Nathan [New York: Henry Holt, 2004], pp. 158-159.)

I can understand why Dorothy felt disdainful towards Dare and Blaine — that’s what we adults are supposed to do, we’re supposed to give up those fantasy worlds — but there is not much separating Dare and Blaine playing with teddy bears, and Anthony Trollope weeping uncontrollably as he wrote about the death of one of his characters. Nor is there much separating their fantasy world from the worlds that mystics encounter. I suspect we all have different levels of attunement to transrational worlds: some people are what we might call tone-deaf to fantasy, mysticism, and even fiction; others of us are not.

* For the record, Dare wound up keeping just one of the bears, who became the mischievous Little Bear in her children’s books.

Playing the numbers game

The deadline for congregations to certify with the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) is February 1. As they submit their certification data, the numbers appear on the following UUA Web page: List of Congregations That Submitted Membership Numbers. Some of us — those of us who are fascinated by numbers and hard data — think it is entertaining to watch this Web site, so we can see which congregations have moved up in membership and attendance this past year, and which have moved down.

It’s also fun to calculate average attendance as a percentage of membership; a quick scan of the larger congregations show percentages as low as 34% (West Shore, Cleveland) and as high as 95% (Vancouver, Wash.) — my own congregation here in Palo Alto stands at 71%. I’ve always felt most comfortable serving congregations where average attendance is a high percentage of membership, because I like to imagine that means members are more engaged and that perhaps the congregation is growing or ready to grow, but the reality is that membership numbers often have little relation to the actual size of the congregation. The other reality is that all too often congregational leaders play fast and loose with attendance figures, leaving out low attendance months, or simply guessing at attendance (and I’m betting they generally guess high).

Whatever. It’s still fun to watch the figures come in, and play around with them.

A truth about bosses

As much as we would like to believe otherwise, here’s some truth about leaders of organizations from Robert I. Sutton, an organizational theorist at Stanford University:

“The truth is that bosses of everything from small groups to Fortune 500 firms don’t matter as much as most of us believe. They typically account for less than 15 percent of the gap between good an bad organizational performance, although they often get over 50 percent of the blame and credit. Bosses of small (and young) workplaces have the biggest impact, especially on human reactions like turnover, satisfaction, and health. Yet even those bosses are over-romanticized, and their impact is magnified in our minds. In fact, even when bosses have no influence at all, we still heap on the credit and blame. When experiments at Stanford and Caltech were rigged so it was impossible for leaders to influence team performance, members still gave the appointed ‘leader’ most of the credit and blame. Members of poorly performing teams were even willing to spend their own money to get rid of their ‘lousy’ (if irrelevant) leaders.

“If you are a boss, this is your lot in life. You can’t change it, so you better learn to deal with it.” [Good Boss, Bad Boss by Robert Sutton (New York: Business Plus, 2010), p. 49.]

Based on my own experience, all this is true of ministers. As a minister, I have gotten credit for successes that I had little to do with, and I have been blamed for failures that I had little to do with. I’ve seen the same happen to chairs of congregational boards. As Sutton says, that’s life — best to learn to deal with it.

Springtime

I had to talk with someone in New England, who happened to mention all the snow on the ground there. I told them that here in the Bay area, we’ve been having warm days, with temperatures in the 60s. I did not tell them that as I was driving to work yesterday, I noticed that new green leaves are appearing on some of the deciduous trees; that for the last few days the evening air has been filled with the scent of flowers; that on Sunday I stood and watched a gorgeous male Anna’s Hummingbird (Calypte anna) in fresh bright plumage feeding at the hummingbird feeder hanging near my office.