This article was written by a UUA church leader for a listserv of UUA leaders and is used with permission.
POLICY GOVERNANCEâ and church size –
does Policy Governance (the “Carver model”) fit congregations of all sizes?
To consider this question, one needs to be familiar with congregational size theory. Alice Mann, a senior consultant with the Alban Institute (www.alban.org), is the expert in this field, and you can learn lots more from her two books on this subject. In a nutshell, the structure of a church needs to fit the size it is, and these are usually described in this way [with the more familiar UU terms bracketed]:
> Family [fellowship] size, with up to 50 adults & children attending on an average Sunday
> Pastoral [small church] size, with 50 to 150 in average attendance
> Program [mid-size], pulling up to 400 (or more) each Sunday
Sometimes this category is divided in two, and may morph into:
> Corporate or “resource” [large] churches [the UUA has posed 600 as a base number]
There are plateaus between these sizes, where congregations may go aground or get tangled in the turbulence of roles and structures in flux.
Fellowships and small churches thrive effectively as organisms. They are “group-centered” in fellowship life, evolving to minister-centered in small-church size. In fellowship size, the board (or core group) are active participants in all that’s going on; in effect, it’s a big family. If the congregation grows, more and more will be going on, and a volunteer board can’t easily or adequately contain it all. So there’s a shift to “pastor-centered” church life, with someone present everyday at the heart of things to interconnect it all.
If a small church keeps growing, that pastor/person approaches burn-out, and the church bumps up against a ceiling in the number of people and activities it can nourish and sustain. The shift from pastoral (small) to program (mid) size is particularly difficult, sometimes very conflicted. Congregational life has grown complex. The church is evolving from an organism into an organization. There’s need to resume a “group-centered” focus again, employing the minister and a growing staff to coordinate and support a variety of programs and the lay leaders that engage members with each other in activities they care about.
“The role of the governing board shifts away from hands-on management toward concern with overarching goals, policy, and oversight,” Alice Mann writes (in Raising the Roof, her book on the pastoral-to-program size transition). This is not an easy transition for boards deeply engaged in congregational life. Board members yearn to keep in touch with everything that’s going on, and, as John Carver (who conceived Policy Governance) notes, when a board can do that “there’s not enough going on.” Clearly this is true at program-church size. To sustain that shift in dynamics from organism to organization a style of governance is needed that can free the board from managing church activities and return it to leading and articulating the vision of what the church is here for and why all these good folks are doing all of this in the first place.
Let me hint at the difference with an actual item from the agenda of a real church board meeting: a proposal for one coffee hour between services (vs. coffee after each). Granted, a family-size congregation would not be having double services, but this provides a fine example. A fellowship board might aim to coalesce members’ thinking about the idea. A small-church board might receive a synopsis of thoughtful opinions, discuss them, decide the question, and perhaps try it a while. – Whereas none of this would normally command board-meeting time or attention in a mid-size or larger church – even if it were to try containing everyone in one coffee hour, which it wouldn’t, couldn’t, and would not expect to. Longing to know everyone is dear to the human heart and tends to sabotage growth from pastoral to program size. Witness the many small churches in the U.S. & UUA that wish to grow and don’t.
Each size has its own real and rich value. Wise governance styles fit the size congregation the board is serving. A fellowship board is expected to have warm hands on all that’s happening. A small-church board continues to live with that expectation and responsibility, even as some of the weight of it shifts onto someone’s shoulders. – These congregations are organisms. A church’s ‘owners’, leaders, actors and beneficiaries are very often the same people. Congregations are unusual in the degree to which roles are multiple and interknit. And ours share a faith in which the relational nature of life is a core value. As a church grows, however, the board can no longer both lead and manage them, and roles need to be distinguished and focused if the church is to thrive in its increasing complexity.
Policy Governance achieves this, effectively freeing all levels of leadership to fulfill their focused roles the best they can – while safely and prudently containing all that activity without the board having its hands on everything. One can intuit an emerging need for this at the upper end of pastoral size, when members begin to experience the board as suppressing creativity and bottlenecking ideas; fellow members elected to the board become “them” rather than “us”.
In the meanwhile, whether the distinction between roles that is key to the Carver model can dynamically serve a closely interknit organism is a significant question. Some say yes, others no. I don’t recommend trying Policy Governance in congregations that aren’t committed to growing into program size. And trust needs to be high as well; it’s a paradigm shift in empowerment. That’s a lot of change!
But several Carver principles can serve any size congregation well. In particular: the distinction between Ends and Means, and the magic of governing them differently (charting Ends powerfully and positively in ongoing engagement with members, and framing Means limitations clearly, stating what is not allowable rather than continue trying to direct what is). And further: the strength of the “nested set” principle, stating policies as largely as possible for all to follow so that greater specificity is contained within them. These two principles enable a board to safely empower others and to delegate, insofar as possible, whole jobs. It truly is shared ministry.
Even the board of a small fellowship can begin thinking in this way by devoting time to articulate the values that lead it to make any given decision ─ then record these in the minutes they keep, and share them with the congregation. This deepens and enriches board life, too. It reveals how what we do matters. It grows leaders; and illuminates future decisions, as well.
Margaret Keip · 12-2010
