Hi!
I'm at the UU Large Church Conference in Minneapolis, MN and the theme of this year's conference (it is held only once every three years) is Governance and Ministry. I can't decide if that's a lucky coincidence or some kind of punishment. Oh well.....
Yesterday's presentations were all by Dan Hotchkiss. Good news was that he was talking very generally about governance issues and not referring to his book at all (because as you know, we were already confused once by the Hotchkiss/Carver similarities). I didn't pick up a lot of "takeaways" from these sessions (though they were interesting and educational in setting context for our work) but I DID like his notion that all this work on governance has one basic goal; to make our congregations better servants of our purposes and better models of our principles.
Another idea that I hadn't fully developed for myself was that a church's governance structure should not be about replicating itself, or keeping itself in business, but about designing for tomorrow, moving us toward a deeper engagement with our spiritual selves and the world.
As we struggle in the Governance Task Force and the Board to improve the Governance Document that we borrowed as our starting place and continue to move the system toward Policy Governance, we always need to remember that the point of it all is to lead us closer and closer to the answer to this question: How has belonging to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville changed your life?
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