Hello good people! It’s me again. Last July, three months into the pandemic, I wrote this piece inviting people (Unitarian Universalists and other religious folks) to right-sized expectations for religious professionals. You might remember.

Now here we are in March 2021, the pandemicversary. I’ve been on lockdown for a year and I imagine some of you have as well, and I want to bring forward another installment.

In mid-November, UUA President Susan Frederick-Gray wrote an invitational pastoral message as we entered the holidays, Lean Into What You Love.

“While the longing to be together is real, so too is the way in-person gatherings increase risk. This pandemic is a vivid reminder that our decisions impact those around us—not only our loved ones, but those most vulnerable, including weary healthcare and essential workers. This is why we continue to lean into our values of collective care and interdependence.”

In December Rev. Sunshine Jeremiah Wolfe wrote an invitational December Relational Health Advisor y,

“A confluence of events has come together to create a season of potential miscommunication, reactivity, and disconnection. …This [time] is creating unsuitable conditions for communication. Expect higher chances of overwhelm, assumptions, heightened emotional response, and conflict for the next 3-6 weeks.”

They spoke with emotional intelligence, philosophical insight, and spiritual leadership about the challenges we are all experiencing right now. If you have not read them, please do.

I thought to myself, “Those are nice invitational pieces, inviting people to breathe and slow down,” and I hoped it would help folks to do that.

Because of the work that I do, I spend time with hundreds of lay leaders, ministers, religious educators, music directors, administrative professionals, and others within Unitarian Universalism and other religious traditions. People around the continent have told me what was happening in their congregations: how under stress people are, how weighted and weighty even the smallest things feel to people during these times, and how people all too often misdirect their responses to that stress.

Those gentle nudges from our UU leaders in December were lovely. And they were not specific steps you can implement today, to live our values, adapt to safely minister to one another, and respond to urgent demands of our world. In the middle of a pandemic when none of us have all of our cylinders firing consistently, when all of us are experiencing extra pressure, confusion, and fear, as well as illness, loss, and grief, we need to be clear.

Your ministers and staff miss you desperately. My colleagues, even the most diehard introverts, have shared with me how they miss shaking hands after worship. How they miss chatting with you over coffee or running into you in the supermarket. They desperately miss being able to sit with you both while you celebrate and while you grieve. They miss being able to visit the elders in person, but they know that they can’t because they might bring a virus that would kill them.

And at the same time, the stories and experiences of distance and pandemic leadership challenges that I keep hearing from my colleagues break my heart. They are breaking my heart for my faith, breaking my heart for congregations, breaking my heart for my colleagues.

My people, there are things we need to do right now, to stop the heartbreak and to lean into our values. I come from generations of people who hint-at-things. Direct communication is generally reserved for Heads of Household and Prophets. While I don’t want to be as forceful as the prophet Isaiah, I am unwilling to hint and hope people pick up on it.

I invite, nay, implore, all of our people (volunteer and professional leaders alike) to stop and breathe, be right-sized, and be kind.

Stop and Breathe

I genuinely mean that I would like you to stop a few moments right now as you read this essay. Turn away from the page on your computer, gaze at a plant or out a window at the sky. Breathe deeply ten times to reflect on your innate goodness, on the best you are capable of, on being your most powerfully resilient. As you breathe, reflect on this – you do not have to hold up the universe solely; you only have to do your part.

Reflect on your right-sized part. If you have let your part expand like a balloon, about to pop or so huge it pushes other balloons away, breathe and let some of that air out.

Ten more long slow breaths, and then ten more. Breathe until your pulse is low and your body can be still.

How was that?

Some of you didn’t do it – you just kept reading. I really do want you to breathe before you finish this. If you have a strong resistance to being told what to do, consider that this is a spiritual practice to which I am inviting you.

Be Right-Sized

Many lay leaders have told me that pandemic has meant they have extra time to work on projects. They are often retirees, who live in the country or suburb or in a city near a park where they can be outdoors and take walks without risking social-distancing criteria. They are usually people who are not in financial distress during this time. Circumstances are certainly anxiety-producing, and it feels as though the whole world is out of control. They often shared how helpful it has been to spend time in their woodshop or their sewing room, increasing the size of the garden, or taking this time to turn the back porch into a four-season space with light.

Others have also shared that they thought this is a great time to modify the church bylaws, or plan for a new and improved religious education program after we reopen fully, or explore the governance structure and the ways committees divide their work.

I want to be clear. Some projects will necessarily take longer or require greater mindfulness of which stakeholders have the bandwidth to work on them. Examples might be projects that were begun before the pandemic began, or complex and necessary projects like search or thinking through how to scaffold our return during the post-acute period of the pandemic. But major projects created because “there’s time right now”? Please, no. At distance from one another and under stress, people who might not always agree during the best of times will find that working on complicated congregational matters during a pandemic is not something we can accomplish, “extra time” or no.

