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
Please note that 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?
School boards quite rightly spend a great deal of time discussing systems: enrolments, finances, risk, staffing, compliance, strategic priorities.
Yet schools are also places where people arrive carrying grief, anxiety, exhaustion, loneliness, hope, cultural difference, family pressure and uncertainty about who they are becoming. I suspect much of those factors enter the life of a school “sideways” – meaning in the small ways of human interaction and often long before their appearance in a formal report.
One of the ongoing tensions in governance is how institutions remain genuinely human while still remaining organised and effective. Sometimes that tension becomes visible in surprisingly ordinary moments: how a complaint is received when it arrives emotionally rather than neatly; whether a student wellbeing concern is treated as an interruption to the “real agenda” or as part of the school’s core work; whether people who are struggling feel they need to become “less complicated” before they can be heard.
This month’s reflection speaks into that space in schools.
What’s the story this month?
This is one that many Uniting Church communities of faith are hearing this month.
The Gospel reading I selected from the community of Matthew gathers together several stories in quick succession.
Jesus calls Matthew, a tax collector, to follow him and then shares a meal with people others regard suspiciously. Religious leaders question why he would place himself among such company. Around the same time, a grieving father arrives asking for help for his daughter. On the way to respond, another interruption occurs: a woman who has lived for years with illness reaches out quietly through the crowd.
The whole passage feels unsettled. People interrupt one another, while expected boundaries blur and planned movement gives way to human need. Woven through it all is a simple line: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” I think this sentence is doing some big work in these stories.
It seems to shift attention away from maintaining clean systems and toward responding to actual people standing in front of you – in real time, with all the inconvenience and unpredictability that brings.
In a board setting, that may raise practical questions:
- What happens when a wellbeing concern complicates a carefully planned strategy?
- How does a board respond when the lived experience of students, staff or families does not fit neatly within existing assumptions?
- When difficult stories emerge, is the instinct to protect the institution first, or to understand more deeply what people are experiencing?
The Gospel passage does not reject structure or leadership. But it may suggest that healthy leadership remains interruptible.
Where else this idea shows up
A somewhat similar instinct appears within Baháʼí approaches to consultation. Consultation is not simply about persuading others toward a preferred position. It asks participants to hold their views with enough openness that the group can genuinely learn from what emerges in the conversation. In practice, this may require a certain loosening of certainty, particularly for those holding authority.
In Confucian traditions, there is also a strong emphasis on the moral quality of relationships and everyday conduct. Culture is shaped not only through formal rules, but through repeated patterns of attentiveness, respect and humane response. The way leaders react under pressure matters deeply because it teaches the community what kind of behaviour is truly valued.
Translated into school governance, these ideas can be quite practical:
- A board might notice whether meetings leave enough room for genuine discernment or whether discussion closes down too quickly around familiar voices. It may ask whether reports focus only on problems and metrics, or whether they also help board members understand the lived texture of school culture and wellbeing.
- Some schools, for example, invite short student or staff reflections into board meetings from time to time. Others ask leadership teams not only where challenges exist, but where trust, belonging or unexpected care are already emerging within the community.
- Across these traditions there is a shared suggestion that institutions are shaped gradually by what they repeatedly notice, reward and respond to.
What else this might mean for school boards
Seen in that light, governance is not only about keeping a school effective. It is also about shaping what kind of community the school becomes under pressure. Boards obviously cannot personally resolve every pastoral complexity within a school and nor should they attempt to. Yet they do influence what receives attention, what is measured, what is discussed and what kinds of responses are encouraged.
Some practical examples may lie in the questions a board chooses to ask:
Alongside financial and strategic reporting, a board member might occasionally ask:
- “Where are students or staff currently finding genuine belonging in the life of the school?”, or
- “Where do people still appear hesitant to approach us, participate or ask for help?”
Similarly, when reviewing a proposed initiative, a board might ask:
- “Will this strengthen relationships and trust within the community, or mainly improve efficiency?”
These are not soft questions. They often reveal whether a school’s stated commitments are becoming visible in daily life.
Two Uniting Church characteristics may be particularly relevant here
- Enabling faith development and individual wellbeing within the UCA heritage of worship, witness and service: This is not only about formal learning or wellbeing programs, but this characteristic also comes alive through the creation of school cultures where people are treated as more than outcomes, problems or performance measures.
- Embracing diversity of faiths, cultures and languages: a recognition that communities become stronger when different experiences and perspectives are genuinely engaged rather than flattened into one dominant way of seeing.
Taken together, these characteristics suggest that good governance is not simply measured by how efficiently problems are solved, but by whether the life of the community becomes more humane, trustworthy and attentive over time.
A few questions to sit with
These are not for immediate answers, but perhaps to let travel with us through the meeting:
- What tends to interrupt this board’s attention, and how do we usually respond when it does?
- Are there people within the school community who may experience the school as difficult to approach, difficult to trust, or difficult to belong within?
- What kinds of behaviour, conversation and priorities are we repeatedly rewarding through our governance practices?
- Where might mercy, attentiveness or flexibility actually strengthen the school rather than weaken it?
