Best Practices in Catholic Church Ministry Performance Management
Best Practices in Catholic Church Ministry Performance Management Edited by Charles E. Zech
LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Best practices in Catholic Church ministry performance management / edited by Charles E. Zech. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-4523-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-4525-8 (electronic) 1. Church personnel management. 2. Catholic Church—Clergy—Rating of. 3. Lay ministry—Catholic Church—Evaluation. 4. Catholic Church—Government. I. Zech, Charles E., 1947BX1803.B47 2010 254'.02--dc22 2010014361
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Contents
1 Introduction
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Charles E. Zech, Ph.D.
2 Framework of Accountability in the Church
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Most Reverend Donald W. Wuerl, S.T.D.
Part One: Performance Evaluation of Laity
3 Human Resource Guidelines for Developing a Performance 4 5 6
Management System Daniel Koys, Ph.D. The Evolution of Employment Practices Regarding Lay Parish Ministry David DeLambo, Ph.D. Using Standards in Lay Ecclesial Ministry Professional Development Christopher Anderson Performance Management in a Family Business? Zeni Fox, Ph.D.
Part Two: Performance Evaluation of Clergy 7 Performance Management of Catholic Clergy: “Best Practice” or New Iconoclasm? Rev. John Beal, J.C.D. 8 Importance of Performance Evaluation of Seminarians and Priests for Effective Parish Ministry Sr. Katarina Schuth, O.S.F., Ph.D. v
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39 45
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Contents
9 Clergy Performance Management: An Organizational 10 11 12
Psychology Perspective Lisa R. Berlinger, Ph.D. Performance Management and Ongoing Formation of Priests James H. Alphen Neither Fish Nor Fowl: Performance Evaluation of Deacons Deacon Justin Green, Ph.D. Summary and Conclusion Charles E. Zech, Ph.D.
Index About the Contributors
83 91 105 117 121 123
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Best Practices in Catholic Church Ministry Performance Management: Introduction Charles E. Zech, Ph.D.
“T
he Church is not a business.” So those of us who conduct research and teach about Church managerial practices are regularly reminded. The appropriate response is, “Yes, the Church is not a business. But it does have a stewardship responsibility to ensure that all of its resources are used as effectively as possible to carry out God’s work on earth.” Among other things, this involves managing both its financial and human resource assets in an efficient manner. In the case of financial assets, stewardship takes the form of financial transparency and accountability at all levels. In the case of human resource assets, good stewardship involves assisting those engaged in ministry (whether clerical or lay, paid or volunteer) to achieve their greatest potential through the various components of performance management. Church leaders at all levels seem to have gotten the message that financial accountability and transparency are important. More effort is being put into properly involving Church members in financial decision making through structures such as Diocesan Finance Councils and Parish Finance Councils. More and more dioceses and parishes are making a better effort to provide parishioners with annual financial reports that are understandable, meaningful, and accessible. While as a Church we still haven’t progressed as far as many would like in our financial accountability and transparency, at least the need is recognized in most quarters. The same cannot be said about developing our human resource assets through performance management techniques. For a variety of reasons, the Church has lagged well behind other organizations, including other nonprofits, in its willingness to even address this critical issue. This book is intended to be a first step towards rectifying that deficiency. It tackles the tricky questions relating to the performance management of lay 1
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Church workers (both paid and volunteer) and clergy (priests and deacons). Performance management is multi-faceted, ranging from issues about hiring, job descriptions, performance criteria, performance appraisal, formation, and firing procedures. As much as we might wish it were not so, the church as a charitable organization is subject to the same civil law employment regulations as companies in the private sector. At the same time, there is support for the performance management of Church ministers (including clergy) in both Canon Law and in Church tradition. It has been said, “If you want to introduce something controversial like performance management to the Church leadership, begin your statement with the phrase, ‘As the Church has always done . . . ,’ and you will receive immediate acceptance.” The question might be asked as to why the notion of performance management, especially the performance appraisal piece, has not been embraced by Church leaders. Among the reasons identified by chapter authors in this book are: • The lack of training in performance management techniques in both our seminaries and our lay ministry programs • At the parish level, the close personal relationship between those doing the performance appraisal (e.g., a pastor or staff member) and those staff members being appraised, who might well be parishioners themselves and have many supportive friends in the parish • The view that performance management is a secular, materialistic concept at odds with the Church’s core values • The abstract nature of many outcomes, such as “a change in peoples’ minds and hearts,” which are frequently either unobservable or unmeasurable • Recognition that often ministry is performed (as frequently is the case of pastors, permanent deacons, or parish life coordinators) in a setting where their activities cannot be routinely monitored by their evaluator(s) • A reluctance or inability to distinguish “who one is” (e.g., an ordained priest) from “what one does” (e.g., manage a complex organization like a parish) • The view that an honest performance assessment, which might contain some negative comments, is somehow “un-Christian” Nevertheless, the times demand that performance management be taken seriously at all levels of Church life. Most of the discussion in the chapters that follow relate to the issue of how best to go about doing it.
Introduction
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THE DESIGN OF THIS BOOK Following this introductory chapter is a chapter by Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington. In his chapter, Archbishop Wuerl emphasizes the importance of accountability in a hierarchical church, and reflects on how mechanisms for accountability in the Church are determined by the unique nature and mission of the Church. This, of course, is the crux of the performance management issue: in the spirit of good stewardship, how do we ensure accountability among those engaged in a ministry while observing the special nature of what it means to be Church? There exist aspects of the Church, in her identity and mission, that form the context or framework for any specific mechanisms of accountability and against which those mechanisms themselves must be measured. At the same time, all members are called to accountability through three related but distinct activities: communication, consultation, and collaboration. Following Archbishop Wuerl’s chapter the book is divided into two parts. The first part considers performance management issues with regards to the laity, and the second part examines factors affecting the performance management of clergy. Daniel Koys, a business school professor, leads off the first part with a chapter that provides critical background to the discussion. Koys presents a review of the elements contained in a three-step performance management system: define, evaluate/communicate, and improve/reward. The chapter demonstrates how these “best practices” in performance management as employed in the business sector can be adapted to fit the unique circumstances of the faith-based sector. In another chapter intended to provide needed background and context, David DeLambo summarizes some findings from his landmark studies of parish ministry. The chapter presents background information on the current practices at the parish level with regards to performance management issues such as job descriptions, job contracts, performance appraisals, and personnel policies and employee handbooks, and highlights the rather informal nature of these practices at the parish level. In a third chapter meant to introduce the issues, Christopher Anderson traces the history of the establishment of standards and competencies (which are at the heart of performance management) for lay ecclesial ministers. Developed by four groups representing various ministries performed by lay ecclesial ministers, and approved by the USCCB, five standards were identified, and they serve as the headings for 33 competencies. The strength of this effort lies in the fact that these certification standards emanate solely from Catholic institutions, unlike other professional certifications which come from either
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government or secular organizations. Anderson goes on to provide examples of how these standards can be applied in practice. Zeni Fox covers many of the critical issues in the performance management of laity with her aptly titled chapter, “Performance Management in a Family Business?” Her data suggests that lay ecclesial ministers would welcome the affirmation and professionalism that performance management would include. At the same time, she acknowledges that the “strongly relational pattern” inherent in parish hiring and firing decisions presents a challenge to the development and implementation of an effective performance management system. She doesn’t believe that a strict business model of performance management would fit the reality of parish ministry. Nevertheless, she recognizes that there is much that can be learned from the business model. At the same time there is also much that can be learned from more typical Church approaches, such as discernment, spirituality, and interpersonal ways of holding one another accountable. Part two of this book is concerned with an even thornier issue, the performance management of clergy. In the first chapter of this part, Fr. John Beal appropriately begins by examining the issue of the performance management of clergy from the perspective of the Code of Canon Law. Although the Code does not explicitly call for ongoing performance appraisals, it does suggest the need for some kind of regular assessment of pastoral performance to allow for warnings and corrective action that could avert the need for removal. Thus, it provides a canonical warrant for the introduction of some sort of system of performance management for pastors and other ecclesiastical office holders. Fr. Beal also discusses the tradition of the performance management of clergy emanating from the Council of Trent. To insure that truly qualified candidates would be appointed as pastors, Trent required that candidates for vacant parishes were to be examined by the bishop and a board of examiners about their theological competence, pastoral prudence, and other qualities suitable for the direction of the vacant parish. When all of the candidates had been examined, the bishop and the board of examiners voted on their suitability. Only those judged competent could lawfully be appointed to the parish. In the following chapter, Sr. Katarina Schuth compares and contrasts the high degree of performance appraisal that seminarians are subject to with the fact that for the most part performance appraisal is limited to the early years of ordination and if it happens at all, it is much less comprehensive. Her research has revealed that priests who do undertake various forms of self-evaluation are usually satisfied, or even delighted, by the outcome of the process. Rather than resulting in criticism, they learn of the general approval of parishioners. In her chapter, Lisa Berlinger points out that a performance appraisal is a developmental tool, and therefore should not be used to determine punish-
Introduction
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ment, discipline, removal, termination, incarceration, or institutionalization. Instead, its purpose it to facilitate learning. Major transgressions should be handled outside of the appraisal system, and the bishops have their own systems for handling problems with clergy. The primary purpose of a performance appraisal for clergy is for the development of the priest. This means the purpose is not so the organization can have a form in its file or keep up its system. The chapter concludes with some specific suggestions about how to conduct the performance appraisal of a priest. These include discussions on the timing of the process, learning to give and receive feedback, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation, all presented within the context of the performance appraisal of a priest. In a chapter similar in intent to Christopher Anderson’s earlier chapter on standards and competencies for lay ecclesial ministers, James Alphen articulates a conceptual framework to facilitate alignment of priests’ performance with the purpose of their ministry. The project implements the recommendations contained in the USCCB’s 2001 document, The Basic Plan for the Ongoing Formation of Priests. The framework is based on competency modeling, a contemporary management practice used in business, education, and other sectors. Its purpose is to help learners achieve desired performance by identifying the constituent knowledge, skills, and attitudes of behavioral outcomes that reflect the desired performance. It experiments with the application of a generally accepted performance management practice in a specific performance setting, formation for priests and presbyterates. This chapter introduces the conceptual framework to date by analyzing twelve cells representing the interfaces of the three presbyteral munera and the four dimensions of formation. The performance management of the emerging clergy model of permanent deacon is very topical. Deacon Justin Green considers the performance appraisal of deacons from a variety of perspectives: deacons as clergy; deacons as quasi-staff; deacons as volunteers; the multi-site, extra-ecclesial role of deacons; and deacons as professionals. He concludes that the best fit for developing a performance management system for permanent deacons is one based on a model of deacons as professionals. The final chapter of the book considers a series of recommendations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY National Conference of Catholic Bishops. The Basic Plan for the Ongoing Formation of Priests. Washington D.C.: 2001.
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Framework of Accountability in the Church Most Reverend Donald W. Wuerl, S.T.D.
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n this chapter, I want to discuss the idea of accountability in a hierarchical Church and how what is assumed of Church leadership, i.e., that it is properly carrying out its responsibility, is verifiable in an affirming and credible manner. In the remaining chapters of this book, there will be discussions on best practices regarding lay ecclesial ministers and the clergy. Each of these topics has its own specific focus as a part of a much larger picture. What I would like to do in this chapter is to reflect with you on how any mechanism for accountability in the Church will be determined by the unique nature and mission of the Church. Thus, I will highlight the aspects of the Church, in her identity and mission, that form the context or framework for any specific mechanisms of accountability and against which those mechanisms themselves must be measured. While it is important to manage effectively and responsibly the many institutional aspects of the Church and her ministry, we can only do this fruitfully with a clear understanding of how different the Church is from any other reality we experience, even though the Church in her spiritual and pastoral ministry relies on the organizational and managerial skills and expertise required to carry out her work in a structured manner. The discussion about accountability in a divinely established hierarchical Church takes us into an area that is distinct from—even though in some of its manifestations it might be related to—the question of specific, practical, managerial or fiscal controls that might be put in place to ensure the proper oversight of the many institutional aspects of Church life and ministry. In this chapter, I want to focus first on the larger issue of the accountability of pastors of souls and how such unique responsibility can be both exercised and verified. 7
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SUPPOSITIONS There are a number of “givens,” facts, in our discussion because we are dealing with a divinely established and structured reality. At the same time, there is a need to integrate these “givens” into the vicissitudes of the human condition and the circumstances of our day. Bishops and pastors have a leadership and oversight role that is theirs by ordination. Our discussion recognizes the sacred ordering of the Church and focuses more directly on how those in holy orders can best exercise their responsibility. To understand governance in the Catholic Church, we have to go back to its origin, its divine institution and its purpose. Fully aware of the perennial importance of the truth he was revealing to us, Jesus established his Church. In Matthew’s Gospel, after Peter’s dramatic profession of faith, Jesus foretold his intention to establish a Church that would endure until the end of time. “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church” (Mt. 16:18). After his Resurrection and before his ascension in glory, Jesus fulfills his promise with the mandate to Peter and the Apostles: “Feed my sheep” (Jn. 21:17). The Church—the Body of Christ, the People of God—is structured, visible, and identifiable. The Lord Jesus endowed his community with a structure that will remain until his kingdom is fully achieved. He willfully chose the Twelve, with Peter as their head, as the foundation stones of “the new Jerusalem” (Mt. 19:28). The Apostles and other disciples share in Jesus’ mission and his power precisely to lead and serve his new body so that, together, through works of faith and love, the kingdom of God might become manifest in the world. In his apostolic exhortation, Sacramentum Caritatis, our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, calls us to reflect on the Church as the great sacrament of Christ’s presence. Jesus intended to remain with us in a new, yet visible, manner. In imitation of his own Incarnation in which the divine and human came together, Jesus would continue in his Church in which the spiritual and temporal would be present. In establishing his Church, Christ instituted the sacrament of baptism to bring about a new creation of all of the faithful who form his new body. Thus, we look to the faithful laywomen and laymen to see the vitality and mission of the Church unfold in the world around us. As the Second Vatican Council in its document on the apostolate of the laity taught us, the task of the laity is the evangelization and sanctification of the temporal order. The same vision is evident in the dogmatic constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium.
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All of us through the gift of baptism are configured to Christ as part of his body—the Church. In the Eucharist we participate in the mystery of Christ’s death and Resurrection in a way that we share in this great saving action. The Church of Christ, spread throughout the entire world, is manifest in her many particular churches entrusted to the care of a successor to the Apostles and always in communion with our Holy Father, Universal Shepherd of the Church and successor to Peter. As the ordination rite teaches us, the work of the bishop who has the overall responsibility and oversight of a diocesan Church is carried out in intimate collaboration with his brother priests and, in a particular manner, with the pastors with whom the bishop shares the responsibility for teaching, sanctifying, and leading the flock entrusted to his care. Deacons are configured to Christ the Servant. Priests and bishops are configured to Christ the Head. The Second Vatican Council chose, in a particular way, to speak of the Church as the “People of God” (Lumen Gentium, 9-17). The Church is not an abstraction. It is certainly not merely a group of bishops or priests in important positions, nor is it a group of individuals who determine what they will believe and how the Church will be constituted. The Body of Christ is made up of all the members of the family of faith who are blessed with the gifts of the Holy Spirit and are united as one body around the Apostles and their successors—with Christ as its head. The Church does not hover formlessly over the cities and communities of people. Nor does it exist solely in the hearts of people. Rather, it is reflected in the lives and activities of the faithful as they carry out their God-given mission with their God-given abilities to transform the temporal order and bring it into God’s kingdom. At the service of the Church are the hierarchy and the apostolic tradition which guarantee that the saving revelation of Jesus Christ continues to be proclaimed, celebrated and lived in every successive generation.
GOVERNANCE When we speak about structure, governance, and accountability, what must be presumed is the “obedience of faith” that the Second Vatican Council speaks about in its Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum (DV, 5). In other words, we must assume as our starting point that which Christ has revealed, established and ordained, and also entrusted to a continuous living body in which the power of the Spirit, transforming grace and the gifts of God are constantly at work. Otherwise, we might be tempted to reduce the question of accountability to one of organization, popular approval, or even poll
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taking to determine the content of the apostolic proclamation, or the horizons of our Catholic ministry. Our frame of reference for all means of accountability is the vision of the Catholic Church communicated by Christ, articulated in the Scriptures and passed on in a 2,000-year unbroken, living tradition. Yet, we also recognize that the fullness of this vision has not always been realized in individual members. It is the nature of an incarnational Church that the divine is mediated through the human. Christ promised that his Holy Spirit would be with his Church until the end of time to preserve it in all truth. He never assured us that every believer, including priests and bishops, would be sinless or even good managers. But he did guarantee that his teaching would not be adulterated, falsified, or lost. It is a wondrous gift passed on in earthen vessels. How ministry can be exercised in a highly complex, technological, modern world is one thing; that it be done and in continuity with the apostolic understanding of that ministry is another. Both are related, but the latter is foundational to the former. Thus, no matter how we envision best practices, we do so realizing that the Church in which these best practices develop and are realized is already a uniquely structured reality that will bring its own determinants to what can ultimately be recognized as a “best practice.” Our task as we ask how best we might serve the Church is one we approach with great reverence, mindful that what we deal with ultimately is mystery, Incarnation, grace, and redemption.
ACCOUNTABILITY Given the divinely established and sacramentally articulated structure of the Church to guarantee that the teaching and ministry of Jesus continue in our time, how do we ensure a level of accountability? Or, put another way, how do we provide for the leadership of the Church a mechanism to be accountable together with the whole body? This, I believe, is an important issue of our day—and not necessarily driven by current events alone. It is healthy for the whole body to know that members and leaders alike are accountable to Christ and his Gospel. What we must insist upon is both accountability and, at the same time, respect for the distinct and unique nature of the Church. There is a temptation for some to make the Church into an American democratic organization as if we, the members, had supreme authority over the body. Our starting point is different. We begin with the faith community and recognize that there already is a foundation of truth for the consensus out of which we act. We do not vote or take a headcount to determine what we
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should believe or how the Church should be structured. But we are called to see that the whole Church is faithful to its identity, message, and mission. This responsibility extends to a verifiable oversight of the way in which we deal with the array of means at the service of ministry. These are sometimes referred to as the Church’s temporalities. But it also includes the right relations among and treatment of Church personnel. Pope Benedict XVI in his first encyclical, God Is Love, reminds us of the three-fold essential work of the Church: to proclaim the Gospel, to celebrate the sacred mysteries, and to provide a ministry of charity. These three activities—reflected in the educational, pastoral, and charitable works, structures and institutions of the Church—require appropriate, adequate professional direction and oversight. In fact, today the very effectiveness of the structures, institutions, and programs of the Church can be facilitated and, to some extent, measured by their governing policies and guidelines, as well as by the mechanisms that provide for the implementation of these various directives. When we address accountability in the Church, we must be careful not to use a political model for a reality that transcends human political institutions. When we consider accountability in the Church, we are speaking of a real and valuable principle, but one that must be exercised within the reality of the spiritual gift that Christ established in his Church. Everyone in the Church is called to accountability before the faith—the Creed—of the Church. No one is above the Creed. The Church teaches with divine authority in matters of faith and morals. We are all called out of the received teaching to respond with an adherence that transcends our own particular preference, appreciation, or even understanding. At a practical level, all members—lay and clerical, baptized and ordained—are called to accountability operative in an openness found in three distinct but related activities: communication, consultation, and collaboration. Whatever our responsibility, we must exercise it with an openness that takes the form of shared information (communication), reporting on the discharge of our duties, and accepting critique of our actions (consultation), as we strive to work together for the spread of the Gospel (collaboration). Today no organization, ecclesiastical, political, economic, academic, or other can function well without adequate and extensive communications. This can take the form of sharing information, first of all among those in leadership positions, then between leadership and those they serve, and finally between the body and the rest of the wider community. So often we assume that what we know is also known and appreciated in like manner by others. Our starting point should include actively sharing significant information.
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Along with the sharing of information should be an openness to hear from others, particularly those involved and affected by our actions. Consultation involves some process for feedback. At its best, consultation includes a serious evaluation of all valid and credible points of view on the issue. Out of a sharing of information and the serious weighing of the variety of points of view should come a commitment to collaboration. This is particularly true when the responsible authority arrives at a decision. Acceptance of the decision of legitimate authority should be manifest in a commitment to its collaborative implementation. Such active collaboration, even in difficult decisions, more readily follows on an active prior consultation rooted in shared information. The structures to do this already exist. If our goal is to establish as a working principle within the Church a level of openness or transparency, let us look at what we already have and see how it should be used to achieve the outcome. If our purpose is to encourage an attitude of accountability and a climate of collaboration, should we not begin with those structures that are already a part of the fabric of the Church and that respect her identity and mission? On the diocesan level, canon law already requires that there be a priest or presbyteral council and a finance council. Wisdom also urges the existence of a pastoral council made up primarily of lay people. On the parish level, there should be both a pastoral/parish council and finance council. These structures provide mechanisms for the regular and routine participation of both the clergy and the faithful in the oversight or verification of the leadership ministry. What do these advisory and participatory institutions bring to the Church and to the issue of accountability? The first thing they provide is a forum for the sharing of information. Communication of information is the beginning of that level of consultation that produces effective collaboration. In this model, the presbyteral council and the diocesan pastoral council are utilized to tap the expertise of the clergy and laity of the diocese in formulating policy and seeing that it is carried out. The authority of the bishop remains intact since the final judgment remains his. Yet, his accountability to the Church is highlighted through the process of communication and consultation. This process and approach presumes the absolute unique magisterial role of the bishop in matters of faith and morals. At the same time, it engages the bishop on the diocesan level and the pastor on the parish level with the expertise and experience of all of those who make up the Body of Christ. Most of the faithful assume and, I believe, rightly so that their priests and bishops are doing a good job, that they are responsible to Christ, to his
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teaching and to his Church. By sharing more information with the faithful entrusted to our spiritual care, we complement what is assumed by what is now verifiable. When all the members of the body assume their proper and responsible roles in the Church, ecclesial communion is strengthened. There is a sense in which solidarity is nothing less than the practical expression of the Church’s communion or unity. Communion in and with the Church obliges its members, even in practical decisions, to support the legitimate exercise of a bishop’s responsibility. Solidarity, which is the practical manifestation of spiritual communion, requires such support. Otherwise, the unity of the Church becomes a theoretical consideration and the role of the bishop, who has the responsibility of unifying, is diminished. In our discussion so far, we have kept our focus on the Church as manifest at the diocesan level by a bishop and in the local parish under the care of a pastor. Another whole area of accountability involves Catholic educational institutions, universities, colleges, and others, as well as Catholic health care institutions and Catholic social service agencies. All of these expressions of the Church are also called to accountability as they carry out their mission in the name of the Church. The very nature of a Catholic institution, which is part of a larger community of faith, makes it incumbent upon that institution to work out of a lived and concrete communion with its diocesan bishop whose task is to oversee all ministry in the local Church. Institutions that are recognized as Catholic and that exercise their ministry and activities as a part of the Church are not independent from the Church. As members of the Catholic community, they must live and act within the structure of this community. That means working in solidarity with the bishops. How these institutional expressions of the Catholic faith are held accountable to the unifying and authenticating ministry of the pastors of the Church is another question for another national gathering. The Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services as well as The Application of Ex Corde Ecclesia for the United States are examples of ways today in which clearly articulated avenues of accountability are being developed through mutual consultation and collaboration, and against which institutional identity can be measured and verified. For the bishop or pastor accountability understood as the transparency of the exercise of authority does not mean giving up decision-making authority. It does, however, mean that such apostolic authority is exercised in the context of an informed and consulted local Church. The challenge of accountability in the Church in the United States today calls for bishops not to abdicate our responsibility, but to share information.
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This effort leads us to consult with clergy and laity alike to see what consensus there is in practical matters of policy and pastoral practice. Out of this level of communication and consultation, even when the pastors of the Church have to make difficult choices, should come fruitful collaboration.
THE FUTURE This manner of communication, consultation and collaboration will present opportunities not only for diocesan bishops and pastors to demonstrate accountability, but also it will challenge the many educational, health care and social service entities that are recognized as Catholic to do the same. Such accountability would involve not only best practices in performance management, but also, and more significantly, areas of Catholic institutional identity.
CONCLUSION We have so much of which to be proud. There is no institution that does as much each day as does the Catholic Church to provide spiritual, pastoral, educational, medical, social service, and human care to people both within and outside our faith community. We can be enormously proud of this fact as we can of the realization that the Catholic Church does this because of our deep conviction that this is the work of Christ. The future should be marked by such openness and sense of stewardship that we can comfortably recognize that while our roles are diverse and each of us have different tasks, we are all linked together and all ultimately responsible before God and one another. Making this clear and having the structures to do this only strengthens our own sense of accountability, therefore, our credibility, and, ultimately, the future of our ministry together.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Pope Benedict XVI. Deus Caritas Est, God Is Love. January 2006. ———. Sacramentum Caritatis, The Sacrament of Charity. February 2007. Second Vatican Council. Lumen Gentium, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. November 1964. ———. Dei Verbum, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation. November 1965.
