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The Good Old Days and Other Works of Fiction

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / December 6, 2019 / 0 Comments

When were your glory days? Pose this question and a congregation’s leaders will often tell stories of high attendance, engaged participation, and buildings that couldn’t hold it all. Glory-era memories are almost always recounted as blissful, happy times of pure goodness. However, parts of the story rarely get told—including how the seeds of decline may […]

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5 Practices for Coaxing Order out of Chaos

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / October 29, 2019 / 0 Comments

Chaos is a natural by-product of innovation. Innovation happens best in conditions of upheaval, disturbance, and dissonance. However, people expect their leaders to keep things calm, predictable, and orderly. How do we coax order out of chaos without squelching innovation? Stages of Innovation Innovation occurs in predictable stages. It begins with a disturbance in the status quo, […]

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7 Ways to Inspire Confidence While Saying “I Don’t Know”

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / October 29, 2019 / 0 Comments

People look to leaders to fix organizational problems; a leader who fails to resolve a problem quickly may be labelled weak or ineffectual. However, it isn’t in anyone’s best interest for a leader to start fixing things when the way ahead isn’t clear. How does a leader say, “I don’t know what to do next,” […]

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How To Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / October 29, 2019 / 2 Comments

How do you lead an organization stuck between an ending and a new beginning—when the old way of doing things no longer works but a way forward is not yet clear? I call such in-between times liminal seasons—threshold times when the continuity of tradition disintegrates and uncertainty about the future fuels doubt and chaos. In a […]

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How Many People Can One Pastor Supervise?

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / July 14, 2017 / 0 Comments

Only the largest congregations have the resources to hire full-time supervisors. The average congregation employs a “head of staff” who also preaches, teaches, provides pastoral care, leads mission and ministry, and guides the work of the board. Given this breadth of responsibility, how many employees can a pastor effectively supervise? What happens when a supervisor […]

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Making Space for Middle Ground

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / March 16, 2017 / 4 Comments

We are a nation divided and those divisions are creeping into congregational life. It grows increasingly difficult to hold an ideological middle ground in politics, theology, or leadership. Pastors climb into pulpits fearful that a simple sermon topic will be interpreted as a political statement. Decision-making is heavy-laden with ideological spin, making it difficult to […]

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Taming the Bureaucracy Beast

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / October 13, 2015 / 0 Comments

The church needs innovation, experimentation and risk taking.  The church has bureaucracy; inactivity in the name of good order and process. Senseless bureaucracy keeps us endlessly mired in reporting, approval seeking and communication. We end up with repetitive meetings, multiple levels of approval, over-reliance on procedure, and postponed decision making until everyone is informed and […]

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Building a Discerning Team

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / August 18, 2014 / 0 Comments

Most teams in congregational settings assume they are being Spirit-led.  They believe that God will be self-disclosing and guide the work of the team, so long as good people gather with good intent.  They expect that discernment will happen automatically in the context of good decision making. And so, they demonstrate little intentionality when it […]

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Size Matters

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / June 25, 2014 / 0 Comments

Size Matters…at least it does in the world of congregations. Don’t get me wrong. The size of a congregation doesn’t automatically make it any more or less impactful. Small churches and large churches can be equally effective in ministry. However, a congregation’s perception of its size, and how it functions in relationship to that perception…that […]

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Spiritual Work in Pastoral Transition

By Susan Beaumont & Associates / February 19, 2013 / 0 Comments

 Recently, I had the opportunity to listen to Frank Ostaseski speak about Being a Compassionate Companion while accompanying the dying. Frank is a leader/teacher in the Zen Hospice Project. As I listened to Frank speak, I was struck by how well his five precepts for walking with the dying apply to congregational life, when a congregation is in the […]

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