At The Table of Thanks

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.

At Tomorrow's Table of Thanks

Families across America will gathering tomorrow to celebrate Thanksgiving. In church fellowship halls, in schools, fraternal order meeting halls and in missions everywhere, people without families will find a holiday meal to share with strangers.

Over the course of this year, I have been reflecting regularly upon a passage from Ephesians that has served to help me stay grounded and focused. I find that it helps to be actually gratiful to God for his gifts.  I share Ephesians 2:4-10 as a reminder from who all good gifts come.

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.

May you find many people tomorrow to whom you can say thanks.

Thank you very much.

What Unites Us Makes Us Whole

There is a term that has become very popular for describing the future. It is emergent. As you can see from this listing in Wikipedia, emergent is applied in many different ways and in many different contexts.

I use the term in a very specific way. For me, it is a scientific term that identifies how something has become a whole-ly different thing through the interaction of its parts. In this sense, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And once it has become this new whole entity, it cannot be broken down into its collection of parts again.

The problem is that in virtually every field of knowledge and society, including the church, we have lost our ability to understand what something whole is. Our analytical approach to knowledge and truth breaks down wholes into parts, and then decides which part is the essential truth of the whole.  This reductive way of thinking has led to the divisive nature of almost every segment of our society, including the church.

The Whole of the Church

For the church, the experience at Pentecost was the catalytic act that changed the church from a collection of followers of Jesus Christ, into a global movement of the incarnation of Christ's grace and love in space and time.  We are not the same as any other institution, organization, association or ethical, or religious system of belief.  It is a difference that matters.

Of course, if you look at our denomination, you'd would be hard pressed to see it. We are just as divided and disunited as everyone else.

For us the future church isn't emerging. It is already emergent as something wholly different. Yet, we live in the in-between-times. For most of us, this emergent reality has yet to become our own emergent experience. It may be because our faith has yet to become whole within us. It is part social, part intellectual, part cultural, political and tradition. When it becomes whole within us, we are changed into something new and whole.

Without using this language, this is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer is trying articulate in the essay, The Love of God and the Decay of the World, from his book, Ethics.

In my previous post, What Divides Us, I reflected on how Bonhoeffer distinguishes between the knowledge of God that determines all that we know and understand about ourselves and the world, and the knowledge of good and evil which places us in the position as judge of what is good and evil. In the latter, we become the ultimate authority of truth, and within our union with God, we are at best a penultimate one, if one at all.

This means that our answer to the division and disunion in the world and the church is not to take sides, but to be different. This is what Bonhoeffer shows us in Jesus' encounter with people.

Bonhoeffer's understanding of Jesus

Bonhoeffer begins the section, The World of Recovered Unity, by examinning Jesus' encounter with the Pharisee.

The Pharisee "... is the man to whom only the knowledge of good and evil has come to be of importance in his entire life; in other words, he is simply the man of disunion. ... The Pharisee is that extremely admirable man who subordinates his entire life to his knowledge of good and evil and is as severe a judge of himself as of his neighbor to the honor of God, whom he humbly thanks for this knowlege."

This is the description of most of us. We are earnest, committed, devoted followers of Christ. We group together with those who are like us, as we see those who are not like us to be strangers or worse outside of the faith.  These are the kinds of people Jesus encounters. Their tactical approach to encountering Jesus is to ask questions that are essentially binary traps, either-or questions that are intended to force Jesus to pick sides.

And so, even when they come face to face with Jesus, they cannot do otherwise than attempt to force Him, too, into conflicts and into decisions in order to see how he will conduct Himself in them. It is this that constitutes the temptation of Jesus. ... The crucial point about all these arguments is that Jesus does not allow HImself to be drawn in into a single one of these conflicts and decisions. With each of His answers He simply leaves the case of conflict beneath Him. ... Just as the Phariees cannot do otherwise than confront Jesus with situations of conflict, so, too, Jesus cannot do otherwise than refuse to accept these situations. Just as the Phraisees' questions and temptation arises from the disunion of the knowledge of good and evil, so, too, Jesus's answer arises from unity with God, with the origin, and from the overcoming of the disunion of man with God.