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United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services. Issued by National Conference of Catholic Bishops/U.S. Catholic Conference, 2001. ———. The Application of Ex Corde Ecclesiae for the United States. Issued by National Conference of Catholic Bishops/U.S. Catholic Conference, 2001.
I PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF LAITY
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Human Resource Guidelines for Developing a Performance Management System Daniel Koys, Ph.D.
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n chapter 2 of this book, Archbishop Donald Wuerl discussed the importance of accountability in the Church.1 This chapter encourages accountability among lay ecclesial ministers by proposing a three-step performance management system: define, evaluate/communicate, and improve/reward. I suggest three guidelines for defining performance: know what drives the performance of lay ministers, choose useful performance criteria, and determine the level of performance expected. My five guidelines for evaluating and communicating are use an appropriate method, use appropriate evaluator(s), accept role conflict, avoid evaluation errors, and give useful feedback. I propose four guidelines to improve and reward people: work on weaknesses discovered, terminate when necessary, decide if you should integrate the system into a pay philosophy, and reward good performance.
DEFINE PERFORMANCE Know What Drives the Performance of the Lay Ministers In order to understand a performance management system, one must first understand the factors that affect job performance. The Human Resource Management literature widely acknowledges the formula below. The equation uses multiplication and not addition, meaning that if any of the three factors are zero, performance will be zero. So a performance management system must address all three: ability, effort, and support. That is, Performance ⫽ Ability ⫻ Effort ⫻ Support.2
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A parish can influence the ability level of its lay ministers through its staffing and development practices. For example, research shows that intelligence and conscientiousness have significant positive correlations with performance on a wide variety of jobs,3 so those traits can be among those assessed when hiring lay ministers. Once on board, a performance management system can help develop their abilities. A performance management system also can influence the motivation of the lay ministers. Goal setting is a very effective motivational technique,4 so the system should include goals valued by the ministers. Research shows that tying pay to performance influences employee motivation and organizational performance.5 Although lay ministers may not value money as much as other employees, they can be motivated by pay just as other U.S. employees are. People are also motivated to avoid negative outcomes,6 so including a discipline process in the performance management system will help motivate the lay ministers. Performance levels are also influenced by the support ministers get from parishioners, fellow lay ministers, the pastor, and the diocese. Such support can come from a performance management system that is aimed at improving ability and motivation. Chose Useful Performance Criteria The second guideline for developing a performance management system is to choose useful performance criteria for the lay ministers. All of the important parts of the job must be included as performance criteria and no criteria should be chosen that are not part of the job.7 Research shows that 84 percent of lay ministers have position descriptions,8 so that is a good starting point for choosing the criteria. The ultimate performance criteria for lay ministers’ jobs is helping parishioners know, love, and serve God in this world so as to be happy with God in the next. Since those ultimate results do not lend themselves to an earthly performance management system, we may be able to use results such as the number of parishioners served, the knowledge gained in religious education programs, or staying within the budget. Many lay ministers’ jobs do not have results that can be validly measured, so the next most useful performance criteria are behaviors needed to produce results.9 For example, the behavioral criteria for a music minister might include choosing music for liturgies, directing the choir, and training cantors. The least useful performance criteria are related to personality characteristics because they are very hard to validly measure. For example, research shows that “good relational skills” is the most important factor pastors use to
Guidelines for Developing a Performance Management System
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hire lay ministers.10 A “friendly” personality is not as useful as behaviors indicative of good relational skills.11 Determine the Level of Performance Expected Once we define the performance criteria, we must define the level of performance expected of the lay minister on each criterion. It is tempting to say that each minister should just perform at the highest level possible, but research shows that setting goals will be more motivating.12 The supervisor should set those goals if the culture of the parish emphasizes a top-down decisionmaking process. However, in many situations, it is better for the employee to be involved in setting the goals so as to encourage greater employee commitment to goal attainment. A great deal of research has shown that goals should have certain characteristics in order to be most motivating.13 Based on that research, the SMART acronym was developed to help people remember the characteristics of good goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable (but challenging), Relevant and recorded, and Time frame.14 The above three guidelines help determine what has to be evaluated. The next five guidelines will help a parish decide how to evaluate its lay ministers.
EVALUATE AND COMMUNICATE Use an Appropriate Performance Appraisal Method There are many different performance appraisal methods available.15 To help parishes understand which methods are best, I will state what I think is the most important advantage and the most important disadvantage of each of eight different methods. There is no perfect method; the best method is the one that maximizes the advantages and minimizes the disadvantages for a particular parish. The first three methods require the evaluator to compare a person’s performance against expected performance levels. Graphic rating scales (for example, low quality work = 1 and high quality work = 5) have the advantage of being easy to use, but they have the disadvantage of being prone to certain errors (for example, leniency errors). Behavioral rating scales (for example, “gives well organized presentations”) have the advantage of being specific, but their specificity makes them hard to develop for more than one job. Checklists just require the evaluator to say “yes” or “no” to a particular performance dimension, but they have to be very long if they are to cover more than one job.
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The next two methods require the evaluator to compare the person’s performance against the performance of others in similar jobs. The ranking method has the evaluator list all of the employees from best to worst. This gives a clear order, but it makes it look like the difference between each employee is the same. Forced distribution methods require the evaluator to place a small percentage of employees in the lowest performance category, a large percentage in the middle category, and a small percentage in the highest category. This is good for distributing merit pay increases, but it flies in the face of the Lake Wobegon effect (“all of the children in Lake Wobegon are above average”).16 The last three methods require the evaluator to write about the person. Critical incidents (for example, “was polite to an angry parishioner”) have the advantage of focusing on extremely good or extremely bad situations, but they have the disadvantage of keeping a little black book on each employee. The essay method just requires a write-up at the end of the performance period. Its inherent flexibility allows it to be applied to many different jobs, but it is dependent on the evaluator’s writing skills. The flexibility of Management by Objectives (MBO) allows the evaluator to write different objectives for each person, but different levels of difficulty make it hard to compare across objectives. Use Appropriate Evaluators The choice of evaluators is based on three factors: the knowledge of the potential evaluators, the parish’s decision-making process, and the ability of the potential evaluators to accept role conflict. That first factor is obvious; certain people should not be evaluators unless they have knowledge of the lay minister’s behaviors and/or results. If the decision-making process is more hierarchical, then it is appropriate for the supervisor to be the evaluator. If the decision-making process is more collegial, then the supervisor, peers, subordinates, and those served could be evaluators. A national study of lay people employed in parishes showed that most of them preferred to be evaluated by those they directly served.17 A good evaluator must also be able to accept the role conflict that is inherent in the performance appraisal process. That is the topic of the sixth guideline. Accept Role Conflict Most organizations want to use their performance appraisal process for two different purposes: to help make administrative decisions about employees (for
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example, staffing decisions) and to help develop employees. This is analogous to what literature has said about leaders for decades: some leaders are more task-oriented and some are more people-oriented. In a court of law, these two roles are played by different people—judges and counselors. However, in performance appraisal, the evaluators have to play both roles. If someone cannot accept this role conflict, he or she should not be an evaluator. Avoid Evaluation Errors There are several common errors that people make when they evaluate others. One set of errors results in a restriction of the evaluator’s range of judgments. Rather than using the entire performance period, some people restrict their judgments to first impressions (primacy error) or to recent impressions (recency error). Rather than using the full range of an evaluation scale, some people use only the scale’s high end (leniency error), some use only the scale’s low end (severity error), and some use only the middle of the scale (central tendency error). Another set of errors involves conscious or unconscious biases. Halo errors and horns errors occur when evaluators let their positive (or negative) judgments on one performance criterion bias their judgments on the other performance criteria. For example, halo error would occur if an evaluator let his judgment of a DRE’s knowledge of theology influence his judgment of her administrative skills. The similar to me error and the different from me error can occur because some people are biased towards doing the job one way, their way. Illegal discrimination occurs when a protected class characteristic (for example, race, sex, color, religion,18 national origin, age, or non-job-related disability) is used to make a judgment about an individual person. Since 5 to 20 percent of pastors say that gender and/or ethnicity are at least somewhat important in hiring a lay minister,19 care must be taken to avoid illegal discrimination. Give Useful Feedback The results of the evaluation must be communicated to the lay ministers.20 The most useful feedback focuses on behaviors and/or results that the employee has some control over. In communicating to employees, the evaluator should give specific reasons for positive and negative ratings. This can lead to a performance plan with specific objectives, as well as specific steps for any needed improvements. Some feedback will be less useful to employees. The evaluator should avoid surprising lay ministers with information they have never heard before.
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It is better to mention issues as they occur throughout the year and to summarize them at the end of the year. The evaluator should avoid giving feedback that focuses on attitudes and personality because they tend to evoke defensiveness. It is better to focus on behaviors.21 It is not useful for the supervisor to do all of the talking in the session. Employees should participate because research shows that this will increase their commitment to action.22
IMPROVE AND REWARD PERFORMANCE (SO WHAT?) Unless there are tangible consequences, the above guidelines will most likely turn performance appraisal into a paper exercise that does not help sustain good performance or correct poor performance. These last four guidelines answer the “so what?” question. Work on Any Weaknesses Discovered When weaknesses are discovered in the performance management process, the evaluator must not gloss over them in a mistaken effort to be a nice guy.23 Many employers have been sued for wrongful discharge when poorly performing employees were given inflated evaluations but were subsequently fired.24 Weaknesses are opportunities to improve the employee’s abilities. Those related to current duties and technical skills can be addressed through training, performance improvement plans, or informal mentoring. Weakness related to future needs and soft skills can be addressed through long-term employee development such as degree programs, job rotation, and project teams. If the weaknesses are severe, the pastor has to clearly inform the employee that the person’s job security is at stake if performance does not improve. A formal probation period can give the employee a chance to make specific improvements. Terminate When Necessary Termination is a big “so what” to most people. If performance improvements do not result from improvement plans and probationary periods, termination is necessary. There are at least two different ways to terminate employees in the United States: by following the common law doctrine of employment-at-will or by following the standards of just cause. If the lay ministers do not have an employment contract, the pastor may want to fire lay ministers as he sees fit. To support such an employment-
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at-will policy, certain procedures are needed. If the parish has an employee handbook, it should clearly state that both the lay minister and the pastor can terminate employment at any time for any reason. The pastor should not give any oral or written assurances to lay ministers that they will be fired only for just cause. Finally, the parish needs to keep appropriate documentation that will support any future decision to fire someone.25 If the pastor wishes to follow a policy of firing only for just cause, (or if the lay ministers’ contracts demand that he do so) he should follow the following standards that have evolved through union-management grievance and arbitration procedures:26 (1) warn the employee about the performance problem and its effect on job security, (2) be sure that the rules upon which the termination is based are reasonable, (3) investigate the situation before deciding to terminate the person, (4) conduct a fair investigation and don’t just justify a foregone conclusion, (5) have sufficient evidence that the infraction occurred, (6) apply rules and sanctions even handedly across employee groups and across time, and (7) be sure that the termination is a reasonable penalty, given the infraction. Decide If You Should Integrate the System into the Parish’s Pay Policy The parish has to decide how the performance appraisal results will affect the lay ministers’ pay. The Catholic Church has not had a history of tying pay to performance, so some parishes will decide to keep it that way. Other parishes may decide that pay is too big of a “so what?” to leave out of the performance management system. One way for a parish to make that decision is for it to develop a pay philosophy. To do so, it can specify the values and objectives underlying its pay system. For example, the Catholic university I work for defined these values as underlying its pay system: mission directed, fair, financially sustainable, externally competitive, and legally compliant. Those values lead to the development of four compensation objectives: to attract and retain good employees, to pay equitably based on job responsibilities, to reward individual contributions, and to administer the system effectively. If the parish takes the time to specify the values and objectives of its pay system, it will see how performance management does or does not fit into that system. Reward Good Performance The parish has to reward good performance in some way. If its pay philosophy is to reward individual performance with pay, the parish must decide between
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merit increases (which raise the base pay) and bonuses (which do not raise the base pay). Since people in the United States have come to expect some type of base pay increase each year, a parish may decide upon a merit increase policy. To do that, the parish has to set a pay increase budget each year based on its ability to pay. If it is concerned about attraction and retention of good lay ministers, it will also want to consider the pay increases offered in the relevant labor market (usually similar parishes and possibly not-for-profit organizations). Let’s assume that other parishes are increasing pay by three percent of payroll, and let’s assume that the parish can afford to match that. The next step would be to assign three percent pay increases to the lay ministers who received the average performance appraisal rating. If the performance appraisal has three rating categories of (1) does not meet expectations, (2) meets expectations, and (3) exceeds expectations, we might expect that the average rating would be a 2. However, performance appraisal ratings suffer from the same malady that produces grade inflation (the Lake Wobegon effect),27 so the mathematical average may actually be closer to 3. If a parish does not want to use merit increases, it could use bonuses tied to some measure of individual or group performance. If it does not want to use pay as a reward, it will have to find other rewards to answer the “so what?” question or else the performance management system will just be a bureaucratic, paper-work exercise. For example, the pastor could give a nonmonetary recognition such as publicly praising the minister for dedication to excellence and commitment to service.
SUMMARY In summary, I have used research results from the field of Human Resource Management to propose a performance management system composed on three major steps. I embedded 12 guidelines to help parishes implement those steps: I)
II)
Define performance. A) Know what drives the performance of the parish’s lay ministers. B) Choose useful performance criteria. C) Determine the expected level of performance on each criterion. Conduct performance appraisals by evaluating and communicating to lay ministers. A) Use an appropriate appraisal method. B) Use appropriate evaluator(s).
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C)
III)
Accept the role conflict inherent in the performance appraisal process. D) Avoid evaluation errors. E) Give useful feedback. Improve and reward performance (the “so what?”). A) Work on any weaknesses discovered. B) As a last resort, terminate when necessary. C) Decide if you should integrate the system into the parish’s pay philosophy. D) Reward good performance.
NOTES 1. Donald Wuerl, “Structures of Accountability in the Church,” this volume. 2. Robert L. Mathis and John H. Jackson, Human Resource Management, 11th edition (Mason, OH: South-Western, 2006), 78–79. 3. The correlation between intelligence and job performance is .23 for unskilled jobs, .40 for semi-skilled jobs, and .58 for professional-managerial jobs. The correlation between conscientiousness and job performance is .31, according to F. L. Schmidt and J. E. Hunter, “The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings,” Psychological Bulletin 124 (1998), 262–274. 4. E. A. Locke and G. P. Latham, A Theory of Goal-Setting and Task Performance (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990). 5. R. E. Kopelman and L. Reinharth, “Research Results: The Effect of Merit-Pay Practices on White Collar Performance,” Compensation Review 14 (1982) 30–40. Also R. L. Heneman, Merit Pay: Linking Pay Increases to Performance Ratings (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992). 6. V. H. Vroom, Work and Motivation (New York: Wiley, 1964). 7. Mathis and Jackson, Human Resource Management, 333. 8. David DeLambo, “The Evolution of Employment Practices Regarding Lay Parish Ministry,” this volume. 9. Mathis and Jackson, Human Resource Management, 332. 10. DeLambo, “Evolution of Employment Practices.” 11. Mike Svach, Director of Diocesan Personnel, Diocese of Joliet, IL, 2007, personal communication. 12. Locke and Latham, Goal-Setting and Task Performance. 13. Locke and Latham, Goal-Setting and Task Performance. 14. Laird W. Mealiea and Gary P. Latham, Skills for Managerial Success: Theory, Experience, and Practice (Chicago: Irwin, 1996) 356–365. 15. Mathis and Jackson, Human Resource Management, 343–351. 16. Garrison Keiler on NPR radio.
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17. Zenobia Fox, “A Post-Vatican II Phenomenon: Lay Ministers: A Critical Three Dimensional Study,” unpublished dissertation, Fordham University, 1986, 204–205. 18. The courts grant exceptions to the prohibition of religious-based discrimination when it comes to religious organizations. 19. DeLambo, “Evolution of Employment Practices.” 20. Mathis and Jackson, Human Resource Management, 354–357. 21. Mike Svach, personal communication, 2007. 22. John Ivancevich, Peter Lorenzi, Steven Skinner, and Philip Crosby, Management Quality and Competitiveness (Burr Ridge, IL: Irwin, 1994), 529. 23. Mike Svach, personal communication, 2007. 24. Michael Orey, “Fear of Firing,” Business Week (April 23, 2007), 52–62. 25. Carrie Brodzinski, “Avoiding Wrongful Termination Suits,” National Underwriter, October 13, 2003, 38–39. 26. Mathis and Jackson, Human Resource Management, 499. See also Frank Elkouri, Edna Asper Elkouri, and Alan Miles Ruben, How Arbitration Works (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 2003), 930–933. 27. Garrison Keiler on NPR radio.
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The Evolution of Employment Practices Regarding Lay Parish Ministry David DeLambo, Ph.D.
T
here is a degree to which parish ministry, and the relationships among its workers, will always be familial—with all the good and bad that such a relationship invokes. It is the nature of the church to be so. But with the changes in employment laws starting in the 1960s, the church as a charitable organization became subject to the same regulations as companies in the private sector and employment practices began to be more formal. Parishes started developing job descriptions, conducting performance appraisals, and establishing personnel policies and employee handbooks in response to these changes in civil law. Canon 1286 of the Revised Code of Canon Law (1983) requires those administering parishes to observe both principles taught by the church and the applicable civil law when dealing with employees. Granted, the modern parish operates more like a small, family-run business than the sophisticated for-profit company. Still practices once reserved for the large corporation are now somewhat common in the church. In what follows I will briefly explore the evolution of employment practices regarding lay parish ministry. The use of the term “evolution” related to employment practices implies trend data and that’s exactly what we have. This recent study of lay parish ministry is the third by the National Pastoral Life Center. The late Msgr. Philip J. Murnion and I conducted the previous two in 1990 and 1997. Since the 2005 study is largely a replication of the previous two, we have comparable data spanning a 15-year period. This is what makes this recent study so valuable. This exploration will primarily focus on parish human resource practices in 2005, weaving in findings from 1990 and 1997 when important differences exist. I’ll cover such issues as job descriptions,
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job contracts, recruiting methods, and position qualifications, to name a few. For those interested in exploring these issues in greater depth than what is presented here, I would recommend obtaining a copy of Lay Parish Ministers: A Study of Emerging Leadership published by the National Pastoral Life Center in November of 2005. To begin, let me define the population I’m referring to when I use the term lay parish minister. In each of our three studies we operationally defined a lay parish minister as a layperson or a vowed religious (considered “lay” by canon law) working at least 20 hours a week in a paid position as a member of a parish pastoral staff. We are looking at pastoral staff as distinct from support staff, maintenance staff, and parochial school staff. Parish life coordinator, director of religious education, pastoral associate, youth minister, music minister, and liturgist are but a few of the more common roles held by lay parish ministers.
RESEARCH METHODS As replication studies, the research methodology employed in 1990, 1997, and 2005 are nearly identical. All were conducted in two phases. Phase I was a national survey of Catholic parishes. Parishes were selected through stratified random sampling. First, dioceses were randomly selected in each of the USCCB regions of the country.1 In 1990 and 1997, a total of 43 dioceses were selected; in 2005, however, we chose to double that number to further insure that the dioceses selected represented the country. Next, a random sample of parishes from these dioceses was obtained from the Official Catholic Directory. In 2005, that process produced a list of 3,000 parishes in the 86 selected dioceses. Phase I questionnaires were sent to the pastors or parish life coordinators of these parishes. The purpose of Phase I was twofold: first, to gather basic information on the ever-changing context of parish ministry; second, to gather the specific names of laypersons, religious, and clergy serving these parishes. A staffing sheet was included in the center section of the parish survey, asking for names, job titles, and demographic information on all members of the pastoral staff working at least 20 hours in a typical week. Of the 3,000 parishes surveyed, 928 responded for a return rate of 31 percent. In Phase II questionnaires were sent to the pastors and lay ministers of parishes employing lay parish ministers. A total of 1,600 lay ministers and 600 pastors received questionnaires. Forty-seven percent of lay parish ministers and 56 percent of pastors returned surveys.
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FINDINGS Let us start our exploration of the data by looking at some basic human resource practices employed by parishes. • Job Descriptions: There is a trend toward putting ministry responsibilities in writing: 84 percent of ministers today have job descriptions, compared with 81 in 1997 and 74 percent in 1990. But standardized job descriptions are not the norm; the majority of those with job descriptions (58 percent) said they helped write it. By and large, parish job descriptions are uniquely crafted to fit the needs of the parish, the gifts of the broader staff, as well as the interests of the pastor and pastoral ministers. And they are fluid. As ministers come and go, the pastor and staff reconfigure their responsibilities according to their gifts and interests, picking up new roles and leaving old ones behind. This is not a practice unique to parish ministry, just indicative of it. • Job Contracts: Here is an interesting finding. Employment contracts are rare in general corporate life where employment-at-will is the norm. In non-profits, only one-third provide employment contracts to their top executives. Yet in the Church, almost six-in-ten lay ministers (57 percent) report working under an employment contract. Do we know for certain why this is the case? No. It may be that the practice is a carry-over from the experience of teachers in the Catholic school system where contracts are standard. The practice may also stem from the fact that women religious—who pioneered the field of lay parish ministry and were often required to work under contracts by their orders—set a precedent that became a norm. Some in ministry have hypothesized that a contract offers a pastor a non-confrontational way to end the employment of an underperforming minister by simply allowing the contract to expire without renewing it. From the employee perspective of the lay parish minister, a contract might be viewed as protection from termination without cause. But given the length of most contracts, which is one year, how much protection does it truly afford? Clearly, further research is needed on the motivations behind the use of employment contracts by parishes. • Performance Appraisals: It is common knowledge that most managers and employees find participating in formal performance appraisals painful. However they are useful in evaluating recruitment results (i.e., whether you hired the right person), determining training needs, identifying accomplishments, and determining professional
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growth opportunities for employees. In the case of parishes, using such a large number of job contracts, appraisals are also a potential means of evaluating whether a contract is being fulfilled. Therefore it is surprising that less than half of lay parish ministers (44 percent) receive an annual evaluation. However, use of performance appraisals is on the rise; only 37 percent of lay parish ministers received such evaluations in 1990. Do we know why so few ministers receive formal performance appraisals? No. One reason may be lack of experience and training on the part of pastors. Pastors generally do not themselves receive formal evaluations and most have not been trained to conduct them. They may see little value in performing a task they themselves have not experienced, benefited from, or been trained to perform. • Personnel Policies and Employee Handbooks: It appears that parishes see value in creating employee handbooks and establishing termination procedures. Two-thirds of ministers (68 percent) say their parish provides written personnel policies or employee handbooks; a similar number (64 percent) say their parish has a termination policy or procedure. We have no comparable data from earlier studies to determine if this is a growing trend, but the use of personnel policies and employee handbooks by parishes merits further attention. Let us turn our attention from the topic of employment practices to the topic of ministry recruitment. We asked Lay Pastoral Ministers how they first learned of their present ministry position. The results are presented here in table 4.1. Table 4.1. How You First Learned About Your Present Ministry Position: Those With and Without Previous Ministry Employment (2005) Category Informal Networks 67%
Formal Networks 22%
TOTAL
How you first learned about your present ministry position Contacted and asked to apply by the pastor Contacted and asked to apply by other parish staff Word of mouth Parish bulletin advertisement Diocesan newspaper/magazine advertisement Religious order network Diocesan personnel office Diocesan ministry placement network Internet posting National newspaper / magazine advertisement National ministry placement network Other
Percent 31 20 13 3 6 4 4 4 3 1 — 11 100%
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Notice that two-thirds of ministers first learned of their position through local, informal, and personal networks. They were contacted and asked to apply by the pastor or another staff member, they heard about the opening through the grape vine or read about the opening in the parish bulletin. Only 22 percent first learned of their present position through more formal means: • • • • • • •
Diocesan newspaper/magazine advertisement Religious order network Diocesan personnel office Diocesan ministry placement network Internet posting National newspaper / magazine advertisement National ministry placement network
Parenthetically, those in first paid ministry position (44 percent of the total) were more likely to have learned about their present position through local, “INFORMAL” networks (77 percent versus 59 percent); those with previous paid experience are three times more likely to have learned through “FORMAL” networks (33 percent versus 11 percent). Still, informal networks were the predominant way of learning about job openings among both groups. Now compare how lay ministers learned about their present positions with the way parishes recruit for these positions. Table 4.2 lists methods parishes use to recruit lay parish ministers. Here, too, informal networks dominate. As seen in table 4.2, the most commonly used method is “one-to-one” recruitment. Eighty-four percent use this method regularly or often. This is consistent with the above finding that the majority of lay ministers learn of their position through direct contact by pastors and staff. The parish bulletin, on the other hand, while widely used for recruitment (67 percent), is a less efficient means of communicating job openings, since only 3 percent of parish ministers learned of their current position through this method. A more efficient means of recruitment is advertisement in the diocesan newspaper: 40 percent of parishes use this method “regularly” or “often” and 7 percent of ministers first learn of their current position this way. Nevertheless, what stands out is the heavy reliance on local, informal, personal networks when searching for lay parish ministers. This is exemplified in the reported use of one-to-one recruiting methods among people they know, and the frequent use of the parish bulletin to advertise positions. There is other evidence as well. We found that the vast majority of lay parish ministers without previous paid ministry experience came to their current positions through volunteerism. Nearly three-quarters of those in their first paid assignment (74
19 24 6 5 7 3 2 2
One-to-one recruiting from people you know Advertisement in parish bulletin
Use of diocesan recruiting network or clearinghouse Advertisement in diocesan or other local papers Contact with religious orders Contact with colleges, universities, etc. Advertisement in national papers, publications Internet Use of national recruiting network or clearinghouse
Other
Informal Networks Above 50%
Formal Networks Below 50%
43 37
Method Used
% Use Regularly
Category
Table 4.2. Methods Used by Parishes to Recruit Lay Parish Ministers (2005)
12
48 40 27 21 14 13 8
84 67
% Use Regularly or Often
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percent) say they had previously been VOLUNTEERING at the parish that currently employs them, versus 37 percent of those for whom this was not their first paid position. Additionally, slightly more than three-quarters of those in their first paid ministry position say they were PARISHIONERS at the parish where they FIRST became a PAID lay minister versus 43 percent of those for whom this was not their first paid position. One might call this the “local dimension” of lay parish ministry—recruiting and hiring from within the parish. There are some benefits to hiring from within. Those volunteering come with: • • • •
pre-existing social networks—a valuable asset in getting things done; demonstrated commitment to ministry and to the parish; a pre-existing positive relationship with the pastor; and a record of success ministering in the parish (i.e., less risk).
