At The Table of Thanks

The Tree of Gratitude

Stewardship in the church gets a bad rap because it seems so focused on money and budgets. People don't want their church to be about those things, yet every church requires financial resources to operate. There is a huge ethical, spiritual conflict related to stewardship in the church which we all share.

One way that this is being addressed is to focus on generosity. If you attended the Stewardship Kaleidoscope conference in Charlotte, you found the theme throughout the program. I'm all for being generous. It is, however, an action that follows being grateful in hearts.

I suspect that people in churches are beginning to catch on that generosity is just a code word for stewardship.  As a result, it will not be long before we'll need another code word to distract us from the issue of stewardship and giving in the church.

I came to the world of congregational stewardship through a growing appreciation for place of gratitude in our lives.

A lot of the mass-market gratitude literature is focused on feelings of gratefulness and how they make us feel good or happy. It is a fairly benign narcissistic behavior. So, I'm up front in saying that I'm not primarily interested in the feelings of gratitude.  I am, rather, more interested in the strategic importance of gratitude as a function of human community.  This is especially true for the church, and even more so for congregational stewardship campaigns.

Being Grateful

What if gratitude was not primarily a feeling, but rather how we lived. When we act gratefully, change happens in our lives and in the lives of those with whom we live and work.   When we are grateful, and it is reflected in how we live, then we'll see a change in our well-being. Our lives will flourish with perspective and passion.

To practice gratitude is to shift our focus from feeling grateful to being grateful in all we do. Yet, even recognizing this as a good idea is not sufficient, because most of our motivation to be grateful is dependent upon having feelings that lead us in that direction.  As a result, we need some thing more than just a belief in being grateful.  We can't wait to feel grateful to act with gratitude.

The Five Actions of Gratitude

As I have have discovered over the past several years that there are five basic actions of gratitude. When we do them, it creates an atmosphere, an environment, develops a culture for gratefulness and generosity wherever we are. Each of these actions is a reflection of our being grateful.

SAY THANKS

When we say thanks, we express gratitude. When we say thanks a lot, we change our perspective on who we are and how we fit into the world around us. We begin to see the connections that we have with people. We begin to recognize the contributions of others to our lives. When we say thanks to them, and doing so in a way that is meaningful to the person we are thanking, we are deepening our relationship with them.

After over a decade and a half of consulting and coaching leaders, I'm convinced that most of us go through our lives with a real sense of isolation from other people. All of us often feel alone in the crowd. This feeling of isolation becomes more acute in those times when we experience personal loss or failure. Most of us do not know really who will stand with us if we were to lose everything, suffering the humiliation of failure and loss.

What I have found is that saying thanks in tangible ways builds strength in relationships that enable us to weather the hardest of times.

Our ultimate thanks goes to God in Jesus Christ. However, when we thank others, we are recognizing that the grace and love of God shared with us through others.  Our connectionalism isn't just a polity or social media thing. It is the very basis of everything in creation.

To Say Thanks is to act to bring reconciliation and unity into our lives and the world that surrounds it.  For this reason, it has a strategic importance that transcends its personal and tactical benefits.  It is the fundamental basis of all our relationships, regardless of the setting or situation. You'll see more of this as we go throught he other four actions of gratitude.

GIVE BACK

Currently, the idea of paying it forward has captured the hearts and minds of many people. While worthy of our action, it misses the importance of how giving back can be an act of gratitude. Paying forward is a linear progress of gratitude. Giving back completes the circle of giving that strengthens families, friendships, organizations and communities.

Giving back and paying forward have been the fundamental motivations of most stewardship campaigns. It is a recognition of the integral connection between the past, present and the future. But more importantly, giving back in service is how we tangibly demonstrate the importance that someone or some group has had in our lives. This makes our stewardship or our philanthropy more of a connectional reality than simply giving to a cause.  This completeness is important for the church as it provides a stronger basis for our mission to be one of a community of faith reaching out, rather just a program of compassion by the church.

The challenge of giving back is to grasp the big picture. We may be able to list a few people who have made a difference in our lives. However, if we take the time to see the connections that occur in life, we'll see that many people and institutions have contributed to providing us the opportunities that we now have. It is to them that we give back as well.

