Welcome. I’m Dan Hotchkiss, author of Governance and Ministry and congregational consultant. I write and consult about congregational governance, board leadership, and staff–clergy partnerships based on decades of work with churches, synagogues, and other passion-driven organizations. You can read my recent blog posts on the Congregational Consulting Group site, and see a complete publications list here. For new writing, I’m gradually migrating to a Substack page.
The third edition of Goverance and Ministry was published in February, 2026. If you’re familiar with prior editions, you’ll find new and updated material and a streamlined structure that will help make your congregation’s life more focused and less stressful.
Coaching and consulting
My focus is to help leaders to engage constituents in discerning what the mission calls for at a given time, and to act boldly and creatively. For decades, I was on the road a lot, visiting churches, synagogues, and other organizations in 33 denominational families across North America. Wherever I went, I learned something new.
Today I’m semi-retired, coaching and consulting selectively by phone and videoconference, sometimes driving from my home near Boston. Feel free to make a no-charge, half-hour appointment using my online scheduler. I’ll try to make the conversation worthwhile, and if it makes sense to go farther, I will propose a way to do that. But don’t hesitate call—it helps me stay in touch, and sometimes I can help.
Career and life
Before becoming a consultant in 2000 or so, I worked as a parish minister, then as a denominational executive. For 14 years, I was a senior consultant for the Alban Institute, learning from the likes of Speed Leas, Roy Oswald, Ed White, Gil Rendle, and Alice Mann. Most of my work at Alban was to help congregations to discern and plan their future—with side interests in finance, conflict management, fundraising, growth, and staff development. Since 2014, I have been consulting on my own.
I still think of myself as a minister and am active in a small church near my home, along with my wife Susan, who retired in 2025 as a church music director. My two sons teach math and Latin, and I stay in touch with my extended family, taking turns with three sisters caring for our mother in our home town of Rockford, Illinois.
In semi-retirement, I have had more time for unpaid pursuits, including singing with the Solstice Singers on Cape Cod, managing the website I created for my church, and volunteering for Sustainable Middleborough, an environmental organization I helped launch in 2017.