Given that pastors frequently recruit via local, informal, and personal networks, the question arises: what do they look for in a lay parish minister? What do they value? What qualities and credentials do they think are most important? We asked pastors with lay parish ministers on staff to rate a series of considerations in terms of their importance when hiring a lay parish minister. The results are captured in table 4.3. Table 4.3. What Pastors Consider Important in Hiring (2005)
How important are these when hiring a lay parish minister? That That That That That That That That That That That That That That That That
the person has good relational skills the person is prayerful the person has experience in ministry the person has a similar ecclesiology the person has a degree in a ministry-related field the person is lay their salary won’t be the family’s primary income the person is a religious they can receive healthcare via their spouse the person is a parishioner the person is someone you know the person is married the person’s ethnic background matches parishioners the person is bi-lingual the person is female the person is male
% Very Important
% Very or Somewhat Important
68 51 32 36 18 11 9 18 8 12 5 2 6 6 1 <1
99 95 83 79 66 41 38 36 31 31 26 23 20 19 7 5
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Table 4.4. What Credentials Were Required for Your Present Position? (Lay Parish Ministers, 2005) Required Credential
% “Yes”
Master’s degree or equivalent Bachelor’s degree or equivalent Certificate or special training: diocesan or other Certification process: diocesan or national Other None
31 33 26 18 13 11
Note that pastors look for people with good relational skills, who are prayerful, experienced in ministry, and share a similar ecclesiology. Nearly all pastors who retain lay parish ministers rated these qualities as “Very” or “Somewhat Important.” That the person they hire has a degree in a ministryrelated field does have importance to about two-thirds of pastors (66 percent), but few (18 percent) rate this as “Very Important.” The bottom line is that hiring decisions are based more on important personal qualities than on résumés and credentials. Support for this conclusion is evident in the list of credentials lay parish ministers report as prerequisites for their present positions. We gave lay ministers a list of possible credentials and asked them to check all that apply. Their results are recorded in table 4.4. Table 4.4 shows that nearly 70 percent of lay parish ministry positions do not require a Master’s degree; nearly 75 percent do not require a certificate or special training; and more than 80 percent do not require some form of certification. This is not to say that pastors do not value training and education; they simply value other qualities more. Parenthetically, those with previous paid ministry experience were much more likely to say that a master’s degree was required for their present ministry position than those for whom this was their first paid position (43 percent versus 17 percent).
CONCLUSION In sum, we can see that in terms of basic human resource practices, lay parish ministry is becoming more formal, more professional. This is seen in the increasing use of job descriptions, and to some degree performance evaluations, and the presence of employee handbooks and policies. Some of this is due to the increasing human resource support parishes are receiving from diocesan offices. This is an interesting topic in and of itself, one that is explored in some detail in the book. However, in terms of recruitment practices and job
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qualifications, lay parish ministry remains largely informal. Pastors tend to recruit people they know, drawing largely from the pool of volunteers at their parishes. They look for people with good relational skills, who are prayerful, experienced in ministry, and share a similar ecclesiology. Much less emphasis is placed on professional credentials like pastoral education, formation, and training. Overall these findings are consistent with a burgeoning profession/ ministerial vocation that is still in its nascent stage. It will be interesting to see the direction that dioceses and parishes take in years to come with regard to employment issues. Will HR practices conform more to the corporate and not-for-profit sector? Will the responsibility for staffing parishes move appreciably away from the parish and the pastor in the direction of the diocese and the bishop?
NOTE 1. In 1990 and 1997, what was then the National Conference of Catholic Bishops was divided into 13 Regions. Its successor, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is divided into 14 Regions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY DeLambo, David. Lay Parish Ministers: A Study of Emerging Leadership. New York: National Parish Life Center, 2005.
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Using Standards in Lay Ecclesial Ministry Professional Development Christopher Anderson
Knowing the standards and competencies needed to succeed in a role is at the heart of any evaluation process. When the people developing these standards and competencies work within the field, an extra degree of credibility is added since the standards represent the communal wisdom of the profession. Within the Catholic Church, groups of ministerial professionals have been naming the standards and competencies needed for their roles for over forty years. Their collective wisdom provides a resource for use in professional evaluations when working with lay ecclesial ministers to develop a professional growth plan.
HISTORY OF STANDARDS For the past 75 years, professional associations representing doctors, nurses, teachers, accountants, and engineers have developed educational requirements and skills standards. These requirements and standards raised the professionalism in these fields while increasing the awareness of the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in these roles. During this same period, Christian denominations began professionalizing their expectations for ministers (Rev. Joseph Merkt and Dr. Sharon Callahan).1 Later many of these same denominations also examined the role of the laity in their congregations and within their leadership. Within the Catholic Church, the first efforts to certify ministers came about for hospital, prison, and seaport chaplains. Secular and interfaith organizations were calling for chaplains to be certified. Catholic associations, including the Bishops’ Conference, responded with certification processes. The first 39
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Catholic hospital chaplains were certified through grandfathering in 1966. All those who were originally certified were priests. Religious deacons and laity became eligible in 1973. Later specializations and additional processes were developed for other types of chaplains. The current National Certification Standards for Lay Ecclesial Ministers were developed by four Catholic associations: • • • •
National National National National
Association for Lay Ministry (NALM) Conference for Catechetical Leadership (NCCL) Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry (NFCYM) Association of Pastoral Musicians (NPM)
These standards and competencies were approved in 2003 by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Commission on Certification and Accreditation (USCCB-CCA). There are five standards: 1) Personal & Spiritual Maturity; 2) Ministerial Identity; 3) Roman Catholic Theology; 4) Pastoral and Ministerial Care & Praxis; and 5) Professional Practice. These serve as headings for what is the heart of the resource, 33 core competencies. Example 1. Certification Standard Five: Professional Practice Core Competency 5.1 A lay ecclesial minister shall utilize leadership skills in ministry, including visioning, planning, communication, decision making, delegation and conflict management.2
Additionally the National Certification Standards for Lay Ecclesial Ministers include specialized competencies relating to the individual fields within lay ecclesial ministry: parish catechetical leaders, youth ministry leaders, pastoral associates, parish life coordinators, and directors of music ministry. Having one combined common resource for the formation and certification for lay ecclesial ministers represents a great deal of foresight, collaboration, and coordination between individual ministers, formation programs, and the four ministerial associations. Naturally, it did not start that way. Each ministry and their professional associations independently developed their own competencies and standards. The first to be approved were youth minister standards developed by NFCYM and approved by the USCCB-CCA in 1990. NALM’s standards for pastoral associates and parish administrators were developed and approved in 1995. NCCL followed with directors of religious education in 1996. Once all three organizations had approved standards, an inter-organizational effort began to unite the efforts. The main reason for this unification was to allow formation programs to work effectively with different standards for each ministry. The combined
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standards affirms the basic and fundamental knowledge necessary to function as a professional lay ecclesial minister is the same regardless of the specialized ministry. These common areas are the heart of the current standards, but inclusion of the specialized competencies creates an all-inclusive resource for formation programs. A distinguishing aspect of these standardizing efforts, and eventual certification of lay ecclesial ministers, is that the individuals and organizations championing standards and certification are solely from Catholic institutions. Unlike other certified professionals currently employed by the Church, such as health care professionals, chaplains, and teachers, there is no outside government or secular group demanding professional certification. Since the vast majority are diocesan and parish employees, additional voices are also needed. It is hoped that others, from the pews to the bishop’s cathedra, will see the benefit of standards and certification so that tested, proven, and qualified lay ministers will assume leadership roles in our parishes. USING THE STANDARDS IN EVALUATION Early editions of the standards cautioned against using the standards in employee evaluations. The caution was based on the concern that almost every minister, lay or ordained, would fall short of the standards and competencies to some degree. In addition, a supervisor could misuse the open-ended nature of the phrasing of the standards and competencies and interpret them in a way that no one could reasonably meet. These cautions were wise, and they remain so today, since the standards are designed to be used in education and ministry formation rather than creating objective-based evaluations. The development of assessment tools for educators to use with ministry students or for continuing education has always been encouraged. All the organizations involved in issuing professional standards for ministers have some type of standard-based assessment tools for use in an educational setting.3 These tools allow individuals and organizations to assess ministers based on the skills expectations developed by their ministerial peers so they can name their strengths and weaknesses with objective measures and develop individual learning plans. Currently, too often these self-assessments are only used with students and not by working professionals. The next step is to modify these assessment tools so they can be used to create individual professional development plans in the work setting. Developing these plans would be a natural outgrowth from performance appraisal processes that are focused on developing an individual’s talents and gifts to meet the demands of ministry.
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The first step in developing a growth plan is simply to have the individual take a self-assessment. All of these ministerial self-assessments ask individuals to evaluate themselves compared to a core concept and assign themselves some type of grade. For example, NALM’s new assessment tool uses this scale: 1 - to indicate an awareness of the competency, but with no experience in this area. 2 - to indicate a brief introduction to the core competency, but with little experience in this area. 3 - to indicate a grasp of the core concepts of the competency, including an awareness of the available resources and some demonstrated experience in this area. 4 - to indicate knowledge that informs practice by a demonstrated inclusion of the core competencies into one’s ministerial practice. 5 - to indicate a mastery for empowering others by demonstrating an expert level of knowledge, confidence, and skill as well as the ability to form or train others in this area.4 After the individual has completed the self-assessment, he or she should review the assessment with a supervisor and discuss the results. The supervisor’s input should become an important step in the process at this point, confirming the results or explaining why the supervisor’s assessment would vary. The goal is to build conformity between the individual and supervisor assessment. Before beginning to build an individual learning plan within a job setting, William Johnston suggests that some other factors be weighed. These include but are not limited to: 1. Do past evaluations highlight any particular competency or competencies that the individual needs to strengthen, develop, cultivate, or learn? 2. Within the organization, have there been any changes that will make certain skills or knowledge more important in the near future? 3. Does the parish’s organizational plan call for the development of any particular competency or competencies? 4. Does the development of any particular competency or competencies make more sense in the collective context of the whole staff’s knowledge and skill set rather than the context of the individual? 5. Are there any competencies that simply seem most important or even more interesting to the individual at this time?5 After reviewing the self-assessment and other factors shaping the professional development needs of the individual, choose two or three competency
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items to address in the coming year. These should be selected in conversation between the supervisor and the employee. Since we are talking about formation for ministry, prayer needs to be part of the decision-making process as well. The next step is writing a plan that includes the following elements: • • • •
The competency How the development will happen Approaching timelines The means for assessing progress
Commonly these are developed into a chart for easy reference. Throughout the year, the plan needs to be referenced and updated. Courses, workshops, readings, and formational activities should be recorded, making the plan a record for future evaluations. Like the instructions on a shampoo bottle, the final step in developing a successful growth plan is “repeat.” The standards and competencies represent a body of knowledge that no minister could hope to completely master. There is always room for more study, more practice, and more development of the knowledge and skills to be an effective minister. Personal growth plans should be reworked each year as part of the employee’s evaluation.
CO-WORKERS IN THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD The USCCB pastoral, Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord: A Resource for Guiding the Development of Lay Ecclesial Ministry, affects those working with the standards in two ways. First, Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord affirms the efforts that the national ministerial associations and the USCCB-CCA have made regarding standards. Anecdotally, NALM has seen an increase in interest in standards and certification since the release of the bishops’ statements, an increase that is expected to continue since many dioceses and schools are beginning to work Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord into their continuing educational plans. Secondly, Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord has its own four focus areas for lay formation: • • • •
Human Spiritual Intellectual Pastoral
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These four areas could be used for developing self-assessments based on this document versus using the standards and competencies. However, since CoWorkers in the Vineyard of the Lord does not have the level of detail present in the Standards, it is simply more practical to continue to use the Standards. Rev. Joseph Merkt developed a grid early in the consultation process for the pastoral that shows where all the formation areas put forth in Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord are in National Certification Standards for Lay Ecclesial Ministers.
CONCLUSION Now that the standards and competencies are impacting ministry formation efforts, a new emphasis can be developed for their use in sustaining individuals in lay ecclesial ministry. Using the standards and competencies as a means for developing individual professional growth plans is a natural offshoot of the overall effort to improve the performance of the ministerial workforce. As the number of lay ecclesial ministers continues to grow, the Church needs more intentional means to evaluate and form them during their service to the community.
NOTES 1. Joseph Merkt and Sharon Callahan, Common Formation Goals for Ministry (Washington, DC. National Association for Lay Ministry, National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry, and National Conference for Catechetical Leadership, 2000), 1. 2. National Certification Standards for Lay Ecclesial Ministers (Washington, DC. National Association for Lay Ministry, National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry, National Conference for Catechetical Leadership and National Association of Pastoral Musicians, 2006). 3. Both the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry and National Conference for Catechetical Leadership have developed self-assessment tools based on the standards. NALM provides these tools in That Ministries May Flourish: Resources for Using the National Certification Standards. The Archdiocese of Louisville and the Diocese of Phoenix, have developed their own standard assessment tools. 4. NALM, That Ministries May Flourish. 5. NALM, That Ministries May Flourish.
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Performance Management in a Family Business? Zeni Fox, Ph.D.
T
his chapter addresses performance management of lay ecclesial ministers. “Performance management” is a business concept in vogue today. “Lay ecclesial minister” is a Church title (the relatively new designation for those lay persons who are professionally prepared for their ministry in the Church). What are the implications of drawing these two realms together—if you will, the secular and the sacred—to speak of performance management of lay ecclesial ministers? I think that the question of structuring a performance management system for lay ministers in a parish is complex for several reasons. My approach in exploring this issue will be rather like the turning of a kaleidoscope, noting various relevant aspects. I will examine in turn the lay ecclesial ministers, priests and pastors, the parish, and a theological perspective relative to our concerns. The view point I bring is that of a pastoral theologian; it is informed most particularly by my teaching of numerous lay ecclesial ministers over the course of many years, and of following the research reports on parishes and ministry.
LAY ECCLESIAL MINISTERS In 1992 Philip Murnion published his study conducted for the Committee on Pastoral Practices of the Bishops’ Conference. One of the six themes he judged as most notable was that “the emergence of lay ministry has had a sharply local quality, with all the advantages and disadvantages this brings—establishing positions, their responsibilities and requirements, has been largely determined by pastors and increasingly means hiring parishioners.”1 In examining hiring 45
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approaches, Murnion differentiated between a “professional” approach, and one based on the pastor’s prior experience with the individual. Almost 82 percent of the pastors said they recruited from among people they knew.2 One pastor said that “he liked to have people work first on a volunteer basis, for both of them to find each other’s particular way of working.”3 Furthermore, in describing the nature of the pastor-parish minister relationship, 25 percent of the parish ministers chose the description team, 11 percent colleague, and 9 percent friend, while only 16 percent said employee.4 In this relationally oriented pattern of hiring and working, Murnion’s findings relative to evaluation are not surprising. “Performance evaluations are infrequent: about one in three ministers experience this.” (It is interesting that vowed religious are less likely to have regular evaluations than are lay people.) Murnion places these results in a larger context, namely that “there is not much of a tradition of evaluation in the church.”5 In addition to assessing the use of more formal evaluation, Murnion examined the idea of “affirmation,” which he said many ministers are looking for, so as to have assurance that their work is valuable and appreciated. He concluded, “There are some indications from the data and from the site visits that pastors are not always generous with such comments.”6 The basic pattern identified in the 1992 study, of a preference for hiring persons already known, and of placing a high valuation on collegial working, is found again in the two later studies by the Pastoral Life Center.7 In 1985, I had conducted a national study of lay persons employed in parishes, in ministerial roles. Although the data is old, my experience suggests that some perspectives are consistent with the situation today. Seeking to understand the locus of attention of the lay ministers, four questions were posed, asking whose praise was most valued, whose critique most painful, whose evaluation most frequently sought, and who most valued their work. In response to each question, by a significant margin, respondents named those they directly served. In most instances, the pastor ranked second. Diocesan personnel and the bishop were not of import.8 One interpretation of this is that, although part of a hierarchical Church, ministers do not focus primarily on their superiors, but on the people they serve. This may explain why lay ecclesial ministers so often use written evaluation tools at the end of programs they have planned, seeking the perspective of participants. This pattern of evaluation is very widespread. However, another finding from my study suggests that formal evaluation could be very helpful to these ministers. Asked how their situation could be improved, responses such as more money, more security, more success, and more autonomy were ranked far lower in importance than “that my efforts are valued,” ranked first by a significant margin. Second ranked was “that my
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role or function be clarified.”9 Performance evaluation could provide needed affirmation, and role clarification. A development in professional lay ministry circles over the last 15 or so years is notable. Several organizations have gone through an extensive process developing competency based standards for their constituents. The National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry was the first to do this, later followed by the National Association for Lay Ministry (they prepared three sets of standards, for Pastoral Ministers, Pastoral Associates, and Parish Life Coordinators) and the National Conference of Catechetical Leadership. Broad consultation with their membership and eventual approval by the USCCB Commission on Certification and Accreditation has made the language of the standards part of common parlance in these circles. The publication of common competency goals in 2000 marked a further development.10 The Association of Graduate Programs in Ministry has had extensive conversation about the use of the competency goals as benchmarks in their formation for ministry programs, and the bishops reference them in their document on lay ecclesial ministry, Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord.11 Commenting on this development, Charlotte McCorquodale, chair of the NFCYM committee which began these efforts, said, “It was a struggle, because these concepts were foreign to our world. But the level of commitment was high, because we desired to raise the professionalism of youth ministry. The biggest challenge was deciding which of five roles, volunteer on up, to focus on. We settled on the coordinator role.”12 What is particularly notable is that the development of competency based standards, of an accountability mechanism, was a grass roots effort from the beginning, an effort by lay ministry practitioners to improve efforts in their fields. The felt need for accountability can be noted here. The data presented here suggests that lay ecclesial ministers desire the professionalization of their roles in the Church, and would welcome the affirmation and clarification of their role and work which performance management would include. However, the strongly relational pattern of hiring and working would present a challenge to the development and implementation of such a system.
PRIESTS AND PASTORS A second variable relative to performance evaluation is the priest, the person most likely to conduct performance evaluations. The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) has found that parish priests spend about 16 percent of their time in parish administrative or supervisory work, with pastors tending to spend a greater proportion of their time, especially pastors of larger
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parishes.13 Seventy percent of non-retired priests would prefer to spend less time in administrative or supervisory work than they now do. The percentage was almost the same among the recently ordained. This data has further relevance when placed in the context of some other findings by CARA. The work load of priests is heavy: about three fourths of priests report that they are on call 24 hours a day; about four-tenths work over 60 hours per week, and nearly two-tenths work over 80 hours per week. Thirty percent of priests report that they are too busy to meet all the pastoral needs of the people they serve, with the proportion increasing to 44 percent among those who spend more than 20 hours a week on supervisory and administrative work.14 Being too busy and feeling burdened by administrative and supervisory work poses a problem larger than the issue of morale of priests. CARA found that eighty percent of all non-retired priests in the general survey “strongly disagree” that they have seriously thought about leaving the priesthood in the last five years. However, this decreases to 73 percent among priests who “strongly agree” that they would prefer less administrative work, to 60 percent among priests who strongly agree they are too busy to pray, and 56 percent among priests who strongly agree they are too busy to meet the pastoral needs of those they serve. In general, the relationships are parallel—though not quite as strong—among recently ordained priests.15
A factor in the desire for less administrative work may be that priests feel they are not prepared in the seminary for such functions. A study of recently ordained priests found that the area of seminary formation that received the lowest rating was preparation for church administration. Commenting on this, Sr. Katarina Schuth says, “Seminaries are hard-pressed to include any more areas of study than are already required by the Program of Priestly Formation and the requests of various bishops and religious superiors.”16 The same study found that of fifteen problems which may face priests today, the one that ranked highest was “too much work.”17 When the young priests name the areas of ministry which give them the greatest satisfaction, 75 percent or more say the following are of great importance: administering the sacraments and presiding at liturgy, preaching the Word, helping people and families in their daily lives, and the opportunity to work with many people and be a part of their lives. Only 46 percent name administering the life of the Church.18 As noted above, a CARA study found that 30 percent of parish priests say they are too busy to adequately meet the pastoral needs of the people they serve.19 Coupled with the finding that priests have too much work, this data on what priests value doing suggests to me that evaluation would not receive a high priority in the planning of a day’s work.
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The picture that emerges here is of pastors/priests who have not been prepared for administrative and supervisory work, who do not prefer doing this kind of work, and who already feel overburdened by all that their role entails. Add to this the complexity, noted above, of a very relational system, and the difficulty of introducing a performance management system is clear.
PARISHES Perhaps it is when we look at parishes in the United States that my suggestion that many are like a family business becomes most apparent. CARA’s “National Parish Inventory” describes parishes according to four models based on the size of the parish. Each model describes approximately the same number of parishes. The smallest parishes, with 200 or fewer registered households, are called “family parishes.” Only 63 percent of them have a resident pastor; the average number of priests is 1.1, and the average number of lay professional staff 0.7. In “community parishes,” from 201 to 549 registered households, 91 percent have a resident pastor; the average number of priests assigned to each parish is 1.2 and the average number of lay professional staff 1.5. Even in parishes described as “corporate,” the average number of priests assigned is 1.5, and of lay professional staff 2.4. Ninety-six percent of these parishes have a resident pastor. Finally, in “mega parishes,” with more than 1200 registered households, 97 percent have a resident pastor. In these parishes, there are on average 2.3 priests assigned, and 3.8 lay professional staff.20 When these numbers are viewed with the findings about the relational style of hiring and working prevalent in parishes it is clear that a business corporate model of performance evaluation would be difficult. An added perspective on this comes from my recent work with the process in my archdiocese focused toward building relationships for ministry between parishes, including linking and merging of parishes. I observed two differing models of parishes. One I described as communal, centered in the life of an organic community, and expressed through such activities as devotions, parish societies, and festivals. The second, I described as bureaucratic (with no prejudice involved in the term), centered in structured ministries and councils. The evaluation tool for parish life prepared by the diocese was far more relevant to the lived life of the bureaucratic style parishes, though a significant proportion of the parishes are of the communal type. Such variation in the life of our parishes is a factor to consider in any plans for evaluation processes. I think that performance management would be particularly difficult to implement in communal-type parishes.
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If, indeed, most parishes are more like family businesses, what would be an effective system for performance management? Since the model emerges out of large business organizations, what adaptation would be needed if this were to be help to Church life?
THEOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS There are many ways in which we could situate efforts at evaluation within the theological tradition of the church. I will draw on the document approved by the United States bishops in November of 2005, Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord, because it is the first official document to examine the reality of lay ecclesial ministry. Two themes are of particular relevance to our discussion. The first is the idea of vocation, of a call from God to what we do in life. There has been significant expansion of this concept in the Catholic community in recent years, inviting us to be attentive to God’s call to each member of the community. There has always been an emphasis on how important discernment of God’s call is relative to leadership of the ecclesial community. There is also a long tradition of nurturing and supporting vocations of church service. The bishops say: These lay ecclesial ministers often express a sense of being called. This sense motivates what they are doing, guiding and shaping a major life choice and commitment to Church ministry. At the same time, they know that a self-discerned call by the individual is not sufficient. Their call must also become one that is discerned with the Church and authenticated by the bishop, or his delegate, who alone is able to authorize someone to serve in ecclesial ministry.21
In an earlier document, they said: Lay ecclesial ministry is experienced by many to be a call to ministry, a vocation. It is the role and responsibility of the entire Church (including the bishop and the local parish community) to foster, nurture, encourage, and help discern all vocations to ministry.22
This emphasis on vocation, a call from God to ministry, and on discernment, suggests modes of evaluation which strive to glimpse the workings of the Spirit. Religious communities and dioceses have developed ways of assessing effective ministry, and based on such evaluation, giving more responsibility to parish ministers. (This is much truer relative to the ordained than to lay leaders.) Implicit in such evaluation is an effort to discern the work of the
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Spirit in the Church, at times more intentional than at others. Gospel values such as serving the least, and empowering others, are factors in such discernment. A system devised based on bottom line evaluation is different in kind from that which, at its best, Church “evaluation” seeks to embody. The second theme in Co-Workers relative to our concern is its theology of ministry. The bishops root the Church’s mission and ministry in the mystery of the Trinity: “The one true God is fundamentally relational: a loving communion of persons,” and the Church which shares in the life of the Trinity exists as a communion of persons. All of the faithful are called to participate in the Church’s mission, with their diverse ministries and charisms, or gifts of the Spirit. Ministry, therefore, is “profoundly relational.”23 This interpersonal, relational dimension of ministry must be the framework for evaluative processes. The document presents ministry as situated in an ordered community of disciples, with the bishop as the center of communion. Evaluation is treated in this context. By reason of his ministry it is the role of the bishop, often through the pastor, to give oversight (episcope) to order these new ministerial relationships within his diocese and to affirm and guide the use of those gifts that lay ecclesial ministers bring—not to extinguish the Spirit, but to test everything and to retain what is good. . . . The guidance can take a range of forms in the life and structure of a particular church [including] establishing standards for formation and evaluation.24
Although evaluation is but a minor note in the document, the oversight or evaluation of lay ecclesial ministers clearly is valued, and clearly is consonant with our traditions. However, the themes of vocation, discernment and relationality must be kept in mind in developing evaluation procedures. It is here that the challenge is most clear: to develop modes of performance evaluation that are congruent with these central aspects of our tradition, aspects which have stood the test of a two thousand year history.
CONCLUSION It has been my intention to identify some of the complexities relative to developing modes of performance evaluation in parishes. I do not think that a business model of evaluation would fit the reality of parish ministry, although there is surely much to be learned from business models. There is also much to be learned from processes of discernment, a spiritually grounded way of “testing the
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spirit,” and from interpersonal ways of holding one another accountable. Developing models appropriate to life in the Church must draw on multiple sources in order to be faithful to the dynamic of a community of disciples. What is needed at this point is an ongoing and in-depth exchange between individuals from the world of business and the Church to continue the dialogue in order to discern (yes, discern) ways of allowing the riches of the Church’s tradition, and the wisdom of the world of business, to mutually enrich each other (the idea of mutual enrichment is deliberately posed), for the good of the Church, and the human enterprise of business.
NOTES 1. Philip J. Murnion, New Parish Ministers: Laity and Religious on Parish Staffs (New York: National Pastoral Life Center, 1992), 2. Murnion, New Parish Ministers, 37. In his 1999 study, Murnion notes that pastors continue to primarily hire parishioners. See also Philip J. Murnion and David DeLambo, Parishes and Parish Ministers: A Study of Parish and Lay Ministry (New York, National Pastoral Life Center, 1999), 23. 3. Murnion, New Parish Ministers, 41. 4. Murnion and DeLambo, Parishes and Parish Ministers, 58, reporting here the statistics from the 1992 study. 5. John Beal’s chapter, in this volume, explores the modes of performance management for priests which have been employed in recent history, what Canon Law requires, and some of the difficulties relative to developing a more comprehensive system for clergy. 6. Murnion, New Parish Ministers. 7. Murnion and DeLambo, Parishes and Parish Ministers; see also David DeLambo, Lay Parish Ministers: A Study in Emerging Leadership (New York, National Pastoral Life Center, 2005). David DeLambo’s paper in this volume more fully explores recent data on this topic. 8. Zenobia Fox, A Post-Vatican II Phenomenon: Lay Ministers: A Critical Three Dimensional Study, unpublished dissertation, Fordham University, 1986, 204-205. 9. Fox, A Post-Vatican II Phenomenon, 202. 10. Joseph T. Merkt, ed., “Common Formation Goals for Ministry” (Washington, DC, NALM, NCCL, NFCYM, 2000). Further perspective on this development is offered in this volume by Christopher Anderson. 11. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2005), 46. 12. Charlotte McCorquodale, interview by author, telephone conversation, March 28, 2007. 13. Paul Perl and Brian T. Froehle, “Priests in the United States: Satisfaction, Work Load and Support Structures,” CARA, Working Paper No. 5, 2002, 31-33, accessed
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April 10, 2007. Sr. Katarina Schuth offers valuable perspective on the experience of seminarians and priests with performance evaluation in her paper in this volume. 14. Perl and Froehle, “Priests in the United States,” 25-26, 35. 15. Perl and Froehle, “Priests in the United States,” 39. 16. “The Study’s Implications for Seminary Formators,” in The First Five Years of the Priesthood, Dean R. Hoge, (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2002). 17. Hoge, First Five Years, 26. 18. Hoge, First Five Years, 21. 19. Perl and Froehle, “Priests in the United States,” 35. 20. Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, “National Parish Inventory” (Washington DC, 2000), 4. 21. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Co-Workers. The bishops also state that their work made them aware of “a need for a more thorough study of our theology of vocation,” 67. 22. Lay Ecclesial Ministry: The State of the Questions, A Report of the Subcommittee on Lay Ministry (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1999). 23. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Co-Workers, 17-21. 24. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Co-Workers, 23.
II PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF CLERGY
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Performance Management Of Catholic Clergy: “Best Practice” or New Iconoclasm? Rev. John Beal, J.C.D.
PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT OF CLERGY: AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME?
Almost every organization of any size employs some structured system for
regular assessment or evaluation of the performance of its personnel. A conspicuous exception to this trend is the Roman Catholic Church. Although performance appraisal policies and practices for lay employees of the Church, both those who meet the criteria for lay ecclesial minister and others, are not uncommon but still rather spotty,1 those for personnel, both lay and clergy, involved in specialized sectors, especially education and health care, are common. However, performance management has not been enthusiastically embraced, notably with the principle of periodic performance assessments of the ordained ministering in parish settings. Scattered efforts have been made to evaluate the performance of the newly ordained and of pastors, especially when decisions about the renewal of the latter’s terms are pending,2 but these efforts have not generated a groundswell of support for a more systematic approach to the assessment of ministerial performance by the ordained. Performance evaluations do occur, of course. Bishops and their staffs form impressions of priests’ ministerial performance, sometimes on the basis of direct observation, but more often on the basis of reports from others; other priests are quite aware of their confreres’ strengths and weaknesses, achievements and failings, talents and foibles; and lay people evaluate clergy performance every time they preside over the Eucharist, mount the pulpit, or appear (or fail to appear) at a hospital bedside. However, these evaluations are neither systematic nor susceptible to being aggregated into a form suitable for assisting the clergy to develop their ministerial skills and so to improve their ministerial 57
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performance. What Thomas Reese said about clergy performance assessments nearly 20 years ago remains largely true today: “Everyone agrees that the weakest part of the priests’ personnel system is the lack of any systematic evaluation. In most archdioceses there is no real evaluation of a priest’s work.”3 During their years of seminary formation, future priests are to receive a grounding in the theological disciplines which will provide the framework for their ministry and to develop some rudimentary competence in such practical pastoral skills as homiletics, liturgical celebration, catechetics and religious education, pastoral counseling, and church administration; and their academic, pastoral, and spiritual development is regularly monitored and evaluated. After ordination, priests are obliged “to pursue sacred studies,” “to attend pastoral lectures. . . and conferences which offer them the opportunity to acquire a fuller knowledge of the sacred sciences and pastoral methods,” and “to acquire a fuller knowledge of other sciences, . . . particularly insofar as such knowledge contributes to the exercise of pastoral ministry.”(c. 279) However, fulfillment of this obligation for continuing formation has largely been the responsibility of the individual priest himself, although his continuing formation may be monitored by ecclesiastical superiors through attendance checks at continuing education and formation programs and at annual retreats.4 The underlying presumption seems to be that postordination development of pastoral skills will result inevitably from “learning by doing” supplemented by various forms of “in-service training” and perhaps by mentoring from other priests and, more recently, from lay collaborators. The “ordain them and they will learn” approach to developing priests’ pastoral skills may have had some merit in an age in which a priest could expect to spend an extended period (often twenty years or more) of “internship” after ordination in a series of postings as parochial vicar where he would “learn the ropes” from seasoned pastors before he was entrusted with the responsibility as pastor for a parish. However, that age is over. As the growing shortage of priests makes its impact felt, priests are now assuming the responsibility of pastoring parishes after considerably shorter “internships” as parochial vicars than was previously the case. It is now not unusual for priests to assume their first pastorate by the time they have completed their first year of ordination, and appointment as pastor within five years of ordination is now the norm rather than the exception.5 Moreover, parish priests are increasingly finding themselves responsible for the pastoral care of multiple parishes that have been “yoked” or “clustered” or for parishes whose size and population have been swelled by closures of and mergers with neighboring parishes.6 Priests face the additional responsibilities entailed by larger and often multiple parish communities with less support than has been traditional from other priests, less support both in performing day-today parish ministry and in the camaraderie of rectory living. Less support, of course, entails less monitoring and mentoring as well.7
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Parish priests are responsible for the maintenance of large and sometimes aging parish plants and diverse parish communities whose budgets often exceed $1 million per year. Provision of adequate pastoral care with a diminished presence of other priests and religious requires parish priests to see to the recruitment, training, supervision, and coordination of the activities of a staff of lay ministers, both volunteer and paid, as well as some permanent deacons. These tasks call for administrative and managerial skills that were touched on lightly, if at all, during seminary formation.8 Despite these significant changes in the ecclesial landscape in which ordained ministers operate, changes which have increased the burden of ministerial responsibilities the ordained must bear and for which neither education nor experience have adequately prepared them, a rather “laissez-faire” attitude toward clergy performance and ongoing formation has continued in the Catholic Church. The evidence in support of the presumption that the ordained do in fact enhance their ministerial skills by practicing them is not very encouraging. Since the 1970s Catholics have consistently been less willing than Protestants to give excellent ratings to their parish priests’ performance as preachers, counselors, liturgical presiders, and youth ministers. In fact, in a recent survey, 24 percent of Catholics (compared to 17 percent of Protestants) gave their parish priests fair or poor ratings for their performance in at least four areas of pastoral activity.9 There is also some evidence that priests are aware that the skills they developed in homiletics and liturgy as well as other aspects of pastoral ministry during their seminary formation needs to be further improved after ordination if they are to meet the demands of parish ministry.10 Priests are even more emphatic in acknowledging that their seminary training did not adequately prepare them for the financial and managerial responsibilities incumbent on pastors.11 One would think that the evidence of chronic dissatisfaction with ministerial performance among people in the pews and of a nagging sense among ordained ministers themselves that their performance in critical areas of pastoral ministry needs improvement would create a clamor, if not among the ordained themselves, at least among church leaders for a systematic program of continuing formation in pastoral skills connected with performance evaluation.
PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT OF CLERGY: AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS NOT YET COME Despite the empirical data arguing for the need for a system of performance evaluations tied to specific programs of ongoing formation for ordained ministers, clamor for such a programmatic approach to clergy performance has been
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less than deafening. Part of the reason for this silence, of course, is the sheer practical difficulty of creating such a program with few recent precedents on which to draw. Since parish priests are among the last “generalists,” devising a program of continuing formation tied to performance evaluation for all of the multifarious tasks they are expected to perform is a daunting challenge, but no more daunting than the challenge of creating performance management systems for other multi-tasking professionals. A more serious obstacle to the development and implementation of a system of performance management for ordained ministers is the resistance to such evaluation by the ordained themselves and the consequent reluctance of ecclesiastical authorities to impose one. More disturbing is the apparent lack of interest among ordained ministers in developing their practical skills. The reason most frequently cited by priests for their actual non-participation in ongoing formation programs is their lack of time,12 but there are indications that upgrading pastoral skills is also not a high priority for them.13 The data indicates that priests are most enthusiastic about pursuing opportunities for developing skills in areas that “are mainly personal and spiritual” and are relatively uninterested in continuing formation in practical pastoral skills in areas they view as peripheral to their vocation as spiritual leaders.14 Not surprisingly, therefore, although priests acknowledged that their seminary training had not equipped them with the financial and administrative skills demanded of pastors, these were the areas in which they in fact were least likely to have participated in programs of ongoing formation and for which they exhibited the least interest in future participation.15 If pressed, priests are likely to respond that these practical aspects of parish ministry were not what attracted them to ordained ministry in the first place.16 Thus, recognition on the part of priests of serious deficiencies in their pastoral skills rather anomalously coincides with indifference on their part to exerting themselves to remedy these deficiencies and resistance to serious evaluation of their ministerial performance. Lurking in the background of this anomaly is a theology of priestly ministry that so emphasizes the spiritual dimension of priestly existence that it tends at least to overshadow its human dimension and so privileges the personal and private aspects of priestly ministry that it tends to ignore its communal and public aspects. Hoge and others have noted the predominance of such a theology, which they refer to as the “cultic model” of priesthood, especially among men recently ordained and have contrasted it with a theology, which they refer to as the “faithful servant” model, which they find to be more characteristic of older priests.17 Nevertheless, relative indifference to engaging in the hard and time-consuming work of upgrading practical pastoral skills and resistance to the sort of performance evaluation such work entails is fairly constant across the generational spectrum.
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Thus, while the distinction between “cultic” and “servant leader” models of priesthood may be useful for identifying predominant tendencies in the professed theologies of different generations of the priests, it is less helpful in surfacing the operative theology which is widely shared, albeit with different emphases, by priests of all generations. The intergenerational unwillingness of priests to devote the necessary time and effort to acquiring and improving practical pastoral skills betrays an operative theology that values, what canon lawyers are wont to call, a priest’s status in the Church over his function for the Church.18 By speaking first of the “ministry” of priests and only then of their “life” in its decree Presbyterium Ordinis, the Second Vatican Council tried to redress the imbalance in the by then traditional theology that privileged the status of the priest over his function.19 Nevertheless, the primary drift of most magisterial statements since the Council, especially those of Pope John Paul II, has been to strengthen priestly identity by emphasizing the difference between the common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial priesthood, by emphasizing the cultic nature of priesthood, by stressing the priest’s configuration to Christ, and by stressing the state of life of the priest. Discussions of priestly ministry treat his sacramental ministry and pastoral care of individuals. More communal and ecclesial themes within pastoral leadership rarely occur.20 The linchpin of this magisterial theology which has shaped and reinforced the operative theology of many, if not most, priests is the notion that, by his ontological configuration to Christ through sacred ordination, the priest is empowered to “act in the person of Christ the Head of the Church” (in persona Christi Capitis). The idea that the priests acts “in the person of Christ” has a long lineage in Catholic theology. The phrase was originally concerned primarily with grounding the priest’s power to utter the words of consecration of the Eucharistic species and of sacramental forgiveness and only secondarily did it seep into explanations of the priest’s teaching and governing functions.21 The Second Vatican Council continued this extension of the phrase “in the person of Christ” beyond the priest’s sanctifying activity to his teaching and governing activity as well,22 and post-conciliar magisterial statements have seen this ontological configuration of the priest to Christ the Head as the critical feature distinguishing the ministerial priesthood from the common priesthood of all the faithful, i.e., as what essentially sets the ordained apart from lay people in the Church.23 When this theological conception of the priest functioning or acting in the person of Christ in his ministerial activities becomes intertwined with a priestly spirituality focused on the priest’s affinity to Christ flowing from and deepened by his personal imitatio Christi, the result has been a tendency “to see the priest as one who had a special relation with Christ, operative not only in (all) his ministerial actions but also in his
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personal life.”24 This marriage of theology and spirituality raises few obstacles to the quiet absorption of the human dimension of priestly ministry by the divine. The consequence is a tendency to presume that God will supply for the human inadequacies of priests in their teaching and governing functions as he provides grace ex opera operato in their sanctifying function and to minimize the importance of the human skills and competence of the minister. When the priest’s primary function is to be an icon of Christ in the midst of the church community, what he is becomes more important than what he does. Thus, criticism of a priest’s ministerial performance or attempts to assess, and so improve, it can easily be perceived as a new iconoclasm. The problem with this theology of the priesthood is not so much that it is false, but that it is out of balance; the problem lies not so much in what it affirms as in what it neglects. The power to act “in the person of Christ” may adequately explain how the ministerial priesthood is essentially different from the common priesthood, but it does little to explain how, as Lumen Gentium, §10, also affirms, these two priesthoods are essentially ordered one to another. The priest’s configuration to Christ occurs not for his own sake but for the sake of the Church he is ordained to serve.25 The ontological and the functional approaches to priestly ministry are not radically opposed to one another; they are two essential dimensions of one priestly ministry, which always exist in tension but must be kept in balance. Just as in an earlier age a polemical overemphasis on the ex opere operato effect of the sacraments as means of grace fostered neglect of what was necessary for their ex opere operantis fruitfulness, so today a (not entirely unpolemical) overemphasis on the priest’s ontological and spiritual status as icon of Christ the Head of the Church can foster a neglect of those human qualities, talents, and skills that are necessary for his function to be effective. When that balance between the ontological and the functional is disturbed, there will be a drift toward experiencing and practicing ordained ministry either as a mere specialized function within the Church community (congregationalism) or as a status above the community for a clerical elite (clericalism). Although both congregationalism and clericalism are challenges today, it is clericalism in its many and sometimes subtle forms that poses the greatest obstacle to introducing systems of clergy performance management. Among the more insidious features of clericalism in its manifold forms is its tendency, on the one hand, to view human development, whether individual or communal, clerical or lay, as spiritually irrelevant and, on the other hand, to view the laity as so many individual clients to be serviced rather than as a people through which the Church is present in the world to hasten the day when “the world itself will be freed from its slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom 8:21).26
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This sense of the unimportance of the human and this-worldly aspects of ministry is especially evident in the ambivalence exhibited by pastors toward improving their administrative and managerial skills. Most “do not see these material dimensions as essential to their leadership role but only as something to be tolerated and, if possible, handed over completely to others. Their ‘ideal’ situation would be one in which they would have nothing to do with the material side of a community’s life.”27 For them, “real” ministry is spiritual and personal, focused on providing for the religious needs of individuals; public tasks requiring the acquisition and development of human skills in communication, organization, and leadership must perhaps be endured but are largely irrelevant to such “real” ministry. Coaxing such priests into participation in continuing formation not only in administrative and managerial skills but also in other practical skills and into acceptance of systematic performance management will be a very “hard sell.”
REMEMBRANCE OF TIMES PAST: THE CONTRIBUTION OF CANON LAW Introduction of systematic performance management closely linked to continuing formation in ministerial skills for Catholic priests requires restoring a balance between ordained ministry as a vocation and as a profession, between the ontological and functional dimension of priesthood, and between the priest’s status and function in the ecclesial community. Although canon law has traditionally not been shy about emphasizing the status that the ordained enjoy in the ecclesial community, it has also demonstrated a concern for ministerial performance. Canon law clearly distinguishes a cleric’s status from his function, and attempts to assure the orderly and competent provision of ministry through an interlocking system of ecclesiastical offices. An ecclesiastical office is “any function constituted in a stable manner by divine or ecclesiastical ordinance to be exercised for a spiritual purpose” (c. 145, §1). Each office has its own rights and obligations or, to use more contemporary terminology, “job description,” set forth either in the law itself or in the decree by which the office is established and conferred (c. 145, §2). This “job description” provides a basis for an assessment of the office holder’s ministerial performance. Ordination gives a cleric a status in the Church that entitles them to respect and enough financial support to prevent him from being indigent; it does not, however, entitle him to appointment to or retention of an ecclesiastical office. For appointment to and continuance in an ecclesiastical office, canon law requires competent performance.
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From the Patristic era on, a prime canonical vehicle for the assurance of competent performance of duties by office holders has been the Episcopal visitation of the diocese. Even today, a diocesan bishop “is obliged to visit the diocese annually either in whole or in part, so that he visits the entire diocese at least every five years” (c. 396, §1). Although the Episcopal visitation has degenerated into something of a formality today, it was once a serious instrument for assuring pastoral accountability. It involved auditing of the parish books, inspection of the parish plant, and, for a long time, the assembling of a parish synod at which parishioners were questioned about the pastor’s performance of his duties.28 Since the bishop often conferred the sacrament of confirmation during his visitation, the practice of questioning confirmation candidates about their knowledge of Christian doctrine was not designed primarily to test the suitability of the candidates but to evaluate how well the pastor had been performing his responsibility of seeing to the Christian formation of young people. When the visitation revealed deficiencies in a pastor’s performance, the bishop was and is authorized to order appropriate remedial action. Although the institute of visitation has fallen into desuetude in most places, it is a historical reminder of canon law’s concern for regular assessment of ministerial performance. Canon law also recognizes the importance of competent performance of pastoral responsibilities by providing for removal from office for nonperformance. A pattern of behavior “detrimental or disturbing to ecclesial communion,” “grave neglect or violation of parochial duties which persists after a warning,” and “poor administration of temporal affairs” are grounds for the removal of a pastor (c. 1741, 1°, 4°, and 5°). Although the Code does not explicitly call for ongoing performance appraisals, it does suggest the need for some kind of regular assessment of pastoral performance to allow for warnings and corrective action that could avert the need for removal. Thus, it provides a canonical warrant for the introduction of some sort a system of performance management for pastors and other ecclesiastical office holders. From the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century until the Second Vatican Council in the twentieth, canon law was a principle vehicle for the Church’s assessment of the performance of its ordained ministers. While the forms performance assessment took during this period may not be the ones we would adopt for use today, they do clearly indicate that assessment of performance by ordained ministers is neither impossible in the practical realm nor inappropriate in the theological. The Council of Trent sought to clarify and defend Catholic doctrine against the challenges of the sixteenth-century Protestant reformers and to initiate necessary reforms in ecclesiastical discipline. Among the situations desperately in need of attention were the inadequate preparation and shoddy
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performance of many priests. Trent took a first step toward insuring adequate initial formation of candidates for the priesthood by calling for the establishment of seminaries. To insure that truly qualified candidates would be appointed as pastors, Trent also required that candidates for vacant parishes were to be examined by the bishop and a board of examiners about their theological competence, pastoral prudence, and other qualities suitable for the direction of the vacant parish. When all of the candidates had been examined, the bishop and the board of examiners voted on their suitability. Only those judged competent could lawfully be appointed to the parish.29 By the time the 1917 Code of Canon Law was promulgated, this system of assessing competence for pastoral office by examination had been extended to include not only candidates for appointments as pastors30 but also candidates for ordination,31 for reception and retention of the faculty to hear confessions,32 and for reception and retention of the faculty to preach.33 In addition, those already ordained as priests were to be examined in each of the first three years after ordination (each of the first five years in the United States)34 in the sacred sciences including canon law, Church history, liturgy, homiletics, and catechetics.35 Unsatisfactory performance on these “junior clergy examinations” would necessitate a priest’s repetition of the examinations for additional years, could result in the loss of his faculties to preach and hear confessions, and would adversely affect his chances for appointments to offices. Although the Holy See insisted that the requirements of junior clergy examination and of examinations of candidates for vacant pastorates were still in force even after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council,36 the practice soon fell into desuetude as did the practice of requiring examinations of those seeking faculties to preach and hear confessions and of candidates for vacant pastorates. These requirements were, however, formally abrogated only with the promulgation of the 1983 Code of Canon Law. Nonetheless, the revised code does retain examinations as a method for determining the suitability of candidates for vacant parishes as an option for diocesan bishops (c. 521, §3). One suspects that the rapidity with which this system of examinations for insuring ministerial competence disappeared in the wake of Vatican II indicates that the system itself had ceased to serve its function adequately. Unfortunately, no better or even comparable system has yet replaced it. Although these examinations did attempt to assess practical pastoral skills as well as theological knowledge (one of the components of the junior clergy examination, for example, was to write a sermon on a Scripture text provided by the examiners), their primary focus was cognitive rather than performative. Despite its limitations, this system of examinations did address the most glaring perceived problem of the post-Tridentine era, the inadequate intellectual formation of candidates for ordination and appointment to office, and it
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contributed greatly to a vast improvement in ministerial competence and, one presumes, performance as the Tridentine and post-Tridentine reforms took hold. The option of the counter-Reformation Church for examinations as the preferred method for assessing ministerial competence was not a retrieval of a practice of the ancient Church or a new theological construct. Rather, it was adopting and adapting what was already emerging elsewhere as the “best practice” for evaluating competence in the learned professions. In those places where appointment as pastors was based on competitive examinations (concursus), the Church adopted the prevailing “best practice” with a suspiciously meritocratic twist. It is unlikely that anyone today would choose a series of oral or written examinations as the optimal way of assessing priests’ suitability for appointment to office or for continuance in office. However, our society still uses this system to assess the competence of graduates of law, medical, nursing, and other professional schools before it allows them to practice their chosen vocations. Nevertheless, the post-Tridentine system of post-ordination examinations for the clergy is a reminder that there was a time when the Church took ministerial competence and performance seriously and when it saw no incompatibility between a rather high theology of priestly status and rather high requirements for priestly performance. It took well over a century for the impact of the reforms of the clergy initiated by Trent to be felt and their implementation was resisted, sometimes fiercely, by the clergy themselves. However, since these reforms did slowly improve the competence and performance of the clergy, they give hope that new efforts toward clergy performance management need not be in vain. The history of the Tridentine reforms suggests that what was resisted as a new iconoclasm at its outset can, with the passage of time, come to be perceived as best practice. NOTES 1. See Zeni Fox, “Performance Management in a Family Business?” in this volume. 2. See the discussion of these efforts at performance management in Katarina Schuth, “Importance of Performance Management of Seminarians and Priests for Effective Parish Ministry” in this volume. 3. Thomas J. Reese, Archbishop: Inside the Power Structure of the American Catholic Church (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1989), 251. See also Kevin McDonough, “Diocesan Bureaucracy,” America 177 (October 11, 1997), 12-13. 4. Dean R. Hoge, Experiences of Priests Ordained Five to Nine Years (Washington, DC: NCEA, 2006), 79, 89-90.
