Ruchotzke

Reaching out to the nones

The Rev. Renee Ruchotzke has a three-part essay titled “Could the Nones Become Unitarian Universalists?” on the UUA blog Growing Vital Leaders. She notes, “Young adult ministry has been a challenge for congregations of all liberal protestant denominations for decades but the game is changing in ways we couldn’t have imagined back in the post WWII church-building boom.”

Many young adults find conservative churches too restrictive, she says in Part 1. And liberal ones have not articulated a compelling theology. In Part 2 she ticks off reasons why young adults leave churches. The reasons include not developing a close friendship with anyone, and not getting help with discovering their own mission in the world.

In Part 3 she highlights congregations like First Unitarian Church of Rochester, NY which have created small group programs that lead to deeper engagement and spiritual development.

Growing Vital Leaders is a good blog for congregational leaders to bookmark. Other recent topics have been on cohesive leadership and making members and the larger community aware of your congregation’s outreach ministries.

Ruchotzke is Leadership Development Consultant for the Central East Regional Group (CERG), of the UUA.

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Growth, Resources

Being open to other points of view

The Rev. Renee Ruchotzke has posted an article on the UUA blog Growing Vital Leaders, about the dangers of running congregations from within a bubble. A bubble happens, she notes, when leaders aren’t receptive to ideas from others or simply don’t take the time to look beyond their own congregation for solutions.

Ruchotzke says, “Congregational leaders often don’t think to look beyond their congregation’s walls for ideas or answers. They may believe that their own congregation is unique in its situation, but there is likely a congregation down the road (or in another district) that has similar challenges. Part of the goal of cluster-building and regionalization is to help congregations connect to one another and access the wisdom of the wider UU movement.”

The full article is here.

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Uncategorized

Eliminating financial barriers to participation

Does your congregation impose unspoken financial barriers to membership, leadership, or simply to participation? That is, if you want to have a social life within the congregation do you have to buy it at the annual auction? What about those who can’t afford to do so?

If you want to be on the governing board, does that require taking time off from work for meetings? If someone takes on a volunteer task, are they expected to pay for any needed materials themselves? In a blog post, the Rev. Renee Ruchotzke notes, “For those who don’t have much—or any—disposable income, some norms can create a financial barrier against potential involvement.”

The full post, “Financial Barriers to Leadership,” is on the UUA’s Growing Vital Leaders blog, for which Ruchotzke is one of the primary authors.

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Resources

Making room for introverts

A good leader makes room for introverts to be heard, the Rev. Renee Ruchotzke reminds. In a recent post on the UUA blog Growing Vital Leaders, in an essay titled “Making Space for the Quiet Voices,” she argues for making sure that everyone in a meeting is invited to speak.

She writes, “I’ve learned from experience that some of the best ideas and reflections come from the introverts or the people who might be at the margins of the conversation because of age or culture.”

The blog entry also includes a brief video from the Rev. Erik Walker Wikstrom, author of the book Serving With Grace: Lay Leadership as a Spiritual Practice. In the video, Wikstrom advises leaders to speak last:

If you are usually one of the first ones to speak make it a discipline to hold your tongue for a while. Hold back. Let others talk first. Nine times out of ten you’ll find your really good ideas coming out of other people’s mouths. Since this really isn’t about showing how smart you are, is it, but about furthering the work of the church in a way that also deepens your spiritual life, you can rejoice that the important ideas got out there and you got to practice humility. And of course if anything has been unsaid, you can say it at the end.

 

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Resources

Why Unitarian Universalism is right for Generation Y

The Rev. Renee Ruchotzke writes about Generation Y—the Millennials—on the UUA blog Growing Vital Leaders. Ruchotzke is Regional Leadership Development consultant for the Central East Regional Group of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

In a blog post from June 28 titled “To Be ‘Bona Fide,’” she quotes sociologist Robert Putnam, who notes in his book, American Grace, that the Millennials—born from the late ’70s to early 2000s—are less likely to have been raised in a particular religion than any previous generation and are less likely to believe that any one religion holds exclusive access to the “truth.” Millennials yearn for authenticity, she says, adding:

I believe this is good news for Unitarian Universalism. The promise of our faith is the promise of a living tradition, not the dry bones of old, irrelevant texts. The promise of our faith is the promise of personal wholeness; from our identity-based ministries to our antiracism, antioppression, and multicultural work. And the promise of our faith is the promise of being connected to something greater than ourselves . . .

The best gift we can give each generation is to embody that promise, to invite each new generation to join us, to nurture them as they become a part of our communities and grow in their own faith and commitment, and—most importantly—to step back and allow them to transform our living tradition as generations before have done.

Ruchotzke also recommends David Kinnaman’s book, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church . . . and Rethinking Faith.

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Growth

Evaluation a constant process

The Rev. Renee Ruchotzke, writing on the website of the Central East Regional Group of the Unitarian Universalist Association, encourages congregational leaders to constantly evaluate programs by asking, “Are we serving our core purpose (by doing this program)? Is it relevant to people’s lives?”

In her blog post, Ruchotzke, who is Regional Leadership Development Consultant for CERG, writes,

Our congregations can get stuck in . . . patterns with events or traditions but we don’t always notice when a committee or a program has outlasted its relevance . . .  In systems, any change within the system elicits one of two reactions.  The first and strongest reaction is push-back:  the system wants to return to its previous “comfortable” state.  The other reaction is for the system to change and establish a new equilibrium of the parts, and a new homeostasis. It’s the role of the leaders to help the system to respond to change based on the congregation’s core purpose rather than to react based on habit and individual desire for comfort.

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Resources