1. Name of Committee / Work Group:
2. Name of person filling out this survey:
3. Role of person filling out this survey with the committee / work group (e.g. Chair, Secretary):
4. Is the total number of people assigned to your committee / work group adequate to accomplish your work?
5. Are the number of people actually attending your meetings & contributing to your work sufficient for your committee / work group to be successful?
6. How has your committee / work group chosen to perform its decision-making & group-work:
• Conventional sit-down, in-person meetings
• Conference telephone calls
• Email
• Blog
• List serve
• Web site
• Other
7. What specific, measurable objectives has your committee / work group developed to measure it progress & contribution to the Mission Goals of Presbytery?
8. Over the last 6 months, what is the most difficult problem your committee / work group has faced in accomplishing its work and achieving success as defined by the Mission Goals of Presbytery?
9. What single additional resource and/or assistance would be the most helpful to your committee / work group it is pursues the Mission Goals of Presbytery?
10. What else would you like the Evaluation Team to know about your effort as a committee / work group?
Please return this completed survey to ______________________ by 31 March 2008.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
Agenda for 26 February 2008
Presbytery Evaluation Team
Tuesday 26 February 2008
First United Presbyterian Church Silver Creek 6:30 – 8:30 PM
Proposed Agenda
6:30 Opening Devotion – John
And when you pray, don’t act like phonies. They love to stand up and pray in houses of worship and on street corners, so they can show off in public. I swear to you, their prayers have been answered! When you pray, go into a room by yourself and shut the door behind you. Then pray to your Father, the hidden one. And your Father, with his eye for the hidden, will applaud you.
Matthew 6: 5-6
(trans. Five Gospels, Funk & Hoover, 1993)
6:40 Team Members introduce themselves
Welcome to Neil Farmelo and Mary Beth Karr
6:50 Additions, Adjustments, and Approval of Agenda
6:55 Shall we forward the Comments’ section of the feedback questionnaires from January’s Presbytery Meeting to the Moderator, Clerk, and Council Chair with or without the inclusion of the two specific names mentioned in those comments?
Would it be helpful, in terms of gaining a broader understanding of the purpose of the feedback questionnaires, to reiterate our “encouragement” to the Moderator to share the Comments from these feedback questionnaires by printing them in the floor papers for the subsequent meeting?
Background -
Each of the last two times we have sent along comments we have encouraged the Moderator to share them with the Presbytery. To date, it doesn’t seem that this has happened. The result, to my mind, is a lost opportunity in giving to a group the very feedback that could result in a change in that group’s (the Presbytery in its plenary meetings) behavior as well movement toward Adult Posture (i.e. greater ownership and responsibility) by meeting participants.
7:00 Can we make the Team Blog work ?!
7:05 “Could we now construct a brief narrative on the workings of the Council this past year ?”
7:20 “Is it reasonable for us to ask Council to assist us in developing a few possible key indicators for each of the 5 Mission Priorities ?”
7:35 “Could we now ask the primary teams, committees, and task forces to send us some evidence of their thinking about accomplishments for the past [and coming] year with some suggestions about how hey intend to measure their progress toward those accomplishments ?”
7:50 “Is it reasonable for us to develop one or more survey type tools geared to getting a reading on how people feel about the current state of processes in the Presbytery ?”
8:05 Additional Matters
8:10 Date and Time of our Next Meeting?
8:20 How did we do tonight?
8:25 Closing Prayer – Dick Redington
Tuesday 26 February 2008
First United Presbyterian Church Silver Creek 6:30 – 8:30 PM
Proposed Agenda
6:30 Opening Devotion – John
And when you pray, don’t act like phonies. They love to stand up and pray in houses of worship and on street corners, so they can show off in public. I swear to you, their prayers have been answered! When you pray, go into a room by yourself and shut the door behind you. Then pray to your Father, the hidden one. And your Father, with his eye for the hidden, will applaud you.
Matthew 6: 5-6
(trans. Five Gospels, Funk & Hoover, 1993)
6:40 Team Members introduce themselves
Welcome to Neil Farmelo and Mary Beth Karr
6:50 Additions, Adjustments, and Approval of Agenda
6:55 Shall we forward the Comments’ section of the feedback questionnaires from January’s Presbytery Meeting to the Moderator, Clerk, and Council Chair with or without the inclusion of the two specific names mentioned in those comments?
