Dear RVUUFians,
As many of you have heard by now, our newly hired Congregational Administrator Janet has decided not to stay on at RVUUF. Her last day was July 2nd. I write today to let you know how we are planning to move forward over the summer and beyond.
During July and August, at least until Rev. Sean returns from his summer rest and study leave, Rev. Alison Duren-Sutherland has resumed the part-time office support role she has been filling since December. Rev. Alison is typically in the office Mondays and Fridays, and will also be checking email and phone messages from home throughout the week. Please make sure to contact Rev. Alison to schedule a meeting time if you would like to meet her in the office, as her office hours are variable. We are grateful for her continued support in the office, and we also recognize that the time may soon come when she will no longer be available in this capacity. Board members are training in the key office tasks that Rev. Alison has been performing, in case she should need to leave her temporary administrative role before a new long-term candidate is hired.
We also want to let the congregation know that we have learned some important lessons from the past six months and our two unsuccessful attempts to hire a permanent administrator. We have heard and accepted the truth that the Congregational Administrator position as it had been constituted was too large a job with too diverse a skill-set for any one person. As a reminder, before the pandemic building closure, Alison was working as an assistant to our previous administrator Dawn to take care of all these job functions, and yet we have been attempting to hire only one position to do everything Alison and Dawn had held together. We are taking steps to make the job more manageable by hiring a local bookkeeping service to take primary responsibility for the congregation’s financial record-keeping. With most financial management tasks taken out of the job description of the Congregational Administrator, we believe it will be easier to find an interested candidate with the right skills. We hope to have candidates for Rev. Sean to interview when he returns in August.
In the meantime, we ask for your ongoing patience and support during this longer than expected transitional time, and we have a few ideas for how you can help us integrate our new Congregational Administrator when they eventually arrive:
- Please do not contact the new administrator using their personal email or phone number. All communications should be directed to the office.admin email and/or the congregation’s voice mail system.
- It will be very exciting for us when we find the right candidate, but please remember that there are around 150 of us and only one of them. This means that if we all approach them during their first couple of weeks, either with outstanding tasks that need to be completed or simply with our enthusiasm at their arrival, they will likely be overwhelmed! Please consider giving any new hire time to adjust and integrate before approaching them with your non-urgent needs or your excitement about their arrival, and please try to approach them in a spirit of patience and understanding as they learn their job. If you are anxious about the transition, it is important that you do the work to manage your anxiety (deep breathing, meditation, etc) before approaching the new hire, so that you do not add your anxiety to the very normal anxiety they will also be experiencing upon starting a new job.
- Please remember that being an employee of our church does not make someone the servant of our church. Our employees, like all of us, are full human beings, endowed with inherent worth and dignity. RVUUF employees deserve to be approached with the same respect that we would give to anyone in our RVUUFian family, or to any fellow human being. Please make sure that your compassionate communication skills and commitment to right relationship are engaged as deeply in communications with our staff as they are when communicating with fellow members.
Thank you for your continued perseverance and support as we endeavor to improve our administrative systems to meet the needs of our RVUUF community.
In Faith,
Jim Meckel
RVUUF Board President
July 7, 2023