Reader Reflections, Part Two
ACNAtoo has been reflecting on what we’ve each learned during our first year and we invited you to share your thoughts as well. The following reflection was submitted by one of our readers.
It takes a community to think things through. All the different perspectives you’ve brought together form a very special mosaic. This project is a creative work, and we are better off for having it. I particularly appreciated Helen Keuning’s narrative. For Helen, her experience as part of the Bishop’s Council and the inner workings that she observed were catalysts in her decision to leave the ACNA. Helen’s testimony caused me to think more about how churches function.
Organizational Dysfunction
I have an interest in designing effective systems, contingency planning, organizational health, and measuring outcomes. The events in the ACNA in the last few years have shown how these subjects can be mishandled.
Helen presented an argument that things have not been handled well, and even worse, the system itself has problems. I liked her thoroughness, she made her case well, and was respectful in the process. Her account resonated with me.
My own experience in the church has led me to expect churches to kind of stink on the organizational level, like poorly-run small businesses, without a clear sense of direction guiding their activities, being managed either by volunteers who have other more significant commitments, or leaders who lack basic managerial facility when the job calls for anything beyond running weekly services and basic seasonal ministries.
In my own DUM (on the basis of the last few years this should be the acronym)/ACNA experience when church leaders stay in the pocket they seem to do okay. But if they go off-script, or if something unplanned happens, they don’t know what to do because they’re not trained for it. They didn’t prepare for it, and I would wager that some part of them feels like it’s not their problem. The bible school to seminary to pastor pipeline doesn’t automatically prepare church staff to manage ever-changing organizations where “stuff is going down” all the time.
In a for-profit business context, even an incompetent manager is motivated by profit to respond to the crisis, but the incentive structure for pastors is more about saving face, maintaining the status quo, and minimizing problems when they happen. Examples of how this weird incentive structure works have been illustrated ad nauseum here on ACNAtoo. Why do churches function like this?
I don’t get the sense that a lot of churches, especially small ones, are being managed with tangible plans that get more detailed than their vision statements or values, that they are measuring their results beyond their income and attendance, or that they have strong plans for when things go sideways. Even small businesses prepare crisis contingency plans that are ready to fire at a moment’s notice.
The ACNA, with attendance in the tens of thousands, has seemed clueless and unprepared to respond meaningfully and quickly over the last few years. The ACNA communication timescale is weeks and months, not hours or days. I’m willing to point at vanity and malice as possible culprits for this, but I don’t think deviousness or obfuscation are the primary issues, I think the larger factor is garden-variety incompetence and unpreparedness. I don’t think this is the inevitable fate of all church leaders, but I do think it’s a default disposition that requires something in order to be overcome.
I’m sympathetic for the parish priest who is doing what they can to get by, who is open to organizational self-critique, and who wants to take abuse in the church seriously. I don’t want to entirely blame paid church staff for the poorly-run organizations they may be part of. Churches and their governing bodies are ripe for organizational improvement, and I wish it didn’t take a crisis to make this evident.
Unprepared for Abuse
My complaints about how churches function organizationally is a broad point. Zooming to specifics, a lack of organizational excellence hurts people when churches can’t recognize abuse and don’t know how to respond to it. How are pastors being trained on a regular basis to prevent abuse? How are they being trained on a regular basis to deal with trauma? Is this skill set seen as a basic competency of a pastor on the same level as being able to preach a sermon, plan a service, and fund-raise?
The corporate term for the kind of training that seems to be missing is continuing education, and it is common outside of the church. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, forklift operators, and telemarketers all have continuing education requirements as part of their jobs. The idea is that culture changes, our collective knowledge increases, and professionals update their skills accordingly. We learn new things, we encounter new problems, and we collectively come up with new industry-standard approaches.
What are pastors and other church staff expected to do at a regular interval as a basic responsibility of their job? Are the dioceses, deaneries, governing boards, and members of churches advocating for systems and processes that are preparing church staff to do their jobs well? Pastors should be on the cutting-edge of what their churches and broader cultures need, and they should be leading their churches to function well, operationally, organizationally, and more.
Although I have gained a dimmer view of the church as a well-oiled organization and see a strong need for organizational improvement within the ACNA, I have gained a higher view of what the people of the church are capable of when they unite to act under their shared values. To me that’s what church is about – the organizational stuff should exist to facilitate the well-being of the people and not the other way around. With regard to abuse, abuse in the church is everyone’s problem. With regard to church systems and processes, organizational excellence should be every congregant’s interest.
We invite further reflections from our readers.
