With this homily, delivered on Sunday, Jan. 31, Janine Larsen, Congregational Life Staff, UUA Pacific Western Region, introduced “Appreciative Inquiry” exercises for the RVUUF congregation.

Good morning and greetings from the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Pacific Western Region! I’m delighted to be with you and your process team today as a member of the UUA’s Congregational Life Staff. It’s a particular privilege to help kick off this energetic process to investigate your dreams and visions, in order to bring forth a new guiding statement of the compelling and vital mission of the Rogue Valley UU Fellowship.

I have great respect and fondness for this congregation, filled as it is with competent, dedicated and insightful leaders. Each of you brings to this conversation and this Fellowship interesting stories and gifts, talents and questions, needs and strengths and struggles. While I expect that most of you have some understanding of the purpose of mission statements in congregations, given that Rev. Nan has been talking about this in her sermons of late, I will hazard a guess that some of you have not considered how the mission of a religious institution might differ from that of a corporation or secular non-profit. And I’ll also guess that even fewer of you have some experience with “Appreciative Inquiry,” the specific strategy your Process Team is employing to frame the imaginative work you begin today.

If you are anything at all like most Unitarian Universalists, you might have sighed mightily when you heard the congregation would be going through the exercise of updating your mission statement. After all, the current version is only five years old and seems good enough, right? I confess that I’m not a big fan of the process – we seem to have it on our checklist as a “to-do” every so often, which includes the mandate “must include all members and friends.” I mean, if this is about marketing, just have someone who is into all that write it up and be done with it! Leave the rest of us to do things we’re actually interested in, for Pete’s sake! Though I’ve also seen a few occasions where the exercise became sort of a free-for-all among those who consider themselves experts – or at least uniquely qualified – in any creative or management-oriented endeavor.

And those among you who prefer no-nonsense approaches to such things might also have rolled your eyes big time when you heard or read about the Appreciative Inquiry process your leadership team is touting. I’ll bet a few of you suspect we’re going to be getting out guitars and singing some verses of Kumbaya. Well, the eye-rollers probably just stayed home today, and for those who are eager to hold hands and sing some soulful verses, I’m sorry to disappoint you. You’re in for a treat of a different kind.

So, let’s take a look at what’s up with this. My own hesitance about mission statement renewal is that I’ve found too often that people get way too caught up in the technical aspects of defining mission, vision, and purpose. Everyone has their own version of the truth and their own formula for how to methodically take care of this task. It’s a form of work avoidance, I think, to get caught up in clarifying and wordsmithing the definitions and inter-relationship of these terms.

What matters really is community understanding, commitment and inspiration to transform our lives and the lives of others. A mission statement, regardless of how elegantly crafted, means nothing if it does not affect the human experience that comes about as a direct result of the passionate expression of that mission. As our opening words clarified, “The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all” (1).

This is why your process team specifically asked you to begin by “attending this service with curiosity, courage and a commitment to community.” I want to thank you for caring enough about this Fellowship and the Rogue Valley to simply be here today, fully and faithfully. Take a look around at the dear and demanding people who are this beloved community, and take a deep breath together. And as you exhale, take off your critic’s ears, open your skeptic’s heart, loosen your achiever’s grip, and allow yourself to just engage one another with goodwill.

Appreciative Inquiry is a “strengths-based approach to organization development and change management” (2). Management guru Peter Drucker has said that “The task of organizational leadership is to create an alignment of strengths in ways that make a system’s weaknesses irrelevant” (3). Appreciative Inquiry, or “A.I.”, employs narrative leadership to identify the positive story of a business, organization or in our case, your congregation, departing from our culture’s tradition of deficit-based assessment. “Words make worlds,” say the originators of Appreciative Inquiry. That is, we manifest what we practice. Today’s conversations invite us into valuation rather than evaluation.

An executive of GTE (General Telephone/ Verizon) described his company’s experience with A.I. by explaining, “Appreciative Inquiry can get you much better results than seeking out and solving problems… We concentrate enormous resources on correcting problems that have relatively minor impact on overall service and performance… when used continually and over a long period of time, this approach can lead to a negative culture” (4).

Consider how often scrutinizing the past to pick out and pick at errors in our ways generates overwhelm and defensiveness. Like our Unitarian Universalist faith, A.I. is forward-oriented. We’re invited to discover RVUUF’s positive core, appreciating what is, imagining what might be, determining what should be, and creating what will be.

