Interim Report #13 - 5/5/25

Potlucks. Leadership and Clergy. Accounting.

We were aware, heading into Lent and the Easter holiday, that this would be a bit of a sprint. I’m absolutely delighted and uplifted by how active the church has become during this spring season. The updates below represent my best efforts at answering the questions I receive on a regular basis.

Tuesday Night Potlucks

When Katie A. first approached me about a strategy for strengthening interpersonal connections among the churchfolk, her idea solved several problems at once.
She wanted to see a return to unstructured socializing at the church and church potlucks are probably the most tried-and-true strategy for generating conversations. Katie very wisely hewed toward a loose definition of what form this should take - something incredibly simple and intentionally vague. “Just get together and eat and talk.” (It’s not lost on me that this is roughly 70% of what is supposed to happen at churches and faith communities).

At the time of that conversation, the church was still locked up tight as a drum and “doing stuff” required a lot of heavy lifting on the part of the staff. This is not the fault of anyone. Humans tend to organize themselves along observable patterns and heuristics are needed for any organization with a membership of more than ten people. Rules accumulate.

I wanted to see the congregation take on a stronger role in the general operations of the physical plant. This means, for example, that any random group of ten church members will contain at least one person who knows how to find a mop and a bucket or where a vacuum cleaner is stored, another knows how to operate the kitchen stove, still another how to set up tables and chairs, where the light-switches are located, etc.
Another way to put this is as follows -
If every professional staff member disappeared tomorrow, the church (as an organism) would continue to function more-or-less along the same trajectory as it did yesterday. Problems would accumulate, to be sure, but the place wouldn’t come to a screeching halt. At the very least, the plane would land itself on auto-pilot rather than fall flaming from the sky.

This means that I have a few important responsibilities:
- I must instruct the staff that they must teach. Each staff person is required to teach some number of volunteers how to do some set of the functions of their job.
- I must insist that the members plan ahead for events and recruit like-minded members as co-conspirators in their vision. No “dumping ideas onto staff.” There’s no shortage of “great ideas” around FSC. But great ideas are just that - ideas. I have five great ideas before I get out of bed in the morning. We all have great ideas. We don’t have enough staff to do all the work of every great idea.
Furthermore - the very best ideas of FSC, the things that have grown into world-changing programs - have been created by teams of members. The staff are here to act as support personnel behind-the-scenes, to do research, and to be equipment managers. Y’all are the players taking to the field.
- I need to get extremely granular with staff job descriptions - so that I can respond truthfully when the church isn’t yet staffed for some particular task and the work must be done by volunteers.
- I have to check, re-check, and the triple check my own ego and remember that I serve a necessary but non-critical function in the ecosystem at Fountain Street.
- Professional skills are less a function of arcane knowledge and more a product of learned efficiency.

A potluck run by the members of FSC accomplishes all of these goals.

As I suspected, the potlucks were wildly successful. They helped build bridges between “sanctuary worshippers” and folks in the chapel community. They blew the dust off the kitchen and taught people (outside of the beloved, overworked women’s association) how to operate the place.
They resulted in many important lessons on what sort of food best feeds the people around here.

And they also served to attract committee meetings and other events back into the building (away from Zoom) and they also served as a springboard for re-opening several committees that had lain dormant.

I also knew from the start that they would trend toward becoming a “soup kitchen” for the unhoused folks in our neighborhood.

Let me be absolutely clear: our neighborhood does not need another soup kitchen. Soup kitchens, often euphemistically referred to as “feeding programs” are part of the economy of support for unhoused and housing unstable community members. They’re good and important but they can also quickly become patronizing and reinforce imagined divisions between social castes in America.
I’m not going to rehash this whole thing again - I address it to an exhausting degree in much of my writing and in previous reports and I’ll post a follow-up to this post that continues this specific conversation.

The matter of “FSC and homeless people” deserves its own dedicated post - but the circumstances are too fluid at the moment to be written about definitively.
They’re fluid because
- The portico is going to be fenced off soon, for reasons that I’ve addressed elsewhere. The only reason it isn’t currently fenced off is because our nation is being run by a clown-car of idiots and the tariffs have somehow complicated the acquisition of fence parts.
- The housing crisis in our city was on the edge of a cliff prior to the election and it is now tumbling over that cliff. I expect to see an unprecedented wave of economic refugees populating the streets of Grand Rapids in the next few months and this coming winter is going to be utterly catastrophic. I am being a serious as a heart-attack, here. Army tents and packed hospitals. If the City Commission does not take immediate and drastic action, next winter is going to be a galloping disaster.
- FSC members are still unsure of who is actually “a homeless person” and who is simply disheveled, or disabled, or simply new around here. Many of the best-dressed attendees at our Sunday morning services are currently unhoused, and many of our members live in managed care facilities, and a lot of us don’t know each other very well, yet.

