It Takes A Church...

The First Big Question.

My first professional aspiration was to be a journalist.  I read “All the President’s Men” and decided that I wanted to be a reporter who got the truth out and changed the world.  That lasted until I took my first journalism class in college.  Mostly, it was about writing about incidental things that didn’t really change any thing I was all that interested in.  (“City council repeals leash laws”, “School board adopts lunch program.”)

But what I learned in my first journalism class was that every story had to answer the “Five Ws”:  Who, what, where, when, why.  WHAT was never said, but was by far the most important lesson that I learned was that by far the most important “W” is the first one: “Who”.  “Who” is always first.  “Who” is what is interesting.  “Who” makes the story.  

And without even knowing it, that first “W” (with a capital “W”!) was the most important element in every story.  It’s all about “Who”.  (This sounds like a Dr. Seuss story, doesn’t it?)  And this is true for faith and faith journeys too.   

St. Augustine famously wrote,  “O God, Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”  As I wrote in my first book, for the Christian, the goal and grounding, the beginning and end of the spiritual life is about union with a person.  Faith is about a “who” far more than a “what” (or even a “why”).  Who God is, who you are, Who I am, Who we are.

This “First Big Question” is also the first issue in our pursuit of a model of church life that can adapt for the future without losing it’s spiritual identity.  Again, WHO God is (and certainly not, “WHAT God is”) is the starting place.  God’s identity, character, and calling is the starting place for our congregational life, our missional vision, our strategy and planning.  As one of my church leaders has said so well that we have co-opted it as a kind of leadership mantra: “Who drives what drives how.”

And once we have clarified, at least in part, Who God is (The Triune Creator of the World) and What God is doing (Restoring His Creation through reestablishing his Reign) and How God tends to go about these things (through His Word and Spirit within His People) we can go on to the next Big Question...and it's still a "who" question:  “Who is the 2nd most important ‘who’?” 

Which is where I’ll pick this up next time.

"Culture trumps vision every time."

The words rolled around in my head.  And I asked her to repeat it.  She seemed to slow down to make sure that I got it.

“Tod, you have done a great job articulating a compelling vision for our church.  It’s one of the things that you do best. But you have to remember that vision is not all that powerful.  Culture trumps vision every time.” 

She went on to say that in most organizations, far more powerful than any agreed upon, outside, even authoritative or "divinely inspired" goal, mission, or purpose, is the ingrained, unconscious, unexamined and  usually even unnoticed norms, attitudes, and forces that give a group a sense of cohesion.  The culture of a group is like its "DNA", its part of what makes it what it is. A “culture” is the result of the intentional and mostly unintentional “habits” of a people. The assumptions, “givens”, the unreflected-upon actions and attitudes that make up “who we are” that most of the time we don’t even think about.

The woman sitting across the table from me in the coffee shop was one of my elders.  In her professional life she is a consultant with years of senior management experience in medical and pharmaceutical sales.  She had just finished helping our staff with a comprehensive strategic planning process that was all built around making sure that everything we do was consistent with our church vision statement.  

She affirmed (and I love) our church vision statement.  But just as I was getting excited that people were really starting to “get the vision”, she hit me with this reality-club: Vision is quickly thwarted by the culture of a people, community or organization.  And this was utterly depressing to me.

In fact, I resisted it for quite awhile.  Until I began to see as I spoke with colleagues, taught in seminaries and consulted with church leaders, how often the “vision statements” of a church were only approved, applauded and, especially applied when the vision expressed the culture of the church.  Rarely did a vision statement become the rallying crying for challenging the culture of a church to be more radically faithful to the Kingdom calling.  Instead, the Vision Statement remained on the wall and the culture was accommodated…and little genuine life transformation occurred.

So, how do we move from affirming a vision to transforming a culture?  That is the question that I have been rolling around in my head since I sat in that coffee shop. 

Here is one thing I believe:  No one sets out to undermine their vision.  No one who believes in the vision of a church, organization or cause determines to let it get trumped by the status quo.  But it happens.  All.  the. time.  And it happens mostly unconsciously through our unreflective habitual actions.  

So, the “vision” that I have of being under 18% body fat and qualifying for the Boston Marathon, gets “trumped” every time I “unconsciously” eat three bowls of chips and salsa while I am sitting at a table talking with a friend about my “vision” to have less than 18% body fat and qualify for the Boston Marathon.  

The vision of raising children who will live for Christ at all cost, gets trumped as soon as junior makes the “elite” soccer team that plays on Sundays.

The vision of the Church that exists to be the answer to the prayer, “Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven” gets trumped when we make decisions primarily to “meet the needs” of our members.  

