This weekend we begin Year A in the College curriculum, a year that focuses on our foundational materials, the ‘self’ of the leader, and conflict. It’s our new year, our new beginning of a two-year cycle of learning and growth as lay and clergy leaders.
Our Foundation: In the College we teach seven core models of organization development and congregational development. Models are lenses, ways of looking at our congregations that reveal different things depending on which lens we’re using. We can look at how a congregation is doing on its basic task or mission, how flexibly it welcomes people who tap into the community in different ways to develop their faith, how its size affects the way people make decisions, and so on.
The Self of the Leader: The College always engages leaders on three levels: self, team, and whole system. We learn things about how we function as leaders and what motivates us; we apply that learning in small groups and work teams; and we take on projects that involve whole congregations in planned change. In Year A, we take the Myers-Briggs Typology Indicator (MBTI) instrument, a tool that helps people understand how they prefer to get energy, gather information, make decisions, and interact with the outer world. Awareness of these preferences helps us appreciate different preferences in others, and gain insight about how we behave in conflict.
Conflict: All organizations have conflict, and in some sense all organizations are continually on some level of conflict: any engagement of two or more persons around a problem will generate a kind of forcefield that, when you look at it, has elements of conflict in it. (For example, if you and I miss our bus and are running late, we have to come together around that problem, and we may have competing views of how to solve it. We also might squabble a little.) Conflict is normal, but also stressful, even traumatic at times. It’s natural for leaders to listen to their fears and shrink from the challenge, and it’s natural for whole systems to do unconscious things in a conflict that deepen the problem. This is the year when we delve deeply into all this, and learn ways to be more conscious, responsive, and effective in the conflicts that inevitably develop in our life as the Body of Christ.
Happy New Year!
