At The Table of Thanks

Defining Worshiping Communities

The PCUSA has initiated a campaign to establish 1001 Worshiping Communities within the decade. From the program website:

We will seek to create a movement, bubbling up from within rather than directed nationally, engaging congregations and presbyteries together in fresh ways.

There is nothing more transformative than the people of God, gathered together to worship the risen Christ, and sent out to serve the world in Christ’s name.

God’s Spirit is moving throughout the Church, whispering the same things, inspiring new models, fresh vision, and an awareness that is bringing God’s people to understand and embrace again the truth that “It’s all about congregations.”

The most effective evangelism tool is to start new communities of faith.  These new worshiping communities are the most strategic way to reach new generations, new residents, and new populations that established churches are not reaching.

Worshiping communities are defined by Acts 2:42: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

I like this campaign. I support it. I want to see it succeed. I'll do what I can to help. I'll begin by challenging our conception of what a worshiping community is in order to broaden our vision for what is possible.

What is a worshipping community?

There are different ways for us to approach this question.

From some people, the local congregation is the worshiping community, and generally this is what is meant by the campaign's aim.

However, I do think that we should broaden our conception of what a worshiping community is in order to see that there are more avenues for creating new congregations that simply the actions of presbyteries and local congregations.

The broadening of our conception of a worshiping community may also bring us to a new understanding of what the Spirit of God is doing in our time and place.

In the simplest sense, it is a community that worships Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

Is it more than that? This simple description certainly describes many congregations.

In addition, there is leadership, governance, spiritual formation, outreach, stewardship, and fellowship.

This describes many groups that function within a congregation. A choir in this sense could be a worshiping community. A mission team that goes to Guatemala or Rwanda could be a worshipping community. A church's youth group certainly would be a worshiping community. A homeless ministry could be. The list could go on and on.

The result is that we define ourselves by our institutional structure rather than by our function as the people of God.

As a result, we see programs where we should see worshiping communities.

An Example

One of the most hidden and under-appreciated (IMHO) ministries of the Presbyterian Church USA are our college and university campus ministries and chaplaincies.  I have been involved with this aspect of the life of the church for almost a quarter century.

Campus ministry is not very romantic, like a mission trip to an exotic tropical country. It isn't very visible like a church's youth group. It isn't a producer of larger numbers of worshipers on a Sunday morning.(Remember your college days?) It isn't a dramatic social need like hunger or homelessness.  In the minds of many people, they are just college students, living through extended adolescence.

This is unfortunate. It represents a kind of thinking is limits the church from being a network of worshiping communities.

A Difference in Perception

To get at the heart of what a worshiping community is we need to make an important distinction.

When we describe an aspect of being a worshiping community as "a program" or "a ministry" of the church, we are conceiving the church as an organizational institution. We see it as a non-profit business. 

However, if we look at a church or an aspect of a church as a worshiping community, our perception changes.  Instead of an institution, we see relationships.

Go sit in our your youth group. Visit a campus ministry. Go on a mission trip. Join the choir. What you'll find is that these groups are more than programs. They are communities.

Our short-sightedness here is a product of the age we live in. That age is fading, and the era of community is emerging.

Five Standards for a Worshiping Community, a starting point

Based on what I've seen through my work with churches over the years, here are five that can be a starting point for discerning whether your church's "programs, ministries and groups" are worshiping communities.

1. A Mission that is an expression of faith in Jesus Christ, with a purpose beyond the group's benefit.

2. Participation is a setting for personal spiritual formation. Every participant, therefore, has the opportunity to contribute.

3. Prayer, biblical reflection and times of worship take place regularly.

4. The program, ministry or group, even as a part of a larger body, has a means of governing itself.

5. Fellowship and caring support for one another provides a context for being a community, rather than just as a program or committee of an institution.

These are sort of minimum standards.

I worked with a large church many years ago where we discovered that they were really two churches under one roof. One church was focused on spiritual growth, Bible study, prayer and support for one another. The other church was focused on outreach and service in the community and throughout the world. In the long range plan that was adopted, all groups within the church were asked to include in their life and work together, both Bible study and prayer, and outreach and service.

Seeing each church as a collection of small worshiping communities is how we strengthen the whole body. To treat each group as a worshiping community is to treat each of them holistically.

Shifting your programs and ministries into being worshiping communities.

If the General Assembly's goal of 1001 worshiping communities in a decade is to be reached, we then need to begin by shifting our perceptions about what the church is. Here's a starting point for your local church.

1. Acknowledge that every gathering of people in your congregation can be a worshiping community. Apply the five criteria above to each group.

2. Treat worship as a primary place for spiritual formation. Equip people to fully experience the grace and love of Jesus Christ in their lives through the context of worship. And to do this in every gathering point in the life of the church.

3. Give people the freedom and opportunity to grow their worshiping communities. Encourage initiative and imagination in seeing what God can do through each individual group.  Give each group the opportunity to lead the church in worship.

An example in practice

I came to this awareness about worshiping communities by participating in one of the weekly gatherings of students in a Presbyterian Campus Ministry. In the space of a little over two hours, these students served dinner that they had organized and made for everyone, worshiped with song, prayer, reflection upon the Scripture, discussed their mission outreach plans for their upcoming semester break, and closed with requests for prayer and closing worship.

Sitting there I realized that I was witnessing the future of the church.I saw in them what I believe we all want in our experience of faith. These students were not being initiated into an institutional model of the church. They were being the church as a worshiping community. It was a very uplifting, revelatory moment for me.

What these students do, so can the people in your church. It doesn't have to be the decision of the Session. It just takes one person deciding that their group is going to develop this way. This is how grassroots movements begin. By the initiative of people who decide that their world can be different. You don't have to change the whole church, just the part where you are.  When we do this together, our cumulative impact is significant. We begin by changing our perceptions and behaviors in the place were we are already committed and involved.

The future of the church is now.

The future is in seeing that thousands of small worshiping communities connected together in churches and presbyteries across the denomination need strengthening and support.  It begins with each of us deciding to focus our efforts in just one place to help develop that place as a worshiping community.

My place is with our Presbyterian Campus Ministries. Where's your place?

Bonhoeffer's After Ten Years for our time

This post was originally published November 24, 2007 at my former blog, The Presbyterian Polis. I post it now as I believe it provides us perspective for the times we are in.

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For past couple of months, I've been drawn to the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  His short book Life Together has been a helpful perspective in a church world torn between artificial triumphalism and institutional cynicism.   It's about how real people engage one another through their faith in Christ and in their relationships with one another.

Lately, I have been reading portions from The Cost of Discipleship and Ethics trying to grasp who this man was. I find his perspective on the Christian faith and the church totally different from most of the people I know and read today.

A couple days ago, I ran into United Methodist pastor colleague Tony Sayer at the bookstore. After a wide ranging discussion that lasted over an hour, I told him I was reading Bonhoeffer. His eyes lit up. He's a Bonhoeffer devotee and after some discussion, suggested I read a piece Bonhoeffer wrote in 1942, not many months before he was arrested by the German Gestapo. So, I went home, dug through a box of books and found my 40 year old copy of Letters and Papers from Prison. The copy I have is not the expanded edition that is now available.  I've ordered it and its on the way here.

The essay that Tony suggested is After Ten Years.  It is his reflections on his work and life in the context of the rise of National Socialism under the Nazi dictator Adolph Hitler.  His thoughts are not historical, but more personal and spiritual.  I find them quite relevant to our time.

Bonhoeffer speaks of the radical evilness of evil of the Third Reich and the multitude of failed attempts to confront it.

The failure of rationalism is evident.  With best of intentions, but with a naive lack of realism, the rationalist imagines that a small dose of reason will be enough to put the world right.  In his short-sightedness he wants to do justice to all sides, but in the melee of conflicting forces he gets trampled upon without having achieved the slightest effect. Disappointed by the irrationality of the world, he realises at last his futility, retires from the fray, and weakly surrenders to the winning side.

Worse still is the total collapse of moral fanaticism. The fanatic imagines his moral purity will prove a match for the power of evil, but like a bull he goes for the red rag instead of the man who carries it, grows weary and succumbs.  He becomes entangled with non-essentials and falls into the trap set by the superior ingenuity of his adversary.

Then there is the man with a conscience.  He fights single-handed against overwhelming odds in situations which demand a decision.  But are so many conflicts going on, all of which demand some vital choice - with no advice or support save that of his own conscience - that he is torn to pieces.  Evil approaches him in so many specious and deceptive guises that his conscience becomes nervous and vacillating.  In the end he contents himself with a salved instead of a clear conscience, and starts lying to his conscience as a means of avoiding despair. If a man relies exclusively on his conscience he fails to see how a bad conscience is sometimes more wholesome and strong than a deluded one.

When men are confronted by a bewildering variety of alternatives, the path of duty seems to offer a sure way out. They grasp at the imperative as the one certainty.  The responsibility for the imperative rests upon its author, not upon its executor. But when men are confined to the limits of duty, they never risk a daring deed on their own responsibility, which is the only way to score a bull's eye against evil and defeat it. Then man of duty will in the end be forced to give the devil his due.

What then of the man of freedom?   He is the man who aspires to stand his ground in the world, who values the necessary deed more highly than a clear conscience or the duties of his calling, who is ready to sacrifice a barren principle for a fruitful compromise or a barren mediocrity for a fruitful radicalism.  What then of him?  He must beware lest his freedom should become his own undoing.  For in choosing the lesser of two evils he may fail to see the greater evil he seeks to avoid may prove the lesser. Here we have the raw material of tragedy.

