Cousins

When I was a child, I was frequently told that the Presbyterian Church was like a family of cousins. I could related to that. I came from a family with lots of cousins.

(Pictured above, left to right, my Aunt Helen, my mother, Frances and my aunt Jane. The boys, left to right, Lee, Allen, me, Chuck and Turner.)

In my mother’s family there were four sisters, who had fifteen children. We'd gather at my grandparents big house in Asheville for Thanksgiving, Christmas or Easter. The adults ate in the dining room at the big table. The children ate on card tables spread out over the main hallway and living room. After lunch, we’d go out to the front yard and play football.

Seven of the cousins were girls, the rest boys (obviously) and being the only son in my family, those seven boys were the brothers I didn’t have.

My Presbyterian story

For 58 years, I've been a part of the Presbyterian family, the past thirty as an ordained Teaching Elder. I've spent the last sixteen years as a leadership and planning consultant, serving churches and an array of public, private and non-profit organizations. I've also been engaged in the world of Presbyterian campus ministries and chaplaincies at virtually every level since 1988. Today, I'm serving as the Interim Executive Director of the North Carolina Presbyterian Higher Education Ministries. And for the past two years, I've been involved in the world of congregational and presbytery stewardship through my program, The Stewardship of Gratitude.

I began blogging 2004, principally at Leading Questions, where I've explored the changing nature of social and organizational leadership. In a post last spring that marked a turning point in my thinking, I wrote:

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?

It is from this perspective that I return to blogging about things Presbyterian, having left my old blog in the spring of 2008, The Presbyterian Polis, because I felt that I had nothing substantial to contribute. I return for many reasons. The chief being my optimism about the future of our church. Sadly, I'm a member of a small club. I'd like to change that.

An Outliers Viewpoint

I am an outlier, not an antagonist. My perspective is not ideologically liberal nor conservative, neither Evangelical nor Progressive. I don't find those social / political positions adequately representing what I see or who I am. For some reason, it is sufficient for me to be a Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ, who is a Presbyterian. More about that in a future post.

My perspective has been impacted by spending a vast amount of my life during the past decade and a half working outside of the traditional boundaries of the church. I've frequently described my professional ministerial life as having walked out to the line where the church and the rest of the world meet, and stepped over. I live on the frontier of change as I see how people, organizations and churches are trying to understand and deal with the epic transition that we are in globally. I truly mean epic. It isn't hyperbole. To understand read my compilation of Leading Questions posts, Leadership for the 21st century.

I've spent the majority of my ordained life sitting in the pew on Sunday morning. It has been a rich experience to live more as a parishioner and business person, than the pastor of a congregation. I see things differently than I did twenty years ago. And on those few instances where I've taken on an interim parish position, to stand in the pulpit and lead in worship has also impacted what I've learned about being a pastor, a parishioner, a Presbyterian and a member of the human race in the 21st. century. The women and men who don a clergy's vestments each week to lead us in worship, care for us pastorally, and administer their church's organization have my deepest respect, admiration and prayers. There may be no more difficult job than being the pastor of a congregation.

Through this blog, I'm sharing my thoughts and impressions alone. They are my observations and reflections upon my experience with people and organizations both inside and outside the church. I'm grateful for the encounters and partnerships that I have had with a very broad spectrum of people who have helped me to better understand the time that we are in.

The Presbyterian moment

For two hundred years, the Presbyterian church has been trying to join the modern world. That's the only way I can explain it. I view both Evangelicalism and Progressivism as modernist Presbyterian expressions. The war that has been tearing down the edifice of the modern Presbyterian church for the past two hundred years is a product of modernist approaches to how we think, organize, seek meaning and understanding in a rapidly changing society.

I say this because the intellectual character of these movements are modernist at their core. Modernist approaches are reductive by design, seeking some kernel of truth which becomes the central truth upon which everything else is judged. It is the scientific method applied to the social sciences. It is how we have been taught to determine what is true, from the parts, divided out, separate into categories, and reduced to a single, absolutely certain idea. This is not a theological critique, but rather a methodological one.

It is a way of thinking that is inherently divisive. It has produced what it was intended to produce, a determination about what is true and what is not, and who is in and who is out.

This is what has been happening to the Presbyterian church (small c) for two centuries. Today, I hear Conservatives say they want purity and Liberals want social justice. Pick your side, and live within your own individual increasingly marginalized social/political ideology. This is a modernist, reductive faith.

Conservatism and Liberalism, Evangelicalism and Progressivism are not the only reductions of the Reformed faith. They are just the most dominant, volatile and divisive.

Why Things Aren't Working

The modernist way is anti-relational and pro-institutional. Its culture has adhered to our historic Presbyterian way, destroying the connectionalism that has been the hallmark of our church. Modernism has created an industrial-designed religion, manufactured for consumption in small doses on a weekly basis. With modernism, institutions are organizational structures of power and order. Even the best of institutions, treat people as inconvenient disruptions to their systems of efficient operation. I say this having seen it first hand in every kind of organizational institution that you can imagine.

