It’s Not Enough to Be a Staff: The Second Essential Principle for Transformation
Fr. John Riccardo
March 10, 2021
A number of years ago, when I was still serving as pastor of a large parish with a large staff, the Lord gave an image to help us better understand the relationship between the staff and the parish as a whole. The parish family, in the image, is like the human body—the eyes, ears, hands, feet, and more. The staff, again in the image, is like the spinal cord. If the spinal cord is pinched in any way, the eyes, ears, hands, and feet don’t function as they are supposed to.
Here’s the tragic but unfortunate reality: in most parishes the spinal cord isn’t “pinched.” It’s virtually snapped. And, more often than not, everyone knows it - both on the staff and in the parish, at least among those who are actively involved. And it’s usually even worse at the diocesan level in chanceries. Most staffs are plagued by politics, high turnover, low morale, meetings after meetings in the parking lot, silo mentalities, and other similar dysfunctions.
But it doesn’t have to be!
Last week we looked briefly at the first essential principle for transformation in the Church (the need to re-acquire a biblical worldview). Today, we want to just touch on the second. We call it “It’s not enough to be a staff.”
I became aware of the importance of organizational health about 18 years after being ordained and about 10 years after being a pastor. Until that time, because of my temperament, perhaps, I had concentrated the bulk of my time, effort, and energy on what we were doing much more than on how we were going to do what we were doing. That changed for me when I was able to be a part of what became the leadership team to prepare for a Synod on Evangelization in the Archdiocese of Detroit. Archbishop Vigneron hired someone to come in and turn us into a team. This man, Mike, spent three hours with us every few weeks, helping us grow in trust and vulnerability with each other, allowing us to engage in really healthy conflict, which allowed us to prayerfully arrive at the best answers to what the Lord was calling us to do. After a few months of this, I realized I was closer to these people, many of whom I hadn’t known before, than the people I had worked with in the parish for many years. We had better meetings, incredible clarity on what we were focused on, and were much more productive. I was sold.
I made an effort to read everything I could on organizational health, and especially The Advantage, a great work by Pat Lencioni, one of the founders of the Table Group and “The Amazing Parish.” I went on to hire Mike to work with us as a staff and everything changed. We went from a highly productive—but dysfunctional—staff, to a healthy team over the course of six to nine months. Were we perfect? Of course not. But there were no more meetings after meetings in the parking lot; there was minimal politics at the office; we trusted one another in a new way; we had healthy and passionate conflict so as to arrive at the best answers to what the Lord was calling us to do; and morale at the office was generally very high. We committed time to really get to know each other better, which enabled us to love each other more sincerely, since you cannot love what you do not know.
Most importantly, we began to pray in a deliberate and intentional way every day together as a team. And this created the deepest change in us. Prayer, in most parishes and dioceses, tragically, is reduced to an agenda item. But the Word of God reminds us, “Unless the Lord builds the house, the laborers labor in vain” (Psalm 127). After months of talking about the need to pray together more intentionally, and knowing there was no convenient time to do this, we finally just made the decision that every day at 11:30 am in our conference room we were going to gather. And everyone knew we were all expected to be there, unless of course there was an emergency or funeral or some such thing. We would daily send from 11:30 am -12:00 pm together, writing intentions on the whiteboard, bringing things before one another and the Lord in prayer. Sometimes we’d finish with a Rosary, sometimes the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. We did this every day as a team, except Tuesdays, when we would make a “holy half hour” together before the Blessed Sacrament. It was common to see members of the team in each other’s offices not gossiping about some situation or person but praying with one another. In fact, one friend of ours, who used to visit the parish often, commented on how he came to expect seeing people in our hallways praying with and over one another.
The net result of all this hard work at getting healthy, and it was incredibly hard work, was that we went from being a staff to a team and then more than a team, a family. A culture was created, through the hard work of everyone, that was different from anything we had ever been a part of. And none of us can ever imagine serving in an unhealthy organization again.
In Exodus 18, Moses’s father-in-law tells him that he is not acting wisely in trying to handle all of the work of leading the people of Israel on his own. “The task is too heavy for you,” Jethro tells Moses. “You cannot do it alone.” And so, it is in the parish and diocese. The beauty of digging deep into organizational health, forming a team and creating cultural clarity, is that the pastor, or bishop, finds himself surrounded by men and women whom he trusts and who will shoulder the burden with him of prayerfully discerning and executing the vision and strategy of the parish or diocese. And this can help bring about incredible transformation!