Property insurance challenges are becoming more common, from rate increases to policy terminations. While we can't make these problems go away, we can offer some suggestions.

Tips, tools, and spiritual grounding for each stage of congregational life, from emerging, to membership, to thriving, to renewal, or to decline and possibly dissolution.

In churches with fewer than 30 members, keep your policies simple and practical.

On top of managing the “logistics” of a staff member’s departure, you will need to manage the emotional component. Congregants may have a whole range of feelings and reactions. It’s important to acknowledge all feelings.

Someone has just reached out to you with some critical feedback about the minister. What should you do next?

Here are the latest insights, ideas, tools, and permission to do the work of the Committee on (Shared) Ministry effectively from Congregational Life Staff.

Help your people learn how to give helpful evaluations and so we can be much better ministers.

Conflict engagement requires engaging in healthy communication and modeling healthy boundaries.

One evening at a Board meeting, we came to a question about our definitions of membership....

The work of the Committee on Ministry (CoM) is shared ministry, which includes attending to the vitality of the congregation.

Assemble a team of people with complimentary skills to serve on the Committee on Shared Ministry.

The mental model of the "Social Discipline Window" can be helpful in understanding different patterns of how we might respond when someone is causing harm in our communities.

Disability advocates remind us that multiplatform worship in real time, with the chance for some interaction, creates a meaningful experience for those participating online.

The following (from the Northlake UU Church in Kirkland, WA) is an example of a chater (or charge) for a Right Relationship Team (aka Healthy Congregation Team): Purposes: To facilitate the well-being of the _________ Community by fostering harmonious relations and mediating conflicts within the...

Choose members who are well respected and trusted based on their spiritual maturity and deep listening skills. Conflict transformation requires vulnerability, which requires trust.

Support and accountability for different aspects of right relationship lie within different parts of the congregation. 

Our covenants articulate our intention, but how do we live into the practice? Right Relations Teams are lay leaders entrusted to help the congregation practice faithful communication and creative conflict based on values of mutuality and consent. 

Congregations, like all organizational systems, need feedback loops.  Regular assessment of the ministry is essential to group self-awareness and growth.

Online moments of radical inclusion, connection, and creativity shared as a litany.

As religious leaders, part of our work is to help our communities hold the tensions between different needs in the congregation, especially around worship.