This perspective of Bonhoeffer's rises out of his experience with the German church's relationship with Hitler's National Socialist Party. Here the church finessed the knowledge of good and evil by saying, the Nazi's can promote the cause of the church in Germany. (To better understand this reality, read Bonhoeffer's essay After Ten Years, from Letters and Papers from Prison.)

The picture Bonhoeffer presents is of a person who is in union with God, and the person who is disunited with God and himself. Here's what Bonhoeffer sees.

Jesus often seems not to understand at all what men are asking Him. He seems to be answering quite a different question from that which has been put to Him. He seems to be missing the point of the question, not answering the question but addressing Himself directly to the questioner. He speaks with a complete freedom which is not bound by the law of logical alternatives. In this freedom Jesus leave all laws beneath Him; and to the Pharisees this freedom necessarily appears  as the negation of all order, all piety and all belief.  Jesus casts aside all the distinctions which the Pharisee so laboriously maintains; … Jesus replies evasively to all the clear questions which are intended to determine His position once and for all. All this means that, for the Pharisee, He is a nihilist, a man who knows and respects only his own law, an egoist and a blasphemer of God. On the other hand, no one can discern in Jesus the uncertainty and the timidity of one who acts arbitrarily, but His freedom gives to Him and to His followers in all their actions a peculiar quality of sureness, unquestionableness and radiance, the quality of what is overcome and of what overcomes.  The freedom of Jesus is not the arbitrary choice of one amongst innumerable possibilities; it consists on the contrary precisely in the complete simplicity of His action, which is never confronted by a plurality of possibilities, conflicts or alternatives, but always only by one thing. This one thing Jesus calls the will of God. He says that to do this will is His meat. This will of God is His life. He lives and acts not by the knowledge of good and evil but the will of God. There is only one will of God. In it the origin is recovered; in it there is established the freedom and the simplicity of all action.

 When I read this recently, my thoughts were drawn to the disunion within our Presbyerian body. I realized that each side of every debate is certain in their claims. Certain that they have discerned what is true and right for the church. But the divisive nature of these ecclesiastical positions shows us that we are all Pharisees, working the ethical boundaries of the knowledge of good and evil. 

In the very first paragraph of Bonhoeffer's essay, he states that the aim of Christian ethics is to invalidate the knowledge of good and evil. It seems to me that we are caught in cycle where we are constantly validating our disunion from God, rather than the church's distinctive place in society.

There are two questions that are thrust upon us.

How can we live well as followers of Jesus Christ if we do not make judgments of good and evil?

What does it mean to live by the will of God?

These questions are important for us, because without understanding them we don't grasp the freedom and radicalness of Bonhoeffer's perspective.

There is a spurious activity of man which is itself a judgment, and there is also, astonishingly enough, a judgment which is true activity of man, that is to say, a ‘judging’ which springs from the achievement of union with the origin, with Jesus Christ. There is a ‘knowing’ which arises from the knowledge of Jesus Christ as the Reconciler. … This judgment and this knowledge spring from unity, not from disunion. They therefore create not further disunion, but reconciliation.  Jesus Christ’s judgment consisted precisely in His having come not to condemn but to save … and likewise men who are reconciled with God and man in Christ will judge all things, as men who do not judge, and will know all things as men who do not know good and evil. Their judgment will consist in brotherly help, in lifting up the falling and in showing the way to the straying, in exhortation and in consolation, … and also, if the need arises, in a temporary suspension of fellowship, but in such a manner that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.  It will be judgment of reconciliation and not of disunion, a judgment by not judging, a judgment which is the act of reconciling. No longer knowing good and evil, but knowing Christ as origin and as reconciliation, man will know all. For in knowing Christ man knows and acknowledges God’s choice which has fallen upon this man himself; he no longer stands as the chooser between good and evil, that is to say, in disunion; he is the chosen one, who can no longer choose, but has already made his choice in his being chosen in the freedom and unity of the deed and will of God.