Richard Southern and Robert Norton, in their book, Cracking Your Congregation’s Code: Mapping Your Spiritual DNA to Create Your Future (5), caution that many congregations have a written mission statement but don’t really have a mission, a reason for being. They point out that the wording of many mission statements too often simply describe the status quo. By making no demands on the congregation or its members, the mission is assumed to be “keep things just as we like them.” This is the antithesis of our liberal faith.

Without a forward-looking, ever renewing mission, programs and ministries become entrenched. Institutional maintenance becomes the mission, and management rather than dynamic congregational ministry becomes the main activity of the congregation. Focus turns inward, people and functions become entrenched, turf is defined and jealously guarded, term limits are non-existent or ignored and permanent tenure prevents leadership refreshment and development. The church system becomes moribund, flat and – to break the monotony – quarrelsome.

UU minister the Rev. Kirk Loadman-Copeland observed further that “Institution-Focused” congregations often suffer from confusion about roles, combined with lack of clarity about authority, responsibility, and accountability. There can develop a “tyranny of individuality” in which single persons or very small groups can stop any initiative. The church becomes increasingly risk-averse and change averse, and regularly presents as a closed system absorbed with maintenance and conformity. Professional staff are hired and task forces empaneled, but it becomes something of a pattern to mistrust them and keep them from actually doing the jobs they were hired for.

A mission-focused congregation, on the other hand, offers a clear focus on identity and destiny. Committees and program teams are aligned with and guided by sense of shared mission, leaders are resilient and serve interdependently, and individuals are inspired to live out the mission in personal and public ways (6).

Appreciative Inquiry calls us to raise the bar. With the advantage of the stories contributed by many people describing the experience of an organization at its best, mission statements can be infused with empowered destiny, asking, “What is the world calling us to become?”

• Listen to these reframes of organizational goals:
  Embarrassed by high rates of misdirected baggage, British Airways employees engaging in an AI process initially proposed a goal of “Better service recovery.” Then someone pointed out that this was self-defeating, as if it were ok to lose a customer’s luggage as long as it could be returned more promptly. Returning to their positive core, the employees asked themselves “What do we want more of?” The reframed goal: “Exceptional arrival experience” (7).
• A Fortune 500 company wanted to “put a dent in the huge problem of sexual harassment.” Giving everyone’s story a place in the discussion and shifting from evaluation to valuation brought a shift in spirit, with significant increases in trust. Their new goal: “High-quality cross-gender relationships in the workplace” (8).
• A small Christian church described their mission to “Reduce sin in our community.” Returning to a positive core, they found a deeper mission to “Create sacred space where we can learn to love as Jesus did.”

I encourage you today to let go of the need to move swiftly towards a productive outcome. Instead, allow yourself to open wide your mind and speak from the heart about what has really mattered to you at RVUUF. Notice what values and strengths are evident in your experience of this Fellowship at its best. And imagining a future RVUUF 5 to 10 years hence, energetically inspired by the positive core of this congregation’s many amazing strengths, consider how you have been transformed. Casting yourself into the future, imagine what you have done personally to help RVUUF become the transformational home that it was meant to be for people of all ages and circumstances, and for families throughout the Rogue Valley.

For today, don’t worry about the outcome. Just dive into the questions.

Enjoy these conversations, and take them home with you for continued reflection. What is the compelling mission that only this Fellowship, this beloved community, is well suited to offer to the Rogue Valley? Let’s see how this story will be shared.

I leave you to enter into your story telling, with the words of organization consultant and spiritual warrior Margaret Wheatley:

There is no power equal to a community discovering what it cares about…It is always like this; real change begins with the simple act of people talking about what they care about” (9).

Janine Larsen
Congregational Life Staff
UUA Pacific Western Region

Works Cited

1. Rev. Dr. Mark Morrison-Reed, Singing the Living Tradition, No. 580
2. David L Cooperrider and Diana Whitney, Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco; 2005. Pg. 1
3. Ibid, Pg. 2
4. Ibid, Pg. 5
5. Richard Southern and Robert Norton, Cracking Your Congregation’s Code: Mapping Your Spiritual DNA to Create Your Future. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. 2001
6. Peter Steinke, Healthy Congregations: A Systems Approach (Washington D.C: The Alban Institute, 1996) 44-45.
7. Cooperrider & Whitney, op cit. Pgs 19-21
8. Paul C. Chaffee, “Claiming the Light: Appreciative Inquiry and Congregational Transformation.” www.congregationalresources.org: A Guide to Resources for Building Congregational Vitality. Pg 67
9. Margaret J. Wheatley. Turning to One Another. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009