- Hawai‘i Conference
"Moving Beyond Shame: An Appreciative Way Approach to Ministry Reviews" Workshop with David Popham
Our Conference Minister, the Rev. Dr. David Popham, offered a free workshop on Tuesday, April 13, 2021 in response to increased interest in ministry reviews following a presentation by the Rev. Dr. Bill Lyons who shared what it means to be an employee of the church while being the pastor and the differences between a Pastor Parish Relations Committee and a Personnel Committee. Watch that presentation HERE.
The increased interest in ministry reviews was typically expressed with this question: "How do we go about conducting a pastor review?" With the question comes the assumption that the pastor is an employee under review and the things that are not working in the church can be made to work through a pastor review. These assumptions about pastor reviews raise some problematic issues.
The purpose of this workshop "Moving Beyond Shame: An Appreciative Way Approach to Ministry Reviews" is to help church leaders and pastors move beyond the usual attitudes behind a pastor review, as well as to engage a broader review of church mission and ministry. For example, if the "why" of your congregation is to express its core purpose as a spiritual fingerprint on the community it serves, I suspect only about half of that has to do with the timeliness of returned emails, what songs are sung, or how your pastor appears in the pulpit. The other half has to do with the congregation as a whole and how it goes about relating to the community.
In "Moving Beyond Shame: An Appreciative Way Approach to Ministry Reviews," we will explore:
why engage in reviews
the folly of feedback and the wisdom of feed-forward, and
mutual ministry valuation of the pastor and congregation.
Watch a recording of the workshop here.
(The recording has been slightly edited for this format.)
