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.