The implication is that it is not within our power to bring unity to the church or society because the impetus at the heart of the knowledge of good and evil is to divide. Only God can bring unity, and only when we turn from being the ultimate authority, to see all things as God sees them. This is not some skill that we develop. It is the gift of grace that comes when we come to the realization that the way we have been living as people and the church isn't working.  This is what it means for that which unites us makes us whole. We become whole persons when we emerge from our attachment to a world organized around the principle of the knowledge of good and evil.

The Body As A Whole

The body imagery in the Scripture points to this truth. Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 12:22-26 points this direction.

On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it. 

Here is a picture of this reconciled union between God and the church, and of the people who are members of its communion.  So there may be no dissension. No division. No disunity. 

It needs to be said that this reality is first a spiritual one that then is reflected in the social, economic, political and organizational world. It is an inner connection that frees us from being the ultimate authority, to be a person who brings reconciliation. This is the will of God.

When it is happening, there is a whole-ness that emerges to show us what it means to be the Body of Christ as the church. 

So What Are We To Do?

First, we must recognize our sin of division, and our responsibility for creating the divisions within the church that are representative of our disunity with God. 

Second, we probably should make a list of all those people in whom we sit in judgment. Then, begin to pray that God would bring reconciliation between us. This is true at all levels, personal, congregation and denominational.

Third, be less quick to judge, and quicker to pray for wisdom in understanding what God sees in any given instance. Be patient, observant and open. Look at how Jesus handles conflicts. He didn't so much ignore their questions, but transform them into ones that would reflect upon their disunity with God.

Reconciliation is not a path towards uniformity or consensus, or validation of our own correctness, but peace and union with God in Jesus Christ. This is the emergent reality that distinguishes the church from other institutions. It is the unity that makes us whole.

What Divides Us

To understand contemporary Presbyterianism, one must understand what divides us. Personally, I am not divided. Feel no need to take sides. My sense is that our diversity is the ground upon which we discover God's call to the future. The diversity that I live in everyday is much greater than that which I find in the church.

While reading Eric Metaxas' fine biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I decided to go back and begin to read some of Bonhoeffer's writings that I had missed in the past. I have been a long-time fan of Life Together and a several years ago posted on his essay, After Ten Years. Like many people, I have a deep appreciation for his courage as a pastor confronting the Nazi regime, and of his pastoral writings. However, when I picked up his volume, Ethics, I found theological reflection that resonated as wisdom for our time.

I want to reflect on the essay, The Love of God and The Decay of the World (also called The Love of God and the Disintegration of the World in some versions) as it relates to why we as Presbyterians are so divided.  Bonhoeffer begins with these words.

The World of Conflicts

The knowledge of good and evil seems to be the aim of all ethical reflection. The first task of Christian ethics is to invalidate this knowledge. In launching this attack on the underlying assumptions of all other ethics, Christian ethics stands so completely alone that it becomes questionable whether there is any purpose in speaking of Christian ethics at all. But if one does so notwithstanding, that can only mean that Christian ethics claims to discuss the origin of the whole problem of ethics, and thus professes to be a critique of all ethics simply as ethics.

Already in the possibility of the knowledge of good and evil Christian ethics discerns a falling away from the origin. Man* at his origin knows only one thing: God. It is only in the unity of his knowledge of God that he knows of other men, of things, and of himself. He knows all things only in God, and God in all things. The knowledge of good and evil shows that he is no longer at one with his origin.

In the knowledge of good and evil man does not understand himself in the reality of the destiny appointed in his origin, but rather in his own possibilities, his possibility of being good or evil.  He knows himself now as something apart from God, outside God, and this means that he now knows only himself and no longer knows God at all; for he can know God only if he knows only God. The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God. Only against God can man know good and evil.