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5. Hoge, Experiences of Priests, 58. Hoge found that 11 percent of diocesan priests were assuming pastorates within one year of ordination, 34 percent within two to three years, 32 percent within four to five years, 18 percent within six or seven years, and only 6 percent after eight or nine years of ordination. 6. In 2005, 44 percent of the Latin Rite parishes in the United States were being served by priests with responsibility for more than one parish and 20 percent of the active priests in parish ministry were serving more than one parish. Katarina Schuth, Priestly Ministry in Multiple Parishes (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2006), 3. Few of these priests serving multiple parishes have been provided with an orientation for or special training in the peculiar problems entailed in pastoring several communities and little has been done to provide ongoing formation for them. See Schuth, Priestly Ministry, 38-47. 7. Orientation, mentoring, and ongoing formation are particularly critical for the growing number of foreign-born priests entering ministerial service in the United States. Since 1985, about 16 percent of all priests beginning ministry in this country have been foreign born. Dean R. Hoge and Aneidi Okure, International Priests in America (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2006), 10-12. However, only about onethird of these priests participated in a program of orientation and acculturation on their arrival and less than two-fifths of them had a priest mentor. Hoge and Okure, International Priests, 157 and 165. Although the Committee on Migration of the USCCB has issued Guidelines for Receiving Pastoral Ministers (Washington: USCCB, 2002), the Guidelines’ recommendations for providing programs of orientation for foreign-born priests have not been widely observed wither by the priests or by the bishops. There is also evidence of some resistance on the part of foreign-born priests to participation in such programs. See Hoge and Okure, International Priests, 109 and 117-118. 8. See Daniel Conway, Anita Rook, and Daniel Schipp, The Reluctant Steward: A Report and Commentary on the Stewardship Development Study (Saint Meinrad, IN: Saint Meinrad School of Theology, 1992). 9. The empirical data is summarized in Andrew M. Greeley, Priests: A Calling in Crisis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 92-95. 10. Dean R. Hoge and Jacqueline E. Wenger, Evolving Visions of the Priesthood: Changes from Vatican II to the Turn of the New Century (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2003), 136-137. In fact in their 2002 survey, 65 percent of diocesan priests strongly or somewhat agreed that “it is urgent that priests achieve greater status as competent professionals in the eyes of the Catholic community.” Hoge and Wenger, Evolving Visions, 216. 11. Daniel Conway, ed., The Reluctant Steward Revisited: Preparing Pastors for Administrative and Financial Duties (Saint Meinrad, IN: Saint Meinrad School of Theology, 2002), 18: “Only 20 percent of those pastors interviewed said that seminaries currently provide as much training on the practical applications of pastoral ministry as is appropriate. The majority disagreed, and the remainder (19 percent) were unsure. Almost half unequivocally said they learned most of what they need to provide administrative and financial leadership for their churches from ‘trial and error,’ while another 26 percent ‘somewhat agreed’ with that assessment.”
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12. Paul Perl and Bryan Froehle, “Ongoing Formation Among Priests in the United States,” CARA Working Paper Number 4 (Washington, DC: CARA, 2002), 25-27; Hoge, Experiences of Priests, 79. The claim of priests that they lack time for continuing formation programs is not without foundation. Perl and Froehle, 13, found that 70 percent of priests reported working over 50 hours per week and 18 percent, almost all recently ordained, reported working over 80 hours per week. On the pressures of time and work on priests see Zeni Fox, “Performance Management in a Family Business?” in this volume. 13. Perl and Froehle, “Ongoing Formation,” 25, found that, while 46 percent of the priests in their sample cited lack of time as a reason for their non-participation in formational activities, 45 percent responded that they “were just not interested in some areas of development.” Although it is difficult to identify which types of programs these priests were not interested in, the data does suggest that actual participation in programs dealing with practical skills was notably lower than participation in more spiritually or personally oriented programs. See, Perl and Froehle, “Ongoing Formation,” 20. 14. Hoge, Experience of Priests, 79. 15. Conway, Reluctant Steward Revisited, 21: “A majority of the pastors who participated in this study believe that seminaries need to do a better job of training students for the administrative and financial aspects of their ministry. Many pastors also believe that their dioceses/denominational bodies should also play a key role in the administrative preparation and financial training of church ministers. However, as was the case ten years ago, the majority of pastors are not interested in attending seminars, workshops or continuing education programs that deal with the administrative and financial aspects of pastoral ministry.” 16. Conway, Reluctant Steward Revisited, 32. 17. Hoge and Wenger, Evolving Visions, 47-60, and Hoge, Experience of Priests, 5972. For a critique of the theological adequacy of the distinction between “cultic” and “servant leader” models, see Susan Wood, “The Search for Identity,” in Hoge and Wenger, Evolving Visions, 167-173. 18. See the discussion of the tension between a priest’s status and his function in John P. Beal, “Turning Pro: Theological-Canonical Hurdles on the Way to a Professional Ethic for Church Leaders, in Church Ethics and Its Organizational Context, ed. Jean M. Bartunek et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 169-177. Although canonists tend to speak of the tension between “status” and “function,” others use somewhat different terminology to express the same tension from different perspectives. Thus, Richard Gula, “A Professional Code of Ethics?” in Church Ethics in Its Organizational Context, 149, speaks of the tension between ministry as a “vocation” and ministry as a “profession”; Susan Wood, “Priesthood: Forty Years After Vatican II,” in Priests for the Twenty First Century, ed. Donald Dietrich (New York, NY: Crossroads, 2006), 11 et passim, speaks of “functional” and “ontological” approaches to ordained ministry; Wood, 13, and others also try to find a balance between the priest’s actions in persona Christi and his actions in persona Ecclesiae. 19. James H. Provost, “Toward a Renewed Canonical Understanding of Official Ministry,” The Jurist 41 (1981): 455-457.
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20. Wood, “Priesthood: Forty Years After Vatican II,” 10. Illustrative of this tendency is the fact that the bishops of the United States devote only four of the one hundred thirteen pages of their norms for ongoing priestly formation explicitly to intellectual and pastoral formation. The rest are concerned primarily with human and spiritual formation. See National Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Basic Plan for the Ongoing Formation of Priests (Washington, DC: USCCB, 2001). 21. See Bernard D. Marliangeas, Clés pour une Théologie du Ministère, In Persona Christi, In Persona Ecclesiae (Paris: Ed. Beauchesne, 1978). The significance of the description of the priest acting in persona Christi has been hotly debated in recent theology. See Dennis Michael Ferrara, “Representation or Self-Effacement: The Axiom In Persona Christi in Saint Thomas and the Magisterium,” Theological Studies 55 (1994): 195-224; Sara Butler, “Questio Disputata: ‘In Persona Christi,’ A Response to Dennis Ferrara,” Theological Studies 56 (1995): 61-80; Dennis Michael Ferrara, “A Reply to Sara Butler,” Theological Studies 56 (1995): 81-91; Dennis Michael Ferrara, “In Persona Christi: A Second Naïveté,” Theological Studies 57 (1996): 65-88; and Sarah Butler, “The Priest as Sacrament of Christ the Bridegroom,” Worship 66 (1992): 498-517. Efforts have also been made to situate the priest’s role of acting in Persona Christi in the context of his role of acting in persona Ecclesiae. See David Power, “Representing Christ in Community,” in Being a Priest Today, ed. Donald Goergen (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), 97-123 and Susan K. Wood, “Priestly Identity: Sacrament of the Ecclesial Community,” Worship 69 (1995): 109-127. 22. For example, Presbyterium Ordinis, §2, affirms: “Inasmuch as it is connected with the episcopal order, the priestly office shares in the authority by which Christ himself builds up, sanctifies, and rules His Body. Therefore, while it indeed presupposes the sacraments of Christian initiation, the sacerdotal office of priests is conferred by that special sacrament through which priests, by the anointing of the Holy Spirit, are marked with a special character and are so configured to Christ the Priest that they can act in the person of Christ the Head.” 23. See Sara Butler, “Priestly Identity: ‘Sacrament’ of Christ the Head,” Worship 70 (1996): 290-306. 24. David Power, “Representing Christ in Community,” in Being A Priest Today, 107. See also Edward Schillebeeckx, Ministry (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 58-65. 25. John Paul II, apostolic exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis, March 25, 1992, §16: “The relation of the priest to Jesus Christ, and I him to his Church, is found in the very being of the priest, by virtue of his sacramental consecration/anointing, and in his activity, that is in his mission or ministry. In particular, the priest minister is the servant of Christ present in the Church as mystery, communion, and mission. In virtue of his participation in the ‘anointing’ and ‘mission’ of Christ, the priest can continue Christ’s prayer, word, sacrifice, and salvific action in the Church. In this way, the priest is a servant of the Church as mystery because he actuates the Church’s sacramental signs of the presence of the Risen Christ. He is a servant of the Church as communion because—in union with the Bishop and closely related to the presbyterate—he builds up the unity of the Church community in the harmony of diverse vocations, charisms, and services. Finally the priest is a servant of the Church as mission because he makes the community a herald and witness of the Gospel.”
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26. Charles Taylor, “Clericalism,” Downside Review 78 (1960): 174. 27. Donald Senior, “The Reluctant Leader: Some Reflections on the Stewardship Study Ten Years Later,” in Reluctant Steward Revisited, 45. 28. See John P. Beal, “The Apostolic Visitation of a Diocese: A Canonico-Historical Investigation,” The Jurist 49 (1989): 349-361. 29. Council of Trent, sess. 24, de ref., c. 18. For the evolution of this practice of filling vacant parishes by competitive examination, see John P. Connolly, Synodal Examiners and Parish Priest Consultors: An Historical Synopsis and Commentary, Canon Law Studies 177 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1943), 4-45. 30. 1917 CIC, c. 459, §3, 3° and §4. 31. Council of Trent, sess. 23, de ref., c. 7; 1917 CIC, cc. 996-997. 32. Council of Trent, sess., 23, de ref., c. 15; 1917 CIC, c. 877. 33. Council of Trent, sess. 5, de ref. c. 7; 1917 CIC, c. 1340. 34. 1917 CIC, c. 130, §1. On the extended period for the United States, see Acta et Decreta Concilii Plenarii Baltimorensis Tertii (Baltimore, MD: John Murphy, 1886) nn. 186-188. Junior clergy examinations did not become part of the universal law of the Church until the promulgation of the 1917 code. However, the practice, already part of particular law in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United States, and parts of Italy, at the urging of many Italian bishops. See René Naz, s.v. “Clerc,” in Dioctinnaire de Droit Canonique, 3: 843. 35. Connolly, Synodal Examiners, 130. 36. Sacred Congregation for the Clergy, circular letter, November 4, 1969, §18, in Canon Law Digest 7:877-878.
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Importance of Performance Evaluation of Seminarians and Priests for Effective Parish Ministry Sr. Katarina Schuth, O.S.F., Ph.D.
As practices related to performance management of Catholic ministry are
considered, it soon becomes apparent that some individuals during certain phases of their involvement in church ministry are intensely evaluated and other individuals at other times are virtually outside the scope of any meaningful evaluation. The larger effort of this volume to examine practices across the board seems a good way to rectify the shortcomings and build on the strengths of various systems and processes. In this chapter I will report on what might be considered the “tale of two converse approaches to performance management.” First, I will describe the quite thorough assessment and evaluation procedures associated with seminarians and then move to the evaluation of priests and parish ministry. The seminary-related explanation provided here is based on my years of study and many writings published on the topic; my knowledge of evaluation of priests and parish ministry is more limited, based on information from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) and on my recent study of nearly 1,000 priests serving multiple parishes.1 Even though ample reasons can be suggested for the significant contrast between the two stages, it is still beneficial to question both the intense evaluation of seminarians and the uneven-at-best evaluation of life and ministry after ordination. Should either or both be reconsidered? How could the first be improved and streamlined? How could the second be enhanced and expanded? The first part of this chapter describes the general framework for evaluation of seminarians. For a candidate who hopes to enter a seminary, from the time he makes known to a vocation director his desire to pursue priesthood, a process of assessment and evaluation begins in earnest. The two words “assessment and evaluation” often are used interchangeably, though perhaps they should not be. While both include the act of examining or considering by 71
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careful study and appraisal a person or situation and then making a judgment about the value, quality, importance, extent, or condition of the same, in this context the former is generally a preliminary overview and the latter a summative exercise. The immediate task of vocation directors is more one of preliminary assessment to determine whether or not the potential candidate has the qualities and dispositions deemed necessary to enter a formation process as a seminarian, and eventually become a priest. After this initial determination, if the man is admitted to seminary, the more comprehensive process of evaluation is set in motion for the next six to eight years.2 While institutions vary somewhat in their expectations of seminarians, certain common requirements must be met according to the Code of Canon Law3 and the Program of Priestly Formation (Fifth Edition, 2005), a document of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The process of assessing the readiness of the candidate for admission to the major seminary begins with the bishop or religious superior, the vocation director, the seminary admissions committee, and others designated by the bishop to make a determination. Sometimes a diocesan committee made up of pastors and lay men and women contribute to the decision. These individuals and groups have the task of interpreting the broad requirements of canon law: the presence of satisfactory human, moral, spiritual, and intellectual characteristics, physical and psychological health, and proper motivation. In a well-defined section entitled “The Admissions Process,” the Program of Priestly Formation (PPF) provides further guidelines and 26 specific norms that regulate admissions policies.4 Elements drawn from the PPF are commonly required for admission, some relating specifically to the applicant’s personal life and others to his potential for ministry; additional requirements particular to a diocese or religious community also may be specified. First, the candidate must provide an account of his life, the process he used in discerning his priestly vocation, and an expression of his desire to be committed to permanent celibacy. He also must give evidence of overall personal balance and moral character, which includes the requisite spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical qualities for priestly ministry. A psychological evaluation is required and the report of a psychologist is to include assessment of psycho-social maturity and psycho-sexual maturity, among other qualities. Since the Master of Divinity program normally is required for ordination and the practice of ministry, its admissions criteria include not only standards of academic preparation and ability but also religious, moral, and other personality qualifications consonant with the practice of ministry in the Roman Catholic tradition. Application for admission is the first real experience for the seminary candidate of assessment by the Church.
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Once accepted, seminarians begin a structured program of formation that includes regular evaluation of their suitability for priesthood and their progress in the program. Seminary faculties recognize this extensive responsibility as crucial to the total formation of the seminarian. Each school develops a plan for evaluation that is based on guidelines provided in the PPF and adapted to the needs of the seminarians and dioceses or religious orders served by the school. The required written guidelines of each seminary describe the programs for human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral formation. The PPF devotes an entire chapter to “The Continuing Evaluation of Seminarians.” It indicates that the process must be clearly described and include primarily the rector and faculty, as well as the seminarians themselves, their parish supervisors, and their peers. It further specifies certain areas of growth for which seminarians are to be accountable. The areas of “performance” that are to be evaluated relative to pastoral formation of seminarians are most pertinent to the present discussion. Among them are the following: a spirit of pastoral charity, a quest for justice, an openness to serve all people; demonstration of appropriate pastoral and administrative skills and competencies for ministry; ability to exercise pastoral leadership; and ability to carry out pastoral work collaboratively with others.5 Other areas of formation receive equal attention, but will not be considered in detail in this paper. Seminary faculties usually use these general prescriptions as a basis for naming some specific behaviors that are expected of seminarians. Again using pastoral formation as an example, students are given a list of desirable qualities that are more measurable. They are expected to develop the pastoral skills upon which they will be evaluated each year of the program. From year to year expectations become more demanding. Some typical goals that seminarians are expected to achieve and which faculty members are obliged to evaluate include: 1. Takes initiative in designing and implementing a program of pastoral formation that builds on his strengths and challenges him to develop in untested areas required for effective pastoral service. 2. Promotes behaviors that foster Christian community and reflect a Gospel-based commitment to service, a spirit of hospitality, and a willingness to resolve conflict. 3. Shows a capacity for collaborative thinking, analyzing, and strategizing for effective service of others. 4. Shows ability to be flexible in exercising different styles of leadership in a variety of contexts. 5. Demonstrates an ability to preside in a welcoming manner at public liturgies.
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6. Gives evidence of understanding the role of the priest as a public person, demonstrates leadership skills, exercises pastoral roles with insight and confidence, and manifests a grasp of the collaborative nature of ministry. 7. Gives evidence of understanding the role of lay ecclesial ministers in their particular pastoral service, and demonstrates appropriate collaborative leadership skills. Similar criteria are developed and evaluated for areas pertaining to human, spiritual, and intellectual formation. Besides the substance of the evaluation, each seminary outlines procedures to be used. Most seminaries conduct a major annual evaluation, preceded by at least monthly meetings of the student with a formation advisor who serves as both guide and informal evaluator in an ongoing way throughout the year. Some seminaries establish a Formation Committee that meets monthly or more frequently to evaluate the progress of all seminarians in the four areas relating to their life goals and ministry development. The PPF requires the involvement of all faculty and others in the year-end evaluation. Typically, faculty members and the parish supervisor are asked to write an individual summative assessment of each seminarian concerning their growth in the four areas mentioned above. These comments are collated by the formation advisor and then presented to the whole faculty for further evaluative comments and a consultative vote. The seminarian also writes a self-assessment and details his perception of his success in achieving overall requirements and his specific goals for each year. As a concluding exercise of the evaluation process in many schools, all of these materials are reviewed by a small team—usually the formation advisor, academic advisor, parish supervisor, and sometimes the vocation director and rector of the seminary—who meet with the student to review the entire year. This group then makes a recommendation as to the future direction the student will take, for example, to continue in the program, to take a pastoral year, or to leave the seminary. The rector makes a final recommendation to the bishop or religious superior, who then determines whether or not the seminarian will continue on the road to priesthood. Besides this formal process, other forms of evaluation are employed, for example, academic faculty evaluate the student’s performance in each course, parish supervisors offer their assessment of how well the seminarian has carried out responsibilities during his field education experiences, and supervisors of various summer placements present their observations in written and/or oral form. These may include Clinical Pastoral Education in a hospital setting, a placement in a multicultural ministry experience, and diaconal ministry in a parish. Finally, some seminaries seek the opinions of other seminarians in a peer review process.6
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The intensive evaluative environment of the seminary stands in sharp contrast to what follows for most priests. During the first few years of priesthood as an associate pastor the newly ordained may be assigned a mentor and his pastor is expected to assist in promoting the growth of the associate through regular guidance. Some dioceses continue a modest form of ongoing evaluation, but for the most part it is limited to the early years of ordination and if it happens at all, it is much less comprehensive. Nonetheless the efforts made by some bishops and priests to maintain an ongoing evaluation system are worth noting. My in-depth knowledge of this area is limited to my recent study of priests serving multiple parishes, but several other important resources will add to information about the extent of performance evaluation being carried out in parishes. The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) has completed more than seven hundred Parish Assistance Survey and Services (PASS) reviews since 1995. Further, they report that a number of dioceses have used other survey tools to systematically evaluate their parishes. Father Thomas P. Sweetser, for example, administers surveys in conjunction with his Parish Evaluation Project (PEP). The Parish Assessment and Renewal (PAR) process, a unique blend of information gathering and future planning, begins with four months of self-assessment, during which time the leadership collects information about the parish. This self-assessment is followed by a two week on-site visit by the PEP Pastoral Consultant team, which culminates in a report of what it has observed, as well as making recommendations for the future. The report is presented to a gathering of the parish leadership, who fashion a plan for the future direction and renewal of the parish.7 Additionally, the Paulist National Catholic Evangelization Association (PNCEA), which provides practical resources to Catholic dioceses, parishes, and individuals, includes a parish survey as a part of its ENVISION project, again as facet of a larger effort related to evangelization.8 Undoubtedly other forms of parish assessments that incorporate evaluation of the pastor and parish staffs are used, but a full accounting of these tools is beyond the scope of this paper and of my expertise. Taking into account these three forms of evaluation, about 1,000 parishes have utilized these services, amounting to just over 5 percent of all parishes. From another vantage point on a broader scale, I asked several questions related to evaluation reports and performance reviews in a survey of 911 priests who are serving multiple parishes. The first question was “Are you required to submit annual written reports on your ministry to your bishop or religious superior?” The overall response showed that just over a quarter (25.6 percent) of the priests said yes, and just less than three quarters (74.4 percent) said no (see tables 8.1a and 8.1b). If the respondents are divided between diocesan and religious order priests, the religious are only slightly more likely to report
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on their ministry at 28 percent compared with 25 percent of diocesan priests. Separating the respondents into four age quartiles, the second oldest group (ages 57-65) is slightly more likely to report on their ministry (30 percent) than the other three groups, which average about 24 percent (see tables 8.1a and 8.1b).9 More variation is demonstrated when the priests are divided according to USCCB Regions. On the low end, Regions II (NY), VIII (MN, ND, SD), and XIV (FL, GA, NC, SC) experience an average of about 14 percent reporting on their ministry. By contrast, on the high end, Regions III (PA), V (AL, KY, LA, MS, TN), and XIII (AZ, CO, NM, UT, WY) have an average between 34 and 40 percent of the priests reporting. The remaining regions show between about 20 and 30 percent. The regional variations do not form a consistent pattern, that is, in the Northeast one region is high in reporting another low; the same is true for the Southeast; and the North Central states are low, while the Southwest states are high. Diocesan patterns are equally scattered and unpredictable by location. On the whole, however, a minority of priests are required to report on the quality of their ministry. The second question asked in this survey relative to evaluation was as follows: “Are you required to submit annual written reports on your well-being to your bishop or religious superior?” While the question is not directly about ministry, the quality of life of priests is ultimately certain to have an effect on pastoral performance. Even fewer priests were asked to submit these reports, with the overall figure at 11.6 percent (see tables 8.2a and 8.2b). It might be expected that religious would be more likely to give a report, but the differTable 8.1a Ministry Report Required All Regions Diocesan Religious
Yes
No
227 (25.6 %) 185 (25.1 %) 42 (28.0 %)
659 (74.4 %) 551 (74.9 %) 108 (72.0 %)
Yes
No
51 (23.7 %)
164 (76.3 %)
68 (30.0 %)
159 (70.0 %)
58 (24.5 %)
179 (75.5 %)
50 (24.2 %)
157 (75.8 %)
Table 8.1b Ages in 2005 Born 1922–1939— 66–83 Born 1940–1948— 57–65 Born 1949–1959— 46–56 Born 1960–1977— 28–45
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ence is only 3.3 percent, with religious at 14.4 percent versus 11.1 percent for diocesan priests. By age quartile only slight variation is evident, ranging from a low of 9.3 percent for those who are 46 to 56 years old to 13.8 percent for those 57 to 65 (see tables 8.2a and 8.2b).10 Again, regional variations are more pronounced, with three at 5 percent or less and three over 20 percent reporting, but all are less than a quarter. On the low end are Regions I (New England States), II (NY), and IX (IA, KS, MO, NE). Higher numbers are reported for Regions X (AR, OK, TX), XIII (AZ, CO, NM, UT, WY), and IV (FL, GA, NC, SC), ranging from 22 percent to 24 percent reporting on well-being. Region II is low in reporting on both ministry and well-being, while Region XIII is high in both cases. Responses to these two questions indicate very limited self-evaluative activity among priests, with about one-fourth of them in this sample reporting annually to their bishops or superiors about their ministry and just over one in ten giving an account of their well-being. Religious priests fare only slightly better, with 28 percent and 14 percent reporting on their ministry and well being, respectively. Age differences are slight and of special note is the low percentage of the youngest priests who submit a report—they are in the second lowest quartile for both questions. One might expect more oversight of those more recently ordained, but across all groups, a “culture of performance evaluation” is definitely not evident. From another point of view, I asked priests about their ability to hire and supervise staff: “How effective do you believe you are in performing tasks associated with your ministry overall regarding hiring and supervising Table 8.2a Well-Being Report Required All Regions Diocesan Religious
Yes
No
102 (11.6 %) 81 (11.1 %) 21 (14.4 %)
777 (88.4 %) 652 (88.9 %) 125 (85.6 %)
Yes
No
27 (12.8 %)
184 (87.2 %)
31 (13.8 %)
193 (86.2 %)
22 ( 9.3 %)
215 (90.7 %)
22 (10.6 %)
185 (89.4 %)
Table 8.2b Ages in 2005 Born 1922–1939— 66–83 Born 1940–1948— 57–65 Born 1949–1959— 46–56 Born 1960–1977— 28–45
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professional staff?”11 On a four point scale (1 = very effective; 4 = not at all effective), their overall rating of themselves was 2.20, indicating an average response just below being effective. Only 14.5 percent thought they were very effective, while 55.3 percent said effective. Some 30 percent of the priests are not satisfied with their ability to perform these evaluative tasks: 25.6 percent say they are not too effective, and 4.6 percent not at all effective. Among the many questions asked of these priests about the exercise of their ministry, this item ranked among the lowest. Another source of information from my survey of priests serving multiple parishes was found in the general comments they made in response to an open-ended question about their concerns overall. Some two dozen of them mentioned their desire to know more about how to evaluate or assess performance of their staff members and a few expressed an interest in being fairly evaluated themselves so that they could improve their ministry. Of the more than two thousand comments recorded, the topic of performance management was not high on the list of priorities. This apparent lack of concern has several possible explanations. On one hand, for the more recently ordained, after years of intense evaluation during seminary, some may be hesitant to request more of the same and others may actually have a strong aversion to the process. For them, ordination may be considered a “rite of passage” that carries with it a certain sense of independence from the scrutiny of pre-ordination years or a feeling of having a right to be “left alone.” After years of practice, older priests may have their own way of assessing the effectiveness of their ministry that is not as formal as some of the opportunities mentioned here. Studies of attitudes of priests toward performance evaluation undoubtedly are in order. Several dimensions of the question are worthy of consideration: evaluation of the priests’ lives, ministry, and leadership styles, including both self-evaluation and external assessment by bishops, superiors, or professional organizations; evaluation of staff by pastors; and evaluation of how well parishes are functioning. Other key times for evaluation might be related to particular circumstances, especially at the time pastors are reassigned or parishes are reconfigured. Reviewing the models of assessment and evaluation in place before and during seminary in contrast to those after ordination leads once more to the original questions posed in the introduction to this chapter. How could the intense evaluation of seminarians be improved or streamlined? How could the uneven evaluation of priestly life and ministry be enhanced and expanded? In the first case, it is conceivable that the “culture of assessment” that pervades the seminary setting is too comprehensive and overarching. During interviews for several books I have written about seminaries, many seminarians complained that they felt they were always under scrutiny and lacked the oppor-
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tunity to make their own life decisions, in order to develop an internal sense of authority. A sizable number of them believed that discipline was imposed in a way that gave them inadequate practice in taking personal responsibility. Some seminaries have responded to this criticism by gradually allowing more independence in prayer and other choices, especially in the last year or two of seminary. If indeed seminarians feel saturated or smothered by being over-evaluated, it might be worthwhile “evaluating the evaluation” procedures. Yet, these years are crucial in determining the fitness of candidates for a lifelong commitment to priesthood. Having available adequate information to make prudential judgments is essential for a creditable evaluation and so the present procedures may well be indispensable. For older priests who are 10 years or more removed from seminary (in fact for younger ones, too), having them recognize the intrinsic value of individual assessment of their performance is highly desirable. It contributes to the impact and importance of evaluation they must do of the entire parish staff. Priests who do undertake various forms of self-evaluation and parish assessment are usually satisfied, even delighted, by the outcome of these activities. Rather than resulting in criticism, they learn of the general appreciation of parishioners. By identifying some areas for improvement, their ministry is enriched and future evaluations are even more positive. Sometimes those who could benefit most are fearful of being criticized or may be unwilling to make necessary changes that would improve their performance. Taking into consideration the aversion or resistance of some priests to assessment, it is all the more important for bishops and religious superiors to insist on fair and even-handed evaluations for the good of the whole church. Some bishops have dedicated considerable time and effort to this exercise, such as Bishop Ricardo Ramirez of Las Cruces, NM. He writes: I try to conduct my parish visits along the lines of dialogue. For several years my parish visits took three days. I would arrive on Friday evening for dinner and conversation with the pastor. The next day was spent in conversation with consultative bodies; i.e., the parish and finance councils, religious educators, liturgical ministers and parish organization leaders. I would say, or at least preach at, all the Masses that weekend. On Sunday, with the help of my chancellor, I would have a report ready to read to the congregation. We would end the visit with a potluck dinner. It was an exhausting exercise. I don’t do that anymore. I now send forms to all those involved in parish leadership, including the pastor, and ask for a self-evaluation of their ministries. These are compiled at the pastoral center. During the parish visit I read them their self-evaluation and have an extended discussion on the various aspects of their parish life. I usually ask a lot of questions, and the people provide what then helps
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Sr. Katarina Schuth me formulate a fairly thorough assessment of the parish. I am sure many other bishops conduct their parish visits in their own dialogical manner.12
Even those bishops who see the value and express interest in the evaluation process find that lack of time prohibits effective implementation. In my study of priest serving multiple parishes, I asked the question, “What could your bishop or religious superior do to assist you in your present ministry?” More than a quarter of the respondents (237) mentioned the significance of simple recognition in the form of being called, visited, or contacted in some way with words of encouragement, affirmation, assurance of prayers, and understanding. Typical comments focused on opportunities to be heard and to know that the bishops “really care about what I am doing.”13 If bishops take this obvious first step of understanding the challenges of priestly ministry today, further steps might follow to change the pattern from avoiding performance evaluations to accepting, if not welcoming them. If that happens, this project, designed to identify and put into effect “best practices in performance management,” will have succeeded.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Bradesca, Donna, O.S.U.. “Evaluation and the Pastoral Internship.” Seminary Journal 3, 1997. Buglione, Stephen. “Screening Revisited: Issues in the Psychological Assessment of Seminary Applicants.” Seminary Journal 9, 2003. Kelly, Patricia, Ronald Karney, and Dorothy Sayers. “Suggestions for Increasing the Effectiveness of the Psychological Assessment of Candidates for Seminary Formation.” Seminary Journal 11, no. 2 (2005):48–54. Latkovic, Mark. “Fostering Theological Excellence in the Classroom Among Catholic Seminary Students and Faculty.” Seminary Journal 10, no. 1 (2004):57–62. Raiche, Diana Dudoit. “Using Assessment to Encourage Evangelization and Faith Formation for Adults: Information for Growth.” Seminary Journal 10, no. 1 (2004):43–46. Ramirez, Bishop Ricardo. “Dialogue in Diocesan Pastoral Life.” Origins 36, no. 12 (2006):191–195. Sheehan, Msgr. Dennis. “Formation for a Holy, Healthy, Effective Priesthood.” Origins 34, no. 5 (2004):71–76. Sperry, Leonard. Sex, Priestly Ministry, and the Church. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2003. Stern, Richard, and Ryan LaMothe. “Seminarian Formation: Time for (Yet) Another Look?” Seminary Journal 12, no. 2 (2006):84–88. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Program of Priestly Formation, 5th Edition. Washington, D.C.: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2006.
