Years ago, my gym in North Carolina pronounced “Towel Amnesty Week” as a playful way to encourage folks who’d taken their towels home to return them without feeling too guilty about it.
At the time, I was working with some ministry leaders experiencing burnout, so I tried something similar. I announced a “committee amnesty” day, when anyone feeling like they needed to do so could take a break. Admittedly, I was a little worried that lots of folks would jump ship, but most folks either recommitted or found new things to try.
Over the years, I’ve experienced an even better way to build ministries while avoiding burnout, and that is to cultivate healthy leadership transitions whenever possible. That usually means encouraging new leadership after a set amount of time, and working to keep too many responsibilities from landing on the shoulders of just a few people.
That is embedded in the polity of our church. Vestry members, for example, can only serve for three years (or six if elected to a second term). This is to cultivate healthy transition: it imposes the life-giving discipline of opening us to new leadership while not putting anyone in the position of being a vestry member for life.
To be sure, this is a privilege of being a larger church. In churches that are smaller or in decline, often the same folks hold leadership gigs for years on end.
Larger and growing churches tend to thrive when they tend carefully to leadership transitions. At Trinity, we do this by requiring or encouraging three-year terms on things like vestry and mission teams, the stewardship committee, and the Wise, Warmeling, Way grants committee. Similarly, we encourage Cathedral Circles to reconsider their leadership every year, though not necessarily to make changes.
Sometimes a lack of new leadership tells us something important. Perhaps that ministry needs to lie fallow for a season, not because it’s unimportant but because our energy is leading us elsewhere at the moment.
Yet finding new folks to help allows us to celebrate where we’ve been while helping a ministry to grow.
To be sure, this doesn’t work for every ministry. Some roles are more specialized and rely on continuity, such as vergers and the leadership of the Property & Sustainability committee.
But generally, cultivating healthy leadership transition allows us to be both effective in ministry and attentive to the Spirit!
This weekend, our Mission Teams will gather for an annual retreat to welcome new members and celebrate those who are rotating off. We can celebrate this same fluidity in many of the ministries of the church. May we all be attentive to where God is calling us to serve, as the Body of Christ and the people of Trinity Cathedral.
Faithfully,
