Organizing principles and practices

1. One-to-one meetings: short, open-ended, face-to-face meetings in which two people explore their concerns, hopes and dreams for themselves, their families, congregation and/or community. Ongoing participation in “one-to-ones” creates the critical relationships of trust that allow clergy, leaders and organizers to continually clarify mutual self-interest and hold each other accountable. One-to-one meetings are also the primary vehicles for discovering new leaders.
2. Accountability and the related practice of agitation: holding people responsible for what they said they would do and challenging, or agitating, people to act on their word, goals and dreams. People in such a relationship are much more likely to hold each other accountable.
3. Leadership development: the growth of lay leaders through organizing training and experience. Lay leaders often apply newly acquired skills to congregational work, for example, initiating more effective, focused council meetings or building relationships with community decision-makers.
4. Power in numbers: understanding “power” as a way to influence people that hold public positions of power and the decisions that determine people’s quality of life. Seeing power as something they can exercise in a beneficial way represents a major shift in thinking for leaders and clergy of many religious traditions. As leaders are trained they often come to understand, as a leader expressed, “We can accomplish with many of us together, what we can’t by ourselves.”
5. Issue selection: the process of choosing which concerns or “solvable problems” to address. This happens through the one-to-ones and house meetings … as one clergyperson described it, “[issues come] from the bottom up … not from the top down.”
6. The action-reflection cycle: Many groups describe the work in terms of cycles … there is a season for acting in the public arena, then a season for evaluating, learning and reflecting.

Adapted from Renewing Congregations: The contribution of Faith-Based Community Organizing. To learn more about how your congregation can be involved in congregation-based community organizing, email Phil Tom or visit the Small Church Web site.