Managing a Declining Congregation’s Level of Anxiety so They Can Change in a Positive Way – Transcript
Jim Latimer
Welcome to this episode of Wisdom from the Field. I am your host Reverend Jim Latimer and today we have the privilege of having with us Reverend Diane Kenaston. Diane is a United Methodist Elder with depth experience in leading and facilitating congregations as they conclude ministry of one form and then sometimes begin another form, be it relocating merging, sometimes even restarting. She’s also part of a very innovative group called the Good Friday Collaborative – an ecumenical group that was formed to partner with congregations in just this type of sacred work. And so, it’s a delight to have Diane speaking with us today, around this particular topic. Diane, what aspect of this topic would you like to share with us right now?
Diane Kenaston
Thanks, Jim, I am so grateful to be here with you and with all of your listeners. I want to talk about simultaneously raising and lowering anxiety in the process of change. And this is because when you start talking about a congregation’s future, people get very, very anxious immediately. And there are other people who say, Oh, no, no, no, no, no, we don’t even have to talk about that. And they refuse to look at it at all. So, in order to change, and to have these conversations about change in the community, we have to raise the anxiety and lower the anxiety.
Diane Kenaston
And so, we had been working for a long time on increasing transparency in our congregation, particularly around finances and people – how people were in leadership and whether we were really reaching the community – all of those questions. And then we began to say in December 2019, Oh! We are facing a budget shortfall that is significant enough that we need to cut staff. And that’s what they would have done in the past and had done in the past when they’ve come to come to a crossroads like this. So, either the pastor needed to go part-time, or we need to let go of the office administrator, or musician. And actually, probably all three of those needed to happen based on the shortfall that we knew was coming due to deaths and moves and other reasons that people were unable to continue giving at very substantial levels in the congregation.
Diane Kenaston
So, the leadership team said, We don’t want to rush into a decision. We have investments for a reason. We have a rainy-day fund, and this is a rainy day. And so, we’re going to spend the next 12 months discerning our options. And we’re going to cover that gap in revenue through investment income. So, we were taking out of the principal, in a fund that we could do that for, which was not sustainable over the long term. But it gave us time to make decisions.
Jim Latimer
Nice.
Diane Kenaston
Yes. So, we were very fortunate with that. And so, we communicated that with everyone who was part of the congregation, particularly the givers. We invited everyone to come to a congregational meeting, which is where we laid out, This is the financial reality for this year. This is how we commit. We’re not going to just pull down $30,000 every year from this fund, but we’re going to use this time wisely to make some forward decisions.
Diane Kenaston
And then as the leadership team was engaging in these internal conversations, it soon came to the point where we needed to invite the whole congregation into shared discernment. And so, our lay leader was a young man who works in communications, and he helped us to generate a communications plan. So, we made a list of all of the categories of anyone who needed to know about this change. That list included former pastors and former music directors. It included inactive members. It included people who lived in town but weren’t formally members. It included children and youth – what would they need to hear? And so, we brainstormed everyone who might possibly need to know about this big discernment meeting that we were having. And then we’ve calculated the best ways to tell the story to them and invite them into the process.
Diane Kenaston
We were very clear about what the message needed to be for the congregation. I actually brought a copy of the letter. I just wanted to read it briefly for you, Jim – “We have experienced challenges in carrying out our mission and ministry. We’ve seen an unsustainable trend of increasing expenses and decreasing revenues, along with declining membership and volunteer capacity. While this trend began decades ago, it has accelerated in recent years and even the past few months. Last year, our building cost topped $100,000, while our worship attendance averaged just 80 people. We anticipate that these challenges will continue. We must face our current reality and be proactive in charting a new course. This fall, our congregation will embark on a journey to discern our future together through a series of all church conversations with local denominational leaders. These discussions are an invitation for us to come together as a church to listen to one another and God.”
Jim Latimer
Diane, that’s beautiful. I love how you are dealing with the anxiety, that when the congregation gets to this point, its anxiety is like – not that there’s enemies, but if there is one, that’s it – it’s anxiety. Because when we’re anxious, we don’t think straight. And we need to be thinking straight. So, this idea of taking an intentional time – 12 months: we’re going to draw a little bit from endowment which we’re doing for a specific reason so people know why; we’re going to develop a communication plan because there are various audiences, and each of them is going not only to hear it differently, but they have a different relationship with us. So, they’re going to see it differently. They have different needs, and you’ve attended to them and have a message for each one. I love the deliberative and thoughtful approach there. And that definitely helps to reduce anxiety plus, simply talking about it and putting it out there and modeling it, Yes, we can talk about this. It’s okay, you know, yeah. And that letter is beautiful.
