At The Table of Thanks

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.

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

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.

Change

Is the word a noun or a verb?

Which is it for the church?

Is change what happens to congregations?

Or, is change what we do as congregations?

It is an important question.

The reality that most churches face is that if they do not change they will be changed. The question therefore is what kind of change do we want.

The Meaning of Change

Sometime during my life time, an idea became embedded in the cultural DNA of the church which suggested that the church is a bulwark against societal change. We began to think that this is the one institution that can remain the same and also remain vital. We sold our members on this notion that change is bad, and stasis is good.

The truth is actually the opposite.

Changing is the only way to stay alive. Not changing is how you become a rock. When Jesus told Peter, "upon this rock, I'll build my church," I don't think he was referring to become an actual rock. Rather, to be resilient in the face of change.

There is a lot that can be discussed about change. And over time, I will address it here. There is one thing I want to say about it now to establish a centerpoint for all other discussions about change.

The  Circle of Impact

There are three broad dimensions that we address in our life and work. I call these the Three Dimensions of Leadership. I define leadership as "personal initiative to create impact." Each person, therefore, has the capacity and opportunity, every day, to lead. Each person living in the midst of the everyday dimensions of ideas, relationships and the social and organizational structures, where we live and work, including our churches, can lead by taking initiative to make a difference that matters.

Within the Circle of Impact are four ideas that I call The Connecting Ideas. They are Mission or Purpose, Values, Vision and Impact. These ideas are the glue that holds the three dimensions together. As a result, there is an alignment that happens when the Connecting Ideas matter.

When your mission is clear, then how you organize the church is given direction. When your mission is not that important, then the functioning of the organizational structure takes an importance that primarily resistant to change. This is the situation that I see in many churches that are struggling with change. Structure isn't determined by their mission, but by their tradition of activity. The old line, "We've never done it that way." is a classic statement of a church that is unclear about the Connecting Ideas. It is a church that can't tell you what its mission is, what its values are, what its vision for the future is or what its Impact is. It is essentially a museum vaguely reflecting a long passed time when the Connecting Ideas were alive and directive.

Dealing with Change

If you want to address change, you must begin to do the following.

First Step: Conversation about what matters

Start talking about the Connecting Ideas.

What is your mission? What's the impact of your mission? What difference, really, what difference does it make?

The most effective missions are externally focused. If your mission is just about the people who are already there, then the people who are not will see that there is no place for them in your congregation.

Be honest with yourselves.  Because if you are not, change will be what happens to you, instead of what you do to create the future that is in your hearts and minds by the Spirit of God.

Second Step: Care for Each Other

If on a small scale, caring for each other in your congregation becomes a part of your mission, then you must create a structure that enables it to happen. You can't just desire it. You must create structure to make it work. Structure serves Mission, and Mission serves People.

The best way to start? Small groups that practice four things. Pray for each other, study together, fellowship over meals, and serve others together.

Third Step: Encourage Each Person to Take Initiative to Make a Difference

There are a lot of positive changes that are taking place in churches. None of them though happen without significant growth in participation and contribution by members.

So, if you are listening, you'll understand that changing (verb) the church begins with changing oneself (verb) to create the change (noun) that you desire rather than the kind that you don't.

Change is personal and communal. We go through it together. It either makes us stronger and the church survives, or we cave into its stresses and fear, and the church declines.

Change is a context of faith. It is a time where we learn the content and character of the faith that we believe. We learn whether it is just an idea, or something more. The more is the difference that matters. It is what I pray you find together as a congregations.