It Takes A Church...

Mid Council Report is now posted #PCUSA: The Guiding Principles

Our final report is now posted. John Vest and I will be blogging about it over the next few weeks trying to keep a good conversation going. The report is lengthy, but there is a 15 page executive summary within a 43 page section that lays out our argument for a "season of reflective experimentation" to bring genuine adaptive change to the denomination for the sake of missional congregations. In addition, there are full reports on the data we collected, the best models we discovered and the work of a racial ethnic task force. We hope this will encourage lots of good creative conversation.

http://oga.pcusa.org/media/uploads/oga/pdf/mgb_commission/mcc_final_report.pdf

To begin the discussion, it seems best to lay our cards on the table.  After a long season of listening to the church, when we moved to the 'experimenting' and 'discerning' phases, we developed this set of Guiding Principles.

• We live in a post-Christendom context that calls for continual re-consideration of our mission, our structures and our practices in order to be faithful to Christ and fruitful participants in God’s mission to the world.[i]  This reality is now undeniable.  We live in a new day, a new epoch.  It is as significant as it was for the Reformed tradition to be transported from Europe to America, and it requires no less a reconsideration and reformulation of our way of being the church.  And if we do not do so, the will eventually die.
• The missional congregation in a healthy, faithful covenant community is the center of the mission and faithful life of discipleship of Jesus Christ. Congregations are the “basic but insufficient” form of God’s mission in the world.  (G.10101) The Congregation is the basic form of mission, but for congregations to be faithful to their mission also requires them to be in covenant relationships with other congregations for shared authority, accountability, edification and missional support.
• Councils exist to serve the mission of the congregations in their local context.  In the words, of Louis Weeks, president emeritus of Union Theological Seminary, “The highest council in the church is really the Session. The rest of the governing bodies serve the Session.”  Presbyteries are “covenant communities of missional congregations”[ii] and the center of our corporate life, governance and mission together connecting congregations to each other and the larger witness of the Church.  It is a “collegial bishop” charged with preparing and ordering the ministry of teaching elders, it is a covenant community of missional congregations, it is the “balcony” that offers a broader perspective to congregational leaders so that they might serve wisely and well in their specific contexts.
• This report and our recommendations are committed to refocusing the mid council structure on one goal: serving fruitful and faithful missional congregations. To that end, our structures, especially our mid council structures, must engage and serve the mission of God in the world through missional congregations and partnerships, not our institutional or denominational concerns.
• There is no “one size fits all model”. Ecclesial structure follows missional function and is always marked by a commitment to being covenantal and contextual. The best ecclesiastical structures are discerned by those who live in it together.  They will be contained within the frame of our shared constitutional life, but those structural changes should ordinarily come from the local context, not the “national office”. The new Form of Government and the passage of Amendment 10A indicate a shift of authority to the local contexts for discerning the shape of a mission and we want to affirm and build upon that shift.
• Our structures must serve and support healthy, shared, spiritual and collaborative leadership between ruling and teaching elders.
   
• This report continues, builds upon and lives into the decisions made by the church to accept a new Form of Government and place the discernment of fitness for ordination on local churches and presbyteries.  Our proposal is a next step in a trajectory that we believe will result in further collaborative creativity by the whole church in every context.
  
• We envision a “big canvas with a clear frame”.  While remaining securely within the “Foundations” of our theological and governance tradition, we call the church to create the conditions to energize collaborative creativity, missional innovation and relational accountability with permission for many different models of middle councils to emerge that will foster the vitality and fruitfulness of missional congregations. 

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[i] Guder, “The Presbytery as Missional Context”, p.3 “Perhaps the most pervasive and powerful reduction made in the course of the western church’s gradual establishment, as it became more dominant in its social and political context, and as the assumption took hold that everyone born and reared in this territories was Christian, was the fact that the essential character of mission in the biblical sense gradually faded away.  Mission is not needed if everyone is already a Christian!...The contemporary exploration of the church’s essentially missional vocation challenges unquestioned attitudes formed over centuries that the church is to be defined more in terms of its maintenance than its mission.  What is meant is, of course, the concern for the maintenance of the church as an institution.  That concern turns the church inward, centers its attention upon itself and its members, upon its survival and their religious needs.  The institutional inwardness of western church contradicts the clearly missional calling of the church in the New Testament defined by Jesus on the Mount of the Ascension: ‘You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8).  Thus, Newbigin’s question can be paraphrased: How does the church truly regain its understanding of itself as called and sent, remembering that the term mission means, in fact, “sending” (see John 20:21)?  How does the church move beyond the idea that Christian identity is basically a geographical or cultural or organizational concept? (emphasis ours).

[ii] This definition is from Darrell Guder, “The Presbytery as Missional Context”.

 

Defining Leadership...