Would it be helpful, in terms of gaining a broader understanding of the purpose of the feedback questionnaires, to reiterate our “encouragement” to the Moderator to share the Comments from these feedback questionnaires by printing them in the floor papers for the subsequent meeting?
Background -
Each of the last two times we have sent along comments we have encouraged the Moderator to share them with the Presbytery. To date, it doesn’t seem that this has happened. The result, to my mind, is a lost opportunity in giving to a group the very feedback that could result in a change in that group’s (the Presbytery in its plenary meetings) behavior as well movement toward Adult Posture (i.e. greater ownership and responsibility) by meeting participants.
7:00 Can we make the Team Blog work ?!
7:05 “Could we now construct a brief narrative on the workings of the Council this past year ?”
7:20 “Is it reasonable for us to ask Council to assist us in developing a few possible key indicators for each of the 5 Mission Priorities ?”
7:35 “Could we now ask the primary teams, committees, and task forces to send us some evidence of their thinking about accomplishments for the past [and coming] year with some suggestions about how hey intend to measure their progress toward those accomplishments ?”
7:50 “Is it reasonable for us to develop one or more survey type tools geared to getting a reading on how people feel about the current state of processes in the Presbytery ?”
8:05 Additional Matters
8:10 Date and Time of our Next Meeting?
8:20 How did we do tonight?
8:25 Closing Prayer – Dick Redington
Monday, February 18, 2008
Where We've Been -- Where We Are
It's been a while since we have wrapped our collective heads around the work of the Evaluation Team. My own memory cogs are given to an occasional slip, and we have a couple of relatively new members, so I thought a brief summary of our efforts to date might help us all.
Where We Have Been – Where We Are
Summary of the Presbytery’s Evaluation Team
Following several years of fact finding and planning the Presbytery of Western New York approved five Mission Priorities and nineteen specific Recommendations to chart its new direction as “Christ’s body, called together for discipleship, hospitality, and wholeness.” (31 March 2007)
Recommendation #8 from the document mentioned above obliged the Presbytery to:
"Create an Evaluation Committee of Council to be responsible for holding the Presbytery accountable to the Mission Priorities and looking to the future for ways to increase Presbytery’s responsiveness to emerging needs within the four-year cycles of discernment mandated in the mission priorities."
The “Evaluation Committee” soon came to be called the “Evaluation Team”, and its original roster of seven members was expanded to nine. The Team first met on 6 June 2007 with five members present. John McClester was elected Chair of the Team and Dick Redington was elected the Team’s representative to Council, both to serve for one year in these capacities.
At its initial meeting the Team acknowledged a general resistance within religious organizations to enforcing accountability through regular measuring, assessing, and evaluating. One Team member asked, somewhat rhetorically, “What are we going to measure, success or faithfulness?” These observations suggested that the Team had before it a challenging task in that the Presbytery had no past practice of evaluating its efforts, nor did the Presbytery appear especially eager to embrace this new behavior – members of Presbytery wondered out loud, “And who is going to evaluate the evaluators?”
The Team agreed that in addition to attempting to model the very group behavior and practices we hope to encourage throughout the Presbytery we would “concentrate our initial efforts on the processes and work of Council,” and to that end the Team sought Council’s permission to place a Process Observer at Council meetings. After some digital conversations with the chair of Council, permission was granted to try this approach.
At its second meeting on 28 August 2007 with four members present the Team acknowledged its unwillingness to produce and deliver a written evaluation of Council’s processes and work. This reluctance was based on considerations of:
• Council’s fresh, brand new existence in a new organizational structure
• So few participating Team members – our critical thinking was less than
optimum
• Presbytery’s hyper-sensitivity to criticism at this stage of its new life
• Little evidence that the Team’s observations were much more than another
collection of opinions.
