A quick excerpt from church consultant Mike Durall’s book The Almost Church: Redefining Unitarian Universalism for a New Era. (You can read a quick summary of the book here.)
While our principles call for the respect and dignity of every person, not all members serve the congregation well. Unfortunately, some people come to church with their own agendas, which may not benefit the congregation as a whole. In fact, the persistent efforts of six to ten people can turn a healthy congregation into a dysfunctional church.
When people come to church, they don’t want to get into conflict with their friends and neighbors. This is not to say that disagreements never occur. Churches are human institutions and good decisions are often the result of ideas from different points of view. however, most parishioners will walk away from conflict when it arises in church, leaving those who created the conflict in a position of inordinate strength.
A friend of mine is a Presyterian minister and he related an incident in his church regarding a group of perinnially disgruntled members. He and the board chair gathered this group together and said to them, “We love you dearly, but we’re going to ask you to take a leave of absence from the church for a year or two, to think and pray about whether this church is truly the one for you.” As much as we desire our church to serve all in our midst, som epeople should be cut loose—perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently.
Anybody in the mood for some goat kicking?
I’ve learned to take Durall with a grain (or more) of salt.
I enjoyed the book while I was reading it, his assessment of the current state of the church sounds reasonable (when it’s in front of you), and his vision of the future is intriguing.
However, when he came to my internship site as a consultant it became clear to me that he’s far too wedded to his general assesment of the current state of the church to able to see specific individual churches clearly. All his work is done through the lens of The Almost Church. By his return visit, he was quoting chapter and verse from his book, while saying very little about the actual state of the congregation he was contracted to observe.
He seems to be much more invested in being “right” than in being constructive.
(I’ll admit, he did bring about some useful changes in the congregation. They were, however, small changes compared to my sense that he couldn’t, or just wouldn’t, look at the individual congregation without superimposing his pre-judged notion of “contemporary UUism” onto it.)