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Change Management for Churches

By Alun Brookfield.

The present situation

Many church leaders seem to be unnecessarily nervous of management techniques - indeed the very word 'management' is to some a 'boo' word. As members of a caring profession, they tend to be much more comfortable with issues of spirituality and pastoralia than with management skills (which means that, in any public presentation to ministers on the subject of change management, an alternative title has to be used!). The idea of management seems to raise strange spectres of harsh, uncaring attitudes combined with a frenetic focus on measurable results. Since much of the work of a church leader is not quantifiable (how do you measure the value of time spent listening to a grieving family, advising a couple approaching marriage or preparing a sermon?), church leaders are understandably nervous.

Another reason for such nervousness may be that the level of management training given to and received by Christian leaders during their training or their ongoing ministry is usually very small in comparison to the amount of training in other areas. This seems incongruous considering the size of the management task they often face. Management training at theological college is more often to do with self-management and system management than with people or change management. My own experience is, I fear, not untypical. Many hours were devoted to developing our pastoral, theological, hermeneutical and other skills, but just two days in four years were given over to management skills - and those two days were mostly spent on developing team-working skills through building Lego towers and doing jigsaws! We received no guidance whatsoever on how to manage change.

Change is the essence of Church

Yet change is of the very essence of ministry and the Church. Anything which is alive changes - for better or worse. Even churches which, in our arrogance, we classify as 'dead', will experience constant change as long as there are people alive to sustain their existence. If the Church is the living body of Christ, it can do no other than change. Every encounter with God generates personal and corporate change. According to Richard Foster, "to pray is to change". The simple addition or subtraction of one person in a congregation (especially small congregations) creates change.

Even congregations who behave as though their role is to resist change tend to forget that their very existence as a congregation is the product of change. For example, the hymn book which they so jealously guard exists because someone had the temerity to use it in the first place! It has rightly been said that although Christ loves us as we are, he doesn't leave us that way!

A significant part of the role of church leaders therefore is to encourage and enable change by bringing their people to encounter God and to respond to him. And for the most part those ordained to leadership in the Church are very good at facilitating this kind of change. However, when it comes to organisational change, they often flounder into deeper and deeper water.

As a result, change in churches often has one or more of four effects:

• it causes great pain and difficulty
• it fails to happen at all
• it happens in an unmanaged way
• it happens painfully slowly.

Church leaders in these circumstances become very skilled at conflict resolution - simply because there is so much of it to do, usually because of change in parish life! Whichever of these is the case, the cost in terms of people and the kingdom of God is immeasurable.

Is there a simple answer?

All of this raises the question, "Does there exist a universal model of change management which is applicable to local church life?" Sadly or thankfully (depending on how you react to management models), the answer appears to be that there is not. Sadly, because it would be very convenient if there were a 'magic bullet' which could be fired at any situation; but thankfully, because every situation is so different that the blanket application of any 'solution' would be almost certainly a disaster.

The reason for this absence of a model is that all business change management thinking is based on a manager/employee relationship. When faced with change, however well or badly managed, employees have two options: either they respond positively to the manager's proposed changes or they resign. Given the usual high personal cost of resignation, there is a strong motivation to cope if possible.

In the Church, however, our people are volunteers. They do not have to cope with proposed change. They can, often with minimal perceived personal cost, vote with their feet (or their car) and go to the church down the road or in the next village or suburb. Worse still, they can withdraw their labour and their good will and remain in the church as a thorn in the vicar's side! So if proposed change is ill-managed, the cost can be very considerable, for both congregation and clergy.

Two scenarios

Successful change management in parish life usually takes place in one of two scenarios.

• When there is a crisis, people will take on board almost any change in order to avert the impending disaster. In my own experience, the last few members of a dying, rural Baptist congregation were willing to trust two young, inexperienced lay preachers with leadership as their only option to avoid closure. My friend and I introduced radical changes to the building and the life of the chapel (without really knowing what we were doing!) and the congregation immediately began to grow to a viable size and cross-section. Hardly anyone questioned the wisdom of the changes because the people were desperate and we were fortunate (blessed?) in that the changes we introduced had the desired effect.
• When the existing congregation is in sufficiently strong relationship with their leader(s) to trust them not to do anything which might cause harm. Such trust usually develops over years of being together, so that a leader's most fruitful ministry often starts when he/she has been in post for five years or more. This is supported by Church Growth research which indicates that most church growth (whether numerical, spiritual, incarnational or evangelistic) takes place between five and fifteen years after a church leader has been appointed.

These two situations have one thing in common - in both, change is accepted on the basis of trust exercised by a congregation towards their leaders. In the first, the people have nothing to lose by giving trust. In the second, they have everything to lose, but do not feel threatened.

Recommendations

So how can we assist church leaders in managing change in a positive and non-damaging way?