What can we do?  How can we experience the true power of a God-inspired Vision?

Well, we can start by focusing on what we are doing.  Observing our actions, paying attention to habits.  And then humbly acknowledge those moments of contradiction and come back to Christ again.

Culture may trump vision every time.  But humble self-awareness of our contradictory nature is a pretty powerful opening hand to play.

 

One Question in Maine

Last fall I was invited to speak to a conference of Methodist pastors and lay leaders in Portland, Maine.  The organizers of the conference had read It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian and asked if I would be willing to come and address a group of the "movers and shakers" who were looking at new ways of church.

Now, usually, I decline outside speaking engagements because I love my church and love being at my church and have plenty of challenges speaking and teaching within my church. But when I agree to speak somewhere it is usually because it is 1) with a friend I want to spend time with, 2) in a place I want to visit or 3) I think there is something I will learn by doing it. This one fell definitely into #3. I wasn't sure what I would learn, but I had a hunch that there could be something in this setting that God wanted me to get at.

So, I flew off to Portland, Maine for a quick turn around trip (left on a Thursday, was back on a Saturday and was preaching on Sunday back at SCPC). I gave three talks on the theme of the church as the answer to Jesus' prayer "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." This set of talks has been my standard "road set" for a year now.   It's the theme I most want to encourage people to consider.  I like to raise a missional vision for what the church is supposed to embody for the world and I always challenge them to consider that their home church, whatever stripe it is, whatever bent, wherever it is located, is supposed to be the embodiment of God's will, the foretaste of God's new creation, a glimpse at what we long for when we speak of "heaven" or "resurrection" or "new Jerusalem."  That the CHURCH is God's demonstration of his character, his love and his truth.  And I challenge people to consider what that vision means to THEIR church and THEIR lives.

And then I usually leave.

But this time, they asked if I would do a "talkback with the speaker" session; a Q & A with people who want to follow up on the issues I raised in my talks.  So, that afternoon, approximately 60 of the 300 or so people who attended the conference came to my "talkback".  I asked the group if we could get all the questions they wanted to discuss on the table and then we'd decide where there was the most interest and energy.  So, I went around the room and gathered up all the questions. It went something like this...

Question #1: "How could we get our church more involved in some place like Africa, the way your church is?"
Question #2-58: "How do you turn around a dying church?"

Over and over again that was the theme:  Our church is dying and "renewing it" is killing us as leaders. We so want to lead into the vision of the Kingdom that you talked about it, but no one is following.  What can we do?

I hadn't spoke about church turnarounds, or leadership issues, or bringing change.  I had spoken on a missional vision, of the church being the embodiment of the Kingdom.  I had wanted to encourage a group of movers and shakers by giving them a grand sweeping vision of what I contend the scriptures lead us to see of what God wants the church to be and that vision had only raised more discouragement.

And this has got me thinking.  A lot. 

I am a big VISION guy. I believe with all my heart that without a vision, people perish and that without a biblical vision churches become stagnant, complacent and consumeristic.  Recently, I have been polled and surveyed and interviewed because SCPC is one of the few growing churches in our denomination and for the better part of ten years, my explanation for why has been our "missional vision".

But more and more I am thinking that Vision, while necessary, is not nearly enough. And the huge challenge of our day is not only recapturing a biblical vision for the church, but re-learning what it takes to lead into that vision. 

The "Methodists in Maine" that I met were a great, earnest, sincere, hardworking, Bible-believing, Kingdom-committed bunch. But like most churches in America today, we are facing some uncharted territory in a culture that at every turn is opposing the way we are best at living out our faith and presenting the gospel.  And in many ways, I see these same forces at work in my church, too.

To meet this challenge we are going to need a clear, biblical vision and a whole different set of strategies, skills, habits and behaviors. Vision and practices. A clear picture and a new set of skills. And exploring why this is so, and what we need to do about it is about the only conversation that I am interested in being in these days.

For Evan and the Heroes He Inspired

Take a moment and watch this. 

Laity Lodge, Lauren Winner and Living the Incarnation

This summer I will have an opportunity to go back to one of my favorites places, to hang with one of my favorite people and meet one of my new favorite authors.  I have been asked to speak at Laity Lodge with Lauren Winner, author of Girl Meets God, Real Sex and Mudhouse Sabbath.

Laity Lodge is a very special place.  You drive through a river to get there and the whole environment whispers to you of rest, reflection and hospitality.

When I was invited to speak with Lauren, I jumped at the chance.  Her book Mudhouse Sabbath was the first one I read on my sabbatical two years ago.

We'll be at Laity Lodge on July 31-Aug 3 talking on themes about an incarnational spirituality.

