Academy Meeting in San Diego
January 5-8, 2006
Report from Dr. Thomas Schattauer
NAAL
President 2005
At the outset of my report, I want to take this opportunity to thank the members of the local committee, who have contributed in countless ways, large and small, to this meeting—Dennis Krouse and Gary Macy from the University of San Diego, to my pastor friend Jim Boline from Santa Monica, and to our hotel liaison Alan Barthel. Please stand so that we can recognize you. I also want to thank Michael Prendergast for his fine work as our Exhibits Coordinator.
In addition to giving oversight to the planning of the annual meeting, the work of the president this year has involved engagement with three signficant initiatives: the negotiation of a new hotel contract, the renovation of the website, and the formulation of the proposal for an administrative assistant.
The first two you have already heard about in the reports from our hotel liaison, Alan Barthel, and the chair of our website task force, Michael Driscoll.
New Hotel Contract
The NAAL and the Hyatt remain a good match in a number
of ways—including
the fact that we are a small professional organization and Hyatt is a smaller
hotel chain. It is my hope that the new contract with the Hyatt will
indeed serve us well in terms of cost and in terms of the settings for
our meetings through 2012.
NAAL Web Site
In regard to the website, we remain grateful for the work of Jerry Chinchar, who first brought this organization into the age of the internet; to Doris Donnelly for giving the impetus toward the redesign of the site; to Michael Driscoll and the members of the website task force (James Caccamo, Julia Upton, Ruth Meyers, and Don LaSalle) for their valuable input; and to Kathy Sexton at the University of Notre Dame for her expertise in carrying out the redesign. Work will continue to make it even more useful and pleasing to the eye. The challenge before the AC and all of us will be to adjust our ways of communicating and receiving information in a way that takes full advantage of this resource.
Proposal for Administrative Assistant
The third initiative—the proposal to hire an administrative assistant for the Academy—will come before you as a motion shortly. Let me say a few things about the proposal by way of background and with the hope of gaining your support. Recent presidents of the Academy have all noted the significant, and at times, overwhelming demands upon the officers of the Academy, especially the secretary, the treasurer, and the president. An important, but modest step to address this issue was taken by the Academy Committee with the appointment of hotel liaison in 2003. Last year in her report as president, Doris Donnelly, put the issue before us once again and recommended that the AC give serious attention to developing a proposal for a part-time administrative assistant.
And we have done that. The first step was a survey of past officers of the Academy, which sought their input as to the advisability of such a move, its potential risks and benefits. The survey results gave significant encouragement to the AC to proceed with the formulation of a proposal. There were also two consistent concerns that were voiced in that survey:
- that this step toward professionalization might change the character of our organization and diminish the role of the officers, and
- that the cost of such a position would not be sustainable.
The proposal that comes to you from the AC has attempted to address those concerns.
- To the first, the proposal makes clear that the position is one of assistance to the officers, who would retain primary responsibility for setting policy, expending funds, planning the annual meeting, and giving leadership to the organization. The proposed role of the administrative assistant includes a wide range of tasks but no executive authority.
- To the concern about cost, the proposal includes a budgetary analysis that shows minimal impact on our budget. This is so for three reasons: 1) the present stipend and expenses for the hotel liaison, as well as its duties, will be rolled into this new position; 2) the recent decision to invest $75,000 in certificates of deposit will give us some additional funding for us to work with; and 3) the $10 increase in annual membership dues, already implemented, substantially offsets the remaining cost. The AC decided on this increase in dues because of the pressing need to provide some means of increased administrative support, which the AC will attend to whatever the outcome of the specific proposal that comes before you.
It is the Academy Committee’s intention to start with a 3-year contract and to evaluate the position and the person who fills it at the end of that first 3-year period. We have not determined who this person will be. We are open to all your suggestions, and we anticipate an application process. We have considered some possibilities and there are some avenues that we will pursue if the proposal receives your support. We are confident that there is someone out there who can serve the Academy well in this position.
I, together with the members of the Academy Committee, invite your careful consideration of this proposal and your counsel as to how it would be carried out. It should be clear that we think it is a step in the right direction.