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NOTES 1. Katarina Schuth, Priestly Ministry in Multiple Parishes (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2006). 2. In recent years two distinct paths are utilized for movement from initial formation to theological studies in a major seminary or school of theology. About equally divided are seminarians who attend a full college seminary program, usually for four years, and those who have already completed a college degree and enroll in a pretheology program for two years to satisfy both formational and academic requirements, especially in philosophy. When either program is finished, at least four more years of study in a major seminary are required beyond the previous four or two years. This paper will focus on the evaluation processes in place during the four years of major seminary. 3. Canon 241 states: 1. The diocesan bishop is to admit to the major seminary only those who are judged capable of dedicating themselves permanently to the sacred ministries in light of their human, moral, spiritual, and intellectual characteristics, their physical and psychological health and their proper motivation. 2. Before they are accepted, they must submit documents certifying that baptism and confirmation have been received and other documents which are required in accord with the accord with the prescriptions of the program for priestly formation. 3. When persons seek admission after they have been dismissed from another seminary or from a religious institute, further testimony is required from their respective superior, especially regarding the cause of their dismissal or their leaving. 4. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Program of Priestly Formation, 5th Edition (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2006), 18-27, 34-67. 5. Program of Priestly Formation, 93. 6. See Bibliography for details of assessment and evaluation procedures for selection, admissions, and formation programs in seminaries and schools of theology. 7. See the Parish Evaluation Project website: http://www.pepparish.org/. 8. See the Paulist website: http://www.pncea.org/. 9. Schuth, Priestly Ministry, 213. 10. Schuth, Priestly Ministry, 214. 11. Schuth, Priestly Ministry, 187. 12. Bishop Ricardo Ramirez, “Dialogue in Diocesan Pastoral Life,” Origins 36/12 (August 31, 2006), 193. 13. Schuth, Priestly Ministry, 128.
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Clergy Performance Management: An Organizational Psychology Perspective Lisa R. Berlinger, Ph.D.
It is far easier to write ten volumes of philosophy than to put a single precept into practice. —Leo Tolstoy
W
hat is performance management and how is it done? Performance management is the process of (1) reviewing the performance of an individual, (2) giving and getting feedback on performance, and (3) planning for future performance. Is clergy performance management appropriate in the Roman Catholic Church? Performance management, with well-done performance appraisals, can help both priests and lay people understand and learn from each other. Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl affirmed the place of accountability in the church:1 How then is there accountability in the church? How are all members—lay and clerical, baptized and ordained—called to accountability? I believe the answer is in the word “openness.” Whatever our responsibility, we must exercise it with an openness that takes the form of sharing information, reporting on the discharge of our duties, and accepting critique of our actions.
All in the church are called, in the service of accountability, to share information, report on the discharge of our duties, and accept critique of (I would say give feedback about) our actions. “Everyone should be able to exercise his or her public role in a way…that is verifiable and that nurtures credibility.”2 Note that the Archbishop’s call for accountability does not shift any decision-making power to the laity: he points to the consultative role of 83
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the laity and insists that it does not involve any decision-making power.3 My discussion here assumes that the laity can exercise, at minimum, their consultative role. Where priests value their status above function,4 where they have so little respect for the laity that they, for example, remove parish or finance council members at will, structural problems prevent performance appraisal from being useful. Regardless of who delivers feedback to a priest, some of the information will have come from those who work most closely with him, and many of these are lay people. A priest who values his status above function may not believe a lay source has the right or knowledge to give him feedback, and that feedback will be rejected. A second caveat involves the situation of some diocesan and religious priests vis-à-vis their superiors. Father James Keenan points out that priests are not often accorded due process by the church hierarchy5 while Fr. John Beal emphasizes the encapsulated nature of the priesthood where a high price is exacted for exercising voice or exit6 and where law is de facto the will of the ruler.7 These conditions could prevent a priest from entering into a performance appraisal at either the diocesan or parish level without fear. These concerns need to be taken seriously before any performance management system is put in place. Performance appraisal is often done incorrectly with damaging results in many different settings. There is reason to be cautious, but we can also put some safeguards in place.
PERFORMANCE FEEDBACK USING PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL First, performance management and performance appraisals, although used in business, are not tools from business; they are tools from the discipline of management, which includes the management of for-profit, government, nonprofit (including, in the United States, churches), and mixed organizations. Second, in adopting and applying performance management tools, organizations signal their values and ultimately create outcomes in line with those values. It is only by using performance management tools in conjunction with the goals of the church that we can say we are creating a best practice. A so-called “best practice” in an organization based on different values and with different goals is not a best practice for the church until we see how it works for the church. We return to Archbishop Wuerl for an account of the church’s values: “At every level in the church, we are accountable to the Gospel, to the teaching of the church on faith and morals, and to the liturgical and canon law that directs and gives order to the mission and ministry
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of the church.”8 It is only in reference to the goals and values of the church that a practice can be a best practice in a particular context. By incorporating the values of the church, performance appraisal of clergy can serve the church. If someone tells you they did a performance appraisal at a Catholic Church that did not incorporate the values of the church, tell them, “Then it was done wrong.”
PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL Why do we do performance appraisals? The “Baltimore Catechism” version of the Human Resources’ response is: We do performance appraisals to assist in determining (1) compensation, (2) promotion, (3) professional development. The question I wish to address is: What are the issues surrounding performance management and the possible mechanisms for performance appraisals of priests? The first issue is that two of the three reasons for doing performance appraisal are rare occurrences for both diocesan and religious priests. First, decisions about changes in compensation are not a function of performance for priests. For most religious priests who have taken a vow of poverty, there is no direct compensation,9 and for diocesan priests, compensation is not related to performance. Compensation (more money or other tangible goods) and promotion are usually under the control of the diocese or religious superior. There are, of course, some exceptions: A parish might lease a car for its priest or provide a special fund for a pastor’s use, but in general, compensation is not based on performance. Second, while good human resource policies blended with pastoral objectives should motivate movement of priests within a diocese from assignment to assignment, these are not characterized as “promotions or demotions” in the same sense as in the business or nonprofit world. So we are left with professional development as the primary purpose of performance appraisal of priests. We will return to this shortly. A half dozen priests that I queried on their views on performance appraisal for clergy reacted with groans and rolling eyes. Like many workers in other organizations, they have shared the distasteful experience of a poorly executed performance appraisal. So it is important we be clear on what a performance appraisal is and is not.
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WHAT PERFORMANCE APPRAISALS ARE NOT A performance appraisal is a development tool, and is therefore not used to determine punishment, discipline, removal, termination, incarceration, or institutionalization. It is true that performance appraisals are sometimes used to document problems or to help collect evidence of problems, but performance appraisal is not a control mechanism according to good human resources practice. Instead, its purpose is to facilitate learning. Major transgressions should be handled outside of the appraisal system, and the bishops have their own systems for handling problems with clergy. Once we note what uses are not appropriately part of performance appraisals, it becomes clear that we cannot rely on performance appraisals to protect us from scandals such as sexual abuse or financial abuse. As theologian Paul Lakeland tells us, these scandals are not the crisis in the Church, but point to a system out of balance,10 a system that no technology or mechanism or tool can fix. The process of going through an appraisal may provide some data, but the system is already in danger if the appraisal is needed to uncover a serious problem. A well-functioning system uncovers problems before they become scandals and prevents them from becoming crises.
USE OF PERFORMANCE APPRAISALS FOR CLERGY—HOW TO DO IT11 The primary purpose of a performance appraisal for clergy is for the development of the priest. This means the purpose is not so the organization can have a form in its file or keep up its system. The appraisal is for the development of the priest and for communication between the priest and those conducting the appraisal. The performance appraisal process starts at least six months to a year before the appraisal, with the priest and the appraiser(s) jointly setting goals. If the diocese is doing the appraisal, the bishop will either have delegated the task to someone with specialized training or, even better, will have received specialized training himself. If the appraisal takes place within a parish or other setting, the entire pastoral team, parish council, and/or finance council (or other appropriate body in another setting) should participate in training to learn to give feedback. Both the priest and the appraiser(s) must learn to give and receive feedback, and this task cannot be adequately accomplished by reading a manual.
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If the feedback is going to be used for learning and development, we pay attention to both how feedback is given as well as how it is received. This subject has received much research regarding the downside of performance appraisal caused by poor reception of feedback; but other than recommending avoidance of some of the conditions that cause individuals to react defensively or negatively to feedback, few remedies are offered. I offer a learning model that should be taught to and practiced by both the people giving and the people receiving feedback.
LEARNING TO GIVE AND RECEIVE FEEDBACK People must be trained to give and receive feedback, and we all learn some things best from experience. I use an individual exercise that I do in a workshop or classroom based on David A. Kolb’s experiential learning model to help people learn to give and receive feedback.12 The exercise begins with each learner choosing a single incident, called a concrete experience, where he or she could have been more effective. This does not have to be a failure situation, but it should be a situation where the learner felt he or she could have acted differently to get a better13 outcome. The concrete experience is then described briefly in two parts: (a) objective and (b) subjective. The objective part includes a description of the facts without any attempt to analyze the content. The subjective part is the personal experience of the event, and includes feelings experienced at the time (e.g., I was angry, sad, confused) as well as thoughts and perceptions that were occurring during the experience. A simple description of the events that occurred is not sufficient. The next part of the exercise, called reflective observation, involves describing (a) the learner’s own perspective on the incident, that is their thoughts and feelings since the experience and (b) the perspectives of others. This is called perspective taking. Although this seems straightforward, learners often have trouble keeping the focus on the event described in the concrete experience. I recommend that learners talk to others—a trusted friend, a family member, even the person involved in the concrete experience (if appropriate) to get the other’s perspective. Learners must assume that the others are not “insane,” but had some reasons (not necessarily good reasons) for their reactions. The purpose of perspective taking is to see the incident from the point of view of any other people directly or marginally involved, from the point of view of a neutral observer, and from the point of view of others who might share some characteristics with the other that the learners do not. Ask, where appropriate, what would the situation have meant to someone younger, older, from a different field or culture?
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Once the learner has taken the relational step of asking how others would see the situation, it is time to move to abstract conceptualization. This part of the exercise helps learners refine their models of people and organizations. While the reflective observation section focused on gaining perspectives and information from specific others, this section focuses on abstract concepts from psychology, theology, the Scriptures, sociology, and other sources as well as the learner’s own personal theories or models that help the learner make sense of the experience.14 Finally, based on analysis of the experience reported, what future actions could be taken to make the learner more effective in a similar situation in the future? This part of the exercise is called active experimentation. Future actions can be stated in the form of rules of thumb or action resolutions. The learner begins by asking, “What steps can be taken to avoid getting in this situation in the future?” and “What steps can I take when I find myself in this situation in the future?” Once those steps are outlined, determine the barriers to carrying out those actions and what supports need to be put in place (e.g., “I will secretly contract with Katherine to give me a signal when she hears me avoiding a topic in a meeting,” or “I will keep a note at the top of my notebook to remind me to consult with each person in the group about any decision.” I have found this exercise, which I have done with learners in both seminary and business school, to be most effective when written and scored so that the learners can see what they are missing and how hard receiving and giving feedback is, even to themselves. Almost every time I have used this exercise, I have had at least one learner write about an incident that happened to someone else even though I stress that the critical incident must be the learner’s incident. Practicing going through the learning model verbally with a group can also be helpful, but is best with a trained facilitator.
A COMPETENCY MODEL APPROACH: INTEGRATING THEOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY Performance management can be taken one step further by using the development of leadership competencies as the basis for performance appraisal. Leaders are evaluated on the extent to which they demonstrate specific behaviors in specific contexts.15 David McClelland and his colleagues found that managers who actively seek and use power (power for the good of others) to bring about the goals or mission of the organization, also exercise self-control by their lack of need for personal recognition.16 These individuals “have become true selfless instruments of a higher authority”17 since the leader is concerned with the mission of the organization and/or a higher power.
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McClelland’s work has been extended to religious organizations, particularly Catholic organizations.18 Using rigorous psychological methodology (nomination by peer of superior performers), Father David Nygren, Ph.D., et al. found that superior leaders of Roman Catholic religious congregations (orders) were distinguished from the typical leader by being “deeply rooted in the awareness and presence of God.” They also found that these leaders were motivated by achievement and socialized power and focused on strategy from a long-term perspective. A 1995 study by James Walsh and his colleagues reported similar findings for parish priests: Successful, effective priests enjoy a wide variety of deep personal relationships with family, friends, other priests, religious sisters, couples, and lay people. At the professional level these priests draw life from the people they serve; their parishioners are important sources of inspiration. At the same time, effective priests possess deep spiritual resources, drawn from their experience of God’s love, the power of Jesus’ example, and a strong sense that the mystery of God underlies the Church and their ministry within it.”19
Developing these competency models with Catholic theological values as the foundation, as Father Nygren and Sr. Ukeritis have done, would raise performance appraisal and performance management to a whole new level, one where effective performance was thought of in terms of behaviors that demonstrated leadership competencies integrated with Catholic values. NOTES 1. Most Reverent Donald W. Wuerl, “Reflections on Governance and Accountability in the Church,” in Governance, Accountability, and Future of the Catholic Church, ed. Francis Oakley and Bruce Russett (New York: Continuum, 2004), 18. 2. Wuerl, “Reflections,” 18. 3. Wuerl, “Reflections,” 18. 4. John P. Beal, “Turning Pro: Theologico-Canonical Hurdles on the Way to a Professional Ethic for Church Leaders,” in Church and Its Organizational Context: Learning From the Sex Abuse Scandal in Catholic Church, ed. Jean M. Bartunek, Mary Ann Hinsdale, and James F. Keenan (New York: Sheed & Ward 2006), 171. 5. James F. Keenan, “Toward an Ecclesial Professional Ethics.” in Church and Its Organizational Context: Learning from the Sex Abuse Scandal in Catholic Church, ed. Jean M. Bartunek, Mary Ann Hinsdale, and James F. Keenan (New York: Sheed & Ward 2006), 90. 6. Beal, “Turning Pro,” 175. 7. John P. Beal, “It Shall Not Be So Among You! Crisis in the Church, Crisis in Church Law,” in Governance, Accountability, and Future of the Catholic Church, ed. Francis Oakley and Bruce Russett (New York: Continuum, 2004), 93.
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8. Wuerl, “Reflections,” 18. 9. See http://www.usccb.org/ogc/RelComp2006.pdf. 10. Paul Lakeland, “The Crisis and the Scandal,” in Church and Its Organizational Context: Learning from the Sex Abuse Scandal in Catholic Church, ed. Jean M. Bartunek, Mary Ann Hinsdale, and James F. Keenan (New York: Sheed & Ward 2006), 7. 11. Excellent information provided by the Archdiocese of Chicago on performance appraisal tools and information, how to give feedback, and on rating errors can be found at http://www.archchicago.org/departments/ministerial_evaluation/ministerial_ evaluation.shtm 12. David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1984). 13. “Better” is defined by the learner by theology, by personal goals, etc. 14. Excellent examples of a theological approach to reconciliation can be found in the speech “Toward Building a Reconciling World” by Sr. Katarina Schuth, OSF, Ph.D., at Loyola University in Chicago in 2004 as part of the Chapel Speaker Series. Schuth also reports some principles of dialogue in relation to the Church suggested by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin in forming the Catholic Common Ground Initiative. The second dimension, “What attitudes should we have toward those with whom we dialogue?” (p. 6) has the same goals as the method outlined here for learning to give and receive feedback. The text of Sr. Schuth’s speech can be found at: http://www .luc.edu/chapelseries/Past_Speakers.shtml. 15. Note that it is particularly important to draw these competencies from rigorous studies that compare effective leaders others. Many studies in education and religion collect data without regard to the effectiveness (by any definition) of the leaders. For a discussion, see Lisa R. Berlinger, “The Behavioral Competency Approach to Effective Ecclesial Leadership,” Journal of Religious Leadership, 2, no.2 (2003), 91–110. 16. David C. McClelland, Human Motivation, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 318. 17. McClelland, Human Motivation, 318. 18. See David J. Nygren and Miriam D. Ukeritis, “Nonprofit Executive Leadership Education Study,” Theological Education, 39, no. 1, (Autumn 1992), 123–124; David J. Nygren and Miriam D. Ukeritis, The Future Religious Orders in the United States: Transformation and Commitment, (New York: Praeger, 1993); David J. Nygren, Miriam D. Ukeritis, David C. McClelland, & J. L. Hickman, “Outstanding Leadership in Nonprofit Organizations: Leadership Competencies in Roman Catholic Religious Orders.” Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 4, no. 4, (Summer, 1994); D. M. Butler and R. D. Herman, “Effective Ministerial Leadership,” Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 9, no 3 (1999), 229–239. 19. James Walsh et al. “Grace Under Pressure: What Gives Life to American Priests,” (Washington, DC: National Catholic Education Association, 1995 [Abstract]).
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Performance Management and Ongoing Formation of Priests James H. Alphen
O
rganizations in every sector of society rely on productive performance by the organization as a whole, its constituent systems, and the people within it to achieve and sustain their mission. How organizations support their productive performance has evolved over millennia and will no doubt continue to evolve. One contemporary expression of organizational support for productive performance is performance management. With roots in the scientific management method of Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915) and evolving through diverse approaches to performance appraisal, performance management can be described as “a tool to execute organizational strategy by signaling […] what is really important to the organization, fixing accountability for behavior and results, and helping to improve performance.”1 While it is easy to understand the relevance of such a tool for business, government, and many not-for-profit organizations, it may be more difficult to recognize how performance management could be a suitable tool in church ministry. Proponents of performance management in business and other economic sectors want to go beyond the issues of ratings and formats that continue to challenge the practice of performance appraisal and to offer performance management as “not so much an event (that is, an annual performance rating) as a continuous and action-oriented process that emphasizes setting expectations in advance, coaching, and continuous performance improvement.”2 In applying performance management approaches in church ministry, emphasis on such components of a relationship between the minister and the church organization she or he is serving could more clearly contribute to the church organization’s support for effective ministry.