I find this a remarkably elegant statement. It is simple, clear and profound. I take it to mean that the ethical process of dividing aspects of life into categories of good and evil is a direct reflection of our loss of unity with God our creator. 

We think of discussions of good and evil as the most natural thing. But what Bonhoeffer shows us that is precisely our point of departure from our relationship with God. Yes, he is saying that we are to think differently than discerning what is good and what is evil. And, yes, I suspect you too feel a bit cast out into the storm without a rudder. How are we to live if we do not make choices between good and evil?

Remember, this is the pastor / theologian who participated in a plot to assassinate Adoph Hitler because he judged him as evil. So, there is something else in Bonhoeffer's perspective that we must grasp.

Let me return to Bonhoeffer.

Man knows good and evil, but because he is not the origin, because he acquires this knowledge only at the price of estrangement from the origin, the good and evil that he knows are not the good and evil of God but good and evil against God.

In other words, our determination of what is good and what is evil is not God's determination. By offering the judgment of what is good and evil from God's perspective, we become the master of God, or rather, we are creating our own little demi-god who serves at our leisure. The knowledge of good and evil makes us judge, determining who God is and who God is not.

Then, Bonhoeffer makes an important distinction between shame and conscience that I find helpful in understanding his point.

In shame man is reminded of his disunion with God and with other men; conscience is the sign of man's disunion with himself. Conscience is farther from the origin than shame, it presupposes disunion with God and with man and marks only the disunion with himself of the man who is already disunited from the origin.It is the voice of apostate life which desires at least to remain one with itself. It is the call to the unity of man with himself.

In effect, there are two types of disunions or divides. One between ourselves and God, revealed in the emotions and awareness of shame. The second is the division within ourselves between our good and bad conscience, that is reflected in our relationships and society at large. See how the divisive nature of our politics is not about our relationship to God, but rather our need to control what passes for the knowledge of good and evil?  Aren't the battles within our church over the past two hundred years really about power and control over who determines the content of the knowledge of good and evil?

I find this very insightful on a psychological level. Rarely, do I hear references to shame any more, often to conscience. As I read, and reread, Bonhoeffer's words, it became quite apparent to me that virtually all the moral, ethical persuasion that exists today is about the conscience.

Morality has become a battlefield of the moral conscience built upon a foundation of either obligation, pragmatism or virtue.  In each, there is an appeal to the conscience to act in a particular way. Can't you hear the following?

How in good conscience can you support _____________?

Don' you feel any obligation to ________? 

It just makes sense to _________. 

A good person will ___________.

What divides us is not God, but ourselves. God has really little do to do with the disunity of the past two hundred years. Presbyterians have been choosing up sides and splitting. Some split by leaving, some split by saying farewell, and for some, by becoming resistant to any and all changes in the life of their churches. We are splitting over very sophisticated statements of conscience, cast in the language of Scripture and theological reflection, yet we are still detached from God, our creator, redeemer and guide.

Let me finish this post with the closing paragraph from the The World of Conflicts section of Bonhoeffer's initial essay in Ethics.

All knowledge is now based on self-knowledge. Instead of the original comprehension of God and of men and of things there is now a taking in vain of God and of men and of things. Everything now is drawn in into the process of disunion.  Knowledge now means the establishment of the relationship to oneself; it means the recognition in all things of oneself and of oneself in all things. And thus, for man who is in disunion with God, all things are in disunion, what is and what should be, life and law, knowledge  and action, idea and reality, reason and instinct, duty and inclination, conviction and advantage, necessity and freedom, exertion and genius, universal and concrete, individual and collective; even truth, justice, beauty and love come into opposition with one another, just as do pleasure and displeasure, happiness and sorrow. One could prolong the list still further and the course of human history adds to it constantly. All these disunions are varieties of the disunion of the knowledge of good and evil. 'The point of decision of the specifically ethical experience is always conflict.'(Spranger, Lebesformen). But in conflict the judge is invoked; and the judge is the knowledge of good and evil; he is man.

