Unitarian Church Leadership

[tcpip]

I've spent a bit of time over the past couple of weeks as a candidate for chairperson for the Melbourne Unitarian Church. It wasn't an easy decision; the current chairperson is a convivial chap and has a fair knowledge of the subject matter. But he's also been in that role for a very long time, and, it must be said, he has been less than effective at dealing with some real problems that the place is facing that have been raised time and time again for years on end. It became very clear to me that nothing was going to change unless the leadership changed.

The reality is that the Church is stagnating or declining on all metrics one cares to mention (except for website visits). Membership is aging and declining - the "electoral roll" is a mere 47, down from over 60 when I first joined and average attendance at services is around 25-30. There is no effort at all to bring in new blood, and least of all young people - indeed, there is active discouragement. The content of the overwhelming majority of services and the Church journal is largely indistinguishable from a left-wing political club, making even the purpose of the place completely redundant. The organisation is too top-heavy with a maddeningly inefficient bureaucracy and a tightly controlled concentration of power. Over the past three years the Church has recorded constant financial losses and a decline in equity.

I've gone into all this in my election material for those who want more information on the dire straits the organisation is in, along with some very achievable, measurable pledges of my own. Alas, I do not have soft-copies of the rather hostile and personal responses, which are overwhelmingly based on defending the bleak financial record, with the particular the claim that depreciation isn't an issue as it is just a 'paper loss', a claim, I must confess, simply astounds. Mostly however, I cannot fathom what the incumbents stand for. More of the same? It'll become a race to see who dies first; the incumbents or the organisation - and nothing will be left for the future.

Comments

[sebastianne.livejournal.com]

Good luck! It sounds like change really does need to occur, and while it might make you unpopular initially with few people, in the long run they will hopefully see the good intentions and very reasonable strategic thinking behind your campaign :)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Well, the first thing that I was accussed of was engaging in an ALP branch-stacking excersise! So the assumption is immediately one of negative intentions. I guess some people have spent a lifetime playing in the morass of dirty politics and the Church is the entirety of their life, rather than being part of their life. So the possibility of their nest being upset is very troubling, even if it means that the organisation dies out.

(The particular accusation died off a little when it became evident that there is not one full member of the Church that I have 'introduced' to the congregation, let alone any members of the ALP.. but it's still being spread among those with small and poisoned minds)

I think I have majority support among the membership. Most are not fools but any stretch of the imagination and can see that the Church need reinvigoration. Sunday will tell...

[sebastianne.livejournal.com]

I've always found it very interesting that there is a quite high over-representation of paranoid personality features (not disorders) amongst people attracted to politics, yet the methods often used in politics are the very ones which aggravate such personality traits~ makes things difficult no matter which approach you try as people will be suspicious naturally and often with experiential backup given the nature of their past experiences in politics. The other main feature of paranoid types is the heavy reliance on a clique, so your recommendations will literally be ruffling a lot of feathers! ;) Hopefully they can move past their anxieties and see that they can have an ongoing and hopefully more progressive and fruitful involvement in the church :)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Sure, and when the personality feature finds themselves in a position where a clique can be easily established through systematic means then the personality and the system start feeding off each other. That's why it's very important that any reform should be about making an organisation more democratic rather than less - as Tony Benn's blackboard stated quite bluntly..

It is one of the difficulties of any organisation claiming to be 'democratic'. On one side it can mean a dictatorship of whomever receives 50%+1 of the vote in an election, with all sorts of behaviours and rules to ensure that dictatorship of the majority remains in place.

On the other hand it can mean proportional representation, inclusion of minority opinions, term limits, automatic recall & etc. The more of these features that are included, the less prone the organisation will be towards being "taken over" - because it will be happening all the time in a manner than nobody can control. Which is ideally what a democratic governance should be about..


(Of course, we're approaching this from different directions.. With your background in psychology and mine in sociology... but the two do meet!)

[sebastianne.livejournal.com]

I don't think you can look at them exclusively- we are social creatures and the relationship between the individual and the social enviornment, while infinitley complex, is certainly a two-way process. I always found it ludicrous that psych and socioloigy are two distinct subjects, but that's another topic altogether :)

A lot of misuse and abuse at systemic levels is founded on shared irrational and mostly unspoken values and beliefs, whether done consciously or otherwise. And as history continually shows the mob mentality is powerful and scary thing!