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PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AND PRIESTS One immediate concern when applying concepts of performance to ministry is that a ministry is not just a job in which someone performs a function and in this way contributes to the organization but also—and more profoundly—a way of life. The Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church teaches that “all Christians, in whatever state or walk in life, are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity, and this holiness is conducive to a more human way of living.”3 This chapter sketches a project that attempts to contribute to application of performance management to the ministry of priests by articulating a conceptual framework to facilitate alignment of priests’ performance with the purpose of their ministry. In describing how the universal call to holiness4 is lived out in the many “forms and tasks of life,”5 the Second Vatican Council profiles the ministry of priests who “share in the grace of office through Christ”6 and “should grow in the love of God and of their neighbor by the daily performance of their duty; should keep the bond of priestly communion, should abound in every spiritual good and give to all a living witness to God.”7 Appropriate application of performance management to the ministry of priests needs to take cognizance not just of priests’ “performance of their duty” but also of their particular sacramental identity as members of the church’s order of presbyters.8 In the Rite of Ordination of Priests, the promises made before presbyteral ordination include commitments not just to discharge the responsibilities of the office of priest but also “to be united more closely every day to Christ the High Priest, who offered himself for us […] as a pure sacrifice, and with him to consecrate [themselves] to God for the salvation of all.”9 The conceptual framework this project aims to build is intended to provide a basis for a more comprehensive and consistent experience of formation for priests and presbyterates. Before outlining the project more specifically, some context about formation of priests may be helpful.
THE BAPTISMAL CALL TO LIFELONG FORMATION The bible and Christian tradition make very clear the vocation of all the People of God to cooperate with the divine grace of lifelong formation. As the U.S. bishops’ The Basic Plan for the Ongoing Formation of Priests puts it: The Second Vatican Council has described the Church as “the people of God, the body of Christ, the bride of Christ, the temple of the Holy Spirit,
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the family of God.”10 In different ways, these images “bring to light the reality of the Church as a communion with its inseparable dimensions: the communion of each Christian with Christ and the communion of all Christians with one another.”11 By communicating his Spirit, Christ continually forms and reforms those who become his brothers and sisters in baptism. “As all the members of the human body, though they are many, form one body, so also are the faithful in Christ.”12 Christ the eternal high priest shares with his body, the Church, the anointing that he himself received.13 Through the waters of baptism and by the power of the Holy Spirit, the faithful are formed into a royal priesthood and joined to Christ, becoming sharers in a common vocation to holiness and a mission to evangelize the world.14
Among the many blessings of the church’s renewal inspired by Vatican II has been our greater attention to what is required for effective formation of all church members as well as of those who serve the church in its diverse ministries. In 1973, at the urging of the U.S. bishops and at the invitation of the National Federation of Priests’ Councils, the National Organization for Continuing Education of Roman Catholic Clergy (NOCERCC) was created.15 In 2006 NOCERCC adopted a revised mission statement recommitting the organization “to the Church’s mission to promote and support ongoing formation for priests and presbyterates” as NOCERCC “collaborates with others to foster a culture of formation within the Church for bishops, priests, deacons, and all the Church’s ministers.”
FROM “CONTINUING EDUCATION” TO “ONGOING FORMATION” In 1972, a few months before NOCERCC’s founding, the U.S. bishops issued The Program of Continuing Education of Priests in response to the Second Vatican Council’s call for renewed attention to formation after presbyteral ordination.16 In contextualizing the term continuing education, the bishops note that the word education is “misleading” in that “one immediately thinks of school and matters academic,” whereas in the context of ongoing formation for priests, “it must be understood in a much broader way.” “Continuing education,” for the bishops, “means the growth of the whole [person]” in many dimensions, including “spiritual, intellectual, emotional.”17 Twelve years later, in 1984, the bishops followed up on the 1972 document with The Continuing Formation of Priests: Growing in Wisdom, Age and Grace. Noting the positive evolution of continuing education practice, the bishops catalogue “changes in style, method, and direction” that evidence a
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“new awareness of learning as a lifelong dynamic” and affirm this new awareness reflected in the term continuing formation.18 Recalling the passage in Romans 12: “Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, so that you may judge what is God’s will” (Romans 12: 2a), the bishops insist that “[a]ny discussion of continuing formation […] of priests needs to be grounded in an understanding of conversion as an ongoing process both personal and communal. [ . . . C]onversion occurs in every facet of one’s life—intellectual, affective, social, spiritual, moral, and ecclesial.”19 The 1984 document describes continuing presbyteral formation as “a lifelong dialogue-journey through which a priest comes to greater awareness of oneself, others and God.” For the bishops “[p]ersonal growth, continuing formation, theological education and human development, all of which lead to greater service of the People of God, are woven throughout the priest’s entire life and ministry.”20 In their 2001 document, The Basic Plan for the Ongoing Formation of Priests, the U.S. bishops seek “to inspire and challenge priests to respond to the promptings of God’s grace” with a plan that is “comprehensive, systematic, practical, and rooted in the Gospel.”21 Building on their two earlier documents, the bishops note that “[p]rograms, resources, and practices do not constitute ongoing formation. They are necessary instruments but always in service to the larger purpose and direction of formation.”22 The Basic Plan defines ongoing formation as “the continuing integration of priestly identity and functions or service for the sake of mission and communion with Christ and the Church.”23 Considering both those elements of ongoing formation that are constant throughout the life of a priest and the distinctive formational tasks at each stage of a priest’s ministry,24 The Basic Plan addresses the formational issues brought into focus through the perspective of the four dimensions or “pillars” of formation articulated by Pope John Paul II in the 1992 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis (I Will Give You Shepherds): human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral.25 Taking its lead from the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests and other church documents, The Basic Plan looks at ongoing formation from the perspective of the three presbyteral munera or offices of teaching, sanctifying, and governing.26 The Basic Plan represents the most comprehensive treatment to date of the U.S. bishops’ vision for ongoing presbyteral formation. From start to finish, it articulates an understanding of and approach to formation that is not confined to programmatic events or only academic concerns but continuous and holistic, a formation that is a constituent element of priests’ daily lives and service.
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COMMUNAL CHARACTER OF ONGOING FORMATION While affirming that “[i]ndividual priests are responsible for their ongoing formation” in fidelity to “their commitment at ordination to serve well the people of God through their ministry and through their own personal faith commitment,”27 the bishops echo in The Basic Plan these words of Pope John Paul II in Pastores Dabo Vobis: “the entire particular church has the responsibility, under the guidance of the bishop, to develop and look after the different aspects of [ . . . ] priests’ permanent formation.”28 Indeed, this responsibility shared by all church members is articulated in several Vatican II documents.29 Within this communal responsibility of the whole church for ongoing presbyteral formation, The Basic Plan also focuses on the fundamentally communal character of presbyteral ministry and life: [P]riests are not priests simply one by one, but they are priests and serve the mission of the Church in a presbyterate in union with the bishop. The corporate sense of priestly identity and mission, although not fully developed even in official documents, is clearly emerging as an important direction for the future.30
In Pastores Dabo Vobis Pope John Paul II articulates what may be the counter-cultural roots of this emerging direction: By its very nature, the ordained ministry can be carried out only to the extent that the priest is united to Christ through sacramental participation in the priestly order [ . . . ] in [ . . . ] communion with [the] bishop. The ordained ministry has a radical “communitarian form” and can only be carried out as “a collective work.”31
To describe how this corporate sense of priestly identity and mission translates into the corporate character of each local church’s presbyterate, Pastores Dabo Vobis reflects that: Unity among the priests with the bishop and among themselves is not something added from the outside to the nature of their service, but expresses its essence inasmuch as it is the care of Christ the priest for the people gathered in the unity of the Blessed Trinity.32 This unity among priests, lived in a spirit of pastoral charity, makes priests witnesses of Jesus Christ, who prayed [ . . . ] “that they may all be one” (John 17: 21).33
The Basic Plan connects this corporate character of the presbyterate with the communal character of ongoing presbyteral formation: The formation of a presbyterate is given by God sacramentally. The ongoing formation of a presbyterate is the deliberate cultivation of the unity
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of the priests and their bishop, a unity that responds to God’s grace and the mission entrusted to them. The ongoing formation of a presbyterate aims to forge a collective sense of study and prayer among the priests of the presbyterate for the sake of their service to the people of God entrusted to their care. Common prayer and study enable the diverse members of a presbyterate to have a common language and mind about the mission they serve through their ministry, as well as a common heart committed and attached to the heart of Jesus Christ, High Priest. [ . . . ] It is clear that the ongoing formation of presbyterates is significant for the vitality of the Church’s mission. It is also clear that the formation of presbyterates centers on cultivating their unity.34
THE BASIC PLAN AS CENTERPIECE OF NOCERCC’S WORK In the foreword to The Basic Plan the U.S. bishops explicitly asked NOCERCC, along with other organizations equipped to support ongoing presbyteral formation, to “carry the principles outlined here forward to implementation.”35 NOCERCC has made The Basic Plan the centerpiece of our work, as reflected in its 2005 Strategic Directions.36 One example of this commitment is Cultivating Unity, a pastoral initiative of NOCERCC in partnership with CARA, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, to foster the unity of priests and bishops. Cultivating Unity is intended to be a transformational process37 engaging the entire diocesan presbyterate with its bishop in frank and faith-centered dialogue leading to a common rededication to priestly ministry. NOCERCC has brought Cultivating Unity to fifteen38 dioceses to date, with generally positive preliminary reports about how the process has helped these presbyterates.
TOWARD A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK TO GUIDE DESIGN OF FORMATION SYSTEMS A second example is the project described above that builds on The Basic Plan’s framework of the three presbyteral munera or offices (teaching, sanctifying, governing) and the four dimensions or “pillars” of formation (human, spiritual, intellectual, pastoral). This project is attempting to articulate a conceptual
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framework of priests’ formation based on what outcomes each of the three munera requires from each of the four dimensions of formation. NOCERCC wants this framework to be a very practical tool that priests’ ongoing formation directors and committees can use to guide design of formation systems in dioceses and religious communities. NOCERCC also wants this framework to help establish common ground with seminaries and schools of theology as it connects ongoing formation more closely with their curricula and connects them more directly with how ongoing formation can complement after ordination their work in initial formation. The initial formation community has already developed resources39 that can be most useful in an ongoing formation context, and NOCERCC would not want needlessly to duplicate valuable existing resources. A resource NOCERCC has identified for this project is competency modeling, a contemporary management practice used in business, education, and other sectors. Its purpose is to help learners achieve desired performance by identifying the constituent knowledge, skills, and attitudes of behavioral outcomes that reflect the desired performance.40 Application of competency modeling to ministry formation requires, of course, great caution, since the purpose of formation is much more basic and comprehensive than competent performance. In the case of priests’ ongoing formation, The Basic Plan, as noted above, emphasizes the importance of continually integrating identity and function for the sake of mission and communion as “the movement toward a unity of life that draws together and dynamically relates who [priests] are, what [priests] do, and what [priests] are about ([priests’] purpose or mission).”41 This project is experimenting with application of a generally-accepted performance management practice in a specific performance setting, formation for priests and presbyterates. Table 10.1 depicts and describes our conceptual framework to date. Twenty-four cells represent the interfaces of the three presbyteral munera, the four dimensions of formation, and the perspectives of the individual priest and the entire presbyterate. Next steps would include: • Formation needs analysis: to identify formation outcomes that reflect each interface and can be organized into comprehensive and developmentally appropriate curricula for priests and presbyterates; • Current performance analysis: to identify the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that constitute the current performance of priests and presbyterates; • Benchmarking: to identify other applications42 of this project’s concepts, prospective objectives, possible formation strategies, and other
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potential design elements that appear to offer valuable insights about results that can be expected by selecting particular design elements; • Formation plans: to map out the objectives; measures of effectiveness; formation strategies, including how to assure that the formation experience appropriately attends to priestly identity as described above as well as to functions; and supporting resources to be utilized; • Piloting of these plans, and evaluation and revision of the pilots; • Broader implementation of the revised plans with continuous evaluation and improvement of the implemented plans. As NOCERCC and those colleagues who choose to collaborate on it work through this project from its present conceptual stage to succeeding stages of design, implementation, and continuous improvement, NOCERCC invites input and feedback from all interested sources.
ABOUT THE THREE PRESBYTERAL OFFICES Teaching: The Ministry of the Word Proclamation of the word of God to people is the first responsibility of priests. The ministry of the word takes place in diverse settings and reflects the particular setting’s scope or purpose. Examples include preaching, teaching, and counseling. Sanctifying: The Ministry of the Sacraments Priests celebrate and preside at the sacramental celebrations of the Church, preeminently the Eucharist, leading the Church in participating in the transforming mysteries of Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, which initiate and lead people into a new way of living. In the Liturgy of the Hours priests pray for the sake of the whole Body of Christ. Governing: Giving a Shepherd’s Care to the Community of Faith Priests care for the community entrusted to them and nurture the bonds that link the local community with the diocese and the universal Church. The priest’s pastoral care for a community of faith means presiding over it, moderating it, and, when necessary, representing it. Responsibilities include initial and ongoing formation of the community, fostering its discernment of God’s direction, and offering guidance on its journey of faith.
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Table 10.1. Project Grid
Each Priest Presbyterate
Teaching Each Priest Presbyterate
Sanctifying Each Priest
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Governing
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ABOUT THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF FAITH Human Formation Aims for fuller development of the individual’s humanity as a bridge for communicating Jesus Christ and of the capacity to relate to others as a person called to serve the community of faith. Integrates the whole being, including body, mind, and heart, to develop psychological competence, cultivate communication skills, care for physical well-being, nurture healthy relationships, and take interest in the arts, sciences, and politics of human life. Intellectual Formation Aims to deepen the understanding of faith. It seeks to link theoretical knowledge with practical wisdom, so that priests can serve their people more effectively. Priests need to return regularly and deliberately to the holy mysteries that ground their ministry and life and engage throughout their ministerial career in theological updating and reflection. Pastoral Formation Aims to develop practical competencies that enable priests to serve their people well. Through application in particular circumstances of ministry and continuous improvement, priests need to develop a diverse range of competencies for such responsibilities as presiding and preaching at liturgy; directing catechesis of adults and children; providing pastoral counseling and spiritual direction; assuring pastoral care for those who are poor, sick, or bereaved; managing human, financial, and physical resources; and facilitating meetings and promoting the faith community’s growth in the unity and freedom of Christ. Spiritual Formation Aims for priests to become better disciples and more transparent sacramental signs of Jesus Christ. Attends to lifelong formation in discipleship, pastoral charity, celibacy, obedience, and simplicity of lifestyle. Emphasizes the practice of spirituality as the cultivation, by the power of the Holy Spirit, of priests’ experience of God and relationship with Christ.43 ABOUT NOCERCC The National Organization for Continuing Education of Roman Catholic Clergy (NOCERCC) is a membership association of dioceses, religious com-
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munities, and other interested organizations and individuals committed to the Church’s mission to promote and support ongoing formation for priests and presbyterates. Founded in 1973, NOCERCC’s current membership includes approximately 150 Roman Catholic dioceses and religious communities in the United States as well as approximately 40 other organizations and individuals around the world that are part of the ongoing clergy formation community. Professional and formational services offered to members include an annual national convention; an annual orientation workshop; regional meetings; an expanding menu of formation opportunities that dioceses and religious communities can host for clergy and other pastoral ministers; a membership newsletter; and other practical resources in diverse media. By engaging in dialogue about contemporary pastoral needs and realities, by sponsoring research on issues of presbyteral formation, and by offering educational opportunities, NOCERCC collaborates with others to foster a culture of formation within the Church for bishops, priests, deacons, and all the Church’s ministers. In this way NOCERCC promotes ongoing formation and assists and encourages faithful, healthy, holy, and effective ministry in the Church. For more information about NOCERCC or this project, contact the NOCERCC National Office by email at
[email protected] or by telephone at 312-781-9450.
NOTES 1. Alain Gosselin, Jon M. Werner, and Nicole Hallé, “Rater Preferences Concerning Performance Management and Appraisal,” Human Resource Development Quarterly, 8, no. 4 (Winter 1997), 321. 2. Gosselin, Werner, and Halle, “Rater Preference,” 321. 3. Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, 1964, no. 40 (hereafter Lumen Gentium). 4. Lumen Gentium, heading, chap. V. 5. Lumen Gentium, no. 41. 6. Lumen Gentium, no. 41. 7. Lumen Gentium, no. 41. 8. The Basic Plan for the Ongoing Formation of Priests (Washington DC: National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2001), Appendix, 108 (hereafter Basic Plan). 9. Rite of Ordination of Priests, The Roman Pontifical, Rites of Ordination of a Bishop, of Priests, and of Deacons, Second Typical Edition, (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2002), no. 124. 10. The Second Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, The Final Report, 1985, II, A, 3 (hereafter The Final Report). 11. Christifideles Laici (The Vocation and the Mission of the Lay Faithful in the World), Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Pope John Paul II, 1988, no. 19 (hereafter
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Christifideles Laici); cf. The Final Report, II, C, 1; Pastores Dabo Vobis (I Will Give You Shepherds), Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Pope John Paul II, 1992, no. 12 (hereafter Pastores Dabo Vobis). 12. Lumen Gentium, no. 7; Ephesians 4: 7, 11–16; 1 Corinthians 12: 13. 13. For example, Matthew 3: 16; Luke 4: 18; Acts 10: 38; also Presbyterorum Ordinis (Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests), Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, 1965, no. 2 (hereafter Presbyterorum Ordinis). 14. Basic Plan, Appendix, p. 108. Cf. Code of Canon Law, cc. 204, 210–211; Lumen Gentium, nos. 10–12, 39–42; Presbyterorum Ordinis, no. 2; Christifideles Laici, no. 14. 15. For example, Joseph M. White, A Work Never Finished: The First Twenty-Five Years of the National Organization for Continuing Education of Roman Catholic Clergy (NOCERCC 1973-1998, 1997), 1–8. 16. For example, Optatum Totius (Decree on the Training of Priests), Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, 1965, no. 22; Presbyterorum Ordinis, no. 19. 17. The Program of Continuing Education of Priests (Washington DC: National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1972), no. 15. 18. The Continuing Formation of Priests: Growing in Wisdom, Age and Grace (Washington DC: National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1984), 1–4. 19. Growing in Wisdom, 5. 20. Growing in Wisdom, 4. 21. Basic Plan, 8. 22. Basic Plan, 11 23. Basic Plan, 11. 24. Basic Plan, 9. 25. Pastores Dabo Vobis, nos. 42–59. 26. Basic Plan, 16–18; Presbyterorum Ordinis, nos. 4–6. 27. Basic Plan, 35–36. 28. Pastores Dabo Vobis, no. 78; Basic Plan, 3. 29. Presbyterorum Ordinis, nos. 7–9; Lumen Gentium, no. 37; Christus Dominus (Decree on the Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church), (Rome: Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, 1965), nos. 15–16. 30. Basic Plan, 93. 31. Pastores Dabo Vobis, no. 17. 32. Synod of Bishops, Eighth Ordinary General Assembly, “The Formation of Priests in the Circumstances of the Present Day,” Proposition 34. 33. Pastores Dabo Vobis, no. 74. 34. Basic Plan, 94–95. 35. Basic Plan, 2. 36. Strategy A2: “To promote and facilitate implementation of the U.S. bishops’ The Basic Plan for the Ongoing Formation of Priests, and to provide programs, products, and services toward that end.” 37. The Cultivating Unity process ordinarily includes two major components: Research: a survey of priests; an interview of the bishop; listening sessions with priests. Convocation: a carefully structured and attentively facilitated convocation, centered
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in common prayer and faith sharing, with bishop and priests; resources available to assist the local church in following up on action items arising from the Cultivating Unity process. 38. As of October 2009. 39. E.g., the Institute for Priests and Presbyterates at Saint Meinrad School of Theology, which “aims to help priests sharpen their skills for more effective ministry and to keep both priests and presbyterates holy, healthy and effective in various ministry settings and stages of life” (from http://www.saintmeinrad.edu/programs_ipp_ovr.aspx). The institute currently focuses on three areas: providing education, formation, and mentors for priests in their first five years; helping priests make the transition to firsttime pastors; and building presbyteral unity (from same website). 40. For an exploration of the application of competency-based learning in business, see Seung Youn Chyung, Donald Stepich, and David Cox, “Building a CompetencyBased Curriculum Architecture to Educate 21st-Century Business Practitioners,” Journal of Education for Business, (July-August 2006), 307–314. 41. Basic Plan, 11. 42. See, for example, a Theological Education for the Anglican Communion (TEAC) initiative, of which the aims include “to create a culture of teaching and learning in the faith community” (from http://www.anglicancommunion.org/teac/). The website notes: TEAC has developed “grids” that “aim to set out in an accessible way the ‘competencies’ that TEAC believes are essential for people engaged in various forms of ministry and discipleship within the Anglican Communion—at different stages in their formation. The grids are an example of the increasingly used ‘Outcomes Based’ model for education.” The grid for formation of priests interfaces 11 competency areas and 4 chronological points, including “[i]n on-going ministry,” describing in each of the 44 cells outcomes for which “evidence should be shown.” 43. Basic Plan, 17-18, 24-35.
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Neither Fish Nor Fowl: Performance Evaluation of Deacons Deacon Justin Green, Ph.D.
“LET’S NOT REINVENT THE WHEEL”
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he central theme of this volume is “best practices in ministry performance management.” Originally, “best practices” was a term used in business but now it appears on the agendas of organizations of every type. And, “best practices” is not the only idea that nonprofit organizations have borrowed from the business world. Diocesan strategic plans and parish pastoral or ministry plans, for example, now serve the same purpose as business plans—describing the ways in which the organization’s vision and mission will be accomplished. An even more fundamental example: nonprofit organizations, including parishes and dioceses, frequently respond as do businesses when confronted with a challenge—how do others solve the problem? A basic axiom in business now has become a rule in almost every part of life including church and nonprofit management: let’s not reinvent the wheel. From time to time, Dilbert has had wisdom to share on the subject, and while Dilbert can be a bit caustic in his sarcasm, he usually has it right. And, indeed, students of business and of nonprofit organization management have invented many very useful wheels in the area of evaluation of employees. The day was relatively late in dawning for nonprofits but, eventually, they have come to realize that staff evaluations are important to organizational performance. It seems obvious that managing the temporal activities of the church requires evaluation of staff, and that organizations would do well to seek out, adapt, and then adopt an evaluation model. Some would point out that competent organizational evaluations and regular financial audits might have
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prevented some of the temporal pits that have trapped parishes, organizations, and dioceses in recent years. Evaluating ministry performance is basic to the effective functioning of churches. It is, however, not something that has been done often in the past. The essays in this volume, therefore, address the question of how to perform a task. Sometimes left unsaid is the perception that church leadership is not always enthusiastic in embracing ministry performance evaluation. Let’s make one point clear from the outset: my concern is the evaluation of deacons in diaconal ministry. CARA data report that many deacons are hired by the church. Some, including the National Association of Diaconate Directors, have raised questions about these data because they appear to commingle reimbursement for ministry expenses with payment for employment. Regardless of the precise numbers, it does seem intuitively clear that, in recent years, an increasing number of deacons have been called upon to administer parishes (with or without a pastor in residence), to manage Curia departments in dioceses, to manage Catholic Charities and similar agencies, and to take up responsibilities at all levels in dioceses, parishes, schools, and organizations. The number of deacons is growing, deacons are committed to the building of God’s kingdom and to supporting the church’s mission given it by Jesus. It comes as no surprise, then, that as the number of deacons increases, more and more find their way to church employment. Deacons who are employed as parish life coordinators, business managers, teachers, or in any other capacity must be evaluated as would any other employee; ordination has absolutely nothing to do with job performance as a parish life coordinator or case manager at a homeless shelter or director of diocesan planning. As an employee of the Diocese of Winona, I expect my job performance to be evaluated by the Vicar General using the process specified in diocesan personnel policies. This should be settled policy and applied whether or not the employee is ordained. Evaluation of deacons in jobs, as opposed to ministry, is not part of this assignment. Other writers in this volume have addressed the challenge of evaluating church employees; this closing essay addresses the narrow issue of evaluating deacons in their ministry. The question, then, is how do we measure the extent to which deacons are fulfilling the vocation to which they are called and ordained, specifically the charisms of worship, word, and service? While several dioceses have adopted an evaluation program, there is no clear consensus on a “best practice.” How, then, to determine whether a model already exists that can be modified and put to good use? Perhaps, the “wheel” already has been invented, all we need do is copy the model, perhaps tweak it a bit here and there, and put it to work. Rather than invent a new one, let’s wander through what we might
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describe as a “wheel warehouse,” an inventory of personnel evaluation models, and see if we can find something suitable as a starting point. But, it’s a big warehouse; there are lots of approaches to personnel evaluations, where to start? Let’s start by considering the essential characteristics of a deacon. Deacons are members of the clergy. Perhaps the shelves in the clergy section of the warehouse will hold evaluation measures used for other clergy that might be adapted to a “best practice” for evaluating deacons. There is not a lot on the shelves, but it still is worth a look.
