Living Into Your Vision We help you deepen and strengthen your governance practice through all the normal changes in your congregation’s or institution’s life. We help you keep your governance connected to your highest purposes.
Related Services
New Board Retreat Boards that get the most from their governance practice take time once a year when new trustees join the board to refresh their understanding of the nine commitments of effective boards, and consider how to deepen their governance practice, particularly their work of:
Linkage: the board's systematic, intentional work to connect with its sources of authority and accountability about the future of the church
Monitoring: the board's work to ensure that its policies are being followed and its mission and Ends are being advanced
Policy creation: the board's work to ensure that its policies continue to reflects the board's values
Ends Assessment Services We've developed effective tools to assess your ends outcomes. We customize our tools for your ends, coach you through their implementation, and analyze the data to help board and minister reflect together on the impact of the congregation's ministries, in congregant lives and in the world. Program Alignment Services We can help you identify, design and implement congregational programs and initiatives to align with your values, advance your mission and ends, and involve your laity in ways that deepen them spiritually. We coach you through a program alignment process customized for your needs .
Refreshing Your Ends Every five to seven years, congregations need to refresh their ends, to have a conversation with the congregation about its values and vision for the future and ensure that the ends reflect the future the congregation wishes to create together. We offer services to design an effective congregational conversation for this purpose, and to re-articulate your ends. Coaching Hours We offer hourly coaching to help congregations address questions as they live into their vision. We offer a discount on our hourly rate to clients who pre-purchase 10 hours of coaching time. Typical questions boards explore with us as they live into their vision:
How can we write policy to better reflect our values in (fill in the blank) area?
What policies would best hold us accountable for doing (fill in the blank) work in the world?
How do we address (fill in the blank) issue in this system?
Related Resources on Our Website
On our page about our Leadership Cycle in the Mission-Focused Congregation, you'll find a model for the interaction between board and minister, between professionals and laity, that liberates and empowers leadership throughout the congregation. You can listen to an overview and explanation of this cycle in our webinar on the cycle.
On our Governance and Covenant page, you can download materials from our 2013 workshop: The Promise and Practice of Good Governance, which explored faithful congregational governance practices from a grounding in our covenantal theology. We focused on how good governance questions help us to form our covenantal promises. We also considered how governance can help us hold ourselves accountable to our promises and continually renew them.