Engaging the System
The first few years in your new system you’re learning new skills and building new practices. We provide coaching and customized services to help you fully realize the benefits of your new governance structure.

​Related Services 

New Board Retreat
Boards that get the most from their governance practice take time once a year when new trustees join the board to refresh their understanding of the nine commitments of effective boards, and consider how to deepen their governance practice, particularly their work of:  
  • Linkage: the board's systematic, intentional work to connect with its sources of authority and accountability about the future of the church
  • Monitoring: the board's work to ensure that its policies are being followed and its mission and ends are being advanced
  • Policy creation: the board's work to ensure that its policies continue to reflects the board's values

​Ends Assessment Services
We've developed effective tools to assess your ends outcomes. We customize our tools for your ends, coach you through their implementation, and analyze the data to help board and minister reflect together on the impact of the congregation's ministries, in congregant lives and in the world.
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Program Alignment Services
We can help you identify, design and implement congregational programs and initiatives to align with your values, advance your mission and ends, and involve your laity in ways that deepen them spiritually. We coach you through a program alignment process customized for your needs.
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Coaching Hours
We offer hourly coaching to help congregations address questions as they engage the system. We offer a discount on our hourly rate to clients who pre-purchase 10 hours of coaching time. Typical questions boards explore with us as they engage the system:
  • How can we refine our monitoring reports so that they provide better information to the board?
  • How can we refine our monitoring reports so they're doable for the minister and other staff?
  • How do we decide who's responsible for (fill in the blank) in this system?
  • How do we address (fill in the blank) issue in this system?
  • What do policy interpretations look like? Who's responsible for developing policy interpretations?

​Related Resources on Our Website 

On our page about our Leadership Cycle in the Mission-Focused Congregation, you'll find a model for the interaction between board and minister, between professionals and laity, that liberates and empowers leadership throughout the congregation. You can listen to an overview and explanation of this cycle in our webinar on the cycle.

On our Governance and Covenant page, you can download materials from our 2013 workshop: The Promise and Practice of Good Governance, which explored faithful congregational governance practices from a grounding in our covenantal theology. We focused on how good governance questions help us to form our covenantal promises. We also considered how governance can help us hold ourselves accountable to our promises and continually renew them.