Some seek refuge from the rough-and-tumble of public life in the sanctuary of their own private virtue.  Such men however are compelled to seal their lips and shut their eyes to the injustice around them. Only at the cost of self-deception can they keep themselves pure from the defilements incurred by responsible action.  For all that they achieve, that which they leave undone will still torment their peace of mind. They will either go to pieces in face of this disquiet, or develop into the most hypocritical of all Pharisees.

Who stands his ground? Only the man whose ultimate criterion is not in his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all these things when he is called to obedience and responsible action in faith and exclusive allegiance to God. The responsible man seeks to make his whole life a response to the question and call of God.

I find this a relevant discussion concerning the future of the church. There are so many attempts to address the central crisis of our age - the purpose and function of the church in the 21st century. Much of this crisis is institutional, justifiably so. Yet, that is not really where the problem begins.

Instead, the problem begins with what does it mean to live as a Christian. This question is what I find in Bonhoeffer that challenges my whole perception of what it means to be a Christian. It shows itself in how dependent I am on structure and tradition.  What comes to mind as I read Bonhoeffer is not the crisis of the church against the culture of an evil regime like the Nazis, but the church in conflict with Christ at its very core.

The various approaches to address the National Socialist threat that Bonhoeffer describes above reminds me of the various approaches that we are trying to use to fix the structure and function of the church. Bonhoeffer speaks of the lack of civil courage in Germany during these ten years, though not the lack of bravery and self-sacrifice.

In the course of a long history we Germans have had to learn the necessity and the power of obedience. The subordination of all individual desires and opinions to the call of duty has given meaning and nobility to life.  We have looked upwards, not in servile fear, but in free trust, seeing our duty as a call, and the call as a vocation.  This readiness to follow a command from above rather than our own private opinion of what was best was a sign of a legitimate self-distrust.  Who can deny that in obedience, duty and calling we Germans have again and again excelled in bravery and self-sacrifice? ... The trouble was we did not understand his world.  He forgot that submissiveness and self-sacrifice could be exploited for evil ends.

He then discusses the ethics of success as no better for understanding where one fits in history.

All the time goodness is successful we can afford the luxury of regarding success as having no ethical significance. But the problem arises when success is achieved by evil means. It is no good then behaving as an arm-chair critic and disputing the issue, for that is to refuse to face the facts.  Nor is opportunism any help, for that is to capitulate before success.  We must be determined not to be outraged critics or mere opportunists.  We must take our full share of responsibility for the moulding of history, whether it be as victors or vanquished.

Bonhoeffer points to a responsibility that is ours given to us by God. The question that I have is what does it mean to be responsible in our time. What does it mean for the church to bear the responsibility for history as he describes it?

To read Bonhoeffer is to be struck hard with the reality that this is a man whose engagement with the world was so complete that his relationship with Christ had come to replace his relationship to the church. For most of us, the church serves as the place where we find God. Without the church there is no faith that is secure and real. This is why, I suspect, that the early Calvinists were so adamant about the place of visual and sensual representations of Christ. That these worldly objects could easily come to replace the living God in Jesus Christ as a result. Is this what has happened in churches? This is what I believe lies behind Bonhoeffer's discussion of folly.

Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than malice.  You can protest against malice, you can unmask it or prevent it by force. ... There is no defence against folly. Neither protests nor force are of any avail against it, and it is never amenable to reason. If facts contradict personal prejudices, there is no need to believe them, and if they are undeniable, they can simply be pushed aside as exceptions.  Thus the fool, as compared with the scoundrel, is invariably self-complacent.

Folly, Bonhoeffer writes, is a moral rather than an intellectual defect.

The fool can often be stubborn, but this must not mislead us into thinking he is independent. One feels somehow, especially in conversation with him, that it is impossible to talk to the man himself, to talk to him personally.  Instead, one is confronted with a series of slogans, watchwords, and the like, which have acquired power over him.  He is under a spell, he is blinded, his very humanity is being prostituted and exploited.  Once he has surrendered his will and become a mere tool, there are no lengths of evil to which the fool will not go, yet all the time he is unable to see that it is evil.  Here lies the danger of a diabolical exploitation of humanity, which can do irreparable damage to the human character.

But it is just at this point that we realise that the fool cannot be saved by education.  What he needs is redemption. ... the only cure for folly is spiritual redemption, for that alone can enable a man to live as a responsible person in the sight of God.

This redemption is not simply joining a church, becoming a member and joining a program. Rather this is the transformation of the whole person to be one who is totally available to God.  This is what it means to be responsible and free. It also means that many of the "things" of this world become constraints or entanglements that rob us of our freedom. The problem with many prophets and ministries that call for absolute discipleship accompanying vows of poverty is that they are like the rationalist, the fanatic, or the moralist who intellectually or emotionally tries to change the world by sheer will.  It rises from that sense of duty that gets confused and clouded in the multitude of motivations that rob us of our freedom.

What my reading of Bonhoeffer leads me to see is that this responsible, spiritually mature person is simply a whole human being.  We aren't to be some super-heroic super-spiritual being whose accomplishments and failures are on some grand scale. Rather, we are to live our human lives as the beings God created us to be. All the things I've quoted from Bonhoeffer above have pointed to how our human lives become diminished in so many ways. The problem with these various paths to perfection is that they result in de-humanizing us and therefore affecting our attitude toward others.  Here is what Bonhoeffer says about those who hold such a contempt for humanity.

There is a very real danger of our drifting into an attitude of contempt for humanity.  We know full well that it would be very wrong, and that it would lead to the most sterile relation with our fellow men.  ... The man who despises others can never hope to do anything with them.  The faults we despise in others are always, to some extent at least, our own too.  How often have we expected from others more  than we are prepared to do ourselves!  Why have we until now held such lofty views about human nature? Why have we not recognised its frailty and liability to temptation?   We must form our estimate of men less from their achievements and failures, and more from their sufferings.  The only profitable relationship to others - and especially to our weaker brethren - is one of love, that is the will to hold fellowship with them. Even God did not despise humanity, but became Man for man's sake.

For Bonhoeffer, as we well as it should be for each of us, how we relate to the other individual is where the practicality of our faith is formed. From this simple, basic approach to our relationships with people can grow the ability to demonstrate the kind of civic courage that he practiced in his own ministry.  It simply becomes how we act in love towards others, regardless of who they are.

Within a matter of a few months of Dietrich Bonhoeffer writing this letter to friends in 1942, the Gestapo came and arrested Bonhoeffer, and within two years he was hanged for his leadership of the church in Germany.  Eberhard Bethge, friend and biographer of Bonhoeffer, in the introduction to Letters and Papers from Prison,  tells the story of what the man was like during his emprisonment.

Bonhoeffer's last weeks were spent with prisoners drawn from all over Europe. Among them was Payne Best, an English officer. ... Best writes: "Bonhoeffer ... was all humility and sweetness, of joy in every smallest event in life, and of deep gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive. ... He was one of the very few men that I have ever met to whom his God was real and close to him."  And again, "The following day, Sunday, April 8th, 1945, Pastor Bonhoeffer held a little service and spoke to us in a manner which reached the hearts of all, finding just the right worlds to express the spirit of our imprisonment and the thoughts and resolutions which it had brought.  He had hardly finished his last prayer when the door opened and two evil-looking men in civilian clothes came in and said: ' Prisoner Bonhoeffer, get ready to come with us.'  Those words 'come with us' - for all prisoners that had come to mean one thing only - the scaffold.

"We bade him good-bye - he drew me aside - ' This is the end,' he said. 'For me the beginning of life,' ... Next day, at Flossenburg, he was hanged."

We live in a time of great change and ferment in the church. We have church schisms in our own denomination. We have Megachurches that are questioning methods and whose leaders are examples of moral failure in tragic ways. We have churches emerging as communities and communities that are emerging as places of hope and love in cities. All the foundations of the church are being shaken to see what will remain.

What I am finding as I travel this journey of spiritual and ecclesiastical change is that the Christ that gave Bonhoeffer joy and peace at the time of his execution is real. The church is not the whole faith, but one place where we meet God, find nurture and nourishment, focus and replenishment for the lives we are to live outside.  While I am a realist, it is my faith and the experience of it that teaches me to be an optimist. Thank God for the life and legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Prophet

 
When I was 17 years old, I went off on a youth retreat. It was spring of my senior year. We were kids from different schools, different churches, different neighborhoods across our city. The first night began with a small group Bible Study. In my group was a fellow named Neil. He lived a few streets away from me, yet went to a different high school. He was a cool kid. A hell-raiser as we use to say. That night was honest about his life, his fears and problems. It was at that moment that I had an epiphany. "If Neil can be this honest, then there must be a God."

I don't know what I thought about God prior to that. I was raised in a happy, Presbyterian home. We believe in Jesus. We went to church. I was involved in my youth group, a friend's youth group and Young Life. Everyone I knew went to church. It wasn't just an activity. It was who we are. My epiphany that night change all of that.

The next day dawned mostly clouding. We were in the mountains. During the time set aside for us to individually go out and spend time in prayer, I laid down in the grass above the cabin where we were staying. I prayed a simple prayer. "If you are real, then my life is yours."As I opened my eyes from praying, the clouds were gone. I toke that as a sign that my prayer of faith and commitment had been hear.