Diane Kenaston
Absolutely. And in conjunction with the letter, we also made sure that we had high touch moments with everyone in the church. So, before this first meeting, I as a pastor individually called every single person connected to the congregation. And before the letter went out, I called everyone who needed to hear from a person prior to receiving the letter. And then the week that the letter was being mailed, I called the people who probably weren’t going to be just as upset to get this in their mailbox, to say, Okay, I’m following up with a letter you may have received. But being very intentional about making sure long-term members received that phone call before they received the letter. And in doing that, over a very short period of time, so, there wasn’t a lot of chance for gossip and communication. But saying, You are not alone in this. You are not being left behind. We are doing this together.
Diane Kenaston
And then that was the only time I as a pastor did all of that phone calling. But for future meetings, and in future months, our leadership team divided up that same list, and called every single member of the congregation reporting back what it was they were hearing, what concerns they had, and we just had a simple script of, What are your hopes? What are your fears? What questions do you have? And then my lay leaders could tell me, Okay, XYZ people, they need pastoral follow up. Or, we would say as a group, This is who needs extra care from our leadership team at this time.
Jim Latimer
I love that. I love how you recognize that it’s human nature that when you hear something that sounds odd, what do you do? You pick up the phone and talk to somebody else! And whatever you say is your opinion, but they hear it as fact. And of course, that’s how gossip works. And that’s really detrimental. So, what you did there was that you proactively, in a short period of time, seeded the congregation with accurate information, which acts as a buffer to all the other stuff that’s swirling around. That was brilliant. And knowing that not only did you need to get out accurate information, but you needed to do it fast. There’s a window.
Diane Kenaston
Yes, very much a window. And so, making sure we planned that one in advance. And so, sharing the information about where we were as a congregation – that raises the anxiety. And having people that you can connect to – that lowers the anxiety. And so, we kept saying over and over again, We’re going to focus on trust and transparency. Because transparency will lower anxiety about whether congregants can trust church leaders, and it will raise enough anxiety about the situation that people will consider change. And that was the balance that we were trying to strike.
Jim Latimer
Yes. Because anxiety is not a total devil; it can also be a motivator. But you want to get it just enough so that it is – on balance – more motivating than debilitating. That’s the fine line you have to walk. Oh, that’s great, Diane.
Diane Kenaston
Yes. So, all of that was a method of truth telling about the current reality. And the reason we did that was because true hope really depends on truth. Russell Herbert, who wrote the book, Living Hope, he says, Daring to hope involves imagining the future transformation of reality, but in a way that remains in touch with that reality as it is presently experienced. To live in hope is to defy reality without taking leave of it.
Diane Kenaston
So, the way that I would paraphrase that is that hope requires imagination grounded in reality. Hope takes the present situation and looks it squarely in the eye. Hope doesn’t fearfully avoid the truth, but leans into it curiously asking questions of the past, present and future. Hope is a creative engagement with what is – that’s truth telling. And it’s the engagement with what is that opens possibilities for the future of what could be. And so, this becomes open and flexible. So, there’s not just one path that you’re going down, but you can see a multitude of paths and options. And, so as a congregation, when we met together and said, This is the reality of where we are – this is what is. We could begin looking at what could be by saying, We could move to a part-time pastor. We could share a pastor with another congregation. We could realign our staff. We could close. We could merge. We could give away all of our money. We could relocate. We could restart. We have options once we look at those realities. And we just kept saying over and over again, Together, we can choose our next steps as a congregation, that we don’t know where we’re going yet. But we know that we’re going to go through it together. And we’re going to be honest with one another as we find hopeful ways to live into the future.
Jim Latimer
Thank you so much, Diane, that was rich. I love the way you took us from the beginning. And then you took us kind of through the end of that discernment process. And that’s another important piece that helps to lower anxiety – when people see, Oh, we have options. We do have options, rather than forced upon us.
Diane Kenaston
Yes. Naming those options. That was the beginning of the process. We started early in the year to say, Okay, here’s our financial reality, we’re going to be looking at options. And a few months later came back and said, Okay, this is the time for the serious conversation. And there are options, but we need to know where we are and what those options are. And from there, we could then begin discerning, Okay, as a congregation, we have xyz values that are going to lead us to make decisions in this direction or that direction.
Jim Latimer
Fabulous. As you learn more about the specifics of your situation and context, the options really take more concrete shape and things like that. That is fabulous. So, Diane, thank you so very much. And again, at the beginning of our interview today, I gave you information to go to the Coachingforinterims.com website to learn more about Diane and her Good Friday Collaborative. It’s very good. So, thank you so much, Diane. Take care.
Diane Kenaston
Thank you.