I am the Reverend David Pyle. And over the last eight years, I've had the honor of working with almost 300 Unitarian Universalist congregations across the Central East, New England, and MidAmerica regions of our Unitarian Universalist Association. Often in support of congregational boards. One of the things that experience has taught me is that very few of our congregational boards have an understanding of what the work of a congregational board should be. And so these boards too often get pulled into one operational decision or crisis after another and are rarely if ever able to proactively work towards building the vitality and future of our liberal faith tradition, or even the vitality and future of their own congregation and its mission in their community and in the world.

Over these years I -- with the help of Paula Cole Jones, my fellow UUA congregational life staff members, and building on the work of the Reverend Dan Hotchkiss -- have developed a set of seven practices for congregational boards. The intention of these seven practices is to give congregational boards a guide to what is their work, and what is not. Each of these practices builds upon the ones that come before in the system. And so in the workshops, and the trainings I have facilitated on these practices, I always say, start with the first practice, and work your way toward the seventh. In those workshops, we spend time going into how to implement these seven practices within a congregational board.

But in this series of videos, I'll simply be introducing each of the practices and making connections to the other of the seven practices as well. Each of the following videos will introduce the congregation board's role in vision and mission discernment, fiduciary responsibility, policy development, congregational assessment, planning for the future, relationship building, and transformation. We will look not only at the meaning of each board practice, but how they are connected to and dependent upon all of the others. It takes a while to change a board's and a congregation's culture around what the work, what the purpose of the congregational board is. That is why I always encourage boards who want to transform their functioning to begin with the first practice of vision and mission discernment. And so we will start there in our next video.