As I look back, I realize that that moment of reaction to Neil's honesty was a seminal one.It was turning point. It was a predictor of what was to come.

During college, one of my friends, who is still a close friend, came to call me Prophet. I don't remember why. It was just one of those nicknames we give to people because something touched in some way that provoked a perception about the person. I appreciated the nickname. And he is the only one who ever used it towards me.

To be a prophet is not just to speak about the future, to be a predictor, but to be a person who speaks honestly. Much of my work as a consultant and coach requires me to speak honestly about what I see. I have learned that it is important to speak honest words with grace and caring. Because what is important isn't what I say, but what they hear that allows them the freedom to respond.

I've been thinking about this as our denomination passes through a century-long transition to what it will be in the future.

I don't have all or many answers. What I do know is that what we have been doing the past hundred years is no longer feasible.  We can envision something different, but not see how we are going to get there.  We need to discern the path to the future. I am convinced it does not look like the near past.

There is a spiritual lesson here. At least there is for me.   At the age of 17, when I gave my life to Christ, like so many of us did, I did not know what lay before me in life. All I knew was that I must trust God that he would guide my steps. Looking back over the 41 years since that moment in time, I can honestly say that what I saw then has been shown to be true in my life. More than anything, I find that what God has given me is the grace to try, fail, admit I'm wrong, and try again.

What I have learned as well is that I must constantly seek the horizon of my life. I learned this from marathon swimmer Diana Nyad who, after failing to complete her attempt to swim from Cuba to the Florida Keys, told Johnny Carson that by pushing herself to the limits of her abilities, she gained knowledge about herself that most 50 years don't have. Later she wrote,

“I am willing to put myself through anything; temporary pain or discomfort means nothing to me as long as I can see that the experience will take me to a new level. I am interested in the unknown, and the only path to the unknown is through breaking barriers, an often-painful process.”

I find we are at this point in the history of our church. We have tried and failed, and continue to fail. We have fail because we refused to believe that we individually and collectively are responsible for the decline inthe church. We have failed to break through the barriers of our own need to be honest with ourselves.

What I learned from Diana Nyad over thirty years ago is the reality that until we push ourselves to the horizon of our faith, we have yet to learn fully the greatness of God's grace to us in a time of need. We learn that in times of tragedy and loss. Now, we need to learn it as our ambition to be God's people leads us to discern God's call upon us for the future.

Today, as I write this, the Fellowship of Presbyterians are gathering for their conference in Orlando. And in six weeks the Next Church conference will convene. Then later this summer the General Assembly of the PCUSA will meet.  For each gathering I pray for humility, wisdom and a spirit of reconciliation.

May God be with us, guide us, strengthen us, sustain us, and grant us the spirit of humility and ambition that leads to discover the horizon of the church that waits to be crossed.

The Real End of the 20th Century

 

Historical Context

Forty six years ago, this picture appeared in a publication of Asheville Presbytery of the old Presbyterian Church US. Years later, a friend of my grandparents gave me it knowing that I'd want it because my grandfather stands in the center-left of the picture behind the man sitting second from the left. 

When this picture was taken, Europe was engaged in what was called The Great War, and my grandfather was a year away from leaving his law practice in Asheville to enlist in the U.S. Army to serve in an artillary battery in France.

I find this point in time significant for understanding our point in time today. Here is Canadian historian, Modris Eksteins in his cultural history of the war, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (1989), describing its context.

Like all wars, the 1914 war, when it broke out, was seen as an opportunity for both change and confirmation. Germany, which been united as recently as 1871 and within one generation had become an awesome industrial and military power, was, on the eve of war, the foremost representative of innovation and renewal. She was, among nations, the very embodiment of vitalism and technical brilliance. The war for her was to be a war of liberation, a Befreiungskrieg, from the hypocrisy of bourgeois form and convenience, and Britain was to her the principal representative of the order against which she was rebelling. Britain was in fact the major conservative power of the fin-de-siecle world. First industrial nation, agent of the Pax Britannica, symbol of an ethic of enterprise and progress based on parliament and law, Britain felt not only her pre-eminence in the world but her entire way of life threatened by the thrusting energy and instability Germany was seen to typify. British involvement in the 1914 war was to turn it from a continental power struggle into a veritable war of cultures.

At the same time the tensions were developing between states in this turn-of-the-century world, fundamental conflicts were surfacing in virtually all areas of human endeavor and behavior: in the arts, in fashion, in sexual mores, between generations, in politics. The whole motif of liberation, which has become so central to our century - be it the emancipation of women, homosexuals, proletariat, youth, appetites, peoples - comes into view at the turn of the century. The term avant-garde has usually been applied to artists and writers who promoted experimental techniques in their work and urged rebellion against established academies. The notion of modernism has been used to subsume both this avant-garde and the intellectual impulse behind the quest for liberation and the act of rebellion. Very few critics have ventured to extend these notions of the avant-garde and modernism to the social and political as well as artistic agents of revolt, and to the act of rebellion in general, in order to identify a broad wave of sentiment and endeavor.

Here, too, this same conflict between progressivism and conservatism has been waged within the Presbyterian community for a century. For many believers, it has meant a loss of belief in the church as the spiritual institution of Christ's kingdom on earth. As a result, a cynical and ironic perspective developed that viewed institutional religion as a false spirituality and the source of many of the world's problems. 

This loss of faith goes beyond the boundaries of religion to the socio-political ideologies of the 19th. century.  Paul Fussell in his insightful book The Great War and Modern Memory, writes,

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because it means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends. In the Great War, eight million people were destroyed because two persons, Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his Consort, had been shot. The Second World War offers even more preposterous ironies. Ostensibly begun to guarantee the sovereignty of Poland, that war managed to bring about Poland's bondage and humiliation. Air bombardment, which was supposed to shorten the war, prolonged it by inviting those who were targets to cast themselves in the role of victim-heroes and thus stiffen their resolve.

But the Great War was more ironic than any before or since. It was a hideous embarrassment to the prevailing Meliorist myth which had dominated the public consciousness for a century. It reversed the Idea of Progress. ...

Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence. One reason the Great War was more ironic than any other is that its beginning was more innocent. ... The certainties were intact. Britain had not known a major war for a century, and on the Continent, as A.J.P. Taylor points out, "there had been no war between the Great Powers since 1871. No man in the prime of life knew what war was like.  All imagined that it would be an affair of great marches and great battles, quickly decided."

Furthermore, the Great War was perhaps the last to be conceived as taking place within a seamless, purposeful "history" involving a coherent stream of time running from past through present to future. The shrewd recruiting power depicting a worried father of the future being asked by his children, "Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?" assumes a future whose moral and social pressures are identical with those of the past. Today, when each day's experience seems notably ad hoc, no such appeal would shame the most stupid at the recruiting office. But the Great War took place in what was, compared with ours, a static world, where the values appeared stable and where the meanings of abstractions seemed permanent and reliable.  Everyone knew what Glory was, and what Honor meant. It was not until eleven years after the war that Hemingway could declare in A Farewell to Arms that "abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates." In the summer 1914 no one would have understood what on earth he was talking about.

The church has not been immuned from these changes in society during the 20th century. A similar loss of innocence raises the question about how God acts within history as wars, genocide, and political and economic tyranny happen.  

The Place of Institutions

It is not unusual to hear persons of my age lamenting the decline of the church, of civility, of government, of business, or of sportmanship, ethics, politics, culture and community in general. Their reaction is similar to that of people one hundred years ago, who felt the same way, as the Great War turned from a short idealistic defense of a nation's values into a violent and costly war of attrition.  At the heart of this change of mind is the decline of the value of the institutions of society.

Hugh Heclo in his book, On Thinking Institutionally, addresses the growing distrust that people have of institutions.

We are disposed to distrust institutions. That is the basic fact of life we share as modern people. And it is the point of departure from which this account must begin. As good pluralists, tolerant multiculturalists, secular or religious moralists (choose your term), we can be divided on almost any other imaginable subject. But a fundamental distrust of institutions is the one mark we have in common as inhabitants of these times. ... With few exceptions, growing distrust in the modern mind is directed toward the entire institutional apparatus of modern society. If you imagine that apparatus as a sort of bank, the overall picture is one of many withdrawals, few deposits, and a continuous depletion of trust reserves.

The correlation here between the distrust of institutions and the decline of institutions is not one-to-one. Distrust is just one facet of the decline. The decline is also a function of the diminishment of values as a core function of organizations and communities. What has replaced values are processes, bureaucratic functions, and political positions that are more or less intended to preserve power and the access to wealth by those with a controlling interest in the institution. 

In the church, the diminishment of denominations is part the product of institutional decline, and partly a product of the growth of the individualization of consumer culture. Churches that have thrived in this environment are more congregational than connectional, and more focused on personal religion than on socio-cultural role of the church as a transformational agent in society. 

The question that confronts us as the church today is whether these trends from the 20th. century will continue through the 21st?

For some time I've been witnessing a shift in churches.  They are not the product deliberations and decisions of the General Assembly, or of  a Presbytery or the Session of a church. Instead, these shifts rise out of the social interaction that people are having with one another in their churches. Most of what I see is describe in the guide, 21st Century Congregation Distinctives.