All of this is to say: the Tuesday Night Potluck was devolving into another soup kitchen, there are no fewer than six Tuesday night soup kitchens within a half-mile of the church, and we are neither staffed nor adequately trained or funded to run a feeding program.

The original idea - open up the building, help members “remember” how to set up social events, eat in the church, and breathe life back into the kitchen and social hall - this has been accomplished. Good work - mission accomplished.

So the Tuesday Night potlucks are going on a hiatus until the fall, when they will re-emerge in some new form, having integrated the important lessons learned.

Interim tasks two and three

The second and third interim tasks are usually described as follows:

2. Illuminate the congregation’s unique identity, its strengths, its needs, and its challenges.

3. Clarify the multiple dimensions of leadership, both ordained and lay, and navigate the shifts in leadership that accompany times of transition.

Task two is nearly complete. The Governing Board and the various committees of the church have a good handle on what they’re supposed to be doing and where the church is heading.
We have the right software in place.
We know how to operate the church.
We are sharing our purpose with the community and, consequently, a lot of stuff is going on around here.

We aren’t ready to “check the box” on task two - but we’re getting very close.

Interim task three is a bit more complicated. There are several very specific things that need to be dealt with before I’ll consider “task three” finished and I’ll begin with the very first and most obvious concern that is before us:

What does it mean to be a “minister” of the Fountain Street Church?

The work of defining “clergy” at Fountain Street is complicated and will require many hands and many brains. FSC is a non-denominational church. It follows a congregationalist polity. Its “ministers” have come from a great variety of backgrounds. Nevertheless, it’s entirely unfair to leave it up to the (currently unformed) pulpit committee to articulate an answer to the question, “what qualifies someone to act as clergy at FSC?”
There are far too many assumptions in the minds of the laity of the church. When we get down to brass tacks and start to read the job postings that have generated clergy in the past we see statements like:

Candidates will have:
- A graduate degree or the equivalent from an accredited seminary.
- Leadership experience of (at least) five years in a faith-based setting.
- Ordination in a mainline protestant denomination (such as the UUA, UCC, or similar denomination).

Away with such ambiguities! To pull at but a single thread:

What sort of graduate degree do you want your minister to possess?
I have a Master of Divinity degree (MDiv). This is a terminal, three year degree. Mine was 96 credit hours and included three units of Clinical Pastoral Education and an accredited field placement. It was, essentially, a comprehensive MA program plus a year of coursework in the field of counseling.
Other recent Senior Ministers at FSC have held a Master of Arts (MA) degree. Most MA programs fall in the 30-60 credit hour range and can focus on a host of different concentrations.
There are other degrees that deserve a mention - for example, many ministers in many churches have an Master of Social Work (MSW) degree, or a Master of Sacred Theology (STM) or a Master of Theology (ThM) or heaps of other degrees.

Some ministers have held PhDs, some have held DMin degrees, and these all mean something.
And not all seminaries are the same.
And for the love of god, not all denominations are the same. I am proud of my standing in the United Church of Christ and I vigorously defend it because I know that standing in the UCC is pretty damned hard to get. It’s a rigorous denomination that works hard to keep out the riff-raff. It accomplishes this despite being tasked with providing ministers to fiercely independent, autonomous, and occasionally exasperating congregations.
I am not, however, a Presbyterian minister - and I would likely refuse a call to a PCUSA church (should one ever be offered to me) because it involves passing a hell of a lot of examinations that I have neither the time nor energy to study for.
Likewise, the mountains I would have to climb to become a priest in the Episcopal Church are so distant and inscrutable that their summits are lost in theological and liturgical heights too rarified for some low-church itinerant preacher such as myself.
The fact that FSC has produced not one - but two Episcopal clergy in the last twenty years is utterly baffling to me and I intend to figure out how this happened.

There are still other matters to contend with, here. I believe that, if FSC is truly serious about its commitment to being an interfaith community, it ought to determine what the qualifications would be required should the Pulpit Committee decide to hire a Rabbi or a Cantor, or a laicized Priest of some orthodox or Roman Catholic tradition, or a Wiccan Priestess, or a Rinpoche or lama or monk or something.
What would be the humanist or atheist equivalent qualifications for an FSC minister? Perhaps someone with a counseling background - say a PhD in Counseling Psychology - might fit the bill. I have no earthly idea.

