President's Message October 2009
Deepening The Conversation
By Joan Nierenberg
If you recall, at our board retreat last year we decided upon “Making a Difference” as the theme that best captured our priorities. We began this year’s retreat on August 29 with a celebration of our successes this past year. A few ways we felt we “made a difference” include: some forward motion towards our goal of building a sanctuary; ending the year with a surplus; supporting stewardship’s new model, leading to an increase in fair share givers; successful Conversations on Congregational Life.
After a day filled with thoughtful sharing of ideas, we realized that the issues we were spending the most time discussing sounded suspiciously familiar:
- Continuing work towards our congregation’s explicit goal of building a sanctuary
- Expressing ourselves better as a caring community through more clearly defined committee and member good works, i.e. Membership, Hospitality, Committee on Ministry, Social Outreach
- Improving communication between and among all our various constituents
- Stewardship
If this list looks familiar to you as well, you will recognize that these are the issues we highlighted last year. Picking up on the metaphor Rev. Bruce used in his minilogue last month that, “ a congregation is a conversation, we chose our board theme this year to be “Deepening the Conversation.” We wish to continue working on these issues, but with a greater emphasis on connecting this work to our mission, our values, our traditions—the purpose
of what we do. Sometimes we get so caught up in the many details, we fail to feel the significance of our work at a deeper, more meaningful level. We spent some time at the retreat dissecting our board meetings this past year and realized how comparatively little time we gave to evaluation, prioritizing, or learning together. That will be my job to set the agendas with a greater emphasis on the board being more proactive rather than reactive; focusing more on policy rather than responding to discrete issues. Somehow we need to find the time to reflect, to consider issues in a larger context, to deepen our conversation. We’re going to try!