Organizational Maturity

My dad is a veteran. He was part of the occupation of Germany in the early 1950s. I have been aware of my father’s military service since I was a small child. He shared funny stories of military life and talked about how much he learned about people from other cultures and places. He rarely talked about how he felt to be stationed in a place where war had destroyed so much and where the monstrous evil of the Holocaust had transpired, but, all of those experiences left their mark on him.

Our congregations are full of people touched by military service. They are veterans who count their service as a formative part of their lives and their identity. They are parents, cousins, siblings, spouses, and children who care about active duty personnel and worry about their well-being. All of these people have rich stories to share—and they might like to share them with us, if only they felt their stories would be welcome. Many of them have insightful perspectives on war and peace, on the role of the military in our nation, and on the thorny questions of power in our interconnected world. Some have spiritual wounds that need pastoral care and compassion. Unitarian Universalist military ministry is about offering safe space for all of these people.

Unitarian Universalist military ministry is also about reaching out into your community. There are people currently serving in the military who long for a free-thinking, justice-seeking, inclusive faith tradition like ours. They may be young adults facing spiritual crisis when their childhood faith no longer serves. They may be career military people who have not found a religious tradition that fits their understanding of what is sacred. They may be people seeking a faith community that embraces them and their same-sex partners. There are people who would welcome our help to find Unitarian Universalism.

If your congregation is exploring how you might begin or strengthen your outreach to military personnel and veterans, you may want to investigate excellent tools recently produced by the UUA. The Military Ministry Toolkit, available online at no charge,includes six 1-hour workshops and a 23-minute video to share with congregational leadership. We’re very excited about this resource! You can find out more about it and ask any questions you may have by attending a webinar:

November 2014: Military Ministry in UU Congregations
Tuesday, Nov. 18 at 1 pm Eastern
or, Wednesday, Nov. 19 at 9 pm Eastern
Presented by Gail Forsyth-Vail with Shawna Foster, a military veteran and the military ministry coordinator for the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Larger Fellowship.

To register, email faithdevwebinar@uua.org. Specify the date/time of the webinar you wish to attend.

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Gail Forsyth-Vail  is Adult Programs Director in the UUA Faith Development Office, a position she came to after many years serving congregations as a religious educator. She is passionate about creating ways for people to connect their own lived experience to the depth and richness of our Unitarian Universalist tradition. She loves learning things, meeting people, telling stories, and being part of a terrific extended family!

October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month.  Today, 70% of people with disabilities are not employed, even though polls show that most of them would prefer to work. Incredibly, this is about the same percentage of unemployed persons since the early 1980’s when I began my work in the field of disabilities.

The Interfaith Disability Advocacy Coalition, of which the UUA is a member, in collaboration with the American Association of People with Disabilities, has published a document on ways that congregations can help to expand employment opportunities for people with disabilities.  Click on the picture in the upper left corner to be directed to that helpful article.

I hear these laments all the time.

“We can’t get young adults to join our congregation.”

“We have a congregational covenant, but there still seems to be a lot of conflict around here.”

“I can’t get anyone to serve on the Board of Trustees.”

“Our fund drive came up short again. No one wants to talk about money.”

These are some of the realities of congregational life. In their struggle to deal with them, leaders often ask the question, “How can I get people to change their behavior?” The answer, many of us think, comes down to more information and changing attitudes. We reason that if we can just give people the right information; if we can get them to think differently, then they’ll come and visit, they’ll readily volunteer, they’ll get along, they’ll contribute generously.

Well, social scientist Jeni Cross, sociology professor at Colorado State University, tells us that this reasoning is incorrect. She debunks two of the myths of behavior change, that education changes people’s behavior and that in order to change behavior, you have to change people’s attitudes. Instead, Cross contends, the most effective way to change behavior is to change behavioral expectations or to reinforce existing social norms. To put it simply, people are more likely to change their behavior if they see others doing it.

So, for example, if you want people to be more ecologically responsive, you won’t get them to do it by appealing to the need to save the planet. They’ll be more likely to respond if you display an ad showing George Clooney or Katy Perry tossing a plastic water bottle in a recycling can. If people are going to toss a dollar bill into the guitar case of a street musician, they are more likely to do so if they see other people doing it. We are more likely to change our behavior if we see that it is part of the social norms in the context of that situation.

In our efforts, then, as leaders in our congregations, it is not enough to just provide information. It is not enough to inspire and challenge and motivate potential and current members so as to change their attitudes towards the congregation and Unitarian Universalism in general. We need to do more. We need to change the expectations of their behavior. We need to create new social norms.We need to change the culture so that people respond because they see everyone else doing it.

So how do we do that? Hey, I’m not saying this is easy. But here are some things you can try in response to the lamentations I listed above. What they all have in common is that they are intended to demonstrate or reinforce expected behavior rather than relying on information or inspiration to get people motivated.

Can’t get young adults to join…or even to visit?

• Post pictures of young adults on the home page of your website engaging in various activities related to congregational life.
• Include one or two quotes from young adults on your website talking about life as a member of your congregation.
• Encourage young adults to serve as greeters. Nothing is more impressive to a young adult visitor than walking into the building and being greeted by a young adult.

Got conflict?

• Make it a practice to read your covenant at every Board and committee meeting and every other event at which members congregate (of course, make sure the covenant is short enough so that you’re not taking half the meeting reading it).
• Look for fellow members who are living out the covenant and publicly and privately thank them for doing so.
• Publish a story in each issue of your newsletter profiling a member who embodies the tenets of the congregational covenant.

No volunteers for the Board?

• Publish a list of all past Presidents in the history of the congregation. Let your congregation see what a distinguished list of leaders it represents.
• Ask current and past Board members to talk about their positive experiences in service. Either publish their comments in your newsletter or ask them to do a testimonial during a worship service.
• At least twice a year, during a worship service, ask all members of the congregation who are in volunteer positions (any position) to rise. Chances are it will be a very large majority of those in attendance. You and the members of the congregation will see that serving others is more of a social norm than you might think.

Need to fill up the coffers?

• Ask people to give live and written testimonials on why they give and how the congregation makes a difference in their lives.
• Publicly acknowledge people who do pledge during the fund drive, with a ribbon that they can attach to their nametag (I PLEDGED FOR (CONGREGATION)) or by putting their names on a display that is shown prominently in the lobby for all to see.
• Throughout the fund drive, continuously make the congregation aware of how many people and what percentage of the congregation has already pledged. You want members to see that pledging is the norm. Everybody’s doing it, so why not you?
• Consider a “Pledge Sunday” where all members of the congregation are asked to step forward and drop their pledge in a ceremonial basket as part of the worship service.

None of these strategies is a quick fix. Effecting behavior change means changing the culture, and changing the culture takes time. Our congregations are not speed boats. We are more like big ocean liners and it takes a lot more time and effort to turn an ocean liner than a speed boat. So, we need to continue informing and educating. We need to continue inspiring and challenging. But we also need to be demonstrating and encouraging and reinforcing positive behavior. And where do we begin? With you, leader. Behave…Yourself.

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Mark Bernstein is Congregational Life Staff with the Central East Regional Group. He always behaves himself and has never been on either a speed boat or a big ocean liner.