At The Table of Thanks

Trust

What I'm Hearing

Over the past several months, I've been traveling quite a bit. When I am with people, I ask a lot of questions. I'm just a curious soul who wants to understand what is going on in the world that we encounter every day. The tenor and substance of my conversations about the PCUSA are changing.

There are a range of topics that I hear. One is a deep concern about the state of presbyteries and how they will function in the future. Another is the impact that the Fellowship of Presbyterians / ECO: Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians will have on the church. A third conversation is a mixture of topics related to GA overtures this summer addressing the definition of marriage and ordination standards, the response by churches and presbyteries to GA votes, and a call for a moratorium on these issues while the new Form of Government has time to be fully implemented in the presbyteries.

I'm no seer with a crystal ball. I don't know what will become. It certainly appears from the conversations that I am having that we have a perfect storm of institutional change awaiting us on the horizon.

Trust

At the spring meeting of my presbytery, I heard appeals from the floor that as Presbyterians we need trust one another. I agree, wholeheartedly. Trust, however, is an outcome, a result, not a strategy.

Trust is the outcome of our attitudes and behaviors toward people and institutions. It is a product of the active expression of dignity, respect, and honor. When it is missing, some barrier stands in the way of the relationship exhibiting these qualities.

It reminds me of what Machiavelli wrote about ingratitude, that it "arises either from avarice or from suspicion." He wrote these words as advice to rulers and their treatment of the people they serve. If the people feel avarice, it is for the power and privilege that the ruler has. If suspicion, it because the ruler has not acted to build trust and confidence in his or her leadership. In our context, I'd say the issues are about who holds power in the church and the fear of those who believe differently that we do.

When ingratitude is present, trust is missing. When trust is present, then expressions of gratitude are evident. This is why my Five Actions of Gratitude are not just a set of nice sentiments, but rather a strategic approach to relationships in the church, and any institution. 

Here's how the Five Actions of Gratitude build trust.

Saying Thanks establishes a relationship of appreciation and gratitude with a person. To identify a reason to say thanks is to begin to create conditions where trust can be built.

Giving Back completes the circle of giving. I take my cue here from Thomas Merton in the beginning paragraphs of his book, No Man Is An Island.

"A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy."

"There is a false and momentary happiness in self-satisfaction, but it always leads to sorrow because it narrows and deadens our spirit.  True happiness is found in unselfish love, a love which increases in proportion as it is shared.  There is no end to the sharing of love, and, therefore, the potential happiness of such love is without limit.  Infinite sharing is the law of God's inner life.  He has made the sharing of ourselves the law of our own being, so that it is in loving others that we best love ourselves.  In disinterested activity we best fulfill our own capacities to act and to be."

For Merton, it is not enough that we are givers of love. Our love is to have a result, a response, an effect that is tangible. To love is more than about our obligation to love. It is about what is to be the impact of our love.

"Yet there can never be happiness in compulsion.  It is not enough for love to be shared: it must be shared freely.  That is to say it must be given, not merely taken.  Unselfish love that is poured out upon a selfish object does not bring perfect happiness: not because love requires a return or a reward for loving, but because it rests in the happiness of the beloved.  And if the one loved receives love selfishly, the lover is not satisfied.  He sees that his love has failed to make the beloved happy.  It has not awakened his capacity for unselfish love."

"Hence the paradox that unselfish love cannot rest perfectly except in a love that is perfectly reciprocated: because it knows that the only true peace is found in selfless love.  Selfless love consents to be loved selflessly for the sake of the beloved.  In so doing, it perfects itself."

"The gift of love is the gift of the power and the capacity to love, and, therefore, to give love with full effect is also to receive it.  So, love can only be kept by being given away, and it can only be given perfectly when it is also received."

I'd like us to consider the importance of these words not solely in the context of our personal relationships, but also in our professional relationships within the church. If this type of love was characteristic of our relationships in our presbyteries, we would not be asking the questions about why we cannot trust one another.

I am not naive as if I'm simply asking for us all just to get along. Rather, I am suggesting that our attitudes and behaviors are conscious choices we make based on emotional states like avarice and fear. 