Finally, let me as succinctly as possible lay out some matters that, I think, deserve our continuing attention:
Worship
In our worship as an Academy, we face many opportunities and significant challenges.
- The presence of musicians and artists in our midst affords opportunities to enrich our worship, and we need to find ways to use these resources more fully.
- As an ecumenical interfaith organization, we have tried to clarify how we will worship together and how we will respect the integrity of various traditions. The initiative that Ruth Meyers took in conversation with a number of you resulted in some guidelines for our worship as an Academy and an explanation that now appears in our annual meeting program. But these are questions that are never fully solved and must be continually addressed. This year’s opening service was an attempt to provide both Jewish and Christian elements side by side in an act of common worship. The schedule of this year’s meeting afforded the opportunity to encourage members to host both an Epiphany eucharist and a Shabbat service on Friday evening. This is another example of a way for us to worship together, so to speak, in parallel events at the same meeting. Our engagement with the questions—both theoretical and practical—as to how we worship at our meeting is critical to the distinctive character of the Academy and could be a timely contribution to a wider discussion in the encounter of religious communities in North America.
Membership
From my perspective, there are a number of issues here. If we are truly to be an ecumenical and interfaith organization, we have some work to do.
- The participation of our Orthodox and other eastern Christian members has been a recurring problem because of meeting dates in conflict with Epiphany and the Julian calendar Christmas. Perhaps the upcoming meetings in 2009 and 20010 when that is not the case will be an opportunity to reconnect with that portion of our membership.
- We need to make an effort to expand our Jewish membership, which first of all means becoming more aware of the obstacles to Jewish participation.
- We should also at least begin to consider what it might mean to welcome the first Muslim members into the Academy.
- The denominational as well as the racial and ethnic diversity of the Academy is not something we should simply leave to chance. It will require some strategic planning and concerted effort. We need to reflect the reality of life on the North American continent.
- Finally, we should note the upward trend in international members and visitors and ask what that might mean for our future.
Cost of the Annual Meeting
Working on the hotel contract and preparing for this meeting raised for me in very concrete ways the high cost of these meetings and the effect of that upon students, some of our retired members, and others without institutional support.
- At present, we provide some scholarship assistance to a few participants, and our new hotel contact will provide discounted rooms for up to ten retired members. The need, however, is greater than those limited efforts.
- To address this concern, I want to encourage the Academy Committee in the coming year to consider ways that we might reduce the burden on these members and visitors so that we might all benefit from their participation. This might include for example a reduced registration fee for qualified participants and a funding strategy to support it since that fee normally only covers the actual cost of the meeting.
Proposal to the Lilly Endowment
With the support of the Academy Committee, I submitted a proposal to the Lilly Endowment that encourages the Endowment to sponsor at least an initial conversation among the leaders of the professional societies in the various fields of practical theology, such as our own.
- Lilly has been investing in the turn toward practice in theological study and congregational life, and we could benefit from understanding better the challenges and opportunities faced by professional organizations, whose member regularly negotiate the relation of academy and religious community, of study and practice. We await Lilly’s response.
- In relation to this, I want to underscore the invitation that we have all received from the Association of Practical Theology to participate in their upcoming conference on “Practical Theology and its Subdisciplines: Pedagogies and the Implications.” I am biased, but I think these conversations would benefit from the participation and wisdom of liturgical scholars.
And by the way, these, my friends, are some of the things that could receive the attention they deserve if we provided more administrative support to the leadership of the Academy.
It has been a privilege and a deep satisfaction to serve the Academy as president this year. I am grateful to you for the for the opportunity and especially grateful to my colleagues on the Academy Committee—first to Doris Donnelly, who leaves the Academy Committee after her service as Past President, and whose gracious leadership of last year’s meeting in Louisville provided such a good model, and to Paul Turner, Don LaSalle, Glenn Byer, Jill Crainshaw, and Ruth Langer, and also to Ruth Meyers—for their hard work, their wise counsel, and their support throughout the year. In the language of my Danish forbears “Mange tusend tak!” —many thousand thanks!