Facing our own limitations in the case of evaluating Council we were encouraged to consider tools, techniques, and data that we might provide to committees, work groups, and the Presbytery itself to aid in self-assessment of progress on the Mission Priorities. In other words, it might be a more reasonable objective for our Team to try and create a culture of self-reflection and evaluation within the Presbytery than for us to produce authoritative evaluations of the work of others.
The Team’s decision to distribute a questionnaire at several subsequent Presbytery meetings was based, in part, on our desire to encourage a climate of self-assessment across the Presbytery. This choice was also a response to a question by the chair of Council, “Would the Presbytery meeting benefit from the presence of a Process Observer (a la Council)?” We thought not; better to use a questionnaire.
Our third meeting on 23 October 2007 had, again, four people in attendance. We concentrated on brain-storming particular tools, techniques, and data sources we might pass along to components of the Presbytery to achieve a culture of self-reflection, mutual accountability, and subsequent improved performance. Suggestions included:
• Measuring attendance
• Tracking timely receipts of congregational financial contributions to
Presbytery
• Calculating church membership trends
• Noting categories and distinctions of pastoral leadership
Dick Chubon pressed us to use such data as Dashboard Indicators, factual, digestible, sketches of the Presbytery’s health and progress towards the Mission Priorities.
Subsequent digital conversations among Team members indicated a lack of confidence in either the Precept Information made available (at cost) through the Synod, or the General Assembly Annual Statistical Reports. Both Cathy Rieley-Goddard and Dick Redington expressed interest in following-up on the conversation / interview technique employed during the transition phase of the Presbytery’s planning effort as an alternative method of gathering data.
The 11 December 2007 meeting of the Team was cancelled because of schedule conflicts. Attempts to do some work over the holidays via a Team Blog ran into technical difficulties. We have to date gathered response questionnaires from three Presbytery meetings.
Where We Have Been – Where We Are
Summary of the Presbytery’s Evaluation Team
Following several years of fact finding and planning the Presbytery of Western New York approved five Mission Priorities and nineteen specific Recommendations to chart its new direction as “Christ’s body, called together for discipleship, hospitality, and wholeness.” (31 March 2007)
Recommendation #8 from the document mentioned above obliged the Presbytery to:
"Create an Evaluation Committee of Council to be responsible for holding the Presbytery accountable to the Mission Priorities and looking to the future for ways to increase Presbytery’s responsiveness to emerging needs within the four-year cycles of discernment mandated in the mission priorities."
The “Evaluation Committee” soon came to be called the “Evaluation Team”, and its original roster of seven members was expanded to nine. The Team first met on 6 June 2007 with five members present. John McClester was elected Chair of the Team and Dick Redington was elected the Team’s representative to Council, both to serve for one year in these capacities.
At its initial meeting the Team acknowledged a general resistance within religious organizations to enforcing accountability through regular measuring, assessing, and evaluating. One Team member asked, somewhat rhetorically, “What are we going to measure, success or faithfulness?” These observations suggested that the Team had before it a challenging task in that the Presbytery had no past practice of evaluating its efforts, nor did the Presbytery appear especially eager to embrace this new behavior – members of Presbytery wondered out loud, “And who is going to evaluate the evaluators?”
The Team agreed that in addition to attempting to model the very group behavior and practices we hope to encourage throughout the Presbytery we would “concentrate our initial efforts on the processes and work of Council,” and to that end the Team sought Council’s permission to place a Process Observer at Council meetings. After some digital conversations with the chair of Council, permission was granted to try this approach.
At its second meeting on 28 August 2007 with four members present the Team acknowledged its unwillingness to produce and deliver a written evaluation of Council’s processes and work. This reluctance was based on considerations of:
• Council’s fresh, brand new existence in a new organizational structure
• So few participating Team members – our critical thinking was less than
optimum
• Presbytery’s hyper-sensitivity to criticism at this stage of its new life
• Little evidence that the Team’s observations were much more than another
collection of opinions.
Facing our own limitations in the case of evaluating Council we were encouraged to consider tools, techniques, and data that we might provide to committees, work groups, and the Presbytery itself to aid in self-assessment of progress on the Mission Priorities. In other words, it might be a more reasonable objective for our Team to try and create a culture of self-reflection and evaluation within the Presbytery than for us to produce authoritative evaluations of the work of others.