 

 

This little riff, produced by the good folks at The High Calling, is my take on leadership as learned from Ronald Heifetz, Peter Block and Abraham Kuyper...

From the MGB Commission Observation Deck #8 #mgbcomm

From the MGB Commission Observation Deck #8

I don’t know who said it first, (Stephen Covey? Paul Batalden? Ed Demming?)  but it gets quoted all the time.  I said it myself yesterday in one of my coaching calls with a pastor.  Here it is:  “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” 

And as our MGB Commission has flown around the country, sat in on conference calls, talked to dozens of EPs and Synod Execs and Elders and Pastors and committee members and GA staff members we have seen the truth of this pithy saying.  And here is our next observation from our travels around the PCUSA:

Our system is perfectly designed to safeguard the status quo.

We want change.  We know we need change.  We are almost desperate for change.  And frankly we know the world is changing faster than we are.   Our Commission was formed to look at that reality squarely and “develop models” for discipleship for changing cultural context.  Everywhere we go, we have been charged, exhorted, prodded and pleaded with to be “be bold”, to “bring change” to “think outside the box”, to “dream, envision, imagine” etc. 

Yet, the system as we have it is perfectly designed to keep things, well… the same.  Even the charge that our Commission was given boils down to this….

• IF you can get every affected Presbytery to agree to a change… and
• IF you can get every affected Synod to agree to a change… and
• IF it is consistent with the constitution as it is currently written…
• THEN…You can come to the Commission and ask for approval to do and ‘experiment’ or re-configure or re-align in a bold, creative, out-of-the-box kind of way. 

Which is at least one reason why one year after we were formed, we have had exactly ZERO proposals come to our Commission for approval.  (And frankly, most innovators are being thwarted by the constitution not presbyteries or synods.)

Because we all believe in the total depravity of humanity, and we all have experienced the pain of someone who ran with the scissors in the church parking lot or dominated the conversation or wouldn’t keep the rules, our system is designed to be a safeguard against dysfunction.  It’s like the structure of our national government (something endless pointed out in seminary classes on polity), that is designed for protecting against the tyranny of the majority and keeping checks and balances in places.  It’s a conservative system meant to preserve what has been, not innovative into what can be.  Our government and our church structure is designed to use regulations to protect each other from the folly or arrogance or blundering bull-headedness of any of our members.  In that way, our structure is designed so that the default answer is “no.”

That is not to say that lots of old guard stakeholders have dug in their heels.  Frankly, that's not what we are hearing.  While there are certainly some, MOST leaders that I talk are simply stuck in a system that has over time stunted our imaginative capacity to actually think and dream of different, new ways of doing things.  (As an architect once said, "First you build your buildings, and then your buildings build you.")

And this is not to say that there is no creative, experimental, out-of-the-box thinking going on out there.  There is.  But they really don’t require a Commission at all.  Those presbyteries and synods that are being led by creative leaders within environments of relatively high degrees of health and trust, filled with “mature and motivated” people are already making changes.  We are trying to learn from them, applaud them and will pass along as we go the key lessons that can be applied to all. 

But even in these places, we have found the ‘default’ in the system is not about serving these healthy leaders so they can continue to be creative, innovative and bold, as they lead their communities toward health, fidelity and fruitfulness, it’s about keeping these innovative change leaders in check. (Which says something about "trust" which will be the next observation.)

(By the way, have you ever noticed that we only have two “official” titles beyond the congregational level?  We have “Moderators” and “Clerks”.  Our structure is designed with one person to insure that everybody takes turn talking and another person checks the rules and takes the notes.  Our structure is not designed for mission, but for conversation.  It’s is not designed for innovation but deliberation.)

But… (And here if there was a soundtrack playing in the background, the strings would start in and your heart would soar just a bit)… but… one of the other truths is that even just “observing something changes it.”  By our raising this observation, we on the Commission hope to also raise some questions about the kinds of structures that we need for actually being part of God's mission to change the world. 

Are we ready to take risks enough to change the design of the system (especially the constitution) to SERVE the healthiest communities, to SERVE the healthiest leaders, to SERVE the mission of the church, and to design for the uncertainties of the future rather than the problems of the past? 

And, what would it take for us to be ready? 

If we don’t...well, we are perfectly designed…for staying right where we are.

Brian McClaren on The Future of the Mainline Church

From a video interview with Gradye Parsons, Stated Clerk of the PCUSA.  #MGBComm

"One of the most important behaviors and practices (for mainline congregations in this huge cultural shift)…is to encourage the development of new congregations that are different--creative new congregations…focused not on competing with existing congregations for a share of the religious market… but on the 'spiritual but not religious.' How do we help those people rediscover a vibrant faith in Christ and a life-transforming community of faith?  Those new communities is where the future is.”

 

Hemorrhaging Pastors

Three. In one day. 

