Bridging the organization silos of the St. James Renewal Movement Teaching Ministries

• Main Author: Acha, Mark Kevin G.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2018
• Subjects: Communication in organizations; Organizational change
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/5475
• Institution: De La Salle University

The issue addressed in this Action Research project focused on breaking down the existing organizational silos between the different Teaching Ministries within the St. James Renewal Movement (SJRM) church community. For the longest time, each Apostolate group within SJRM had their own separate Teaching Ministries which handled the growth and development of all members with their Catholic faith. The issue was determined due to various reasons which included the underdeveloped formation tracks for each Apostolate group, the lack of available members for each Teaching Ministry to help in developing new tracks and implementing activities for the ministry, and the decline of active members who attend activities within the community. These reasons were more apparent within the Singles Apostolate (SA) Teaching Ministry, where I was part of the leadership team. It was hard to develop and implement new tracks and activities for the singles community when we did not have enough members and resources available to aid us in the improvements we wanted to do. This drove me to seek out possible interventions that could help us in our primary goal within the SA Teaching Ministry, and that was to develop a standardized Faith Curriculum that would act as a course outline for all the members of the singles community. The SA Teaching Ministry sought out help from the other Apostolate groups to try and come up with effective interventions, since most of them also experience the same issues the singles community encountered. Eventually, this Action Research project came to fruition that aimed to (1) merge all existing Teaching Ministries and their available resources into one unified ministry, (2) create and implement a new organizational structure for the unified ministry, (3) establish a new culture of collaboration and teamwork within the unified ministry, and lastly (4) to develop a Faith Curriculum or growth track plan for the whole SJRM community. Two whole cycles of the Action Research cycle were done in this project and a third cycle will be implemented which will be briefly discussed. The researchers utilized informal talks, interviews, meetings and daily observations to gather the data needed. Other frameworks such as the ORJI, Ladder of Inference, Right Hand/Left Hand Column Analysis, and the Four Parts of Speech, were used to help gather the most genuine form of data from the participants and the experiences of the researcher during the progression of the project. The researchers also used Kotters Eight Step Change Model, Seven Cs of Communication, Kaysers Six Ingredients for Collaborative Partnerships in Organizations, to name a few of the known frameworks which had significant influence in the direction of this project. All of these frameworks were used to choose the most feasible interventions. The interventions used to address our objectives were (1) the proposed merging of all Teaching Ministries within SJRM which would lead us to the development of organizational structure of the Unified Teaching Ministry followed by developing the faith curriculum tracks. But as the project progressed, the researchers had to digress to a different cycle which was (2) to address the existing communication issues identified within the newly merged ministry, which also led the researcher to a third cycle which will be (3) to address the interpersonal relationship among the members of the Unified Teaching Ministry. As a result, the researchers were successful in bridging the organizational silos that had existed within the SJRM Teaching Ministries through the collaboration that we started, which aimed to develop a standardized Faith Curriculum for the whole community. Even so, a third cycle still needs to be completed before the actual development of the Faith Curriculum begins. This Action Research project also emphasized the degree of unpredictability within a research in real-life action, which was illustrated by Arthur Freedman within his Planned Change through Action Research. Freedman states that there are unanticipated events that occur through the implementation of an action research but despite these events, the aim of the action research process is to move from current state to the desired state in a realistic manner. This involved moving through multiple iterative cycles of action and reflection that are concurrent and have different time spans but still maintaining the core process of action research.