There seem to be two main approaches which can be adopted - bottom up and top down. A bottom-up approach is based on responding to the needs of each situation as it arises. Four things can be offered:

1. Help leaders to be aware of their leadership style. This is the heart of the matter. A leader who is lacking in self-awareness in this area is capable of causing havoc. For example, if they are Myers-Briggs INTJ (and an abnormally high proportion of church leaders are), they know that their proposed changes are right because it is obvious to all except the terminally obtuse! Such leaders need to be aware that they must discipline themselves to be patient with those less fortunate than themselves and communicate the rationale for change over a much longer and intensive period than they would expect, recognising that, although they are certain of their own rectitude, others may have a different, but equally valid, view!

Myers-Briggs is one possible tool for this purpose, but there are many others. All are helpful in their own ways.

2. Provide a set of basic change management tools. This can be done through post-ordination training, continuing ministry education structures and also through conferences and local meetings. It is important for local churches, associations, circuits or dioceses to enable their leaders to be trained in this way - they will reap the benefit in reduced conflict and its associated stress.
3. Train itinerant staff in consulting skills. Senior denominational staff have a role to play in this, but so have those in non-parochial or trans-local ministry, in simply being available to help local leaders to approach change in the right way.
4. Provide access to a professional consultant, somewhat on the model of a spiritual director - someone with whom to talk things through so as to help us see more clearly what is before our eyes.

A top-down process operates in a very different way and requires the leadership of local and perhaps even national Church leaders.

1. Identify where we are now. This means drawing up a description of the life of the congregation (or wider group of congregations) as it currently is.
2. Identify where we want to be in, say, four years from now. In other words, define the broad picture of how we want the congregation or group to look in 2004.
3. Draw up plans to make the required changes, driven from the top. In Anglican terms, this means that it needs to come ideally from the Bishops, but it might be more useful in the short term to work with a single deanery or Archdeaconry, or even with a single congregation as a model to the wider denomination (readers from other denominations, please translate to suit your own circumstances!).

The advantages of this approach are clear.

• Denominational leadership authority supporting and 'nudging' change through all the usual channels of communication.
• A sense of 'team' across the selected group as they all support one another in 'striving towards the goal'.
• Ensuring that the driving force of change was not merely desperation, but policy and vision.
• Church leaders could not justifiably be accused by their congregations of following the latest fad.

Tactics for pursuing this strategic approach include:

1. Equip facilitators to work alongside local congregations. This is the kind of role which could be taken by a denominational or regional Resources Team or by selected people operating trans-locally. Facilitators might need to be trained in consultancy techniques, e.g. needs analysis, SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis.
2. Ensure that in each church/congregation, the likely results of all proposed change should be identified at an early stage and communicated to the congregation.
3. Provide training in internal communications for leaders and congregations. This is, in my experience, a great area of weakness in most congregations. Often the active core know what is going on and the rationale behind it, but the rest of the congregation can be seriously out of touch. For example, very few church-goers know how much it actually costs to run their church per week. Why not? Usually because either no-one has told them or they have been told only once, after which it has been assumed that they 'know'. The usual rule of thumb used in marketing is that if you want someone to respond to a message, they have to hear it ten times at least!

Most Church workers are volunteers

Let me remind readers again that our people are volunteers and need to be managed as such, not as employees. There are a number of excellent books and resources available on this subject, although most of them come from America and need translating into our context.

Two things stand out from my explorations of volunteer management.

• People volunteer for hundreds of different reasons. It is therefore potentially disastrous to any management of change to assume that all the people involved in the processes undergoing change are involved for the same reasons. Motivations may be selfish or altruistic, ranging from a need to escape from an unpleasant home environment to a genuinely selfless desire to serve the needs of others. You name it - people volunteer for that reason. Proposed change which questions the validity of or fails to be sensitive to a person's motivation is liable to result in an explosive reaction.
• Volunteers need to be treated better than most managers treat their staff. Volunteers have even more need to hear their leader say 'well done' than employed staff. Why? Because usually it is easier for a volunteer than it is for an employee to walk away. A recent example occurred in a church where it was decided to increase the size of the stewarding team so that people would be on duty only once per month instead of once per fortnight. The resulting explosion of strong feelings was caused by the fact that some of the existing stewards interpreted the proposal as a criticism of their performance. In other words, no-one had remembered to say 'Thank you and well done' to them before asking others to join the team.

Conclusion

There are no simple answers, no instant solutions, no easy way to ensure that change creates as few ripples on the pond of church life as possible. However, with care, wisdom, sensitivity and skill, the ripples can be managed in such a way as to ensure that no-one is left high and dry - unless, of course they choose to be.

The Revd Alun J Brookfield is a Parish Development Adviser in the Diocese of Bristol and is editor of Ministry Today.