Owing to the lack of clarity around this matter, I’ve taken the following steps:
- I’ve asked the archive team to provide me with a list of every single former “clergyperson” or “minister” or “Senior Minister” of the church along with their professional qualifications. A very brief CV with their educational and ordination background
- I’ve recommended to the Governing Board Chair that - rather than pulling together another “pulpit committee” - the board instead consider approving a “Committee on Ministry” composed of a diversity of FSC members.
This new committee will serve several functions:
- They will execute the tasks of a pulpit committee, seeking candidates to recommend to the congregation to serve as ministers.
- They will serve as the “Pastor/Parish Relations Committee” or the “Pastoral Relations Committee” or whatever the ecclesiological authorities are calling them these days. A group of members that can serve as a confidential conduit between the congregation and the minister.
- They will oversee the annual review of the minister.
- They will, annually, survey the congregation about the pastoral needs of the church and pursue clergy to fulfill these requirements.

I want to break this church of two habits that I’ve observed from the last thirty years of history:

- No more “Senior Ministers” and “Junior Ministers.” I don’t care if you call them “assistant ministers” or “associate ministers” or whatever. This dynamic has harmed the church.
There ought to be simply “ministers” of the church. They can be subordinate to one another if necessary for administrative purposes. They can be assigned different responsibilities and compensated differently and perhaps one will take on the tasks of the Senior Ministers of former days and another will take on the responsibilities of Associates or Assistants or “Ministers for Pastoral Care” or “Education Ministers” or whatever.
But the use of some of these formal titles at FSC has outlived its usefulness to the organization.

Beginning as far back as 1971, it has been clear that the church has expressed a true desire for a “team ministry” approach to clergy staffing.
Duncan Littlefair instructed the clergy to simply introduce themselves as follows: “I am the Rev. So-and-So, a minister of Fountain Street Church.”
In the 90s, David Rankin would describe the cohort as “the preaching ministers of Fountain Street Church.”

- No more “kingmakers.” By this I mean to say, my research shows that FSC is less healthy when the Senior Minister selects and hires the other ministers of the church.
Regardless of how this all shakes out - the Senior Minister should play an advisory role only in the hiring of other clergy.
(Frankly, I’d like to see the committees of the church handle the hiring of the rest of the staff, as well, but that may be beyond the scope of my work.)
I can imagine a universe where, when the Committee on Ministry determines that hiring “a minister for visiting the sick and caring for people in distress” is warranted, the minister/ministers submit a list of promising candidates for the benefit of the search committee, and then get back to their day-to-day work.
FSC is pretty damned good at hiring their own ministers when the head of staff gets out of their way. The other reason that I want to take this power away from the head of staff or Senior Minister is because it creates unhealthy loyalties among the clergy staff.
If I hired my friend and colleague to be a minister of FSC, I might surely expect my friend and colleague to show fealty and respect to me, their boss, for my largess in gracing them with a sweet new gig. And, should I then run into trouble with the congregation, or get into a scuffle with the Governing Board, I might then expect my clergy underlings to form ranks alongside me and defend me from that damned, meddling governing board.
I do not want the clergy of the church to be loyal to the head of staff.
I want the clergy of the church to be loyal to God and the congregation and the congregation’s stated mission.

I realize that this is a hard pill to swallow (mainly for the current head of staff).
I can imagine a minister (any minister) having concerns.
”What if the congregation hires a clergyperson that I don’t particularly like? What if they hire someone I believe is unqualified? What if they hire someone who is X, Y, and Z?”

To quote my sainted, stubborn-as-a-nail grandmother: “tough shit.”

If the head of staff of Fountain Street Church is unable to sustain a professional, collegial relationship with a clergyperson who is, by all accounts, considered qualified for the position by the authority of the congregation, then that head of staff is unqualified to be the head of staff of the Fountain Street Church.
For if they are unable to show leadership, grace, encouragement, goodwill, and loving kindness to a fellow clergy member on staff, how the hell are they going to demonstrate such fruits of the spirit to a congregation as radically diverse as Fountain Street Church?

To be clear: this is an administrative nightmare. How, exactly, should one member of the clergy be designated head of staff, and if so what is their duty to “administer” the other clergy? Do we even need a head of staff? How do we foster collegial relationships without the carrots and sticks of a manager and underlings? Who’s gonna preach the sermon? Does the congregation have to vote on every single clergy hire? How does this actually work, in the real world?