Do we believe that perfect love casts out fear and produces magnanimity rather than the need for control?  It isn't a rhetorical question.

Making Welcome opens ourselves up to those whon we may feel are our adversaries. The practice of hospitality is the domestication of reconciliation. Trust builds relationships of reconciliation.

It was in a similarly divisive church context that the Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthian Christians,

"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 honorable we clothe with greater honor, 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 honor 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 honored, all rejoice together with it."

How ironic that Paul leaves it to us to decide who is the weaker, less honorable, less respectable member. We make that judgment. Practicing open hospitality is a strategy that creates an environment of trust.

Honoring Others treat people with dignity, respect and care. Of the Five Actions, it is this action I've learned that the other four depend. It is the most difficult because it strikes at the heart of our own weaknesses of our fear, insecurity, and self-righteousness. We can practice the first three actions of gratitude in a sort of detached, mechanistic way. But to place the honoring of others ahead of our own welfare forces our egos  to either give way to humility, or abandon gratitude as impractical and unreasonable. Ultimately, trust results from how we treat one another.

Creating Goodness provides the conditions where trust can grow. Note in these words from Paul to the Ephesian church that God's gifts to us are summarized as kindness and that the goodness we create is the way of life that he has prepared for us to live.

"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)

To live the good life that God has prepared is to create an environment where trust is realized. Trust isn't some strategy for working out our differences. It is a measure of how well we are living out God's call.

Moving into the Next Era of Trust

I don't know what will happen this summer at General Assembly. I don't know how churches or presbyteries are going work together in the future. I don't know what the next two years much less the next 50 years will bring to our church.

Here's what I do know. The future of the church is not determined yet. I'm certain that it will not look like the church of our past. Virtually everyone I know admits that the present structure is not sustainable.  The larger question is how do we change while preserving the best of our Presbyterian tradition. How do we prepare for the next generation Presbyterian church?

Given time and opportunity, maybe the new Form of Government will spark an entrepreneurial grassroots rebirth of the church. If it does, then trust will grow.  New models of mission will develop. New worshipping communities will emerge. New ways of designing presbyteries will grow.  We will thne see the present as a moment in time rather than the end of time.

Trust is a key outcome and measure of our future. If trust is present, the church will grow. If not, it will continue to lose membership and churches.  It is a choice that we individually make, that is expressed through our churches and councils of the church.

How do I make this choice?  I choose to act, as one colleague has graciously shared with me, as a bridge. A bridge between people. A bridge between the past and the future. A bridge between the church as it has been and what it will look like in the future. A bridge between those who represent different sides of issues. A bridge for those who are afraid, angry and disaffected.

My offer is to any person, church or presbytery who is willing, to let me be in conversation with you about the future of the church.  Let us together ask these questions.

What should the church to look like in the future?

What new forms of the church do we need to develop?

How can those forms be structured to create trust?

How can we live into “the good works that God prepared to be our way of life?”

Let's talk, and may God build trust and kindness as the hallmarks of our future life together as Presbyterians

The Next Sustainable Church

In the world that I live in, sustainability is a critical issue of survival.  

In the PCUSA, I don't think we are quite there yet.

At the Next Church conference in Dallas this week, I heard one of the presenters admit that we were not yet talking about the next church, but about talking about talking about the next church.

Oh, I was pleased with what I heard from presenters, by many of the conversations that I had with people, and the tone of congeniality that was present. I came away grateful for the ministry and leadership that many of the people that I met are providing. I'm happy to be serving along side of them.

Even in the new world of nFog, even as the Mid-Council Task Force recommends sending Synods to the oblivion of the history books, and even as the Fellowship of Presbyterians'  initiates a two step process for leaving the PCUSA to join their new denomination, the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians, we are not yet addressing the real future of the church at the fundamental level of structure.

I find that we are stuck in our adherence to old denominational forms. Trimming staff and eliminating governing bodies is not a strategy of sustainability.  Let Clay Shirky describe why.

