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 (optional script):
“As part of our meetings this year, we’re taking a few minutes at the start to pause with a short reflection. It’s not a sermon or a lecture, just a chance to notice a story or idea and see what it might open up for us as a board. The goal isn’t to answer big questions on the spot, but to give us some shared grounding before we move into the business.”
Why this reflection?
For many boards, this is the first time we’ve gathered for the year. That matters. Beginnings have a certain power.
Before the routines kick in – before the usual pace and the familiar scripts take over – this reflection creates a small opening. It’s not meant to slow things down for the sake of it, but to help us notice what we’re already carrying into the room: assumptions, habits, pressure, hopes, blind spots.
Board culture doesn’t “arrive later”. It starts here. It forms in the defaults: what we treat as “normal”, who we instinctively listen to, what we rush past, what we’re willing to name.
What’s the story this month (one that many Uniting Church communities of faith are hearing)?
The Gospel reading Matthew 5:13–20 sits near the beginning of Jesus’ public teaching. He speaks directly to his listeners, telling them they are “salt” and “light”- ordinary elements with quiet but essential roles. Salt preserves and gives flavour; light makes things visible and helps people find their way.
He then offers a gentle but unsettling caution. Salt can lose its usefulness. Light can be hidden away, missing its purpose. The passage moves on to questions of integrity – about lives that are consistent rather than showy, visible rather than performative. The emphasis isn’t on dramatic action, but on steady influence: the way people and communities shape what surrounds them over time.
Where else this idea shows up
This attention to formation rather than performance appears across many traditions.
In Buddhist ethics, attention is given to intention and repeated practice. Character isn’t mainly a performance, it’s the result of what we rehearse – day after day – until it becomes instinct.
In public-trust traditions, institutions are judged less by what they say and more by what people experience consistently. Trust is cumulative. It’s built slowly through steadiness and fairness, and it thins out just as quietly when words and actions drift apart.
This focus on drift and formation also helps explain why so many traditions pay close attention to how authority is held, not just what it produces. When attention shifts too far toward outcomes, targets, or performance, relationships can peter out.
There’s a shared human insight that surfaces across cultures: gratitude is never abstract. There is no real “thanks” without a “you” – without recognising people and relationships, not just results. That small shift – from managing “it” to acknowledging “you”- can change how authority is exercised. It pulls leadership back from control toward attentiveness, and from efficiency alone toward care.
What this might mean for school boards
Boards may tend to imagine culture as something shaped through big decisions: strategy, budgets, policies, appointments. Those matter.
But a school’s culture is also formed through smaller, repeated signals. It is built through what is treated as routine; through what goes unquestioned; through how disagreement is handled; how uncertainty is spoken about, and whose experiences are taken seriously.
Seen this way, governance isn’t only about the decisions a board makes. It’s about the defaults it settles into. The habits that become normal. The tone that people learn to expect.
The images of salt and light invite boards to reflect on that quieter influence. Not in a critical way, but an honest one. What kind of atmosphere do our ways of working create? What do people learn about fairness, courage, or care simply by watching how we govern?
Two Uniting Church characteristics resonate here:
Rejoicing in the diversity of life-giving faiths, cultures and languages – culture is shaped not just by who is present, but by whose perspectives are expected and welcomed as part of everyday decision-making.
Enabling faith development and individual wellbeing – formation happens over time. Schools shaped by this characteristic recognise that depth, meaning and wellbeing grow through consistent practice, not one-off initiatives.
Together, these characteristics suggest that a board’s influence lies as much in its settled ways of working as in its stated intentions.
A few questions to sit with
These are not for immediate answers, but perhaps to hover at the edges of this meeting:
- What has become “normal” in how we govern – and when did we last examine it?
- Which habits in our board culture shape the school most strongly, even if we rarely name them?
- If someone was learning what this school values by watching this board, what might they notice first?
