A few months ago I was elected the moderator of a new church, more accurately the moderator of two merged churches. As we began our journey, the pastor who led us through the merger process had to resign for health reasons. I, the lay leader, felt the weight of assuring the organizational if not the spiritual success of this new entity. We soon hired a new interim pastor, but she is learning along with the rest of us.
Now we are a few months into our new effort. There have been many issues, problems and concerns along the way, but we are functioning. I’m satisfied with our achievements so far while I occasionally still feel some anxiety about our future.
Edward Schein offers this advice on successfully merging two organizations in “Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd ed.”. He counsels that there will be a culture clash and that this can be managed by ignoring it, instituting the norms of the larger organization, or working to blend the two cultures. The most challenging choice is to blend the cultures. This is the choice we made. Our goal is to create a new organization in which everyone feels invested. The caveats to achieve this goal were having one worship site, a new name, a new mission, and a new organizational structure. Members of former congregations are to mingle on the new committees or ministries. I believe that three particular choices supported our choice to blend two cultures.
Creating an organizational structure new to both congregations was critical in supporting cultural blending. Everyone experienced a learning curve and we had to come together to make it work. We had to listen to each other about how things used to be done and then choose when to use an old way and when to try something new to all of us. For example, we decided to solve who should have a key to the chosen worship building by adopting the solution from the “other” worship building, put up a lock box instead of passing out multiple keys. We had a vote on our new logo, logo colors, and font. The new logo is new for all of us and the merged congregation chose it.
Another element that helped with cultural blending was the demand in our new bylaws for equal numbers of members from each former congregation on all the committees for two years. Mingling is mandated for now, and hopefully in two years we will all be invested in our new church and the term “former” will fall away.
Creating a building committee was our significant third choice to create a church for everyone. Our building committee’s goal is to incorporate sacred furniture and artifacts from the other church building into our new, chosen worship building and to redesign spaces in the chosen building to improve its use for us and for the community as we go forward and develop.
Although our progress sometimes feels frustratingly slow, we are moving forward together.