These shifts mark the transition from the 20th century church that functions as an institutional pillar of society to one that is a community of shared mission. These shifts lay the ground for a revived institutionalization of the church that is better suited to the 21st. century.  To better understand this, let me return to Hugh Heclo for a moment, and let him describe what an institution is.

... let me simply observe that institutions represent inheritances of valued purpose with attendant rules and moral obligations. They constitute socially ordered grounding for human life. This grounding in a normative field implicates the lives of individuals and collectivies in a lived-out social reality. To live in a culture that turns its back on institutions is equivalent to trying to live in a physical body without its skeleton or hoping to use a language but not is grammar. A culture wholly committed to distrusting its institutions is a self-contradiction.

Heclo's description adequately identifies the church at all levels.  His insight reveals partly why as a denomination that we have declined over the past two generations. Increasingly, our common membership as Presbyterians has been based on the governance structure of the national church. We are Presbyterians, less because of our theology, our values and, even our worship, than we are by the relationship that we share through the Book of Order. For this reason, I welcome the new Form of Government because it forces us to reevaluate who we are and what our purpose as a church is.  These shifts are preparing us for the next era of the Presbyterian church.

21st. Century Congregational Missional Shifts

We are transitioning as a church from an institutional form to one centered in mission. The former is internally focused. The latter externally. You look down the list of the churches in any presbytery and see that the externally focused congregations are growing, and the internal focused ones are committed to preserving a conception of the church that worked for them in the last century. I have often spoken of these churches as "museums of memories" with the pastor as their curator.

Here are two areas of the church where I see these shifts taking place, and what they look like.

LEADERSHIP

Shift from leadership as Control to one of Equipping the membership for ministry.

Shift from leadership as an Organizational Role with defined Administrative Responsibilities to Relationships of Shared Responsibility.

Shift from Leadership by a Select Few to a Community of Shared Leadership.

Shift from a Passive Acceptance of Other People's Leadership to Personal Initiative to Make a Difference that Matters.

MEMBERSHIP

From being a Member on the roll of the church to a Personal Call to participate and contribute to Christ's mission through the church.

From the church as an Institution to a Community in Jesus Christ.

From being spectators and recipients of THE professional pastor's ministry to Participants with him or her.

From Consumers of religious services to Contributors to mission of the church.

This is a marked departure from the mindset of the past century which was cynical, ironic and anti-institutional. This shift marks a growing embrace of purpose, values and a belief in the possibility of making a difference in the world that truly matters. This is not just an idea taking place in a few churches, but a trend beginning to gain momentum on a global scale. When people take responsibility, act collectively based upon shared values, then the basis for creating new institutions for society grows.

This is what I see taking place in the church.

The question that now faces us

With the decline of institutions being one of the products of the 20th. century, as Presbyterians, we are faced with the need to reenvision what it means to be a connectional body. For I see the course of the past century as one of de-connection toward disconnection and dismemberment. The growing congregational culture of our denomination is a product of our time. But that time is passing, and the call to community by society is growing. I believe it is time to rethink what we mean by our connectionalism.

First, it must be relational, or social, or communal. It cannot first be an administrative structure. Instead it must rise from a clarification of our mission as the church in relationship with one another.

Secondly, it means that presbyteries are needed to provide a relational structure to support our shared mission. Presbyteries must be rethought of as something other than an administrative governance body. Instead, as some presbyteries have already begun, they become missional bodies for the coordination of the collective mission of churches.

Thirdly, it means that we need to rethink precisely what is the church at the congregational level. Our structure was right for a homogeneous culture. Now, as I'm beginning to see, we need a broader perspective of what is a worshipping community. We need to provide space for innovation and experimentation so that new communities of Jesus Christ can emerge from relationships of shared responsibility and leadership.

The Real End of the 20th. Century

The loss of innocence that came as the result of the Great War, and the conflicts that followed, is now being replaced by the recovery of purpose and mission. The Presbyterian church that is needed for the 21st. century can be created through the openness of our nFog structure to create a structure that builds relationships between churches, mission endeavors, and other avenues for the Gospel to be expressed in society. I welcome the rebirth of our connectionalism as we discover a new how the Spirit of Christ leads us forth in mission.

The End and the Beginning - a Leading Questions post

The following post was originally published at my Leading Questions blog. It is my perspective on the changes in leadership and organizations that mark the dramatic difference between the 20th and the21st centuries. I share it here as background and context for all the posts that appear here. An ongoing compilation of Leading Questions posts is available as Leadership for the 21st Century.

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Seeing what's coming

What if our past experience instead of illuminating the future, obscures it? What if the way we have always approached a problem, or the conduct of a single day, or the organization of our work makes it more likely that we end up not accomplishing what we envision?

Working in planning processes over the years, I've concluded that people can see what they want, but fail to reach it because of how they go about it.  We can imagine the future, but not see the path that will take us there. This gap in our abilities is becoming more acute as the ways we have worked are becoming less effective.

From another perspective, we rarely see the end of something coming, or the beginning of the next thing. We tend to see in retrospect.  Our aversion to change, I believe, is largely because we don't like surprises. We defend the past hoping that it is sustainable into the future, even if we see a better, different one.The past, even less than ideal, at least seems known and more certain, more secure, more stable, more predictable, more confortable, at one level.  It does not mean that it is satisfying or fulfilling, but it seems safer. 

As a result, instead of providing us a sound basis for change, the past can inhibit us from achieving the vision that we see. Instead, we live by a set of cultural forms that must be defended against change. In other words, the form of the way we live and work remains the same even after its vitality has gone. 

Change that has come

What impresses me about our time is how fast change is happening, and how quickly things we thought were normative seem less relevant.

Ten years ago, websites were the rage. You weren't on the cutting edge of business without one. Today, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a host of other social media platforms are the norm for a business. Twenty years ago, CDs were the norm. Now, digital I-Tunes downloads. Thirty years ago, the Soviet Union was the West's nemesis, now militant Islam. Forty years ago, Vietnam and racial equality were the dominant issues of our time. Now we have an African-American President, and Howard Schultz wants Starbucks in Vietnam. Fifty years ago, President Kennedy was challenging the nation to go to the Moon within the decade. Today, the government is putting space exploration on the back burner as space travel is becoming privatized.

Could we have imagined these changes?  Possibly. We'd probably not be able to see how they'd happen. That is the curious thing about visions and visioning. We can imagine the end, but not the means.  The pathway to the future goes through today and tomorrow. Yet, we are captives of our past thinking and experiences.  They are the measure of what is possible and what can be done.

The End and the Beginning

I have been reflecting, in particular, on these thoughts over the past several months.  I've tried to step back without prejudice and identify what I see without reducing it down to a few simple categories. What I do see are the markers of change in three broad areas.

For one it is the The Beginning of the End, for another The End of the Beginning, and for another, surprisingly, The Beginning of a long delayed Beginning.

Some of this reflection was prompted by a conversation about a project event to take place later this year. It was a discussion about how businesses function. The contrast was between a focus of work as a set of tasks to be done and the importance of human interaction in meeting organizational goals. I realized coming out of that conversation that this project, for me, represented a turning point in human and organizational development. It provided a picture of the past and the future. The past as the Industrial model of business organization and the future of organizations as communities of leaders. That last phrase was what I envisioned a decade and a half ago when I began my consulting business. Only now, after all these years, do I see that simple idea beginning to have relevance for the way we live, work, organize and lead organizations.

What I see is:

The Beginning of the End of the Progressive ideal.

The  End of the Beginning of the Capitalist model.

The Emergence of freedom and democracy on a global scale.

The first two, Progressivism and Capitalism, along with modern Science, are the principal products of the age of Enlightenment.

The Progressive ideal believed, and still does by many of its advocates, that through government control of science and industry a free, equitable and peaceful world could be achieved. Conceived during the 19th century as a belief that society could be perfected, and as a counter-balance to the industrialization taking place in Europe and the United States, it was an utopian belief in a well-order, controlled, uniform world.

The Capitalist model was born in a belief that each individual should be free to pursue their own economic welfare, and not be forced by government rules or economic servitude to do that which they choose not to do. It was the ideology that provided the basis of the industrialization out which has come prosperity for more people in history and the rise of the modern middle class.

Both the Progressive ideal and the Capitalist model have brought great benefits and liabilities to society. They form the two sides of virtually every divisive issue confronting the world today. They are quite similar, yet in very different ways. Both are organized around the control of power and wealth. Both have been institutionalized in the large, hierarchical organizations in Washington and on Wall Street, and in similar institutions throughout the world.

Over the past decade, the Progressive ideal and the Capitalist model have begun to show their age. The assumptions that underlie these ideologies are being challenged by forces of change that are beyond their control. Because the control of global forces of change is problematic and less realistic.

A principal assumption of the Enlightenment is that we can know what we need to know by analytical decision making. In other words, by identifying the parts of a situation, we understand it, and therefore can design a strategic mechanism for controling the outcome.  This analytical process works very well in the realm of the natural sciences, less so in the realm of the social sciences. To paraphrase novelist Walker Percy, "Science can tell us how the brain functions, but not about the functioning of the mind."

At the beginning of this essay, I wrote of what I was seeing The Beginning of The  End of the Progressive ideal and The End of the Beginning of the Capitalist model. Neither of these observations are political statements. I am not a Democrat, nor a Republican. I am not a Progressive nor a Libertarian. I find none of the current choices of political affiliation representative of my own perspective and values. I speak as an outlier, not an antagonist. 