EVALUATING DEACONS AS CLERGY Like priests and bishops, deacons have accepted God’s call to ordination, to service as a minister of the church. But, as several people have pointed out in this volume, it does not appear that God calls men to be priests because they have the gifts and talents to be good pastors or good administrators. Rather, it appears that the priestly vocation is anchored in a unique call to holiness and in a willingness to accept a role in God’s plan for the world. Then, the church assigns them to a “job” as pastor. By contrast, a deacon, too, is called to holiness and to participation in God’s plan but, since the deacon’s fundamental charism is justice and service, assigning him to ministry in a parish and/or elsewhere is a logical consequence of the vocation and of the formation process. Oversimplifying a bit, we have heard discussion of two ways of thinking about vocations to ordained ministry, cultic and servant. The cultic model focuses on liturgy and the sacraments. It is, according to several comments made in this volume, an outmoded way of looking at priesthood, one that might have been appropriate in the Middle Ages or even in more recent times when the church had sufficient priests to enable bishops to consider presbyteral gifts and talents before assigning priests to ministry. Today, when so many diocesan priests also are pastors and shoulder not only the responsibility for the care of souls in a parish but also the management of a parish enterprise, the cultic model seems anachronistic. Indeed, while the formation process for deacons follows the four-fold dimensions of ministry formation and includes spiritual formation, few deacons are ordained for permanent ministry without the expectation that they will be assigned to a parish and/or to a specific ministry. Our task is to develop a method for evaluating deacons in ministry, not deacons qua deacons. The concept of a cultic model for deacons simply isn’t supported by the church’s documents on the reasons for the restoration of the diaconate as a permanent ministry. While the diaconate as a permanent ministry was not restored as a response to a shortage of priests (the exodus from priesthood had only begun),
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the church talks about the restoration in terms of diaconal ministry, the call to function as an icon of Jesus the Servant. Can the servant model of priesthood and of diaconate, therefore, generate a standard for evaluation—can we effectively evaluate how well a man performs the servant responsibilities of priest or deacon? Since this question shifts the focus from evaluation of priests to evaluation of pastors, is there anything to be learned from past experience in evaluation of pastors that will inform our search for a method to evaluate deacons in ministry? Deacons don’t fit the cultic model. Not only are deacons not recruited for liturgy and sacramental ministries, but the institutional church makes abundantly clear that the fundamental charism of deacons is not liturgy or sacraments but justice and service. Deacons are icons of Christ the Servant and, as such, their principal call is to meet the needs of their neighbors. Pastors and deacons are servants (actually, all priests are deacons but the church barely pays even lip service to that fact), and therein may lie the key to developing an effective evaluation. But evaluations of pastors are uncommon, verging on the rare. We might speculate about the reasons. Some are very basic: they derive from pride of position—only superiors are capable of evaluating a pastor. Others are based on practical difficulties and the absence of consensus on how to measure the characteristics of a good pastor. It also is true in many if not most diocese, that performance evaluation of pastors is almost a futile task. Even when dioceses invest in evaluations of pastors, they typically do not invest in the next step: providing resources to help pastors respond affirmatively to the evaluation. The directories governing the formation, ministry, and life of both priests and deacons call for continuing education which would include help in improving an evaluation, but for the most part, these remain promises to be fulfilled, maybe in the future. And, there is little leverage. Even when a priest is determined to be incompetent as a pastor, what options are open to the bishop? Bishops need pastors to accomplish diocesan vision and mission, to celebrate the sacraments. Nowadays, in many dioceses, there are not many assignments for a priest who cannot function effectively as pastor. More often than not, regardless of his skills, or lack thereof, in pastoring, he is assigned as a pastor. He still is a priest and can administer the sacraments and preside at Eucharist. The hope is that the staff will rescue his pastorate, perhaps will teach him how to become a pastor, at least will help him avoid disasters until his term is complete and he moves to the next parish. There isn’t much in the evaluation of pastors here to help us learn how to evaluate deacons in ministry. The church rarely evaluates priests in ministry; there is no model to adapt to the evaluation of deacons.
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DEACONS AS QUASI-STAFF To continue the tour of the tools available in the personnel evaluation warehouse, let’s return to the essential characteristics of deacons. All are clergy. The overwhelming majority are assigned to a parish, an increasing number also to an extra-parish ministry. A significant but unknown number are parish staff. But, even when deacons are not members of the parish staff, they usually have staff-like responsibilities. Many deacons are de facto sacristans, for example. Many are de facto catechists or take responsibility for youth ministry or RCIA or marriage preparation. They look like staff because they do things that, in other parishes, staff are hired to do, but they are not staff because they are not paid. Even though deacons are not parish staff, perhaps best practices for evaluation of parish staff will lead us to an evaluation of deacons in ministry. This volume contains chapters concerned with evaluating parish and diocesan staff. There is one fundamental reason why none of these evaluation theories or techniques fit deacons: deacons are not paid for their ministry. The core element of staff evaluation is the evaluation-reward-punishment nexus. When the staff member is not paid, what are the meaningful rewards-consequences? In the worst case, presumably, a pastor could ask that a deacon be reassigned. The pastor certainly could bar the deacon from taking up a significant ministry in the parish. Denying a deacon the opportunity to live his vocation is a negative consequence of an evaluation. Some would see this as a waste of a God-given resource, and the frittering away of a God-given vocation, perhaps because of a personality challenge. Should pastors evaluate deacons in the same manner as they evaluate paid staff? The cynics would point out, with some accuracy, that parish staffs often are never evaluated, so we are back where we started: no evaluation. Deacons often step in when no one else has agreed to take up the ministry; that’s the charism of service. Is it fair to evaluate a person with neither training nor experience but who has agreed to a staff-like set of responsibilities because no one else is available? If deacons are not paid, even though they perform staff-like functions, maybe justice demands that they be evaluated as volunteers.
DEACONS AS VOLUNTEERS About two decades ago, an article in a journal for nonprofit managers announced: “You CAN fire a volunteer.” That came as news to a lot of not for profit organization managers and, likely, to some pastors as well. Nowadays,
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the point is so well accepted it isn’t even argued. Managers today are far less reluctant to tell volunteers that their efforts are not moving the organization forward and that, perhaps, another organization might be able to make better use of their gifts and talents. Volunteers can be fired. But, it’s tough to fire a deacon-volunteer. Congregations get accustomed to having the deacon at liturgy; when he takes a weekend off for his family, people often ask questions. Banning the deacon from ministry is more than firing a volunteer, it is a rejection of God’s call to the man. Reassignment at least provides the deacon with an alternative, but the threat of division in the parish remains. The point in terms of evaluation is fairly clear: volunteers can be evaluated and invited to take their gifts and talents elsewhere. There is a price to be paid, but it’s usually small—the volunteer and his or her immediate family are no longer stakeholders in the organization. But evaluating the deacon as a volunteer runs against the same problem as unpaid staff evaluations—there are few rewards and even fewer consequences. Reassignment is the “nuclear” option, to be used only as a last resort, and the fallout often rains on everyone involved.
MULTI-SITE, EXTRA-ECCLESIAL: EVEN MORE CHALLENGES So far, our rummaging in search of an evaluation tool has been less than successful. There is still one more factor that ought to be considered before we move on: deacons do not minister in just one place. Deacons usually are assigned to a parish, and their liturgical ministry is in that parish. But, deacons also preside at prayer services in nursing homes, they minister in jails and prisons, homeless shelters, and on the streets. The real challenge grows from the deacon’s lead charism—justice and charity. Many bishops now assign deacons to a parish and to a nonparochial ministry; only occasionally are these associated with the parish. Diaconal ministry takes place at multiple sites; the pastor is at only one. A supervisor at these other sites may be able to evaluate a deacon’s ministry, but who is going to train this person in the ways of the church? Consider the quandary facing the administrator at a nursing home: are the residents better off with a deacon who is only mediocre in his ministry or with no ministry at all? If the church is unwilling to allocate resources for continuing education, then why should a nursing home, for example, budget funds to help a volunteer deacon become more effective in ministry? Deacons can be evaluated as would other volunteers, but it’s a complex task and not a very attractive one.
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THREE POSSIBLE MODELS Let’s examine several existing practices for the evaluation of deacons. They may or may not qualify as best practices, but certainly they are worth a look. I want to review briefly three programs: the Directory for the Formation, Life and Ministry of Permanent Deacons in the United States, and the deacon evaluation programs of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati and the Diocese of Lexington, Kentucky. The Directory is committed to evaluation. The chapters describe minimum standards in the four formation areas (spiritual, pastoral, intellectual, human) at several stages of formation (admission to candidacy, installation as lector and then as acolyte, ordination). The Directory also emphasizes the need for continuing formation, what it refers to as the “post-ordination track.” Sounds good, but a key link is missing. When the Directory shifts from formation to post-ordination formation, all mention of evaluation disappears. Now, I am not surprised by this circumstance. If the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops instructed me today to develop a performance evaluation component for post-ordination formation, I would be hard pressed to submit one for the reasons that have formed my argument thus far. The basic resource for diaconal ministry, then, the Directory, is of little help in terms of ministry evaluation. By contrast, the two dioceses have made an attempt to evaluate deacons in ministry. Both instruments are on the respective diocesan web sites. I found a lot of value in both, and I saw challenges in both. The Archdiocese of Cincinnati instrument is extensive and detailed. If anyone ever searches for the components of diaconal ministry, this form is a great resource. There is nothing left uncovered; at least, I cannot think of anything that a deacon might do that is not included. It focuses on collaboration in ministry. Perhaps the archdiocese has adopted collaboration as a defining approach to ministry and, if so, it should be applauded. But so many other dioceses have not made this commitment hence the emphasis on collaboration makes it difficult to translate the instrument to other places. The other question to consider is that the pastor is the only respondent. That’s great if the parish is the only place in which the deacon ministers. But, as noted, multi-site, extra-ecclesial ministry now is common among deacons. To complete the form, the pastor must depend upon one or more third party assessments, parties with whom he may—or may not—have a relationship, parties who may—or may not—be familiar with ministry. The Cincinnati approach, in my view, gets high marks for creativity and comprehensiveness; it doesn’t solve the problem of multiple site ministries and the focus on collaboration potentially limits its utility. Nonetheless, a deacon director instructed
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by the bishop to develop an evaluation instrument would do well to consider the Cincinnati approach. The Diocese of Lexington instrument is very different. First, it is a lot shorter, and it places collaborative ministry in a more realistic context—recommended but not the default. The items tend to focus on process—how many times, how often, etc.—and not on quality. The assessment items are not as sharply focused as in the Cincinnati questionnaire. The instrument also doesn’t solve the challenge of multi-site, extra-ecclesial ministry. On balance, it appears that both diocesan instruments are useful, they likely produce acceptable to even good or excellent results in their respective environments. They contain much of value, but probably neither is the “best practice” that we seek.
DEACONS AS PROFESSIONALS There is at least one place to look for evaluation tools, the evaluation of professionals. With the publication of Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord, the U.S. Catholic bishops made clear that the church in the twenty-first century expects much from laypeople formed as ministers: the keyword is professional. In the minds of many church leaders, the days in which the director of a ministry program is a volunteer whose principal qualifications are availability and willingness should be gone forever. To do so, of course, will require resources since professionals are far more expensive than volunteers, not just in terms of the cost of formation or compensation but also often in the costs of the programs they seek to develop and manage. The old adage, again borrowed from business, “you get what you pay for” is applicable. Expectations of volunteer led and managed programs are generally low. Want a better program? Be prepared to pay for it, and start with professional leadership. How are professionals outside of ministry evaluated? The rather cynical response is that they are not. The more complete answer is, “by the market.” Professionals, whether physicians, lawyers, chiropractors, accountants, electricians or plumbers or any other, are evaluated by the market. Word gets out—this one is good, this one is average, your life or property is at risk with that one. And, the market tends to utilize informal evaluations circulated informally through the community, a process otherwise known as gossiping. But the better answer is that professionals evaluate and regulate themselves. Most states have boards or councils made up of professionals to develop standards for entry, standards for certification, standards for promotion, practice standards, and ethical standards to name but a few. Not only the well educated professionals fit into this category, so also do barbers, beauticians,
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electricians, plumbers, morticians, almost all trades and many occupations. Does this approach to performance management hold promise for the evaluation of deacons in ministry? Consider the essential characteristics of the process by which professionals are certified and evaluated. The standards are set by the professionals themselves, pursuant to the authority of the legislature, usually with oversight assigned to the chief legal officer, i.e., the attorney general. Typically, entry into the profession—a license—requires a specific amount of training or schooling followed by passage of a qualifying exam constructed by the professionals. Promotion, for example to be a member of an advanced group such as a fellow or a journeyman or to acquire a broader license to practice, is based on years of experience, additional training, and passage of another exam. Perhaps most interestingly, the standards of practice are set by the profession. Who has not had a conversation with a physician about the “gold standard” for treating an injury, disease, or condition? How did a treatment protocol acquire “gold” status? It achieved that rank through professionals self-reporting their experience and by research usually conducted by yet other members of the profession. Discipline is managed internally—each professional board has the authority either to revoke or suspend a license to practice or to recommend such action to another body. In short, the standards are set by the people who actually do the work, and they also monitor—evaluate—the performance of fellow professionals. That’s a bare summary, but how does it fit the task of developing a process for evaluating deacons?
FITTING THE MODEL The authorizing and the oversight functions are fulfilled by the bishop, likely delegated to a vicar or director. Minimum competence standards for entry into the profession, i.e., ordination, have been set by the bishops collectively, published in the Directory and implemented by the bishop’s staff in each diocese according to the ordinary’s instructions. There are no “promotions.” Discipline is administered by the bishop, with the initial involvement of a vicar or director, and generally on the same basis used to discipline secular professionals: complaints by colleagues or by “customers” are investigated and appropriate action taken. Standards of activity also tend to be set by the profession. Few bishops, for example, specify at how many or what proportion of weekend liturgies a deacon should assist. Few specify the number of hours or amount of time to be spent in extra-ecclesial ministries. Few specify how often a deacon may preach at weekend liturgies. Who sets those standards? Each deacon
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individually sets his standard in collaboration with his pastor and his family. Through these individual decisions, all of the deacons in the diocese set the collective standard. I belong to a deacon list server supported by St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota—Deacon-L. Periodically someone posts questions about activity. How often do you preach? How many hours a week/month do you spend in justice/charity ministry? How often do you assist at weekend liturgies? The responses flood in, and the careful reader can develop a reasonably accurate understanding of what deacons do in this country. (Concededly, the question, what is a deacon, is more important. But, we evaluate deacons in ministry by what a deacon does, not on what he is.) More than one pastor in my diocese has called and asked, “A deacon was just assigned to my parish, and I am delighted. But, what does the typical deacon do in the Diocese of Winona? How often should he preach, etc.? What can I expect of him without going beyond the norm, i.e., becoming known as a tough taskmaster for deacons?” While some see these processes as arguing over trivialities, it actually is a profession at work, and not unlike attorneys or electricians who exchange ideas at conferences, conventions and elsewhere. If we consider deacons as professionals, then perhaps we have a model for performance evaluation that can be tailored to fit deacons. There are two issues—how do deacons minister, and how well do they minister. The model for evaluating professionals will help answer both questions. The anti-trust laws don’t apply so there is no reason why a vicar or director cannot circularize all of the deacons in a diocese, collect, and then publish data on what deacons do. More than a response to a questionnaire, this actually is an inductive means of identifying the standards of ministry. There also is no reason why a deacon council, which is called for by the Directory, cannot set minimum or expected standards for deacons in a diocese, much as a board of professionals might set minimum standards for a trade or other activity. These steps are just two ways of measuring what deacons do and then of setting a standard by which every deacon can measure his ministry. As for evaluating the quality of ministry, the instruments developed by the Archdiocese of Cincinnati and the Diocese of Lexington certainly are helpful starts. Adjustments to address the multi-ministry, extra-ecclesial ministry issues are necessary, and the wealth of evaluation literature in business and in education can help us become more innovative and develop better ways of assessing performance in ministry. In my view, the best practices in evaluation of the performance of deacons are most likely to be obtained by conceptualizing the deacon as a professional, and applying the same approach that is used to evaluate the performance of secular professionals.
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CONCLUSION The performance evaluation of deacons is a major challenge, principally because they do not fit readily into an existing category—as the title suggests, they are neither fish nor fowl. Perhaps more accurately, deacons are both fish and fowl, they are clergy, staff, volunteer, and professional. The fact that evaluation is a major challenge, however, is not sufficient cause to avoid it. The Directory doesn’t address evaluation in ministry, but that’s not a good reason for bishops and their vicars or directors to continue to evade the challenge. The people of God are entitled to a performance evaluation, not just of deacons but also of priests, parish and diocesan staff members, even bishops. After all, the faithful are financial and spiritual investors and entitled to expect that the church will do as it preaches and exercise good stewardship over these gifts. Performance management in the church, even for ordained ministers of the church, is an idea whose time has come. Justice compels church leaders to move this item to the top of the temporal administrative agenda. The greater challenge is depth of commitment. Evaluation works in business because management is serious about it. When a valued employee is shown to be short of optimum performance in any area, management’s response in successful enterprises is not to fire them, not to transfer them, but to assist them in rectifying the deficiency. Sometimes, it is continuing education—classes and programs. Sometimes, it is coaching or mentoring, the direct one-on-one relationship that educators know is most likely to produce positive results. The point is that mandates to evaluate without the budget to back both the evaluation process and the follow-up are shams. They deserve to be ignored. Arguments against evaluation are untenable. For example, it cannot be maintained that ministers, and especially ordained ministers, are beyond the reach of human evaluation and subject only to divine judgment. That line of thinking has led more than one local church down the road to ruin. It flies in the face of Scripture, which constantly calls us not to judge each other but to hold each other accountable. The argument that evaluations are impossible is false on its face, and virtually every chapter in this volume has proven that to be the case. Waiting for the perfect approach to evaluation or the perfect instrument for performance evaluation is but a subterfuge. The appeal to limited resources also fails. Homilists often remind us that life is about the choices we make, the priorities that we embrace as, for example, the decision to spend God’s gifts on ourselves instead of our neighbor. The refusal to budget funds for continuing education and post-evaluation
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improvement announces that the church is but half serious about performance evaluation. God and the people of God are entitled to effective and efficient management of the church. It is God’s gift to the faithful, and God has put stewards in place to secure its future. The time has come for the stewards to render an accounting, to recognize that God and the faithful are not served by an institution that does not evaluate itself, its personnel, and its operations. Stewardship requires performance evaluations, justice demands it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord: A Resource for Guiding the Development of Lay Ecclesial Ministry. Washington D.C.: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2005. Directory for the Formation, Life and Ministry of Permanent Deacons in the United States. Washington D.C.: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2005.
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Summary and Conclusion Charles E. Zech, Ph.D.
Among the themes that have emerged from these chapters are the following:
• Performance management is important in the Church today. There is a need for a professional approach to Church ministry. Moreover, it is rooted in the Council of Trent, the Second Vatican Council, and Canon Law. • Most observers are not convinced that a U.S. business model of performance management is directly transferable to a church setting. They cite the need for work towards understanding of different cultures in Church ministry and the fact that the Church is an international organization. There is a need for parishes to integrate business practices in a pastoral way. • Care must be taken to differentiate between who a person is and what they do—ontological vs. functional. There needs to be recognition of the complexity of different types of work and vocations which leads to confusion of job/person in the Church for the many different categories of worker and work. These include parishioner/volunteer, professional lay minister/Church worker (not all Church work is ministry), ordained deacon, and ordained priest. • In spite of its importance, some are not optimistic that the Church will be adopting a performance management system anytime in the near future. They justify their concerns by citing o The lack of appreciation of performance appraisal in parish settings. o Clergy still have too much say in how assessment will be used. They are in need of assessment first. 117
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o Most pastors are not able or willing to adequately mentor parish staff members. The lack of continuing education for priests and their dislike for administration skills confirms a need for a parish administrator who is partner with the pastor, mentor for staff, and coordinator of ministries involving lay volunteers. o There is a need to prepare priests for more collaboration, evaluations and audits. o We are a long way from creating a work environment in which employees feel that they are valued.
RECOMMENDATIONS Possible recommendations to address these issues include: • Our bishops would be well-served by learning how to pro-actively enact and teach what they want to happen. The bishops are the ones who can facilitate change. • Clear communication about performance expectations is essential. Job descriptions are helpful and need to focus on tasks that are essential to the assigned role of duty. There needs to be transparency, clarity in goal setting, expectations, and evaluations. The Church needs to link appraisal to consequences. • Furthermore, in consideration of the link between performance and compensation, there is a need for issues of compensation of all ministers in the Church to be studied. • The need for collaboration between “church people” and “management people.” We need to continue to build the bridge between the knowledge about performance management in the secular world and the particular nature of work in the Church. • The need to develop new structures for accountability to relieve our over-burdened pastors.
CONCLUSION In both his best-selling book Good to Great and its follow-up monograph “Good to Great and the Social Sectors,” researcher and author Jim Collins emphasizes the importance of getting the right people, and placing them in the appropriate jobs. In the latter publication, he emphasizes the need for
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“the use of early assessment mechanisms, rigorously employed.”1 Note the use of the word “rigorous.” As Collins emphasizes, great organizations utilize performance management (including performance assessment) systems that are rigorous, but not ruthless. Surely we as Church can follow that ideal.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Collins, Jim. Good to Great. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. ———. “Good to Great and the Social Sectors.” Boulder, CO: Jim Collins, 2005.
NOTE 1. Jim Collins, “Good to Great and the Social Sectors,” (Boulder, CO: Jim Collins, 2005), 15.
Index
Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium), 8–9, 62, 92 Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum), 9
Basic Plan for the Ongoing Formation of Priests, The, 5, 92, 94–97 Benedict XVI, Pope, 8, 11 Canon Law, Revised Code of (1983), 4, 12, 30, 63–65, 72, 84, 117; Canon 145, 63; Canon 241, 3n81; Canon 396, 64; Canon 521, 65; Canon 1286, 29; Canon 1741, 64 Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), 47–49, 68nn12– 13, 71, 75, 96, 106 checklists, 21 clericalism, 62 collaboration, 3, 9, 11–14, 40, 111–12, 114, 118 competency modeling, 5, 11, 88–89, 97, 103 Council of Trent, 64–66, 117 Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord, 43–44, 47, 50–51, 112 critical incidents rating method, 22 cultic model of clergy, 60–61, 107–8 Deus Caritas. See God Is Love Directory for the Formation, Life, and Ministry of Permanent Deacons in the United States, 111, 113–15
employee handbooks, 9, 25, 29, 32, 36 employment at-will, 24–25, 31 evaluation error: central tendency, 23; leniency, 23; primacy, 23 evaluation, formal, 32, 46, 112 forced distribution appraisal method, 22 goal setting, 20–21, 118 God Is Love (Deus Caritas), 11 governance in the Church, 8, 9 I Will Give You Shepherds (Pastores Dabo Vobis), 94–95 job: contracts, 3, 30–32; descriptions, 2, 3, 29, 31, 36, 63, 118; networks, 32–35 just-cause firing, 24–25 Lumen Gentium. See Dogmatic Constitution on the Church
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Index
management by objectives, 22 merit increase, 26 ontological, 61–62, 63, 117 Parish Assessment and Renewal (PAR), 75 parish council, 12, 86 parish finance council, 12, 86 Pastores Dabo Vobis. See I Will Give You Shepherds Presbyteral munera, 5, 94, 96–97 Presbyterium Ordinis, 61 priest work load, 48 Program of Priestly Formation, 48, 72–74
rating scales: behavioral rating scales, 21; graphic rating scales, 21 recruitment, 33 rite of ordination of priests, 92 Sacrament of Charity, The (Sacramentium Caritatis), 8 self-assessment, 41–42, 44, 74–75 servant-leader, 61, 107–8 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB): Commission on Certification and Accreditation, 40, 47 universal call to holiness, 92
About the Contributors
James H. Alphen is executive director of National Organization for Continuing Education of Roman Catholic Clergy. Christopher Anderson is executive director of the National Association for Lay Ministry. Rev. John P. Beal, J.C.D., is Ordinary Professor of Canon Law at the Catholic University of America. Lisa R. Berlinger, Ph.D., is a senior consultant within the nonprofit division of the LoftusGroup LLC. David DeLambo, Ph.D., is associate director of pastoral planning for the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland and was a consultant for the National Pastoral Life Center. Zeni V. Fox, Ph.D., is Professor of Pastoral Theology at Immaculate Conception Seminary, Seton Hall University. She is editor of The Future of Lay Ecclesial Ministry and author of New Ecclesial Ministry. She also serves as an advisor to the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops Subcommittee on Lay Ministry. Deacon Justin Green is director of the Office of the Diaconate program for the Diocese of Winona. Daniel Koys, Ph.D., is professor of human resource management in the College of Commerce at DePaul University. 123
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About the Contributors
Sr. Katarina Schuth, OSF, Ph.D., is Endowed Chair for the Social Scientific Study of Religion in the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity at University of St. Thomas. She is author of Priestly Ministry in Multiple Parishes. Most Reverend Donald W. Wuerl, S.T.D., was installed in June 2006 as the sixth Archbishop of Washington. He is known nationally for his catechetical and teaching ministry and for his efforts on behalf of Catholic education. Charles Zech, Ph.D., is director of the Center for the Study of Church Management and professor of economics at Villanova University. He is author of Best Practices in Parish Stewardship and co-author of Best Practices of Catholic Pastoral and Finance Councils and Listening to the People of God: Lay Peoples’ Suggestions for Rebuilding the Parish.
