Welcome to the fifth Observation from the balcony that is our particular place as the Middle Governing Body Commission. (For the previous four Observations click here to begin with the first.) While the votes on the amendments, an ongoing discussion about the Fellowship PCUSA and the NEXT Church conversations and well, frankly and very gladly, the onset of Lent are in the center of most of our thoughts, I want to offer an observation that is almost a continuation of the last and a precursor of my next. Think of this as a corollary of Observation #4 (“We don’t have to develop any models, we only have to discover the models that are already out there”) and a bit of priming the pump for what I believe may be the most significant issue that needs to be discussed. (Yes, that's a tease for next week...)
This present observation is meant to once again focus our attention on what we believe is the work of the Spirit in the church, a work that calls for our commission to be as much about discernment as we are about “developing” anything.
Observation #5: “The future is already here, but it is on the margins.”
I don’t know who said it first but I remember who said it to me. He was a Korean-American church planter who had moved his whole family across the country to plant a multi-ethnic congregation in Orange County. That line about future and margins stuck in my brain. Here was a guy with no money, no denominational backing, no big school credentials, no office, no buildings, no paid staff, planting a church that literally had to move to a different location every time they met for worship. In the wild consumer-driven, user-friendly mecca of south Orange County California, he was starting a church that required people to go to a website and find the location where the church was meeting that week! As I listened to him I marveled. I was the pastor of an established congregation that was on prime real estate in a very desirable and growing community. At the time we were dedicated to being as “user-friendly” and even “seeker-friendly” as possible, yet getting people to attend a church that was as convenient and comfortably, accessible and welcoming as we could make it was still a daunting challenge. Maybe this voice from the margins had something to offer my very “centered” church. (That church is now—years later--internationally respected and is considered a model for what churches of the future could be like.)
I was reminded of this statement while at the NEXT Conference as I listened to another church planter, who said something very similar: New paradigms come from those who live on the margins between different social systems or cultures and bring their practices and insights into the “dead center.” (I don’t know if he was intentionally making a pun with a bit of a pinch, but I certainly heard it that way.)
When the center engages the insights from the margins, the center comes alive and moves toward the future.
Now, while a much broader and more significant conversation needs to keep occurring about who exactly is on the margins, how we insure that all the "voices long-silenced" are heard, and while our Commission is working very hard with the Committee on Representation to avoid missing key voices from the margins who can offer us insights that are being vastly overlooked, this argument about voices from the margins is even more relevant when we are talking about changing organizational structures.
We are finding that many who would otherwise be considered part of the center experience our very structures as marginalizing.
In many ways that are NOT all that obvious at first glance that is what the NEXT Church Conference and the Fellowship PC(USA) have in common. They are odd amalgams of the restless margins of the church and the "dead center" (trying!) to engage in that conversation and bring to the surface a myriad of possibilities that are being overlooked and issues to consider. The most common and glib tweet about NEXT Church was how much it “looked like the old church” yet there were also 70 seminarians in attendance and a chorus of voices sang out the challenge of broadening and deepening the conversation to those who were missing. (And by the way, those very same restless and creative seminarians were almost entirely absent from the conversation about Middle Governing Bodies… if there is a subject that feels like “dead center” to them, this must be it to them.)
And while I know this is likely to draw a howl of protest from some corners of the church, many of the now over 320 signers of the “Fellowship PC(USA)” letter see themselves as on the margins, too, when it comes to discussions about denominational structures.
(No, I don't really think that many of them would claim to be culturally marginalized. We Presbyterians by definition are "mainline". But whether you agree or not, this is a key tenet of Beau Weston’s equally provocative argument in Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment. Many large church pastors I know agreed wholeheartedly with Beau’s description of the marginalization of “tall steeple pastors” in Presbytery structures. And as critical as some have been toward the PCUSA Fellowship letter it is an attempt by leaders who while feeling themselves marginalized are trying to engage the broad center of the church in a conversation about the future.)
Now, even if you disagree with my descriptors of WHO is on the margin, my observation is that the most creative possibilities are coming from the interaction of those who consider themselves on the “margins” and an open and alive “center”.
Where leaders in power are listening to those who are currently bored, checked out or discouraged and engaging them in the work, there is a sense of anticipation that we are glimpsing something toward which to move. (Which is why I think the NEXT Church leaders were prescient to work so hard to include the seminarians.)
Where “powerbrokers” and “long time stakeholders” are open to engaging the ideas, models and possibilities of the restless on the fringe, the disconnected in the back pews, those lingering in the narthex of the greater church (or even those heading out the door?) with a desire to learn, new ways of thinking and seeing are possible. If the margins and the “not-so-dead” center can interact with each other relationally and have theological discussions respectfully, there is possibility for genuine lasting change.
James Davison Hunter wrote about this in To Change the World,
“Change is often initiated outside of the centermost positions. When change is initiated in the center, then it typically comes from outside of the center's nucleus. Wherever innovation begins, it comes as a challenge to the dominant ideas and moral systems defined by the elites who possess the highest levels of symbolic capital.”
The key point here is that for true lasting “cultural” change to occur (even within an institution) those in the “center” and those “outside of the center” must be engaged in the conversation. It is the interaction of the margins and the center that creates the new possibilities.
I raise this observation as a way of encouraging hope in the face of our tendency toward cynicism and resistance. I believe we are in a moment when those in the “center” of the church, including our leaders in Louisville, our theologians and historians, our Moderator and Vice-Moderator, EPs and Synod Execs across the nation, and church leaders from across the theological spectrum are openly looking to engage the ideas and perspectives of those--especially those--who don’t consider themselves in the “center”.
So, as one who would never have thought that I would be in the center of a denomination-wide discussion about our future and structure, (that may be the subject of another post) I want to continually use these posts to invite conversation and input--especially from those who are outside of my direct sphere of contact.
Please help me see what you see on at your outpost on the frontier of the future. What kinds of structures will serve your mission?
What do you want our commission to hear? What do we need to see from your perspective?
What kinds of structures do you want us to consider so that we can move toward the future that you are entering ahead of us?
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