I see these ideological movements as products of a different time in history. The assumptions and the way of thinking that brought these ideologies into prominence are now receding in appropriateness. The conditions that gave rise to these ideas over the past three hundred years are now giving way to new conditions.  If progressivism and capitalism are to survive, then their proponents must change.

Emergent connection

These ideologies born in the age of Enlightenment share a reductive approach to knowledge. In other words, we gain knowledge and understanding by breaking things into parts. The assumption is that things are collections of discrete parts.  Yet, we know that in the natural sciences, the mixing of different chemical elements creates something new and different that cannot exist in any other way. Water being the most obvious example.

However, in the social realm, there is a shift toward emergent knowledge as the basis for understanding what is.  The emergent perspective sees connections and wholes rather than just parts. In a network of relationships, the value isn't one person, but rather the connections that one person has to other persons. 

Think of it as the difference between those radio ads selling lists of sales leads, and knowing the person who has a relationship with 100 of those buyers. The former is a list of contacts, of names and addresses. It is a parts list.  The other is a picture of a network of connections that one person has. This second picture is the picture of the future, for it is a picture of relationships.

We see emerging forces all around us. Again, this is not a political statement, but an observation. One difference between the Tea Party demonstrations and the Union demonstrations of the past year is the difference between an emergent organization and a traditional hierarchical one. The Tea Party organization is intentionally decentralized in local communities. Unions are designed as centralized concentrations of power.  One body speaking for a host of organizations.

 The difference here is between a centralized and decentralized organizational structure, like that described in Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom's book, The Starfish and The Spider. The centralized structure (the spider) is vulnerable at the top. Take down the leader, and the organization suffers significant loss of prestige and power. The decentralized system (the starfish) is not vulnerable at the top, because there is none. In a decentralized system, no one expression controls the fortunes of the whole. The centralized is the industrialized model, and the decentralized, an emergent one. The system that the Progressive ideal and the Capitalist model share is one of centralization. Operating separate from both are independents and small business entrepreneurs. The difference is between a hierarchy of control and a network of collaborative relationships.

The recent rebellions in the Middle East are also examples of this emergent model. The use of cell phone and internet technology to connect people in agile, less structured ways make these rebellions possible, not necessarily successful, but possible.Their desire is for a freedom that they see provided and secured by democracy. When thousands of demonstrators fill the streets of Cairo seeking the end of a repressive regime, their impact is far greater than their numbers. We see a visual counterpoint of the difference between being a nation of free people and one living under an authoritarian government.

Even as the Progressive ideal and the Capitalist model decline, the impetus towards freedom and democracy grows. I heard recently that there are now more nations with democratic governments than at any time in history.  Democracy that grows from a grassroots base is an emergent model. The impact is greater than the sum of its individual parts. In an emergent context, one person's actions can serve as a catalyst for thousands more. For example, the recent uprising in Tunisia was started  when a street merchant Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest the abusive treatment by police of his vegetable cart business.

The Network is Emergent

In business, the emergent model has relevance. When a business perceives itself to be a structure of parts, processes and outcomes, following upon the centralized industrial model, then it has a much more difficult time seeing the value that exists in the relational connections that exist both between people and within the structure itself. It is why so many businesses become siloed and turf battles insue.

However, when a business sees itself as a network of interactive individuals, then the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The result is higher levels of communication, collaboration and coordination.

While the Progressive ideal and the Capitalist model are products of the age of Enlightenment, emergence, freedom and democracy are even older ideas finding new ground and relevance.  In the traditional business organization, their relevance can be seen in two ways.

First, in the freedom of the individual to take responsibility through their own initiative. This perspective harkens back to the ancient Greek democracies where Greek farmers and small business owners participated in the governance and protection of their city-state. For businesses to replicate such an ethos requires a shift in perspective from employees as functionaries of the tasks of the company to a recognition of the potential contribution that each person offers. It is in this sense that each person leads out of their own personal initiative to give their best to the company.

Second, in the emergence of businesses as human communities of shared responsibility. The traditional approach has been to break down the organizational structures into discrete parts of tasks and responsibilities, and to staff to that conception of the organization. This traditional hierarchical approach worked in simpler times when businesses were less global, more homogeneous, and employees less well trained, and had the technology to advance their contributions beyond their individual position in the company.

Today, the environment of business has changed, as the context becomes more complex and change accelerates. Agility and responsiveness are not embedded in structure, but in human choice and in relationships that amplify those shared choices to make a difference. It is the freedom to take initiative to act in concert with others that creates the conditions of successfully managing the challenging environment of business today. The result of a greater emphasis on relationship, interaction and personal initiative is a shift in culture. One only has to select any page in the Zappos.com Culture Book to see the influence of genuine community upon the attitudes and behaviors of the company's workforce.

The Keys to Change

I began this post by saying that we rarely see the end of something coming or the beginning of something new. What I offer here has been germinating in my mind for the past three years. It is still not yet fully formed, and may never be. Yet, I am convinced that the changes that I see happening mean that there is no going back to the halcyon days of the 1990's or even the 1950's.  Business organizations will not long succeed as mechanistic structures of human parts. Rather they must emerge into being communities of leaders, where individual initiative, community and freedom are fundamental aspects of the company's culture

The keys to the future, in my mind, are fairly simple.

1. Leadership starts with individual employees' own personal initiative to make a difference. Create space and grant permission for individual employees to take initiative to create new ways of working, new collaborative partnerships and solve problems before that reach a crisis level.

2. Relationships are central to every organizational endeavor. Create space for relationships to grow, and the fruit will be better communication, more collaboration between people and groups, and a more efficient coordination of the work of the organization.

 3. Open the organization to new ideas about its mission. Identify the values that give purpose and meaning to the company's mission.  Organize around those values that unite people around a common purpose, that give them the motivation to want to communicate better, collaborate more, and coordinate their work with others.  Openness is a form of freedom that releases the hidden and constrained potential that exists within every company.

We are now at the End of an era that is unprecedented in human history. The next era is Beginning, and each of us has the privilege and the opportunity to share in its development. It requires adapting to new ideas, new ways of thinking, living and working. I welcome the change that is emerging, because I find hope that a better world can be gained through its development.

Worshiping Communities - the essential question

One of my New Testament professors in seminary would regularly caution us about the hardening of the categories in our interpreting the Scriptures. As the new Form of Government is implemented through the presbyteries, and as the Fellowship of Presbyterians promotes their vision of a New Reformed Body, I feel that we still must guard against the hardening of the categories as we look to what the PCUSA will be for the 21st century.

My question isn't primarily theological or biblical, but rather social. It is a question of how the church as an organization in society adapts to changes that are influencing us.

So, let's play a little thought game to get at the heart of this issue.

*One million Lebanese gather in Beirut, March 14, 2005, to protest Syrian occupation and the assasination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.

The Post-Pentecost Structure

Let's say that right now at the end of the year 2011, Pentecost is happening, not two thousand years ago.  Right now. It may look like the picture above of a crowd of a million people in central Beirut, Lebanon in the spring of 2005.

You and I are present as the Spirit descends upon this random multi-cultural crowd of people gathered in a city square or park in places like Los Angeles, Hanoi or Beirut. On this day, we are present at the spiritual birth of the church.  Not the creation of a new denomination, but the church of Jesus Christ.

How would the media cover the event? What would the Twitter feed of the event be recording? How soon would there be a Facebook page up asking people to like the new social network of Pentecost? How would the dominant religious institutions of our time react? What would be the mainstream religious traditions, if there had been no Christian body for the past two thousand years, until this afternoon?

What do you think the people caught up in the Spirit's appearance would do next?  What do you think would happen tomorrow or the next week? After a year, what do you think would have happened to this group of people? Would they still be together?

More importantly, what organizational form would the people caught up in the Spirit's movement adopt? If the church were born today, what would it look like?  Would it look like a mass uprising or a few people sitting around a table in a coffee shop chatting? Would it look like a downtown, tall steeple church, a mega-church or a house church meeting in a suburban living room?

We have the Acts record to know what happened two thousands years ago. But what about now. The new Form of Government or NRB or any other traditional formalized structure of a denominational church are patterns of church organization that are also logical adaptations to current forms of secular organizations.  As a result, all church structures are products of their historical context. To understand this insight is to recognize that change is not necessarily destructive, but rather how the church adapts to the culture around it.

A Discussion of Structure

One day this past week, I celebrated the 30th anniversary of my ordination as a minister of the word and sacrament / teaching elder. I spent the day with a group of leaders from a presbytery discussing their presbytery's organizational model, and why it wasn't working. Like many presbyteries, they are divided up into regional clusters. The intent was to help this large diverse, geographically scattered presbytery create the conditions for community and shared mission. It hasn't happened like it was designed.

The essential problem, in my opinion, is a widely shared perspective about organizations that has found its way into the church. This adaptation to contemporary organizational norms sees the church as an administrative / programmatic entity created for order, efficiency and top-down accountability. This is the secular corporate model that has been the standard approach to organizations since the end of the Second World War. The PCUSA institutionalized this approach in the reunion of 1983. 

This approach elevates administrative process over human interaction. The result is the creation of an organizational environment of divisive special interests, each seeking to claim preeminence as the core mission of the church.

I am saying that the divisions in the church over the past hundred years are products of organizational design, not simply differences in theology and social / political ideology. The product is disunity in the Body of Christ.

