DIY Small Church Learning Resources: Governance and Leadership

It's often the case in small churches that eventually, everybody serves in just about every colunteer and leadership position! It's sometimes wise to step back and look at your congregation's volunteer culture, and the expectations in your community about leadership. If your congregation is looking for new ways to suport volunteers or new approaches to leadership, start with one of these articles, or call your NER staff.

Supporting volunteer leaders....

The Spectrum of Volunteer Leadership: Is anyone in your church explicitly responsible for supporting volunteers? This blog post talks about the importance of supporting and building the capacity of volunteers in your church so they can effectively share their gifts. 

Creating a Healthy Volunteer Culture: Brief blog post outlines some ways to ensure that what we ask of ourselves and one another as volunteers enrich us and help us grow in faith and in community, instead of depleting and burdening us.

Adaptive Leadership...

Becoming an Adaptive Leader: (PDF) This article is a good introduction to Adaptive Leadership, based the work of Ronald Heifitz and Martin Linsky. Adaptive leadership is about mobilizing people to tackle difficult challenges and thrive. It helps you identify what challenges are technical, and have easily identified solutions, and which are adpative - that is, they require the people involved to learn or change something in order to address the challenge. In other words, it requires people - and organizations - to adapt. This is a great introduction with a particular focus on how it applies to faith communities. (Let your NER staff know if you'd like to know more about Adaptive Leadership!)

In the Name of Adaptive Leadership, What are we Getting Wrong? Once you know a little bit about adaptive leadership and have some practice with it, check in with this article by Susan Beaumont outlining the general roles and responsibilities of adaptive leaders. She names some possible pitfalls adaptive leaders might fall into.