People are messy, inefficient, and costly assets to an institution. Institutions like compliance, and the more narrow and controllable its purpose, the easier it is to operate. As a result, the inherent trend of all modern institutions is not to become more diverse, more human, more relational, more values oriented, more communal and connectional, but to downsize to preserve power, order and the acquired assets of the organization. Is it any wonder that Presbyterian denominational splits end up being ugly fights about property?

The modern industrial model of business is also our modern industrial model of religion. The same disintegration of our nation's industrial base in reflected in the decline of mainstream churches. The system is disintegrating because we no longer live in the modern world. To say we live in a post-modern world actually obscures what I mean, because the term carries so many nuances. My own opinion is that the post-modernist movement is not something separate from modernism, but a reactionary movement within it. As a result, its perspective is also reductive and limited. One example are churches that claim to be evangelical spiritually and progressive socially. While possibly an attempt to bridge the modernist divide, it fails because this ideological collaboration is built upon a modernist foundation. What I see is not really represented by the various ideological post-modernist trends. I see something different on a much larger scale taking place.

We can certainly debate these observations, though I'd rather just have a conversation about them. However, I'm not making an ideological judgment with these comments. Ideology is simply modernism in another form. If anything, I'm more anti-modern than post-modern because of its tendency to destroy that which it embraces. Again, I encourage you to read my Leading Questions collection, Leadership for the 21st century to better understand the epic shift that I see taking place.

Connectionalism is Relational

I take no joy in the disintegration of the institution of the Presbyterian church. It isn't that I'm anti-institutional. Rather, I want the institution to have its proper place as a tool for churches as communities of faith to discover their mission with one another.

Our Family of Presbyterian Cousins
(My family, mother's side, Christmas 1961.)

Presbyterian connectionalism is foremost about our relationships to one another, and secondarily about institutional structures of governance. We are a family of cousins, as I see it. In any family, there is a wide diversity of types, but we never stop believing we are family.

Families are built around relationships of sharing, self-giving, reproducing and celebrating the past and the future as one thing. Institutions are about the management of programs, assets, money and property. Families are about values and generational history, and passing the values and culture of the family onto the next generation.

On Sundays, when we gather for worship, it is a family reunion. We gather in the name of Jesus Christ. We share family stories of the faith going back many millennia. And we come to the table of thanks to celebrate the one who called us to join his family. Yes, we are all cousins in the same family, and we are all adopted sons and daughters of God, chosen to join a family where the love of God unites us together. It is the love and grace of Jesus Christ that unites us. Not our polity, not our property, not our organizational structures, not our traditions, only God's connection to us through Jesus Christ.

At The Table of Thanks

This is the name of my new Presbyterian blog because, ultimately, this is where I want to meet each of you. To grow the connectionalism of our Presbyterian family through our gratitude to God for the many gifts that he has given us. Meals are where relationships are formed. I've had a principle throughout my life that whomever I've had a meal with is a friend for life. While I can't have a meal with everyone, we can at least meet here, over coffee and an illuminated screen to share the life and mission that we have as Presbyterians.

There is much that I want to explore through this blog. Here are some posts you can look forward to seeing soon.

I've begun working on a post about the importance of social objects in a community, and how the sacraments serve this purpose in the church.

I'm working on a post based on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's opening essay in his volume, Ethics, entitled, The Love of God and the Decay of the World. If you can, read it, as I believe you'll see why I say some of the things that I do.

I'll also be posting on my observations about the shifts taking place in churches, and what I look for in a healthy congregation. You can find some of this perspective in my conversation guide, 21st Century Congregational Distinctives as well as in what I've written about The Stewardship of Gratitude.

Finally, I'll regularly be referring to my Circle of Impact conversational guides that I've created to help people talk through the issues that confront them personally and organizationally.

The purpose of all this is to help us create an environment where we can talk about the future and discover why as Presbyterians we are best positioned to be the church of the 21st century, that is if we remember who we are.

Okay, cousin? Welcome to the table of thanks.

The Banner Photo

The banner picture above was taken at a meeting of the Presbytery of Asheville, PCUS, April 1916, outside First Presbyterian Church of Asheville. The building directly behind the gathering is the old city library, with the church to the left. Today there is a large education building where the library once stood.

In the center of the picture is my grandfather, Allen Morrison, at the time a 30 year old deacon at First Presbyterian Asheville, and a year away from volunteering to serve in World War I. And until he passed away at the age of 94, this was his standard attire everyday.

At the far right at the edge of the picture is Dr. Robert Campbell, pastor of First Presbyterian Asheville, who served there for 48 years. The character of his ministry that began in Asheville well over a century ago remains today. His son, Bob, and his family lived for a time down the street from my family in Winston-Salem. Dr. Campbell's son, Walter, and I were childhood friends. Another picture of our connectionalism as Presbyterian cousins.