As a denomination, we have been stuck in a cycle of battles over control of the knowledge of good and evil. We are divided as a denomination because we are divided as individuals. We are divided because we have followed the logic of the knowledge of good and evil to become judges of all that we survey.

Bonhoeffer presents to us, I believe, the heart of our problem as the contemporary church. We feel no shame at our naked impotence and detatchment before God. We feel only the superiority of our righteous consciences exercised against the forces of evil and injustice in the church and the world. Or, if we feel no righteous indignation toward some issue or group, we are easily self-satisfied in the adoption of the traditions that have become how we divided good from evil. Style, taste and our cultural traditions just as easily divide, yet with less belligerence and anger.

Bonhoeffer's essay doesn't end here, nor should we. In my next post, I'll pick up on Bonhoeffer's perspective, and look at What Unites Us.

*Note: Bonhoeffer's non-inclusive language is reflective of a different era. I leave it as the German was translated to preserve its historical context.

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.

The Sacraments as Social Objects

The zipper pulls seen here were designed by students at Crissey Elementary School in Holland, Ohio. Their project was developed through the services of RandomKid, a non-profit that helps kids change the world. (Note: I am the board chair of RandomKid.) The zipper pulls were created by children to help children undergoing chemotherapy as a part of their cancer treatment. From the RandomKid store description:

Each collectible zipper pull, made of acrylic, represents one of six character traits: Respect, Responsibility, Caring, Fairness, Citizenship and Trustworthiness. The zipper pull to pay particular attention to is the Zebra with spots instead of stripes, reminding us of the respect each of us need no matter how different we may look because of the medical issues we face. Proceeds from this project will go to fund ICEE machines-- carbonated, flavored slushy machines for pediatric cancer wards. The ICEE's soothe the tummy when experiencing nausea, and cool the mouth from the harsh effects of chemotherapy. $30 (for a set of 6) will fund ICEE's for 60 children. If ordering singles, specify Zebra, Elephant, Monkey, Lion, Giraffe or Tiger.

These zipper pulls are a social object for these kids at Crissy Elementary.

Stowe Boyd calls himself a Web anthropologist, clairvoyant, and futurist. Not sure what the clairvoyant part means, but the rest is pretty accurate. The other day Stowe made this comment on a post about Google+, the Facebook like social network.

I have long argued that social communities pivot on creation and sharing of social objects: the medium is the message, again. ... one measure of the depth of connection to a social network by members — and the strength of the connection between members — is the fit between the network’s social objects and the members’ goals.

I think it is appropriate to think of a local congregation as a social network, not unlike Google+, Facebook or any number of their wanna-be online kin.

A social object is something tangible that takes on the symbolic and functional meaning of the community.

In sports, the social object can be the game. Pick up basketball is a social object that brings kids together to play. Also a university sports team unites fans and players in allegience and commitment to winning a championship. When the team wins, we win.

In literature and the movies, the best stories are are built around a social object that provides a reason for the connection between the characters. In the Lord of the Rings, the destruction of the "One Ring" is the meaning that gives the Fellowship their purpose. The ring serves as a social object.

In technology, Steve Jobs turned his Apple products into social objects that created a community of people who see themselves as a special and unique community.

Social Objects in the Church

As I read Stowe's post, I reflected upon the church, wondered what are the social objects that are embedded with a meaning that creates a spiritual social bond.

When I served as the interim pastor of the Newland Presbyterian Church, we created this rock cairn as a social object to serve as a focal point of their pastoral transition. Here's the story.

A social object is something tangible. In this case, rocks that were given a specific meaning. My first Sunday with the congregation, following Abraham's example in Genesis 12:7-8, we began to create a rock cairn that served as a focal point of confidence for the future.