The Structural Shift

Over at my Leading Questions blog, I've been writing for a long time about how change is affecting organizations and leaders. The key posts over the past 18 months are gathered in the compilation, Leadership for the 21st Century, that explores the social and organizational changes that are influencing what we understand the nature of leadership and organizational structure are becoming in the 21st century. Working both sides of the line that separates the church from for-profit businesses, non-profit community organizations, local governments, regulated utilities, healthcare organizations and institutions of higher education, I have come to see that there is an epic shift taking place in society from organizational structures of hierarchy to ones based upon a network of relationships. What I see is are Parallel Structures of Networks of Relationships.

Here's the juxtaposition that I see constituting a shift that is historic and transforming society as a whole on a global scale.

Organizations since the rise of the global empires of three millennia ago have functioned through a structure of hierarchy. As this image describes, hierarchical organizations are built around a leadership structure of institutional authority of delegated responsibility whose purpose is institutional integrity. This is the corporate model that we see designed into virtually every business and government institution in our society.

Functioning in parallel are relationship networks. These networks form around a shared mission or interest. I'm distinguishing these relationship networks from the more common social networks that one can find on Facebook, Google + and the myriad other online gathering points. These relationship networks are missional in nature, and are governed by the values that inform that mission. Participation in these networks is based on personal initiative to contribute. As a result, these networks are based upon a leadership structure of shared mission, shared responsibility, personal integrity and initiative to make a difference that matters.

These parallel structures of networks of relationships have always been present in the church.  They are what I see in this guide to 21st Century Congregational Distinctives and the shifts that I see taking place in congregations.

Understanding Parallel Structures

The key to understanding our future as a church and a denomination is understanding how these parallel structures function as worshipping communities.

A parallel structure is not a replacement structure, at least not by intention.

We can see parallel structures throughout the church. The Fellowship of Presbyterians is a parallel structure. The overseas mission work of a presbytery is a parallel structure. The ministry to the homeless in the congregation where my family worships is a parallel structure. The choir in almost every church is a parallel structure.

These structures provide a way for people to gather around a common interest of shared mission. It is how our diversity as a church functions. These are relationship networks that provide what I observe people saying about what they want from their life.

People want their lives to be Personally Meaningful, Socially Fulfilling and Make a Difference that Matters.

People want their values to matter and a purpose to their lives. They want their relationships to be healthy, respectful and caring. And they want to make a difference that matters.

I'm convinced that we need to structure our congregations, as well as our businesses, schools, community organizations and government organization to help people achieve these goals for themselves.

The idea of the PCUSA creating 1001 worshiping communities during the decade is an attractive one to me. It is because I see in this simple goal a way to elevate parallel structures of networks of relationships as places of worship, mission and community that create opportunities for people to find the church a place of Personal Meaning, Social Fulfillment and where their contributions make a difference that matters in the context of shared mission in Jesus Christ.

However, if this vision that I have is to be achieved, it means that we have to change some of our understandings of what church structure means.

A Reforming Structure

The organizational world outside of the church is changing. It is adopting a network perspective where relationships of shared mission and responsibility are their core organizing principle. The old corporate model is failing. The emerging paradigm is the network of relationships. This model puts a premium on personal initiative, creativity and commitment to contributing. The old hierarchical system discouraged initiative in favor of compliance. 

Networks of relationships provide a way for people to become engaged in the full mission activity of the organization. The stronger the relational interaction, the stronger the organization, and greater the opportunities for impact.  This is true in the church as it is in the business world.

For example, in my presbytery, two of our mission endeavors are partnerships with a Guatemalan presbytery and with a hospital in Malawi.The significance of these partnerships is that the Guatemalan churches are financially supporting the mission in Malawi. Shared mission, shared responsibility and the result shared impact as the church.

People involved in these mission partnerships find their faith strengthened, their skills of ministry expanded, and their perception of God's work in the world broadened through their involvement. As a network of relationships, they are functioning as a worshiping community.

The same can be said for the campus ministries that I serve with through the North Carolina Presbyterian Higher Education Ministries.  They are very much are like mini-congregations with programs of worship, fellowship, faith development and mission outreach.

Each of these mission endeavors are parallel structures aligned with a board, a church and in many cases through a presbytery. Each one has aspects of faith development, worship and service as a part of their program. Each is a network of relationships functioning as a worshiping community.

The Structure of Future

Here are my convictions about the future structure of the church. These are not predictions. Rather what I see is how we can adapt to a 21st century social context that is unlike the last century.

1. Relationships precede structure.

2. Connectionalism first must be relational if a connection system of governance is to work.

3. Presbyteries are the key to strengthening the connectional relationship between people and churches.

4. Worshipping communities are networks of relationships of people who are personally engaged in faith development, take personal initiative to contribute, and build relationships of shared mission and responsibility to live out the Great Ends of the Church.

5. As a denomination, we'll be smaller with greater impact, as we become more missional as a church.

The essential question of what will the structure of the PCUSA look like in the future I believe is answered in the development of parallel structures of networks of relationship of shared mission and responsibility as worshipping communities in Jesus Christ.

If Pentecost was to take place today, I believe this is what we would see. Networks of Relationships as Worshipping Communities of Shared Mission.

This is our future.

 *http://www.calpeacepower.org/0201/images/Lebanon_overview_bg.jpg

Why I have hope

Optimism for me is not a luxury I can afford. I'm a realist.

I also feel that cynicism is also a luxury I can't afford. Both optimism and cynicism lead toward a detatchment from reality. If ever in the history of the church, we need to be realists, now is the time.

I preface this post with those words because I want you to know why I have hope in the future of the Presbyterian Church USA. My hopefulness is not an optimistic hope against hope. And it is also not a form of self-deception. Rather my hope is based on what I see taking place in the church. Here are three examples. 

1. Church for a New Generation  - Presbyterians Today, December 2011 cover story,  "Spirit-filled Worship," "Authentic Community," and, "Meaningful Service.

This isn't just some fringe movement. This is the future that is happening right now.

As I read this, it reminded me of what I've been observing in organizations, including churches, for about a decade. People, regardless of their spiritual orientation, have been telling me in widely diverse ways that they want three things for their life. They want it to be Personally Meaningful, Socially Fulfilling and To Make a Difference That Matters.

In practice, this means that people want a purpose, to have a mission and let a set of values define what is meaningful in their lives. The difference between this in the past is that these ideas are not just symbolic totems for appearances sake. Instead, these are the guiding principles for how their lives are to be lived.  These ideas help to create social environments where healthy relationships can result. And with these people who share a common mission and values that can do things that create an impact that fulfills their calling.

This perspective gives me hope because each of these goals create positive, constructive change wherever they are practiced. This is what I see in this article from Presbyterians Today.

2. 1001 Worshipping Communities in Ten Years.

This initiative is a grand vision for the future. Here's a pamphlet that describes ten of these churches.

What gives me hope is the boundaryless nature of speaking of faith communities. A community is a network of people in relationship to one another. Where I live near Asheville, their are prominent mainstream churches downtown. And more hidden because of their lack of church facilities are new worship communities of various traditions. One meets in a converted retail space. Another in the theater in the basement of an office building, another at the YMCA, having moved from a local music hall.

The moment I heard about this initiative, it gave me hope for the church. To create this number of worshipping communities requires us to recognize that many of them will be parallel structures that will not be like congregations that have been the dominant form of church over the past several hundred years. The world is changing, and as many institutional forms decline, new alternative structures emerge to carry on the mission and values of those legacy organizations.

3. North Carolina Presbyterian Higher Education Ministries.

NCPHEM is an organization formed by the five presbyteries in North Carolina in 2004 to distribute funds returned to the presbyteries by the Synod of the Mid-Atlantic. In January, 2011, the board embarked on an awareness / fund raising campaign to support and serve the campus ministries and chaplaincies in North Carolina. I was hired to staff the effort.

A year into our campaign, my hope for the future of our church has grown beyond my expectations. I'm overwhelminginly impressed with the quality of ministers serving the young people on our campuses. I'm even more impressed by what I see happen with students. Here are the worshipping communities of the future. You see and learn about some of them in the Presbyterians Today article linked above. And while, I don't think we needed any validation as to validity of our campaign, it was a tremendous boost in confidence when The Morgan Foundation of Laurel Hill, N.C. made a challenge endowment gift of $500,000 to the support of Presbyterian Higher Education Ministry in North Carolina. We are grateful for the leadership of Jim Morgan, his family and the board of the foundation for their vision of the church in the future.

For a long time, campus ministry has been the forgotten mission of the church. It isn't romantic like going overseas. It isn't visible like the youth ministries in our churches. Yet, it is the link, the linchpin to the future of the church. It is how these 1001 worship communities will be realized. It is how young adults will remain in the life of the church in the future.  I believe this is so because the students in our campus ministries are learning how to create authentic community in a worshipping, missional context.

These ministries deserve our support, just as do the work of 1001 worshipping communities does, and the new church developments in presbyteries throughout the church. Do these ministries need us? Yes. They need our financial support. In addition, they need our mutual partnership as followers of Christ. We, the people in local churches across the nation, need them because the forms of worship and community of the future are being created today through them.

I have hope because as a connectional body, we are at the very beginning of discovering a boundaryless church that is open to many new forms of being a worshipping community. I encourage you to support the 1001 effort. It is an important step for our church.