The Team’s decision to distribute a questionnaire at several subsequent Presbytery meetings was based, in part, on our desire to encourage a climate of self-assessment across the Presbytery. This choice was also a response to a question by the chair of Council, “Would the Presbytery meeting benefit from the presence of a Process Observer (a la Council)?” We thought not; better to use a questionnaire.
Our third meeting on 23 October 2007 had, again, four people in attendance. We concentrated on brain-storming particular tools, techniques, and data sources we might pass along to components of the Presbytery to achieve a culture of self-reflection, mutual accountability, and subsequent improved performance. Suggestions included:
• Measuring attendance
• Tracking timely receipts of congregational financial contributions to
Presbytery
• Calculating church membership trends
• Noting categories and distinctions of pastoral leadership
Dick Chubon pressed us to use such data as Dashboard Indicators, factual, digestible, sketches of the Presbytery’s health and progress towards the Mission Priorities.
Subsequent digital conversations among Team members indicated a lack of confidence in either the Precept Information made available (at cost) through the Synod, or the General Assembly Annual Statistical Reports. Both Cathy Rieley-Goddard and Dick Redington expressed interest in following-up on the conversation / interview technique employed during the transition phase of the Presbytery’s planning effort as an alternative method of gathering data.
The 11 December 2007 meeting of the Team was cancelled because of schedule conflicts. Attempts to do some work over the holidays via a Team Blog ran into technical difficulties. We have to date gathered response questionnaires from three Presbytery meetings.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Super Sunday
Well, the Super Bowl is on the radio behind me and I have just finished typing up the summaries from January's Presbytery Meeting Evaluation Questionnaires. My email is down so I cannot send the two documents along to you (Comments and Statistical Summary of the specific questions), but I will assuming this latest techno glitch rights itself.
In the meantime, look at your calendars. Could we have a Team meeting Tuesday 26 February? The earliest I could get to a meeting in Silver Creek would be 6:30 PM.
What does that look like for you folks?
In the meantime, look at your calendars. Could we have a Team meeting Tuesday 26 February? The earliest I could get to a meeting in Silver Creek would be 6:30 PM.
What does that look like for you folks?
Monday, January 21, 2008
Mid January Update
We have had some technical difficulties getting everyone on the Team signed on to the Evaluation Team blog. I know how frustrating this can be to people, and hope this hurdle has not discouraged anyone. As we remind ourselves in the library, our digital environment is an infant technology requiring a great deal of patience. Thanks for hanging in there with this effort.
Since we have not been able to settle upon a next Team meeting date, perhaps those of us who will be at the Presbytery Meeting Saturday 26 January at Deerhurst can chat, bring one another up to date, and propose some possible next steps for the Team.
I'll handle the questionnaires at this Presbytery Meeting, and would love to have any extra available hands.
Since we have not been able to settle upon a next Team meeting date, perhaps those of us who will be at the Presbytery Meeting Saturday 26 January at Deerhurst can chat, bring one another up to date, and propose some possible next steps for the Team.
I'll handle the questionnaires at this Presbytery Meeting, and would love to have any extra available hands.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Rejoining Team
As I told John, I am going to be leaving my position as Pastor of Island Presbyterian Church. After more than 10 years, it is time. My last Sunday will be Feb. 10, then my husband and I are going away on vacation for 2 weeks. I plan to begin active participation in the Evaluation Team after I return on March 1. I am going to be taking some time to care of some family needs and responsibilities for at least 6 months, so I should be able to be an active participant on the team even though my commitment to the Search Team for the Director of Discipleship and Spiritual Nurture is ongoing. I plan to check in on the blog conversation until I rejoin you in March.
Diane
Diane
Monday, January 7, 2008
Evaluation of the Transition Process
While we were in the midst of developing our current plan and structure for the presbytery, I was serving on General Council. I agreed to participate with a group completing an evaluation of Tim Rogers Martin's work about a year and a half into the 3 year contract. I suggested to the group Assigned to work on this that we needed to evaluate our own work (particularly the Council) as well as that of TRM. I think we did a good piece of work that got approved and shelved by the General Council. The report we produced actually had some action steps for the Council. I just came across the report while purging my office of unneeded paper. I think we might have a look at the report. As John discovered, we cannot attach documents here on the blog, so I am going to send it out as an e-mail to everyone.