For something to work as a social object, it requires investment by people in the idea. The Monday morning after I suggested that we create a rock cairn symbolizing the church's confidence that God will be with them in the future, rocks began to show up in the church yard. Several months later, the Confidence Cairn was constructed, a day of dedication celebrated, and the church discovered a deeper life as a community of faith

Social objects create engagement, participation and contribution. They are more than ideas. They are the bond that gives people a sense of connection and meaning to their relationships.

The Sacraments as Social Objects

It is pretty clear to me that the sacraments are our social objects in the church.

Baptism and the Eucharist are signs of God's engagement with us as his creation. We celebrate them and they point beyond their activity to a deeper reality of grace that as Christians we share.

There is an experiential aspect to the sacraments as social objects. When we celebrate them, we experience ourselves as the church in a manner that is different than when we are simply in worship.

Baptism as Social Object

In Baptism, we become the divine incarnate family to the child. The bond is the Spirit of God expressed through the church to be faithful in the care and nurture of the child baptized.  We see and experience ourselves as a family in that moment. The social object of baptism transforms our sense of who we are, deeping the social context of our relationship as members, to being sisters and brothers responsible for their new sibling.

Earlier this year, the board of the North Carolina Presbyterian Higher Education Ministries initiated an awareness campaign to raise funds for the support of Presbyterian campus ministries and chaplaincies. One of their reasons was to fulfill our baptismal vows to the young people in our churches.

The sacrament of baptism functioning as a social object provides meaning to our mission, and guides us to see the continuum that exists in the church's relationship to young people from infancy, to childhood, adolescence, on to college, and later as young adults. Our understanding of baptism as a sign and seal of God's grace provides a basis for not only the church's ministry along the youth continuum, but also as a way to link the generation's together in a meaningful way. In this respect, every generation has responsibility for the care and nurture of those younger than them.

The Lord's Supper as Social Object

As a child, my home church celebrated Communion once a quarter. Some churches celebrate every week. Today, our family's church celebrates on the first Sunday of each month. In the past, the lack of frequency was thought to elevate the importance of the sacrament, assuming that if you celebrated too often, the sacrament would just become a meaningless ritual.

The real issue here isn't the frequency of celebration, but the purpose of it.

When we understand The Lord's Supper as a social object, we experience a fresh realization of the Father's love and forgiveness through the sacrifice of his Son for us. We see all of us partaking in the meaning, being one in our reception into the community of Christ's church.

The meaning isn't just about my being spiritually fed. It is about us being fed together. This just isn't a sign of God's love for me. It is a sign of God's love for all, and as a social object, becomes a sign of God's inclusion.

Our family usually sits in one of the first half dozen rows in our church. As a result, we are one of the first to receive communion. After sitting down when we are served by intinction, I have begun to pray for each person who receives the bread and wine. My simple prayer is, "May they know God's love."

The Eucharist has become, for me, more than a part of our church's ritual observance of Christian tradition. It is a moment of real communion as a community.  Even when I do not know the person receiving the elements of the meal, I am bound to them by the grace that we have each received through Christ.

Social Transformation

 The church is changing in dramatic ways. How people connect to the church is one of the most distinct ones. Here's a simple way of understand this.

Membership Shift

From Member to Personal Call

From Institution to Community

From Spectators to Participants.

From Consumers to Contributors

In each of these shifts, the sacraments of the church, Baptism and The Lord's Supper, are providing a social context for these changes. This is why I consider them social objects that serve to unite us together as followers of Jesus Christ.

I hope you can also see that other aspects of the church, which may appear to be the dominant forces within a congregation, are not the social objects which provide a social context for uniting the congregation as a community of faith. The are expressions of our purpose derived from the experience we have together.

As a result, if you want your church to grow, then treat the sacraments as social objects for meaning and connection as the people of God.  Build community through the practice of celebration, and the congregation will find new strength in its life together.

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.