"In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter looked at several societies that gradually arrived at a level of remarkable sophistication then suddenly collapsed: the Romans, the Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon. Every one of those groups had rich traditions, complex social structures, advanced technology, but despite their sophistication, they collapsed, impoverishing and scattering their citizens and leaving little but future archeological sites as evidence of previous greatness. Tainter asked himself whether there was some explanation common to these sudden dissolutions.

The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it. Subject to violent compression, Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, through a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex—agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on.

Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.

Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.

The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.

When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification."

This is a telling description of Presbyterianism, and more broadly, Protestantism today. We are a complex network of sophisticated structures of incredible diversity and resiliency. We accommodate every kind of expression of the Christian faith. As a result, it is hard for people apart from our historic faith tradition to know how they fit in and who we actually are.

As Shirky notes, the impetus for the survival, and ultimately,the sustainability of complex societies is to simplify. For in simplicity, comes greater adaptibility, which is essential for sustainability in the midst of rapid, accelerating change.

Yet, our "structure" which is both organizational and social resists simplification at all costs, even at the cost of collapse.

I work a lot with Presbyteries. I serve on the Administrative Board of my presbytery, and chair a couple committees over the years. I regularly work with congregations in leadership, stewardship and mission identification projects. I've had enough engagement with the General Assembly and Synod level work to see the extent that complexity is all through the structure of the PCUSA.

One example that I've experienced a few times already is the change in position descriptions of elders and ministers. I know it had a logical rationale. Yet, it did not simplify but created more complexity. All you need to hear is an elder correcting herself when she slips and uses the term "minister of word and sacrament" instead of "teaching elder" in conversation. 

My hope coming out of the Next Church conference is found in Shirky's concluding paragraph.

"When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future."

I agree.

How, then, do we begin to work simply in the church?

First, we focus on our relationships with one another.

There are presbyteries that are moving toward meetings being more focus on fellowship and communal nurture than business. This is an important start.

Second, we clarify the Connecting Ideas of Purpose, Values, Vision and Impact.

Purpose is the telos of our mission.It is a statement not only of identity but of the outcome or impact of our purpose.

Values are the essential beliefs that unite us together as a community. And our values inform what our purpose is.

Vision is a living picture of our impact. It is a vivid visualization of who we are as a people in community living through the social and organizational structures of the church.

Impact is the change we create. It is the difference that matters and gives our life together its meaning and guidance.

For these ideas to fulfill their inherent potential requires openness and a willfulness to change. And the place we must ultimately change is at the level of church structure.

Third, we remove barriers to leadership. We simplify what it means to be a leader by identifying how every person can function as one. The implication for this step is huge, as we not only must simplify the call process, but also how congregations form and reach sustainability.

Defining Leadership

I've concluded after a quarter century of daily engagement with leadership that it is a far too complex, conceptually amorphous idea.  It needs to be simplified.  Therefore, here is my simple definition of leadership.

Leaders take initiative to create impact.

This means that every person can be a leader. All it takes is the will to act. When that willfulness is guided and inspired by participation in a shared community of purpose, the requirement of a complex structure is removed.

This is another way of speaking of being disciples of Jesus Christ. We each discover our call to create impact. As a result, leadership is not a special designation, but a function of how a person lives out their faith.

What kind of ecclesial structure is needed when the church is a community of leaders? A very simple, adaptive and constantly changing one.

The Next Sustainable Church

A year ago 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?

My mind has not changed. The future will not be like the past.I don't think it is even going to be like the last decade. That is how fast change is happening.

As Presbyterian Christians, we need to step back and recognize how the complexity of our Presbyterian system has contributed to our decline as a denomination. By understanding this one situation, we gain a beginning awareness of how a more simple, adaptible, sustainable church can be formed.

Will we collapse in the near future? No one really knows.

However, I do know that if we focus on relationship building, on clarifying our missional ideology, and the equipping of the priesthood of believers for leading as the expression of their call from God, then we move into the future with energy and commitment to having the kind of impact that feeds the sustainability of the next church.

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.