Caring for your Religious Professionals
The UUMA exists to call forth courageous and transformative ministries, empowered by love, committed to collective liberation … because we need one another.
We need one another! It takes ministers, religious professionals of all kinds, lay leaders and volunteers from congregations, communities and other institutions. How can we bring out more of the best in our religious professionals and our religious communities? Here are some tips and places to go for help.
Nurturing Your Religious Professionals
- Provide Fair Compensation: Any religious professional work is serious. Unlike volunteered services, religious professionals undergo years of training, degrees, and spend a lot more time at their jobs then what is visible at a weekly worship service or bedside visit. Provide generous compensation that values and supports the lives of your staff.
- Provide Fair Benefits: Like everyone religious professionals and their families need medical and retirement benefits to assist them today and in the future.
- Honor day(s) off: A day spent writing a sermon, or meeting with parents and planning curriculum, or attending an administrator’s conference, may not happen in the church but it isn’t really a day off. Make sure your staff have days off.
- Remember, family comes first: Help your staff balance their work and family life by honoring parental leave, providing support for children or spouses, and understanding when family emergencies happen.
- Don’t fear the Sabbatical or Study Leave: Time off provides staff with fresh ideas and renewed energy and can be a time of growth for the people they serve.
- Support your staff’s health & fitness: Be supportive of staff fitness, and encourage time and space for health.
- Encourage professional development: Continuing education is crucial to the success of ministry. Training programs help religious professionals hone their skills and ministries. Be generous in providing professional development funds and time away for study!
- Association for Unitarian Universalist Music Ministries (AAUMM)
- Association of UU Administrators (AUUA)
- Liberal Religious Educators’ Association (LREDA)
- The UU Society for Community Ministries, Inc. (UUSCM)
- UU Association of Membership Professionals (UUAMP)
- UU Retired Ministers and Partners Association (UURMaPA)
- Encourage time with colleagues: Research shows that religious professionals who regularly meet and study with colleagues have longer and more vibrant ministries. Support those connections.
- Show Appreciation: Remind your staff how much you appreciate them, and point out specific ways they are succeeding. One easy way to show appreciation is to send a birthday or work-anniversary card and a thank you card always does wonders for the spirit!
Nurturing Unitarian Universalist Communities
- Covenant Together: Develop, live and adjust a covenant of expectation and promises with the congregation, community and staff.
- Evaluate Shared Ministry: Develop and implement an annual evaluation of the congregation’s and staff’s shared ministry.
- Leadership Development: Professional development is not just for religious professionals and staff. Provide feedback, and regular evaluations and plans to develop lay leadership.
- Development Plans: It’s not enough to just have funds for your staff or lay leaders. Create an annual professional development plan for each staff member and fund those plans.
- Aim High: Support your religious professionals and each other by creating and embodying high expectations regarding leadership development support, generosity and right relations.
- Clarity Around Roles: Be clear about who does what, who is best at what and what is yours and what is somebody else’s – and expect the same of others in your community and staff.
- Having Clear Boundaries: Whether about roles of the staff, or about when someone hurts the community, having good boundaries provides for healing ways to hold each other accountable.
- Don’t be Afraid of Some Change: Small changes and challenges on a routine basis are signs of adaptability and cultural growth and understanding. Like exercise, don’t be afraid to face new projects together.
- Manage Conflict: No one likes conflict, but communities that are healthy manage conflict directly, with honest and clear communication. Communities that try to avoid conflict often face larger and more emotionally charged conflicts down the road.
- Have The Money Talk: As much as it can be uncomfortable, every community needs money to do ministry. Healthy communities are able to have frank conversations about their financial and material needs, in a way that helps them live into their mission and covenant.