On Monday, I heard of three of my pastor friends who all resigned this week.  No affairs, no scandal, no one is renouncing faith.  But three, really good, experienced, pastors all turned in resignations and walked away.  Two are leaving church ministry all together.

The details are as different as the pastors themselves, but the common thread is that they finally got worn down by trying to bring change to a church system that was stuck.

I have been hearing from more pastors these days.  Some of it is related to my work with TAG Consulting, a lot of it is because I am, well, one of them.  We chat and email and text and the common thread is always the same: “The church is stuck and we don’t know what to do.”

Stuck and declining. Stuck and clinging to the past. Stuck and lurching to quick fixes, trying to find an easy answer for what is clearly a systemic challenge. (“If only you could preach better, pastor!” “If only you were more ‘pastoral’ and caring, pastor!”  “If only our worship was more dynamic, pastor!” “Please, pastor, DO something…That is what we pay you for isn’t it?”)

In some cases, the leaders of the church had turned on the pastor making him the scapegoat.  In others, there was a sense that the church just wanted to stop any change process.  For some, they are early in their tenures and are trying to get at the core issues early and bravely, looking squarely at what Jim Colllins calls “the brutal facts.”  But most of them are so far into their ministry at the church that it seems like whatever they do is too little too late.  After trying so hard, it seems that the church just gave up and hunkered down.  As one of my friends said, “This church has gone deaf to my voice.”  And soon after the finger-pointing begins, immediately followed by a big severance, a disillusioned pastor and a crippled church.

Most of my pastor friends acknowledge that they contributed in some way to the very circumstances that are forcing them out of the calling they love.  All of us acknowledge that seminary didn’t prepare us for this.  But, trying to rise to the occasion, they find themselves facing a wall of resistance that quickly turns into a voice of rejection.  The underlying, unspoken issue seems to be: “If only the pastor would stop trying to lead us and just pastor us, then we’d be fine.” 

Except we are not fine.  The culture is changing, the world is changing and churches are facing change on an unprecedented scale.  We are heading into uncharted territory and pastors and lay leaders need to learn to lead a mission together where there are real obstacles, real challenges and where the future is nothing like the past.

Until we do, we’ll keep bleeding pastors and we will watch our churches wither away.

The Leader as Biggest Loser

At the end of our 2006-2007 fiscal year, our church had a $100,000 general fund surplus. In twenty years of church work, I had never seen anything like it.  By all common measures, we were doing as well as a church as we could ever hope.

We were in our tenth consecutive year of growth in worship attendance and membership. We had faced all the obvious and not-so-obvious challenges before us.  We had unified around a vision, we had applied disciplined thinking and acting to most of our ministries, we had even rebuilt our entire campus around our vision to be an intergenerational “Community for the community.”

 And then we noticed something. It was subtle, but there was no mistaking that it was there.  A kind of malaise, a growing sense of discouragement. Leaders were talking about being burned out and others were hesitant to step up.  Even more, we noticed that some families were beginning to slip away.  While the usual "markers" of bucks in the plate and buns in the pew were still pretty good, we began to notice the early signs of disengagement and disconnection.  As the pastor, I was confused.  How could we be doing so well and yet "feel" like "something" was so wrong?

We brought in TAG Consulting to take a good look under the hood.  They led us through their Transforming Church Index process.  It was both easy and comprehensive.  They reported back that our scores were really strong; we were among the healthiest churches in the nation.  But they also told us that there were some disturbing "early warning signs", that could all be traced to an unintended consequence to our “win-win” strategy.

 In my last post I wrote about the importance of getting beyond “win-win” thinking when trying to bring a truly adaptive or transformational change.  Indeed, as I found out personally, the definition of an adaptive challenge is one where someone is going to “lose” something.

The reality of loss is the very reason why these truly transformational challenges are so difficult and enduring. Even more complicated, the “problem” you face to today is very often the result of the “solution” from the past. While “win-wins” feel great, the bad news is that a "win-win" strategy often only perpetuates the gridlock of competing values that keeps the organization stuck.

In our case, the success of a unified vision had given birth to an overly centralized institution.  The very unity, discipline and alignment that had been needed to bring the church together to rebuild the campus around our vision were now stifling creativity, passion and energy.  In an entrepreneurial culture like south Orange County, we had become way too "corporate." 

Our lay people reported that while they trusted the leadership and appreciated the ministry, the most common response of most people was “this is a good church, but they don't need me here." Our church members told us, "We love the preaching, worship and programs, but there is no way for ME to make a difference, express my gifts or fulfill my own sense of calling here."

When our consultant Kevin Ford, laid this out before me, I grimaced.  "So what's causing this?  What's at the heart of the problem?  What do we need to change?" I asked in almost rapid-fire questioning.  He looked at me and said.  "You." 

I gulped. 

