Learning to understand human communities (and in our case, congregations) as systems has been an ongoing learning process for the past several decades for family therapists, organizational development consultants and social scientists....

Membership committees may feel the need for feedback if there seems to be a "revolving door" of members joining and then leaving. It may be helpful to track the reasons why some members decide to leave. 

Video, based on the book Taking Your Church to the Next Level: What Got You Here Won't Get You There by Gary L. McIntosh

Theme-based ministry is happening in more and more congregations throughout the Unitarian Universalist movement. Theme based ministry, sometimes called theme based church, helps create multigenerational connections, as people of all ages explore common themes in age-appropriate ways....

Is your congregation's attendance flat or declining? Are the results from your stewardship campaign disappointing? Are you dipping into an endowment to help cover your operating expenses? Are you thinking about cutting the budget by reducing the working hours of your program staff?

The 1970's heart-throb boy band The Osmonds provided a disservice with their ear-worm hit song "One Bad Apple." They sang, ...

Belonging to and being a part of a community is an important aspect of congregational life. Many of our members think of their congregations as a second home and think of the other members as part of their extended family. The relationships that we create and nurture by sharing the details of our...

Many of our "solid" congregations noticed a drop-off in giving that was not a result of a drop-off of membership during the past two or three years. We don't have much data (the trend is too new) but we do have some anecdotal information that seems to align with greater generational shifts....

Let me share a fable of two congregations. ...

What does it mean to be a member in a congregation? How much can we ask of members?  I believe that membership should signify a commitment to the congregation and it's mission as expressed by the Rev. Michael Piazza. ...

I remember my first church family camp, the Ohio Meadville Summer Institute. At the end of the morning worship, one of the planning committee members would go up to the podium and start singing: Announcements, Announcements, An-NOW-ounce-ments! A terrible death to die, a terrible death to die, A...

Once upon a time there was a congregation that wanted a mission statement. They appointed a committee that worked hard. They held cottage meetings, World Café conversations, and got a real sense of the identity of the congregation, who they were as a "whole"—or their "center." It became time to...

As leaders of a congregation, it may be tempting to assume everyone else has (or should have) the same level of commitment to the institution of the church as we have....

The descriptions of the values of many "spiritual but not religious" people line up pretty nicely with what our UU religious communities could be, or at least what they should at least aspire to be....

Young Adult ministry has been a challenge for congregations of all liberal protestant denominations for decades but the game is changing in ways we couldn't have imagined back in the post WWII church building boom. There has been a lively conversation on the UU-Leaders email list about how to...

Are all of the members and friends of your church aware of all of the outreach ministries of your church? Is the wider community aware of who you are serving and how? Churches need to tell their stories, advises a r… article in the Christian Century. Author George Mitrovich explains When my...

Congregational leaders are often tempted to go through the motions of creating mission, vision, planning and covenant documents without taking a holistic view of the process.  Do the congregations systems support the process?  How do we reflect the core values...

In my last blog post I wrote about the Baby Boomers and the Millennials.  I received a few requests to write about the generational cohort labeled Gen X (rough birth years 1960-1985), sandwiched between the two and much smaller than either.  Most of the ministerial settlements...

There can be a significant cultural divide between baby boomers and millennials in our congregations, which is obvious to the millennials, but often invisible to the boomers.   I was reminded of this after seeing various reactions on Facebook to a recent article on...

How do we find volunteers for the different jobs in our congregation?  How do we fire a volunteer who doesn't perform?  How do we renew a committee stuck in stale ideas and that repels any new committee members and their potential energy? Volunteer recruitment and dealing with...