The Relational Health Team

Your Relational Health Team is a group of lay church members who covenant to help each of us in the congregation live up to our “solemn agreement” to practice faithful communication and creative conflict resolution based on the UU values of mutuality and respect.  As a team, we have “come together” to:
  • Create a vision of how we want to be with one another in our congregation.
  • Periodically surveying the congregation on topics germane to right relations so we can gauge how we are doing as a congregation with respect to relationship issues and restorative practices. 
  • Review and revise our church Covenant of Good Relations and Conflict Resolution Guidelines. ​​
  • Offer trainings and other learning opportunities around navigating the tensions inevitable in growth and change. ​

Covenant of Good Relations

Covenant is Latin for "come together" and means a "solemn agreement" or "promise from the heart.” 
The church currently has a Covenant of Good Relations and a Conflict Resolution process that was completed in 2008; however, it has been long understood that that it needs to be reviewed, updated, and re-socialized.   

The Relational Health Team has been working on a updating the Covenant of Good Relations and is proposing the following Draft Covenant of Right Relations be reviewed during the annual meeting.  Please read the proposed Covenant of Good Relations below and  we welcome your feedback.   Please complete your comments prior to Saturday June 22nd.  We will review all comments and consider them for the final draft that we'll put out for a vote of adoption soon after. 

*The conflict resolution process will be addressed in the next (2024-2025) church year.
​
Proposed Covenant of Good Relations

I. Purpose
The goal of this Covenant (and the accompanying guidelines) is to provide a clear statement about how our values and principles can best be demonstrated through our actions.   We recognize that at times we may fall short of our ideals, and we commit, with the help of the community, to work to address conflict. The well-being of our congregation depends on a sense of fellowship among all within our community — members, friends, children and youth, minister, and staff — whenever and wherever we worship, interact, or work together.

II. Our Covenant of Right Relations
In practicing our Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes and with Love as our guide, we covenant to:
  • Welcome the newcomer.
  • Encourage and support one another.
  • Honor our diversity.
  • Ask questions with an open mind and heart.
  • Listen deeply and non-defensively to seek understanding.
  • Speak and act compassionately.
  • Trust one another to remain in community. 

III. How We Will Live in Covenant
In the interest of building beloved community:
  • In written and spoken communication, we will strive for compassionate candor and a space for reflection, safety in relationships, reverence, and the growth that comes with faith-in-action.
  • We will refrain from negative gossip and the spreading of rumors.
  • We will each do our part to minimize destructive competition and maximize cooperation.
  • When conflict arises, we will name it and work through it together.
  • We will speak from our own experience and seek to understand the experience of others. 

​Personal Skills for Managing Conflict

Our church has long had an expectation that congregants would make an attempt to resolve conflicts directly with each other as a first step. Being successful in this effort requires high levels of trust between the people involved. One source of wisdom we have available to help with this is research conducted for decades and published in The Science of Trust by John Gottman. It turns out that trust is fragile and deserves our conscious attention. Dr. Gottman’s research found four behaviors that consistently erode trust that we would all benefit from paying attention to; defensive reactions, criticism, stonewalling, and contempt. Fortunately, there are replacement behaviors we can practice, use, and support each other with to support and promote trust in our congregation. These skills are:

LISTENING NON-DEFENSIVELY 
This is a skill that takes practice because defending ourselves when we are challenged by others is a totally natural reaction (if not helpful). This video https://leanin.org/education/managing-difficult-conversations illustrates in the first five minutes a way to think about this skill. The rest of the video is worth watching, though perhaps more useful in a work setting. So, the first skill we all need to develop is listening non-defensively. It is one of the strongest tidbits of advice Terasa Cooley offers in Transforming Conflict in chapter seven. 

“I” STATEMENTS WITH AN ASK
This is another skill that takes practice because it does not come naturally. The I statement asks us to identify our emotions and to think carefully about what we need from others that we can communicate in a straight forward manner. This video https://youtu.be/bShsyKUFjKE?si=fO8W0obildvCtEH5 
Is a quick explanation of what the researchers found was the most effective way for us to raise concerns in a way that others can hear us. There are three parts to this skill. 
  1. “I feel [emotion] when …”
  2. describe the context, without naming names
  3. “What I need from you is [a solution focused description of the behavior you’d like to see]”
Here is an example:
  1. I feel angry when
  2. I get interrupted in the middle of making a point. 
  3. What i need from you is to listen to me until i am finished explaining my point.*
*notice the difference between this ask and “don’t interrupt me”

PAUSE THE ACTION
This skill calls on us to be aware of our own level of discomfort in the middle of an difficult discussion and ask for a time out, or pause in the action, when we feel ourselves getting overwhelmed during a difficult conversation. When our physiology is elevated and our heart rate is up, we lose the ability to listen and we have an impulse to just shut down and stonewall. If we can ask for the time to we need, use a breathing activity (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYl3S2CglJM )to let our heart rate return to normal, we can come back to the conversation ready to bring “our best self” in loving kindness for the other person. 

ASK QUESTIONS OF APPRECIATION
This skill calls on us to notice when we are feeling contempt for another person and to intentionally regain appreciation for their presence in our lives and their inherent worth and dignity. This might work best in conversation with a third person who can help ask the questions that are not coming naturally to us on our own. An example of how powerful this can is illustrated in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLmhoOiZ0L8&t=9s and copy of the Choice Map is available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Xl1UGjArjY9c5m4v-ZMdC_w7_D-MB7iW/view 

Survey Says!

The first step in measuring the effectiveness of any process is to set a baseline of where we are right now.   
We wanted to know what your view of the  nature of relations and conflict resolution at First UU.  The Relational Health Team​ (RRT) created a survey to measure where we are at this point.  

In general, what we learned was that the vast majority of the respondents believe that Conflicts are natural in any church community and that you, as congregants, have a role to play in contributing to good relations with your fellow congregants.   You also believed more often than not that we, the congregants and leadership of first church, have not always navigated tough issues or handled conflict well.   Fewer people than not felt they possessed the necessary skills for addressing conflict.   Finally, there was a pretty even splits on whether or not congregants understood a shared vision of right relations at first UU or felt we did or did not currently have overall good relations amongst the congregations of First UU.    

The conclusion is that the goals of the Relational Health Team​ to ​create a vision of how we want to be with one another in our congregation, to review and revise our church Covenant of Good Relations and Conflict Resolution Guidelines, and to offer trainings and other learning opportunities around navigating the tensions inevitable in growth and change, are indeed aligned with what is needed to foment and foster good relations amongst First UU Congregants. 

Detailed Breakdown 
Below are the details of the opinions of those at First UU who kindly responded to our recent congregational survey.  There were seven survey questions asked, and for each question asked for a rating using this scale:
Survey Results
  • Majority of the respondents believe that Conflicts are natural in any church community and that all of us, as congregants, have a role to play in contributing to good relations with each other
  • You also believed more often than not that we (both congregants and leaders)
    • Have not always navigated conflict well
    • Do not feel we have the necessary skills to address conflict as well as necessary 
  • Respondents were pretty evenly divided on whether, or not…
    • You understood the vision and direction of the right relations at First UU
    • That we currently have good relations amongst congregants and First UU
The conclusion is that the goals of the right relations are indeed aligned with what is needed to foment and foster good relations amongst First UU Congregants.

Training, Learning Opportunities & Resources

Training & Learning Opportunities
 - More to come 
Resources
First Words Articles

Questions, Concerns or Comments?  

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