Additionally, your minister and staff don’t have any extra time. Your members with children at home and one or two jobs don’t have any extra time. Your members who are caring for beloved elders in their life don’t have extra time. What this means is that those who are in the privileged position to offer the time and energy risk over-functioning, over-deciding, and marginalizing or silencing people who don’t have the capacity right now to participate.

We cannot micromanage our way out of pandemic pain. We cannot predict our way through to fixing our finances or our sense of disconnection. We cannot make decisions about staffing in the future based on the traumatic experiences of the pandemic.

Nothing in this list is limited to one congregation. I have heard them multiple times from many congregations.

Being right-sized means that you collaborate on what is appropriate activity at this time in pandemic–those things that increase connection, support and meaning among our members. And to get there, you must set aside those things that make life more difficult for your ministerial and other leadership.

• Don’t try to reimagine a program for after reopening. Hope is important: the kind of hope when we have fractured a leg and we are laid up in the hospital and dream about a grand bicycling adventure. But we do not yet know how the fracture will heal, what kind of PT will be necessary, how our body, mind, and spirit will deal with and heal from the trauma. That has to be first and foremost in our minds. Health and healing. We can dream, but we can’t plan the trip before we know what our body will be capable of. What our congregational “body” needs now is connection and care, health and healing. The re-opening process itself will likely be in stages, carefully prioritizing health, maximizing inclusion and justice. The metaphorical bicycle trip is far away.
• Stop over-functioning. Stay in your lane. Let the minister be the minister, and the religious educator, music director, administrators, and other staff be themselves and do their work. They have pivoted in amazing ways that the congregational leadership will never know, and sometimes in ways they don’t even know about one another within staff teams! They’re working far above their hours in severe conditions, many while parenting virtual-schooling children, juggling administrative, educational, technical, and pastoral concerns far beyond the usual.

You likely don’t know these details. And you shouldn’t, not personally about your staff. Part of the minister and staff’s job is not to burden you, their beloved membership, with their personal challenges. But I want you to know deeply and entirely in your bones that your minister and your staff are suffering. They are making pastoral care calls from the closet floor because their children won’t leave them alone. They’re doing administration on the kitchen table while their children are “in school” on the other side of the table, talking into a headset about subtraction, Beowulf, or the bonding of hydrogen atoms. They are re-recording a TFAA/story, piece of music, or sermon an unspeakable number of times because a kid keeps crying or the dog keeps barking. You don’t need to know your specific leadership’s details, but you should understand the conditions under which they are operating.

Meanwhile, too many of the people they serve prioritize communications about distress and upset about things they cannot control, such as the unexpected effects of a Zoom update. Or telling them, “Did you try this?” or “I saw this thing another church did. We should do that.” I assure you, they know what the other churches are doing. They are in Facebook groups and email lists, and other communication mediums daily, talking with one another about what has worked to serve their people better. Something may be new to you but is unlikely to be new to your professionals.

• Don’t try to start new initiatives in the congregation. Please don’t take on rewriting the policy manual, the safe congregation’s plan, or the a revamped curriculum plan and RE program for when we get back in person.
• Avoid micromanaging Sunday worship. It’s not a TV show with an experienced production crew of fifty people. It is a religious educator at their kitchen table, a minister in front of an empty sanctuary or in their office, a tech person with children underfoot, a music director who spent days getting that one piece edited just right.
• Don’t decide that this is the time for you personally to rearrange the sanctuary or change the offices around unless it’s your office.
• Don’t enter if you were told to stay out of the building. Just stay out of the building. Ignoring policy puts your staff and others who must be in the building at risk.
• Don’t solve financial challenges by blaming attendance and an associated staff member. The problem is pandemic, not staff. Budgeting during a pandemic is not the same as budgeting in standard time.
• Don’t think out loud about things that impact your staffs’ livelihood. Don’t casually mention cutting salaries or hours offhandedly or asking staff if they’ve considered other jobs.

If your distress about finances is exceptionally high, remind yourself there is no need to panic. There is simply a need to bring more people into a conversation, to explore more financial/income alternatives relative to building or endowment, to engage the people who are most impacted in exploring solutions.

