In Boston, the Ecosystem Cohort on church space stewardship has been meeting regularly, and the work has moved through the first two of its three phases: systemic discovery, and now the search for leverage. Seasoned and emerging leaders across sectors have begun to learn from one another’s insight and experience how church buildings actually function in Boston’s ecosystem, using systems thinking and the idea of leverage points to ask where a small change could carry the most weight. The team has been delighted to watch pastors, non profit leaders, consultants, and real estate professionals learn the framework together and begin to see their own situations as part of a larger system. There are fourteen different larger dynamics that cohort members named so far. One dynamic is the strain in relationship between pastor and congregation, between churches and the professionals they hire, and between churches and their neighbors. Participants named how information moves, and how slowly it often moves, as a source of mistrust and bottlenecks, and many of the interventions they proposed focus on clearer communication, vetted timelines, and shared planning.
Looking ahead, the cohort is moving beyond the church walls into the professionals and church-adjacent systems that shape how space gets used, and participants will be asked to think about what each proposed change might produce over three months, one year, and five years. EGC is also iterating and adjusting the learning journey based on the cohort’s learnings itself.