Church Organizers Foundation

FOR CONGREGATIONS 

Navigating economic and financial challenges? Considering a merger, partnership, or legacy plan? ​Increasingly, small and mid-sized churches and non-profit organizations face a shortage of stewardship knowledge in making complex ministry decisions. Sooner or later every congregation struggles to navigate in an ever-changing ministry context, staffing configuration with volunteers, and increasing financial challenges.  In Paddling In Tandem, Martin and Anne help congregations understand their economics and finances are connected to their spiritual and emotional health. Through monitoring a dual bottom line, Missional Impact and Financial Health, congregations are able to preserve frontline ministries through all seasons.

FOR CONGREGATIONS

Dealing with transition, conflict, grief or trauma?  Seeking healing and desiring to celebrate God's grace in all times and all things? The timeline practicum will help congregations synthesize their views and understanding of events that have occurred in their history.  As Argyris and Schon note about organizational learning, “There is a continual, more or less concerted meshing of individuals’ images of their activity in the context of their collective interactions." In Uproar, readers will observe important leadership characteristics such as separating oneself from the surrounding anxiety, making decisions based on principle and not instinct, taking responsibility for one’s own emotional being, staying connected to others including those who disagree with you, being a non-anxious presence, focusing on emotional processes rather than the symptoms they produce, knowing people naturally influence one another, and recognizing leader and follower as complements.

FOR CONGREGATIONS

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Struggling to identify solutions to "problems"? Facing problems that require change in multiple areas? Change is being resisted? No quick and easy solution is apparent? If any of these describe your church this retreat is for you. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership is a hands-on, practical guide containing stories, tools, diagrams, cases, and worksheets to help congregational leaders develop their skills as adaptive leaders, able to take their congregation outside its comfort zones and assess and address the toughest challenges.

FOR CONGREGATIONS

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Does your congregation feel stuck? Is your congregation addressing the same recurring  issue(s) year after year? Peter Senge effectively unpacks the organizational learning disability of being fixated on the event itself saying, “We are conditioned to see life as a series of events, and for every event, we think there is one obvious cause.” He further observes, “Focusing on events leads to ‘event’ explanations.” He concludes, “Such explanations may be true as far as they go, but they distract us from seeing the longer-term patterns of change that lie behind the events and from understanding the causes of those patterns."

FOR CONGREGATIONS

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Just because individuals might learn something does not mean the organization has learned something. “In many cases when knowledge held by individuals fails to enter into the stream of distinctively organizational thought and action, organizations know less than their members do” (Argyris & Schon). In Teaming, Amy Edmondson shows that organizations thrive, or fail to thrive, based on how well the small groups within those organizations work and learn. In most organizations, the work that produces value for customers is carried out by teams, and increasingly, by flexible team-like entities. The problem is that teams, and other dynamic groups, don't learn naturally. Edmondson outlines the factors that prevent them from learning, such as interpersonal fear, irrational beliefs about failure, groupthink, problematic power dynamics, and information hoarding. With Teaming, leaders learn to shape these factors.

FOR CONGREGATIONS

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When tensions emerge in a congregation, its leaders cannot be as anxious as the people they serve. To remain effective, congregational leaders must control their own uneasiness. Whenever a major event occurs in the life of the church (the departure or death of a beloved pastor, or church worker misconduct) there are simultaneous learning moments.  The system is unfrozen, willing to unlearn and learn, seeking guidance, and even being willing to innovate due to their desire to perpetuate their mission and accomplish their goals.

FOR CONGREGATIONS

An effective way to establish ground rules to ensure right relations and a steady course during times of change. This down-to-earth workbook gets to the heart of modern congregational life: how to live creatively together despite differences of age, race, culture, opinion, gender, theological or political position. Alban Senior Consultant Gilbert Rendle explains how to grow by valuing our differences rather than trying to ignore or blend them. He describes a method of establishing behavioral covenants that includes leadership instruction, training tools, resources (visual models, examples of specific covenants), small-group exercises, plans for meetings, and retreats.

FOR CONGREGATIONS

Governance training and/or assessing several governance models. In Organizing for Mission and Ministry: Options for Church Structure, the author presents three models for organizing churches, and he identifies the advantages and disadvantages of each model meant to equip church leaders to advance fruitful mission and ministry.