I am aware of at least two congregations that have met with great success in taking a team-ministry approach and using congregational search committees for hiring multiple ministers. I know there are others out there. I will canvas the church universal for best practices. And some of this work will be left in the hands of this new, hypothetical “committee on ministry.”

But - at the very least - FSC will no longer have to form a pulpit committee every time a minister departs. People will rotate on and off of the new “permanent pulpit committee” just as they do every other committee of the church. And it is my fervent prayer that we can relegate the era of the “Senior Minister” to the dustbin of patriarchal, parochial history, where it belongs.

(As an added bonus, I strongly suspect - but have no direct evidence - that hiring a “Minister” rather than a “Senior Minister” will also filter out candidates who view Fountain Street Church as a feather in their professional cap, rather than a place of holy and sacrificial service. Ego-driven clergy have done a number on this place in the last quarter century).

A Note on Counting the Cost:
I am currently doing the work of approximately 2.5 clergypersons. Roughly 20 hours per week of this work is “interim tasks.” I am utterly unable to do as much pastoral visitation as is required and the church desperately needs pastoral visitation. Rev. David Smith is gone from us, now, and I sorely need him back. Alas, this cannot be.
I imagine a ministry staff that could be composed of two full-time clergy, or a full time clergyperson and two part-timers, or five part-timers, or one full time and one part-time and three seminary interns, or a billion other configurations.
But Fountain Street Church needs - right now, today - about 100 hours of “pastoring” per week. We’ll figure out how to get there, how to budget for this, and how to make this happen. And by “we,” I mean the hypothetical FSC Committee on Ministry.
Which is you.

Budgets and Accounting

It remains the goal of the Governing Board, the new Finance Committee, the new treasurer, and myself to provide every committee of the church with a monthly Profit and Loss statement.
We are still dependent on an outside firm for our accounting work. This is prohibitively costly. We are going to hire a Business Director - and this was always the plan - but we wanted to carefully avoid two circumstances that have happened in the recent past:
- “Upgrading” another staff-person to this position despite the staff member lacking the qualifications and experience for the work
- Dumping a rat’s nest into the lap of some unfortunate soul.

This ought to be a part-time position. We have the systems in place and I believe the GB, the Finance Com, Cassie and I have a good handle on the work-flow.
We’re exploring “splitting” the position with another, similarly sized congregation so that the candidate will then qualify for healthcare and retirement benefits and so that we can attract the most qualified candidate for the job.

The Governing Board passed a budget during their April meeting. It’s an honest budget and it reveals an honest deficit. I was clear from the beginning that I would only use honest numbers.
It’s also a budget that we can live within and I am confident that the projected deficit will evaporate by the end of the fiscal year. My “confidence,” however, is unworthy of being included as a line-item in a budget.
Giving is steadily increasing and we are raising money. Many new folks are joining the church and they’re being encouraged to support the church financially. The projections are looking good.
But - similar to “confidence” - projections doth butter no bread.
My hope is that in 2026 the budget will be passed in February, and in 2027 the budget will be passed in January, and then FSC will be back to a “normal” budgetary process.
I also want to steer you away from the alarming practice of having the Senior Minister write the budget. This practice sets off just about every alarm bell in red flag in my congregationalist brain.
As mentioned above - the Senior Minister most certainly ought to offer a great deal of advice and feedback on the budget. But it’s the church’s money and it’s the church’s budget and it should be written by the church.

In nearly two decades of professional ministry, this is the first time I’ve been asked to “write a budget.” You ought to build a hedge around that particular Torah, and then erect a fence around the hedge, and then electrify the fence and probably put up a few signs that say, “Attention Clergy: Stay Out.”

Fountain Street Church has always offered the use of its campus to the community for events. Here, you can see Wishart throwing wide the doors during the depression. This place has always been a hub for the community and free programming and it grows by keeping the campus open to all.

Worship

We will continue worshipping the way we’re worshipping. Attendance is increasing, people seem to enjoy it, Noah and Emmanuel and the rest of us are getting into a groove.
Chapel Community is healing hearts and saving lives and I’m doing everything I can to support that program - it’s finally been included as a separate line in the budget. That 9:30 service is like a beautiful work of art that I had no hand in creating and I’m not gonna touch it.
I really think it is so strong because it doesn’t have a clergy-person in there bossing people around and making decisions.
If staff is required for the Chapel Community (beyond professional musicians) then I am sure that the Chapel Community will make this need known. They’d probably communicate this need to the (currently hypothetical) Committee on Ministry of FSC.

With great humility and gratitude,
Rev. Nathan Dannison