It may be of value, maybe not.
It may be of value, maybe not.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
LIstening Sessions
Responding to Cathy's blog tonight: I have wondered if we should, as a team and by assignment, take on the task of visiting each congregation in our area to "listen". An offer to do that, and not to sit in a session meeting as an evaluator or any other visitor from afar, might open some important avenues. From my own experience in Jamestown, I doubt that winds of change, which I feel flowing freshly in the Presbytery, are soothing the foreheads of many in the congregations. Lots of time would be required (and probably the whole next year, at least) and perhaps not the best use of our time, but it occurs to me.
Dick R.
Dick R.
Attendance Tracking
I was just reading John's thinking about trends in Pby WNY and across the country and thinking about his interest in tracking attendance at meetings of every sort -- presbytery, council, committee, etc. It seems like we ought to be able to craft some sort of electronic way to track people. Online signing in, swipe cards, text messaging, twitter, something that takes advantage of our ability to instantly communicate and feed into some kind of data sorting mechanism. It would require someoneto look at and interpret the data, but it should not be that hard to collect.
On another note, something I have given a bit of thought to as we think about a report to the presbytery on meeting our mission goals and priorities, is that we need to do another round of listening sessions. Whether people felt listened to or not, the listening sessions have been talked about since they happened and they were a way that we got in the door and heard something from most of the congregations in the presbytery. We could ask questions that were far more open ended with a few that were yes or no and/or multiple choice. We could gather quantitative and qualitative information to then use as a way to mark progress toward goals and priorities.
Cathy
On another note, something I have given a bit of thought to as we think about a report to the presbytery on meeting our mission goals and priorities, is that we need to do another round of listening sessions. Whether people felt listened to or not, the listening sessions have been talked about since they happened and they were a way that we got in the door and heard something from most of the congregations in the presbytery. We could ask questions that were far more open ended with a few that were yes or no and/or multiple choice. We could gather quantitative and qualitative information to then use as a way to mark progress toward goals and priorities.
Cathy
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Happy New Year & Things To Do
Well, it is 1 January 2008 and I wish everyone a year of joy and adventure.
A couple of things I'd like to jump on ASAP:
Can we agree to pass along the Comments section of the December Presbytery Meeting Questionnaire as before? That is, to Rex with copies to Bronwen and Lance, with the encouragement to share these with the Presbytery? If I don't hear any objections in the next couple of days I will do this in time for the Council Meeting.
I think DickC's notion that the next questionnaire (for January Presbytery Meeting) should be the same is fine, but we did get a suggestion to ask about Saturday Presbytery Meetings in the comments section from December and this will be our last chance for a while to ask about this. Let me suggest that the questionnaire remain unchanged except for the addition of a true/false question, "It is only because this meeting was on a Saturday that I was able to attend."
DickR's list of items to focus on is a good one. Let's keep plugging away at those.
Finally, could we meet next on Monday 21 January, 5- 7 PM? I have this day off of work and so could make a 5 pm meeting.
A great year to you all.
John.
A couple of things I'd like to jump on ASAP:
Can we agree to pass along the Comments section of the December Presbytery Meeting Questionnaire as before? That is, to Rex with copies to Bronwen and Lance, with the encouragement to share these with the Presbytery? If I don't hear any objections in the next couple of days I will do this in time for the Council Meeting.
I think DickC's notion that the next questionnaire (for January Presbytery Meeting) should be the same is fine, but we did get a suggestion to ask about Saturday Presbytery Meetings in the comments section from December and this will be our last chance for a while to ask about this. Let me suggest that the questionnaire remain unchanged except for the addition of a true/false question, "It is only because this meeting was on a Saturday that I was able to attend."
DickR's list of items to focus on is a good one. Let's keep plugging away at those.
Finally, could we meet next on Monday 21 January, 5- 7 PM? I have this day off of work and so could make a 5 pm meeting.
A great year to you all.
John.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)