Dear One's of St. C's, 

This spring the Bishop's Committee and myself spent a day together at Craig and Whitney's lovely home on Lake Tapps.  We look at the Planned Renegotiation Cycle(look at bottom of message for model) that was originally created in organizational development by Sherwood and Glidewell. This model looks at how shared expectations are directly in relationship with commitment in an organization.  When there is a "pinch" in an organization it is often because the shared expectations are no longer working for one or more parties involved, so therefor the commitment is not being met. So a healthy organization needs to re-negotiate expectations in order for all parties to re-commit to the new agreed upon expectations.  An organization that is not healthy often skips this step and just wants both parties to go back to the previous shared expectations that were no longer working.  This often leads to less productivity and increased dissatisfaction.  

At our retreat we looked at a lot of different areas of St. Columba's to see if any of our past shared expectations needed tweaking or strengthening.  We did this with the role of the Vicar and the Bishop's Committee.  This was very helpful in creating our three goals for the year, which are to develop leaders, deepen stewardship, and re-define Jr. Warden Role (for BC and for whole community).

Today I want to speak with you about the third goal - redefine Jr. Warden Role.  This is a role that has  not been working for a long time.  The community's expectation for the person in this role is so great that the commitment is set up to fail every time.  People who have had this position in past years often like they have failed to meet the expectation placed on them because the role is simply too big.  The last thing we want as a community is for any of our people to feel like they have failed, especially when I know how much every Jr. Warden has deeply cared for this community. 

At the BC retreat we worked on renegotiating expectations for this role, but even as we tried to do this no one wanted the position.  Which spoke volumes to all of us that this position needs to be completely re-imagined by the BC and by the whole community. As Micah pointed out, we kept just returning to the way things were. So we are going to take a year and discern together how this role could be successful for the next Jr. Warden. 

We want to shift how the community and the BC understands this role and for the weight to move off of one person and be more distributed throughout the whole community.  The truth is - we have been moving in this direction for a long time as the Jr. Warden position has slowly been devolving.  But because this has not been a planned changed, it has been half hazard and at times too much has fallen on a few people, when in reality we have a whole community of capable, talented, big hearted people!

To be in good standing with the Diocese we need a Jr. Warden.  So for 2024 we are re-defining the JR. Warden's role as the person who makes sure at each BC meeting we go around the building and make a list of what needs repairs.  This person will be Rod Blalock - thank you Rod!

We will generate this list for the whole community.  We hope people will check out this list and see ways they can help. I will begin to share it the e-news and keep it in the narthex.  I also want to gather the skills, abilities, and interests of people that are part of this church in supporting our building and grounds, so they can be found all in one place. 

My main hope and desire is threefold, one, is that the work gets spread out so "many hands make light work" and the second, is that every single person who finds a spiritual home here at St. Columba's knows that they are apart of what makes this place so welcoming and special, and lastly, that through this experience we can come to see what would be most helpful in a Jr. Warden and we find many people in our community who would be ready and willing to fit our new shared expectations.  We will know that we are successful when multiple people come asking me if they can be the Jr. Warden!!

I am so thankful for this community and all the ways that everyone pitches in when and where they can!  So many of you have come up to be after seeing something around this building that needs attending to and have asked me how you can help.  We are already doing a great job at our intended goal - I am just hoping to bring some organization, clarity, and more support to what we are already doing as we work to re-define the role of Jr. Warden. 

with gratitude, 

Meghan