Kevin continued, "Tod, don't get me wrong.  These people love you.  They respect you.  They appreciate your preaching and they trust you.  In fact, we have never had a church talk more about a senior pastor than this church talks about you.  And that is the problem.  It's not your problem, at least not yet.  Nobody thinks that you are trying to build the church around you, but that is in fact what is happening.  You could continue on for another ten years and the church will remain healthier than most.  But without even trying to, the culture that you have created here under your leadership will continue to disempower, disengage and finally create disconnection for the most creative and passionate members.  Unconsciously, the message that is going out is that everybody here thinks it is their job to support the ministry that YOU are having here.   And that is slowly sapping the passion from the church."

Kevin and I talked about the options open to me at that point:

1. Do nothing. The church would continue to revolve around me and it would likely not become a huge problem until someday after I left the church. 
2.  Resign.  If I was out of the way, then the church members and would-be leaders would be forced to reengage and rediscover its ministry without me and my vision at the center.
3. Learn to lead differently. This would be hard, and it would be a risk.  While the danger signs were evident, the church was still relatively healthy.  There was a significant chance that trying to create a less-centralized and more collaborative culture would be both resisted and resented (especially by those who liked the church the way it was.)  And especially it would mean a big "loss" for me.  I would lose the sense of competence that comes from using a leadership style that I clearly was comfortable with and which had had success. 

Because I love my church and being their pastor, I opted pretty quickly for number 3.  I have been re-learning what it means to lead ever since. 

It wasn't easy.  In fact, it was one of the hardest and yet best things I have ever done.  Today, not only are the "markers" even stronger, but even amidst this great recession, we are still solidly growing.  We have faced hard cutbacks with clear values.  We have maintained unity and have more diverse creative, lay-run ministry than ever.  We are seeing more and more people step into leadership and express faith in missional service.  While I am not as central as I one was, I am still firmly part of a more collaborative ministry. 

Today I consult for TAG and help other pastors learn or re-learn how to lead in this changing world.  And it all began with understanding that for our church mission to "win" I had to "lose".

I had to lose power and control, I had to lose "say" over aspects of the mission, and I had to lose my place at the center in order for our mission and vision to be even more central in our church.

Learning how to be both a good leader and a good loser is where I will pick this up next.

Video: Technical vs. Adaptive Challenges

http://www.youtube.com/user/LRPtvOdyssey#p/c/E379D76ED5580A04/1/rrJk_co28XE

When Win-Win is Wrong-Wrong.

The first leadership book I ever assigned my staff team was Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Effective People. It was, as my pal Charlie would say, “the right tool for the job.”  My team indeed became more "effective" in lots of meaningful ways.  One of the concepts that helped us the most was Habit #4: “Think Win-Win.”

Coming into a situation where there had been lots of “every ministry for itself” thinking and little teamwork around a unified vision, we needed to learn how to think “Win-Win” in as many situations as possible.  And it worked.  Within a remarkably short time, we became a “Win-Win”-seeking bunch of teammates all working together around a clear vision of what our church could be for our community.

Fast-forward a decade and the same “Win-Win” team finds itself “Stuck-Stuck”.  We had made a lot of good changes, the church had grown and we had re-built our entire campus.  Things were good. Mostly.

But now we faced far more complex challenges.  Challenges that had no clear cut solutions. Challenges that were more systemic in nature.  Challenges that required us to learn what we didn’t know.  Challenges that couldn’t be solved through a conference or a video series or a program.  What Ronald Heifetz calls an “adaptive challenge”.   Adaptive Challenges are the true tests of leadership.  These are the enduring tough problems that require PEOPLE to change in order for problems to get solved.  And, by definition, an “Adaptive Challenge” CANNOT be solved through Win-Win. 

Adaptive Challenges can only be solved through careful, wise, discerning, collaborative decision making that results in someone losing.  Indeed, if the organization or church (or  business or state, or country!) doesn’t face this hard reality and insists on “win-win”, the only real result will be “lose-lose.”

One executive pastor of a large Presbyterian church put it to me this way:  “Until now, we could solve every problem in our church through ‘addition’.  If there was a problem, we simply added another ministry, added more money to the budget, add more staff to the team. But now we can’t afford to add anything more.  Any changes we make now are going to have to come through making hard decisions and ‘subtraction’.” For a church that’s used to addition, ‘subtraction’ is really, really painful.

In our own church, getting beyond “win-win” required me to learn to lead differently.  Specifically, while the first decade of my ministry was built around getting “wins” together as we moved toward our vision, if we were going to truly fulfill our mission, we were going to have to make many more tough choices where someone was going to lose.  Perhaps for me, the most important day in my ministry at SCPC was when I realized that if we were going to move beyond “Win-Win” to bring genuine, missional, faithful, change the first “loser” was… me. 

More next post.