As we tell people here in North Carolina, there are three things you can do for us. May I suggest that these apply wherever you are.

  

* Graduating HS Students with Campus Ministries and College & University Chaplaincies in NC and across the US
* With Youth Pastors, Young Adult Ministers, Campus Ministers, Mission & Outreach and Campus Ministry Committees
* With Potential Contributors

 

 

 

* Conduct Special Presbyterian Higher Education Ministry Sunday
* Include campus ministry updates in your church newsletters
* Link to Campus Ministry links on your congregation’s website 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* By Including campus ministries in your church’s budget
* By having a special offering to support Presbyterian campus ministries one Sunday each year.
* Helping us identify potential contributors to help us support, sustain and initiate ministries across the state.

 

 

May you find hope in Christ's life expressed in new ways. May you find a place to connect, your story to tell, and a way to contribute that makes a difference that matters. The next generation of the church is here already. It is a good day for hope.

The Measure of a Church

Over the sixteen years that I have been consulting with churches, one of the most difficult topics to address is the question of the measure of a church's effectiveness.

Like any modern organization, numbers tend to dominate the discussion.

Two Churches, Same Stats

For example, the annual statistical report that congregations submit to Louisville provides an interesting but quite incomplete picture of a congregation. A casual look at this sample graph of three statistical measures would give you an idea that all is not healthy with this congregation. However, if all you knew was the red line's membership growth statistic, that from 1985 to 2010 the congregation grew from around 300 to over 1500 members, you'd rightly think that this is a growing, healthy church.

Then again, if we add in the worship attendance (blue line) and stewardship pledging (green line), we can see that the picture of a congregation's health is much more complicated that membership numbers.  Numbers don't tell everything, and cannot tell the whole story of a congregation. It cannot tell us, for example, that in this hypothetical church, a flood devastated the community in the late nineties, on the heals of a large employer moving their operation overseas. Membership remains steady, growing a bit, but worship attendance and giving declined.  Or, the same statistics for a different congregation could be representative of a series of short pastoral tenures in a church of strong programs for children and youth. So, worship attendance drops while participation in other programs of the church remain strong.

It is important to understand context, so that the numbers provide meaning and insight.  The issue still remains how should we measure theses sample churches. Same numbers, different context.

Faithfulness, the Holy Rationalization

In virtually, every church where I've done work, the issue of measuring their church's life and ministry is a problematic question. I don't see it primarily as an organizational question of statistics and trend lines.  How many times have I heard pastors and parishioners say, "God doesn't call us to be effective but faithful." Or something to this extent. I find this a statement of false piety and the deflecting away of responsibility for the outcomes of the church's life. It dodges the reality that God created us with intention for us to live lives of purpose in Jesus Christ. It suggests a passive kind of faith that lacks a clear sense of God's calling.

The faithfulness claim is really about the church not to being treated like any other organization, so that it avoids scrutiny. Of course, it isn't just like any other organization, and of course, faithfulness is a core facet of our calling to follow Christ.  The question is what should be our standard for being faithful. Do we each come up with our own personal standard because at the end of the day, our faith is entirely personal, between God and me?  Or is there something that we all share as the chruch that calls us to a common aspiration of performance?

How do I know when I am faithful? How do I know if I'm meeting God's standard.

Here are two Scripture references that I find helpful.

First, Ecclesiastes 3:1-15.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

 What gain have the workers from their toil? I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil. I know that whatever God does endures for ever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it; God has done this, so that all should stand in awe before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is; and God seeks out what has gone by.

God meets us in the reality of our lives. We go through the seasons of life. We live with a sense of history, of time and place, and gain the knowledge for how we can adapt to the changes that come in life. And we do this in a life context of God's engagement with us throughout our lives, from before our creation through our passage from death into eternal life.

There is an intentionality that God wishes upon his human creatures to eat, drink and take pleasure in all their toil. To take pleasure in our work is a judgment that we make about what we do. It is a measurement that gives us joy at accomplishing something of real worth. That judgment provides us perspective on the context of our lives lived within the intentionality of God's purpose. This is the world that God has created. To see that our calling is to simply be faithful in some generic sense, empties the meaning of the work that we are to do as his human beings. It is a statement that this world, a world that God has created with clear purpose, has only a secondary, or instrumental purpose. That there is no inherent value in what happens day to day, all that matters is what is to come later, we are in effect passing time in a faithful manner. I don't think this is the perspective that we gain from the Scriptures. And yet, it is one of the guiding ideologies of the modern church, to be people of faith, faithfully serving their Lord without concern for the outcome of their faithfulness. 

This spiritual question this raises is about how we are to actually live our lives, and be the church. Not the church in our imaginations, but the church on the ground, in the streets and in our places of work.

Let's look at Ephesians 4:4-10.

But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.(Emphasis mine.)

The life we live is not our life, but God's gift of kindness to us. It is a gift that deserves our gratitude to God, and our stewardship of that gift.

There is an intentionality to our lives that we miss if all that we are wrapped up in is trying meet some self-determined arbitrary set of rules for what it means to be faithful. In other words, to truly be faithful is to live our lives according to the grace that has been given to us in the concreteness of the talent, personality and social context where we live. When we do this, we each, in our own unique way, become agents and vessels for God's grace in the same concreteness of the world.

To focus on OUR faithfulness is to be distracted from the sufficiency of God's grace as we meet Christ in every hour of the day.

This is an important perspective for churches to grasp. For a church in a real world context is more than a social network of spiritually connected people who are organized as followers of Jesus Christ in a specific time and place. If instead of treating the church like another non-profit organization for the social and spiritual welfare of the community, we see the church as a place of sending people out to live the lives that God, by his kindness, created to be our way of life in that same community, then we begin to see the question of how we measure the church in a very different manner.

The Measure: Mission and Impact

The challenge of measurement is not finding things to measure, but rather measuring those things that provide a true measure of a church's performance. This is especially challenging for churches because we have typically not looked at the church from a performance perspective. Instead, we see the church as a cultural / spiritual community, and faithfulness has more to do with upholding traditions, than achieving some goal.

In a post-Christendom context, the rationale for this approach is less valid. As followers of Jesus Christ, we are living as aliens and exiles. We exist as a constructive social counter-force whose transforming presence creates change. It is this change that we look to as our measure. But to understand the nature of this change, we must begin at a different point.

The Circle of Impact diagram is a conversation guide that I use to help churches and other organizations understand the connection between the Three Dimensions of Leadership - Ideas, Relationships and Structure and the Connecting Ideas - Mission, Values, Vision and Impact. The purpose of the Connecting Ideas is to tie together the Three Dimensions.

For measuring purposes, Mission and Impact are the key ideas.

The church's mission focuses and directs the activities that take place through the structures of the church. For example, one of the churches with whom I've worked developed a new mission statement as a part of a planning process that I facilitated. Their mission is "... to discover and share just how much God loves us" and is applied through every aspect of their church's social and organizational structure. This means that worship, outreach, administration, child care, property management, music and other aspects of their congregation's life have as their mission "... to discover and share just how much God loves us."  As a result, as often as needed, the Session, the pastor, committee members and the congregation as a whole can ask, just how is this part of our church's life helping us "... to discover and share just how much God loves us?"

A compelling mission statement like this one is not just the obligatory God-speak for the cover of the Sunday bulletin. Instead, it serves as a guide for how the whole of the church functions. By providing direction, the church has a better idea for how to measure whether it is fulfilling the intention of the mission statement.

Still, even a well crafted mission statement, like our example here, can turn out to be not specific enough for measuring the church's effectiveness. This is why the idea of impact emerged in my thinking several years ago.

Let me be clear about what I mean by Impact. I see it as change that makes a difference that matters. It is change. Without change there is nothing to measure. With change that is aligned with our mission, we have a measure of the church that makes a difference.

What change do we see in people, and what change do we see in the church when we fulfill our mission "...to discover and share just how much God loves us." What is the transformation you see when a person is transformed by the grace of God. Think hard. Be specific. Write it down if you must. Talk about it. Wrestle with it. For if you can identify the change that your mission in Jesus Christ is intended to create, then you can develop the programs that produce this transformative effect.

Without a clear mission, it is difficult to identify what to measure. And even with a clear mission, but lacking in a clear understanding of the impact that should result, it is difficult to establish a measure that makes a difference.

What does this measure tell us? More than anything a measure of impact is providing us a picture of the active grace and love of God alive and effective through the church. The more we see God's grace in reconciliation and spiritual transformation, the greater our awareness of "just how much God loves us" becomes. The purpose of measurement is not primarily organizational, but rather spiritual to unite us with Jesus Christ as the church.

This emphasis on impact is a shift for virtually every church. What is the shift away from? It is a shift away from measurement by activity and numbers, and toward what changes because of your congregation's life in Jesus Christ. It is the difference between describing a vacation trip by looking at your credit card statement, or by telling stories of places and people who touched your life.

A mission statement that only describes what you do as a church is not going to help you identify what your congregation's impact should be. A statement that describes the change you want to create provides a platform for organizing the whole church to be centers of transformative change.

At Tomorrow's Table of Thanks

Families across America will gathering tomorrow to celebrate Thanksgiving. In church fellowship halls, in schools, fraternal order meeting halls and in missions everywhere, people without families will find a holiday meal to share with strangers.

