Lay Leadership Training & Resources
Finance & Administration
Diocesan Staff are here to help answer your questions about the nuts & bolts challenges of church administration. This page includes resources, forms, contacts, and previous webinars.
EN ESPANOL
Vital Practices from ECF
The Episcopal Church Foundation provides Vestry Papers, an online newsletter of all things vestry. Their site also includes blogs, tools, and webinars. EN ESPANOL
Vestry Resource Guides
Episcopal Church Foundation publishes several excellent resources. The Vestry Resource Guide is available in English and Spanish. Their Finance Resource Guide is also available in English and Spanish.
Vestry Handbook
Church Publishing’s newly revised (2024) fourth edition of the Vestry Handbook by Christopher Webber contains everything you need to know about vestry membership.
Vestry and Bishop’s Committee Training Courses
These courses come from ChurchNext and are provided for free for the Diocese of California as long as you use this portal. Please register your church name and location when you sign up for a course. These courses can be taken as individuals, but a GROUP version is available if someone is acting as the facilitator for the group. The videos will be available to watch and discussion questions can be downloaded. Please contact Amy Cook (amyc@diocal.org) if you would like access to a group version of training.
The Vestry Journey
The Vestry is the elected leadership body of an Episcopal Church, charged with providing guidance and oversight to a congregation. In this introductory course, veteran vestry member Van Sheets unpacks the keys to effective vestry leadership. The titles of his presentations include:
A Spiritual Journey
Beginnings
Attitudes
Serving
This course is perfect for newly elected vestry members who are looking to understand their role.
Vision and the Vestry
Vestries that lead usually run churches that thrive. However, vestries can often get side-tracked on non-essentials that inhibit true vitality from emerging. In this course, veteran vestry consultant, author, and speaker Charles Robertson introduces some fascinating, yet down to earth ideas about how to improve the way vestries lead. His presentations are entitled:
The Sacred Bundle
Designing Structures
Developing Leaders
Visioncasting and Strategic Planning
This course is ideal for new members of the vestry as well as veteran board members. It is a good addition to any vestry meeting or retreat.
Vestry Team Building and Conflict
Healthy churches have healthy leadership teams. And developing health, amidst the challenges and eventualities of conflict and anxiety which is found in any healthy church, is one of the vestry's biggest tasks. In this course, veteran vestry instructor Bill Carroll offers us insight and inspiration. He offers four video presentations entitled:
Building Healthy Teams
Managing Anxiety and Conflict
Triangulation and Secrets
Winning Strategies
This course is ideal for first time vestry members, as well as those who have served before.
Understanding Vestry Finances
Strong leadership makes strong churches. And understanding parish finances plays a crucial role. So says veteran parish financial expert Tom Post, who urges every vestry member to become more deeply involved in a parish's financial picture. In this course, Tom presents four video presentations entitled:
The Importance and Responsibility of Financial Oversight
Reading Financial Statements
Discipline
Transparency
This course is ideal for new vestry members as well as a helpful review for veterans.
What Every Vestry Member needs to know about Money
With privilege comes responsibility. That's what every Vestry member soon finds out. And this is exemplified in the ways Vestries are charged with tending to parish finances. What do we need to know about budgets? Human resources? Taxes? All of these are touched upon in this course. Here are the titles of this course's four video presentations brought to us by The Rev. Kirk Berlenbach:
Financial Roles and Responsibilities
Budgeting
Budgeting and Responsibility
Taxes and Human Resources
This course is ideal for anyone who is on a Vestry or anyone interested in how churches handle their finances.
Canonically Mandated Training
Anti-Racism Training
Click here for information and link to the mandated anti-racism training for all elected lay leaders in congregations.
Whole & Healthy Church
Click here for all forms of Safe Church training needed, both online and live. Along with instructions for background checks, fingerprinting, and explanations of who needs to be trained. .
Diocesan Policies
Click here for the Safe Church policies which cover staff and volunteers, children and adults, lay and ordained. Make sure your vestry has read and adopted these policies.
Best Practices for Vestries and Bishop’s Committee Meetings
Open meetings with Prayer, Bible Study, or a Meditation
Use these 10-15 minute Meditations on the Vitality Practices as a way to open meetings.
Make sure members sign up for the helpful information they need!
Have ALL Vestry and Bishop’s Committee members SIGN UP for the Diocesan Newsletter.
Have ALL Vestry and Bishop’s Committee members SUBSCRIBE to the Vestry Papers and other resources from Episcopal Church Foundation. The green SUBSCRIBE BUTTON is at the right hand top corner of the home page.
Finding it hard to get members to read the Vestry Resource Guide from ECF? Assign a section to each member to read and report on to the rest of the Vestry or Bishop’s Committee at the next meeting. This inevitably highlights the pieces important to your context and shares the responsibility for the knowledge among all the lay leaders.