Category: Pastoral Care

Posted in Boundaries, Church Decline, Church Growth & Vitality, Leadership Development, Managing Expectations, Pastoral Care, Preaching, Volunteers Tagged with

10 min 58 s

Rev. Quentin Chin

  • Helping the congregation think realistically about part-time ministry
  • Reframing part-time ministry from loss to gain
  • Ideas for how to lead Confirmation, preaching, etc., in new ways
  • Is attending church suppers considered “work” for the pastor? If so, how to negotiate that
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Posted in Change Management, Church Growth & Vitality, Conflict Management, Healing / Grief Work, Leadership Development, Pastoral Care, Self-Care Tagged with

10 min 50 s

Rev. Pegi Ridout

  • The difficulty with conflict isn’t that we have it, it’s that we don’t know how to do it well.
  • How do we treat conflict as gift? How do we get there?
  • Respectful communication guidelines developed by Eric Law at the Kaleidoscope Institute
  • trust, respect, listen, then speak.
  • Conflict skills/muscles are built through practice;
  • Pegi’s 3 types of practice for building our conflict muscles;
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Posted in Boundaries, Church Growth & Vitality, Conflict Management, Healing / Grief Work, Leadership Development, Pastoral Care, Self-Care Tagged with

11 min 59 s

Rev. Pegi Ridout

  • Why understanding and managing bullying behavior effectively is so critical to the health of a congregation;
  • Pegi’s 3 types of church bullies (Canaries, Porcupines, Skunks)
  • Strategies for dealing with each type of bully;
  • Some bullies have an important message for the congregation;
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Posted in Boundaries, Conflict Management, Contracting and Negotiating Before Beginning, Governance, Managing Expectations, Pastoral Care, Staff Tagged with

12 min 51 s

Rev. Holly MillerShank

  • How to have good conversations around boundaries with staff who are also members of the congregation;
  • Navigating the tension between the need for job performance by staff and the need for compassionate pastoral care to them;
  • What obligation – or responsibility – do interim ministers have to initiate those difficult conversations with staff?
  • What options do we have as the interim, when a staff member, who is also a congregation member, is no longer able to perform their staff duties?
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Posted in Managing Expectations, Pastoral Care, Self-Care Tagged with

12 min 27 s

Rev. Arlen Vernava

The 3 components of Body Budget: adequate sleep, nutritious food, exercise;

What to do when your Body Budget is in deficit, but don’t have time to attend to it;

How to advance the work of the church when Body Budget is in deficit;

Body Budget applies at the congregational level too;

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Posted in Change Management, Church Decline, Church Mergers, Death and Dying, Entering and Engaging the Congregation, Financial Management, Legacy Churches / Church Closing, Managing Expectations, Pastoral Care Tagged with

13 min 49 s

Rev. Diane Kenaston

How we were able to tell the truth about our reality without also predicting gloom and doom;

My own process from being one of the people in denial about the congregation’s reality, to embracing it and moving forward;

How we were able to build the trust necessary for people to listen to the truth of their reality and move forward;

What I did when I realized that the church was not going to have another full-time pastor after me.

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Posted in Change Management, Church Decline, Church Mergers, Death and Dying, Entering and Engaging the Congregation, Financial Management, Legacy Churches / Church Closing, Managing Expectations, Pastoral Care Tagged with

13 min 37 s

Rev. Diane Kenaston

Simultaneously raising and lowering anxiety in the process of change;

A copy of the letter we sent to the congregation laying out our reasons and reality….

The details of our deliberative and thoughtful approach to ….

The specific steps we took to reduce the congregation’s anxiety level to allow a constructive conversation about our future;

How we named the options we had for the future;

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