Over the course of this year, I have been reflecting regularly upon a passage from Ephesians that has served to help me stay grounded and focused. I find that it helps to be actually gratiful to God for his gifts.  I share Ephesians 2:4-10 as a reminder from who all good gifts come.

But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

May you find many people tomorrow to whom you can say thanks.

Thank you very much.

What Unites Us Makes Us Whole

There is a term that has become very popular for describing the future. It is emergent. As you can see from this listing in Wikipedia, emergent is applied in many different ways and in many different contexts.

I use the term in a very specific way. For me, it is a scientific term that identifies how something has become a whole-ly different thing through the interaction of its parts. In this sense, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And once it has become this new whole entity, it cannot be broken down into its collection of parts again.

The problem is that in virtually every field of knowledge and society, including the church, we have lost our ability to understand what something whole is. Our analytical approach to knowledge and truth breaks down wholes into parts, and then decides which part is the essential truth of the whole.  This reductive way of thinking has led to the divisive nature of almost every segment of our society, including the church.

The Whole of the Church

For the church, the experience at Pentecost was the catalytic act that changed the church from a collection of followers of Jesus Christ, into a global movement of the incarnation of Christ's grace and love in space and time.  We are not the same as any other institution, organization, association or ethical, or religious system of belief.  It is a difference that matters.

Of course, if you look at our denomination, you'd would be hard pressed to see it. We are just as divided and disunited as everyone else.

For us the future church isn't emerging. It is already emergent as something wholly different. Yet, we live in the in-between-times. For most of us, this emergent reality has yet to become our own emergent experience. It may be because our faith has yet to become whole within us. It is part social, part intellectual, part cultural, political and tradition. When it becomes whole within us, we are changed into something new and whole.

Without using this language, this is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer is trying articulate in the essay, The Love of God and the Decay of the World, from his book, Ethics.

In my previous post, What Divides Us, I reflected on how Bonhoeffer distinguishes between the knowledge of God that determines all that we know and understand about ourselves and the world, and the knowledge of good and evil which places us in the position as judge of what is good and evil. In the latter, we become the ultimate authority of truth, and within our union with God, we are at best a penultimate one, if one at all.

This means that our answer to the division and disunion in the world and the church is not to take sides, but to be different. This is what Bonhoeffer shows us in Jesus' encounter with people.

Bonhoeffer's understanding of Jesus

Bonhoeffer begins the section, The World of Recovered Unity, by examinning Jesus' encounter with the Pharisee.

The Pharisee "... is the man to whom only the knowledge of good and evil has come to be of importance in his entire life; in other words, he is simply the man of disunion. ... The Pharisee is that extremely admirable man who subordinates his entire life to his knowledge of good and evil and is as severe a judge of himself as of his neighbor to the honor of God, whom he humbly thanks for this knowlege."

This is the description of most of us. We are earnest, committed, devoted followers of Christ. We group together with those who are like us, as we see those who are not like us to be strangers or worse outside of the faith.  These are the kinds of people Jesus encounters. Their tactical approach to encountering Jesus is to ask questions that are essentially binary traps, either-or questions that are intended to force Jesus to pick sides.

And so, even when they come face to face with Jesus, they cannot do otherwise than attempt to force Him, too, into conflicts and into decisions in order to see how he will conduct Himself in them. It is this that constitutes the temptation of Jesus. ... The crucial point about all these arguments is that Jesus does not allow HImself to be drawn in into a single one of these conflicts and decisions. With each of His answers He simply leaves the case of conflict beneath Him. ... Just as the Phariees cannot do otherwise than confront Jesus with situations of conflict, so, too, Jesus cannot do otherwise than refuse to accept these situations. Just as the Phraisees' questions and temptation arises from the disunion of the knowledge of good and evil, so, too, Jesus's answer arises from unity with God, with the origin, and from the overcoming of the disunion of man with God.

This perspective of Bonhoeffer's rises out of his experience with the German church's relationship with Hitler's National Socialist Party. Here the church finessed the knowledge of good and evil by saying, the Nazi's can promote the cause of the church in Germany. (To better understand this reality, read Bonhoeffer's essay After Ten Years, from Letters and Papers from Prison.)

The picture Bonhoeffer presents is of a person who is in union with God, and the person who is disunited with God and himself. Here's what Bonhoeffer sees.

Jesus often seems not to understand at all what men are asking Him. He seems to be answering quite a different question from that which has been put to Him. He seems to be missing the point of the question, not answering the question but addressing Himself directly to the questioner. He speaks with a complete freedom which is not bound by the law of logical alternatives. In this freedom Jesus leave all laws beneath Him; and to the Pharisees this freedom necessarily appears  as the negation of all order, all piety and all belief.  Jesus casts aside all the distinctions which the Pharisee so laboriously maintains; … Jesus replies evasively to all the clear questions which are intended to determine His position once and for all. All this means that, for the Pharisee, He is a nihilist, a man who knows and respects only his own law, an egoist and a blasphemer of God. On the other hand, no one can discern in Jesus the uncertainty and the timidity of one who acts arbitrarily, but His freedom gives to Him and to His followers in all their actions a peculiar quality of sureness, unquestionableness and radiance, the quality of what is overcome and of what overcomes.  The freedom of Jesus is not the arbitrary choice of one amongst innumerable possibilities; it consists on the contrary precisely in the complete simplicity of His action, which is never confronted by a plurality of possibilities, conflicts or alternatives, but always only by one thing. This one thing Jesus calls the will of God. He says that to do this will is His meat. This will of God is His life. He lives and acts not by the knowledge of good and evil but the will of God. There is only one will of God. In it the origin is recovered; in it there is established the freedom and the simplicity of all action.

 When I read this recently, my thoughts were drawn to the disunion within our Presbyerian body. I realized that each side of every debate is certain in their claims. Certain that they have discerned what is true and right for the church. But the divisive nature of these ecclesiastical positions shows us that we are all Pharisees, working the ethical boundaries of the knowledge of good and evil. 

In the very first paragraph of Bonhoeffer's essay, he states that the aim of Christian ethics is to invalidate the knowledge of good and evil. It seems to me that we are caught in cycle where we are constantly validating our disunion from God, rather than the church's distinctive place in society.

There are two questions that are thrust upon us.

How can we live well as followers of Jesus Christ if we do not make judgments of good and evil?

What does it mean to live by the will of God?

These questions are important for us, because without understanding them we don't grasp the freedom and radicalness of Bonhoeffer's perspective.

There is a spurious activity of man which is itself a judgment, and there is also, astonishingly enough, a judgment which is true activity of man, that is to say, a ‘judging’ which springs from the achievement of union with the origin, with Jesus Christ. There is a ‘knowing’ which arises from the knowledge of Jesus Christ as the Reconciler. … This judgment and this knowledge spring from unity, not from disunion. They therefore create not further disunion, but reconciliation.  Jesus Christ’s judgment consisted precisely in His having come not to condemn but to save … and likewise men who are reconciled with God and man in Christ will judge all things, as men who do not judge, and will know all things as men who do not know good and evil. Their judgment will consist in brotherly help, in lifting up the falling and in showing the way to the straying, in exhortation and in consolation, … and also, if the need arises, in a temporary suspension of fellowship, but in such a manner that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.  It will be judgment of reconciliation and not of disunion, a judgment by not judging, a judgment which is the act of reconciling. No longer knowing good and evil, but knowing Christ as origin and as reconciliation, man will know all. For in knowing Christ man knows and acknowledges God’s choice which has fallen upon this man himself; he no longer stands as the chooser between good and evil, that is to say, in disunion; he is the chosen one, who can no longer choose, but has already made his choice in his being chosen in the freedom and unity of the deed and will of God.

The implication is that it is not within our power to bring unity to the church or society because the impetus at the heart of the knowledge of good and evil is to divide. Only God can bring unity, and only when we turn from being the ultimate authority, to see all things as God sees them. This is not some skill that we develop. It is the gift of grace that comes when we come to the realization that the way we have been living as people and the church isn't working.  This is what it means for that which unites us makes us whole. We become whole persons when we emerge from our attachment to a world organized around the principle of the knowledge of good and evil.

The Body As A Whole

The body imagery in the Scripture points to this truth. Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 12:22-26 points this direction.

On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it. 

Here is a picture of this reconciled union between God and the church, and of the people who are members of its communion.  So there may be no dissension. No division. No disunity. 

It needs to be said that this reality is first a spiritual one that then is reflected in the social, economic, political and organizational world. It is an inner connection that frees us from being the ultimate authority, to be a person who brings reconciliation. This is the will of God.

When it is happening, there is a whole-ness that emerges to show us what it means to be the Body of Christ as the church. 

So What Are We To Do?

First, we must recognize our sin of division, and our responsibility for creating the divisions within the church that are representative of our disunity with God. 

Second, we probably should make a list of all those people in whom we sit in judgment. Then, begin to pray that God would bring reconciliation between us. This is true at all levels, personal, congregation and denominational.

Third, be less quick to judge, and quicker to pray for wisdom in understanding what God sees in any given instance. Be patient, observant and open. Look at how Jesus handles conflicts. He didn't so much ignore their questions, but transform them into ones that would reflect upon their disunity with God.

Reconciliation is not a path towards uniformity or consensus, or validation of our own correctness, but peace and union with God in Jesus Christ. This is the emergent reality that distinguishes the church from other institutions. It is the unity that makes us whole.