An essential point for us to understand is that in giving back we are helping to create sustainable organizations and communities. When we contribute to our church, beyond making a donation, we are creating the conditions for someone like ourselves in a future generation to benefit as we have. We are helping to create a culture of gratitude that strengthens the whole arena of our lives.

MAKE WELCOME

For a church to act in gratitude towards new people means that there is an open expectation for them to join, to participate fully and to contribute through the gifts and talents that God has given them. This is a tall task. It requires a kind of spiritual presence that recognizes that the church is Christ's, not the members.

The best material on hospitality that I have found is from Jan Gunnarsson's Hostmanship organization in Sweden. Here is my review of the first edition of his book Hostmanship. Right now the second edition of the book (completely revised) is only available for purchase from the Hostmanship offices in Sweden. I highly recommend it.

All organizations today face competition for talent. This is also true of churches. Talent isn't just ability. Rather it is the whole person including their character of action and relationship. To provide an open, hospitable environment for people doesn't mean that we elevate the more talented above the lesser ones. No.Quite the opposite. Instead our hospitality, our hostmanship, provides room for each and every person to contribute according to their ability. I have found that when people feel the freedom to take initiative to make a difference, that feeling gets transferred to others, regardless of what they can or cannot do. Everyone has something to contribute. Openness provides them that opportunity, and gives us the opportunity to say thanks for their contributions.

This is Paul means in 1st Corinthians 12 when in speaking of the church as a body, he says,

²²On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, ²³and 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; ²⁴whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior member, ²⁵that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another.

To make people feel welcome is to provide them a culture of opportunity to contribute the gifts and talents that God has given them. It is more than a greeting at the door. It is an invitation to contribute as an act of gratitude to God.

HONOR OTHERS

Honoring others is more than recognizing someone for exemplary service.  At a more fundamental level it is also how we relate to one another. To honor a person is to treat them with dignity, respect and caring. We seek to see them as God sees them. To see that gives us not just a new perspective, but an understanding, an awareness of how God is at work in our midst. To treat people with honor, all people, is to have the heart of a reconcilier, a healer, to be a person who encourages others, celebrates their potential and contributions.  This is what we all want, and, ironically, we can't true give it to ourselves.

When we honor someone, we are saying to them that I am thankful for their life. To practice this act of gratitude requires humility and a willingness to be open to other peoples' ideas and contributions. This is one of the more challenging disciplines that we must learn.  I accept that I am incomplete, yes, even a sinner, and that the completeness of the church comes through the shared giving of people.

For leaders in the church, it means that "I do what I can do, and invite others to do what they can do. Together we make a difference far beyond our individual ability." When we lead this way, "by vacuum" as I call it, it means that we are again openning up the church to the gifts of others. It begins, however, with the respect that each person is due as a child and creation of God.

The question that we should be asking in the church is how do we structure the programs and governance of the church so that we honor each person, not as a member or a donor or a receiver of services, but rather as a person created in God's image with dignity and potential for making a difference.

CREATE GOODNESS

 This is the most personal of the Five Actions of Gratitude. To create goodness is to recognize precisely who God has made me to be. I recognize my strengths, my limitations, the life situation that I am in, and discover a call or a passion for something that is an expression of my deep desire for what the ancient philosphers called our telos, the good life, our purpose, or our calling. 

Creating goodness is an act that reflects God's goodness in the world.  I see this reflected in Paul's words to the Ephesian church.

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. (Ephesians 2:4-10-emphasis mine)

The "good life" therefore is fulfilled in us through our calling to faith and discipleship in Jesus Christ, and is reflect in how we live lives of gratitude each day.

The Impact of Gratitude

This understanding of the connection between our creation as God's person and our calling to create goodness in our lives is what I understand as the basis for leadership in the church. For if each member of a congregation were to fully discover their calling to live the "good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life" then we'd see people taking initiative to make a difference.  This is what leadership is personal action that creates an impact that fulfills a purpose.

When this happens, stewardship is no longer an issue of how do we raise next year's budget, but rather where is God call us to give. And like the image of the tree above, we'll see God's grace and love flowing through the church to touch the lives of people, institutions and communities in ways that we can hardly imagine today.  It all begins with saying thanks.

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.