If you believe cuts in staffing need to be made, the people with whom to have that conversation are the staff themselves. They are the ones who actually know what it is they are doing with their time, the ones who can tell you now, in the middle of a pandemic, what exactly your congregation will lose if staff cuts are a solution. They can take it; they are trained to deal with anxiety, to manage stress, to think outside the box. Think about it for a minute: your minister and religious educator have been inviting you to experiment for over a decade. They say things like “experilearn” and, “well, we’ll try it; if it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.” People’s anxiety can make them freak out because so much of what we have been taught in this broad western culture is that we have to get everything right the first time, the opposite of trying something. Your minister and staff are ready to think creatively – let them be part of the conversation. There are resources to help think about thi s.

And if trusting creativity is hard, or your congregation often practices conflict avoidance, let me say this other way — at a minimum, laying people off during a pandemic is cruel. Don’t double down and surprise people by firing them without trying every single alternative first. 

Be Kind

So, what can you do?

• Be honest about what is reasonable.
• Adjust goals. If it’s staff evaluation time, make sure that you are assessing folks by pandemic goals. There’s no way to evaluate people according to pre-Covid times and no way to “push through” and set goals for after something that has no clear end date. Ensure that you are not blaming staff or ministerial leadership for things caused by pandemic and its attendant anxiety.
• Understand that executive functioning is challenged under stress. Spelling, time management, and memory are things that will not be as functional as during non-emergency times. That includes both laypeople and professionals. Please don’t correct spelling if you understood it. Please don’t shame someone for getting a date or time wrong. Just send a kind email clarifying the right date/time.
• Understand that emotions during a traumatic period will be all over the map. Even if we are people who aren’t used to noticing our feelings, they will drive us. Be intentional about noticing and identifying your own emotions, and reflecting on what is involved.
• Remember that when persons and systems are under stress they often naturally revert to an older, less healthy way of functioning. Lean into what you have learned about systems and emotional literacy and the impact of family dynamics in your life. Make sure you aren’t trying to manage your pandemic fear by minding other people.
• Reassure your staff that working 1.5 times their hours is not necessary to be secure in their jobs.
• Lean into Curiosity. Be extra cautious about assumptions you may make. As you read an email or are in a zoom meeting, if you notice that you have assumed what someone meant or was thinking, imagine three other assumptions that could have been made. Give yourself some space to reflect and then craft an open-ended question to elicit clarification so that you can set aside assumptions.
• Offer intentional kindness. Please consider sending an email or note, especially a hard-copy card, to your minister, religious educator, or another person who has worked to craft a story or sermon that you enjoyed. In the before-times, you would have casually mentioned after the service that you enjoyed it. Now in the absence of those casual mentions, people go weeks without hearing any positive feedback, while complaints come quickly in sharply-worded emails. Send them a text or simply say thank you before you leave the Zoom chat.
• Thank the administrative and building and grounds professionals every time they respond to your politely worded request.
• Help in the ways they need help. Make sure that your congregational lay leadership is covering what they need to so your staff and minister are getting their time off. Telling them to take time off when they are the only person who can perform a required task (on Sundays or any other day) doesn’t help. Ask what specific tasks you can learn and take on to help provide back-up. This might not be what you like to do most, or what you already know how to do. There is so much that can’t be handed off to volunteers; ask what can be, and be willing to learn new things.

None of us can make ourselves not feel fear and distress (or that looming sense of ennui that chaos and uncertainty bring) by having more meetings, writing a detailed document, or controlling minutia of our congregational life. You are not in a space where you suddenly “have time to do things”; you occupy a space where time has been painfully eradicated. It has turned, accordion-style, into a never-ending list of crises, deadlines, and painful interactions with grief. We are all functioning amid a traumatic historical episode. You can choose not to distract yourself from the trauma of these days by trying to micromanage the professional leadership of that church system. You can choose to lean into our values, compassion, and willingness to be present with our uncomfortable feelings.

Revisiting what Rev. Sunshine wrote, [emphasis mine,] “This [time] is creating unsuitable conditions for communication. Expect higher chances of overwhelm, assumptions, heightened emotional response, and conflict for the next 3-6 weeks.”

The reality now is that we will be living with higher chances of overwhelm, assumptions, heightened emotional response, and conflict for the next 3-6 months. We can choose to notice when we are in those states and work towards living well, with kindness, leaning into our values of collective care and interdependence.

And if you have a strong resistance to being told what to do, consider this an invitation to the spiritual practices of kindness, collective care, and interdependence.

So breathe again, good people. It is in our breath that our bodies can be still.

Breathe deeply ten times to reflect on your innate goodness, on the best you are capable of, on being your most powerfully resilient. As you breathe, reflect on this – you do not have to hold up the universe solely; you only have to do your part.

Your right-sized part. If you have let your part expand like a balloon, about to pop or so huge it pushes other balloons away, breathe and let some of that air out.

Ten long slow breaths, and then ten more. Breathe until your pulse is low and your body can be still.