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?

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