By Adrian Pyle, Director of Chaplaincy and Connections
For use in councils/boards of schools who value or connect to the characteristics of the Uniting Church (or are just exploring them). It may take you about five minutes to read aloud at the start of a meeting. There is a video version of this reflection located at the bottom of this page. (Approximately five minutes to read aloud at the start of a meeting).
Chair’s introduction:
This is an optional script.
“As part of our meetings this year, we are taking a few minutes at the start to pause with a short reflection. It is not a sermon or a lecture, just a way of stepping back briefly and asking what might be shaping us beneath the surface as we lead. The aim is not to resolve anything immediately, but to give us a shared lens before we move into the agenda.”
Why this reflection?
It is still fairly early in the year, yet agendas are filling and a board’s pace begins to settle into something familiar. So this is probably the moment when habits of regular leadership begin to take hold, often without much notice. This occurs not only in what decisions are made, but in how those decisions come about. It is caught up in things like the speed of conversation, the space given to uncertainty and the degree to which listening genuinely shapes what follows.
Boards don’t necessarily set out to close good spaces down deliberately. It tends to happen gradually – looking like a preference for efficiency here and a need for clarity there; so that over time, some deeper sense of discernment may be lost.
Even something as simple as a brief pause might make that visible again.
What’s the story this month?
This is one that many Uniting Church communities of faith are hearing this month. Amongst the text of the Gospel according to the community of John – chapter 20 specifically – is a confronting account of a risen Jesus appearing among his followers and saying, “Peace be with you”.
Shortly after, without explanation, he breathes on them. Though it is a slightly odd sounding detail, it is small and possibly easy to move past. There is no immediate instruction, no plan communicated and no sense yet of what they are to do.
Just breath.
While we in our human reading can rush past the text, it actually doesn’t hurry to the next step. It lingers in that moment, as if something about presence, or shared presence, comes first. Only later does direction emerge.
Where else this idea shows up:
In Jewish traditions, there is a long-standing practice sometimes described as “disagreement for the sake of heaven”. Oddness, complexity or difference is not always something to resolve quickly. It can be held, explored, even valued, on the assumption that something deeper may emerge through it.
In Islamic practice, the concept of shura, or consultation, carries a similar intuition. Decision-making is not only about arriving at an outcome, but about the relational and ethical quality of the process itself. Wisdom is understood to be distributed, not held in one place alone.
Across these traditions, there is a resistance to rushing and a sense that clarity often emerges through attentive presence rather than immediate resolution.
What this might mean for school boards:
Of course boards are often required to move things forward. But it may be worth noticing how quickly movement becomes the default, and how easily presence is shortened or bypassed in the process. There is a difference between a conversation that lands quickly and one that takes a little longer but somehow holds more of the complexity and diversity of the room within it.
Two Uniting Church characteristics resonate here:
- Listening and Collaborative Decision-Making: not simply as a process step, but as a posture in which listening genuinely shapes the direction taken.
- Embracing Diversity of Faiths, Cultures and Languages: A recognition that insight is rarely located in a single voice, and that difference is not an obstacle to decision-making, but part of how deeper understanding is formed.
Taken together, these characteristics suggest that strong governance is not only decisive but enables a question to remain open long enough to be changed by what is heard.
A few questions to sit with
These are not for immediate answers, but perhaps to let travel with us through the meeting:
- Where might we be moving too quickly to resolution?
- What have we not yet heard in the conversations before us?
- Are there moments where allowing a little more space might lead to a different kind of clarity?
- What might it look like for this board to let its conversations breathe?