Missing blogger found, Cyberspace reacts...

Yawn? Sigh of relief? It's hard to know after six weeks away from blogging, but I do know that I am getting ready to get back in the blog game.  If nothing else, for my own sake.

So, where have I been?  What have I been doing?  The short blunt truth is...I have been learning.

For months now I have been kicking around ideas that I think are taking shape as another book.  Indeed, I was about to launch out when I posted my last entry in mid-April, intending to blog on the topics as a rough draft of sorts for feedback.  But even before I could get a thought hammered out, I read, experienced, or thought of something that either contradicted or nuanced my original thought.  So, for over a month I have not posted anything, all the while thinking that I would really do so...tomorrow. 

But then I'd learn something new and would have to think again about what I wanted to say.

In the past six weeks,

• I ran the Big Sur Marathon for a P.R.  It is only noteworthy, because Big Sur is hilly and hard and not considered a P.R. course.  So how did that happen?  What did I do differently this time that led to me surprising myself by running a marathon a full 40 minutes faster than I planned or predicted?
• I have been moderating a group for our presbytery called "The Odyssey Group".  We are charged with reconfiguring our vision statement, goals, and structures of our Presbytery.  I have never worked on this kind of stuff at a "governing body" level and I am learning that bringing change is as much about THE WAY we bring change as the change we want to bring. 
• We had to cut our church budget for next fiscal year by $300,000 (the largest deficit reduction I have ever had to be part of). It has meant eliminating five staff positions, eliminating support to five long-term missionaries, and reducing our program lines dramatically.  Through all the pain of it, I have never seen a leadership team (or Session) do better work.  A member of our church who just returned from Afghanistan where he worked with the Department of Homeland Security to set up the Afghanistan Customs Office (how would you like that job?) said it was about the finest work of budgeting based on principles that he'd ever seen.  So what did we do differently?  And how did a church that one consulting firm has called one of the healthiest they have ever seen get into a position where we needed to cut so much money?  And why, in the midst of some of the hardest professional decisions that I have ever had to make and with a congregation that is feeling some deep grief am I more excited about our future than I have been in a couple of years?
• I have been reading a lot.  A really interesting book on leaderless organizations called The Starfish and the Spider.  A sensitive, wise book on change in the church today called Who Stole My Church? What to do when the church you love tries to enter the 21st century.  A short, helpful book called  Thriving Through Ministry Conflict.  And an enthralling read on what separates those who survive tragedies and wilderness experiences called Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why. A lot of reading based on the work of Ronald Heifetz, Chris Argyris and other organizational leadership types. 
• I have been getting ready to do another consulting project with a business.  I am fascinated that what we are learning for bringing change in the church has something to offer for-profit companies for thinking through the kinds of changes that they will need to be competitive.
  
• I have been spending a fair amount of time with a mother whose young son died of a horrible disease last year. Walking with her through her grief and how she is using it to energize herself to raise awareness for organ donation and bone marrow transplants has been both inspiring and challenging.  She would tell you that without a doubt she wants her son back and is in, at times, unbearable agony.  But she would also tell you that she has a purpose for her life, and a sense of vision and focus that seems divinely inspired.  Why does great change for good seem to only come amidst terrible pain and loss? 
• I have been watching the Ken Burns DVD on Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery thinking about what leadership into uncharted territory demands of us. 
• I have been preaching a kind of "midrash" on learning the Spiritual Life from The Road to Emmaus story in Luke 24. There are so many lessons to be learned from spiritually blind people.  Maybe the blind can lead the blind. 
• I joined Weightwatchers online.  I've now lost almost 20 pounds in three months.  This is only significant, because I gained that 20 pounds while 1) training and running the Chicago Marathon, 2) completing the Vineman half-ironman, and 3) completing the Solvang Century (100 mile ride).  It's weird to be both in great shape and overweight at the same time and I had to figure out what I need to do differently so that I could keep my weight down and keep from beating up my body. WW was the very LAST thing that I wanted to do.  But when I figured out how to do WW without a meeting and in a way that worked for me...well, there is a lesson in here someway.
  

And all of these things are rolling around in my head trying to come forth in a different synergistic way. 

But, I am back.  At least I think I am.  I will not being blogging on any regular schedule, but I will be bringing things in "rough draft" form to the blog for consideration.  (If you truly are interested, you may want to subscribe to the feed so you'll get an email when I post.)

I will jump in on my main topic soon, but I do have some housekeeping to take care. Posts that I have either promised others I would put up, or that I have wanted to do for a while but couldn't do during my "unintentional sabbatical".

I'll get those up soon and then I want to return to my visit to Maine last fall and how the questions that I got asked was the trigger for all of this.