At The Table of Thanks

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.

Cousins

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

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

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

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

My Presbyterian story

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

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

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

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

An Outliers Viewpoint

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

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

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

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

The Presbyterian moment

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

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

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

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

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

Why Things Aren't Working

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

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

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

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

Connectionalism is Relational

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

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

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

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

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

At The Table of Thanks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, cousin? Welcome to the table of thanks.

The Banner Photo

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

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

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