Building a Relationship with a 2nd Minister
Twenty-three years with the same minister is a generation. The question of whether the congregation would be willing or able to build a relationship with another minister was a real question. While there were a few who resisted, nearly all of this congregation opened its heart and its lives to me with great hospitality, generosity, and enthusiasm.
We started with a lot of listening, sitting down together, and sharing stories. By my third month I had recorded names of over 400 people that I had met personally. With many, I had extensive conversations about their lives, their experiences in the church, and their hopes for the future. These years later, I can't keep track, but I bet I could come up with double that initial number, especially if you include children and youth. I have worked closely with in the range of 100 lay leaders, and I have led over 50 people in new member classes. I went to a lot of meetings in my first two years and simply tried to be present, and support the good work of this congregation. I asked questions and invited leaders to grow in their vision and our capacity to serve our nearly 1200 children and adults, as well as our wider community. I shared best practices and helped connect members to resources at the UUA or in other UU congregations. I reflected back what great work they were already doing, helping the community better know and claim its own story and strengths. In my first summer, as the sole pastoral presence, I started to get to know people in new and fuller ways. That summer, one of our longtime church members had a stroke, and then passed away. It was my great honor to sit at the bedside of Bob Young and later at the table with his and Lynn's beautiful family as they decided the best possible way forward. By the next summer, I was truly a solo minister for a few months, although as I wrote in my newsletter article that June I didn't really think of it that way. I felt a deep sense of partnership and trust in the congregation and with the staff team. I'm sure my presence has not always been the easiest for staff to navigate - I watched them try to figure out: what does it mean to have a second minister? Especially when the Senior Minister was not the clear supervisor. I listened to their sense of the congregation's history, strengths and possibilities. I tried not to initiate too much change at once, observed their patterns, and in partnership with members of the personnel committee, participated in professional development plans. Along the way, we began to establish staff meetings (nearly non-existent when I arrived), though without a clear chief of staff, that too was relatively limited in its impact or depth. Over these years together, I have gained the staff team's trust, and if I were called as the senior minister, I believe we would be able to create a cohesive staff team that could more effectively serve and equip more and more members of our community. My ministry would not have been effective at Foothills without a willingness and capacity to build real and covenantal relationships of mutual trust and accountability, guided by the spirit of love. I am so grateful for this congregation's willingness, and for the ways we have walked together along this path of mutual transformation. In the end, what else really matters? |