Tod Bolsinger

The Mid Council Report: Experiments, Trust and The Adjacent Possible #PCUSA

This post comes directly from the Mid-Council Report (p.36-37).  In this section we discuss both the challenge and the incredible potential that we Presbyterians have--and that most of us don't even recognize--to truly see creative, innovative transformation of the church we love today and why we believe our recommendations are the first steps toward a brand new day. 

 A brief powerpoint The MCC Report Made Simple: Flat. Flexible. Faithful  and links to other resources are available here.

 

 In To Change the World, University of Virginia sociologist, James Davison Hunter wrote,

“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.” 

For true lasting 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.  And it is exactly that interaction—and the lively experiments that would come from it—that we recommend become the primary work of the church for the next season.

For a generation of Presbyterians who were reared on political, regulatory, and institutional approaches to problem solving, this recommendation will stretch us tremendously.  We will need to develop the capacity to learn from our rich diversity; to have hard conversations about competing values and often unspoken issues that keep us from health and growth; and mostly to trust each other enough to attempt innovative experiments—many of which will likely fail—in order to find successful adaptations that will take us into our future together. 

Historian and President Emeritus of Union Theological Seminary, Louis Weeks said, “No group of Christians has adaptation more in their DNA than Presbyterians.”  We concur.  A tradition that reconceived a communal function for what had been “bishops”; that adapted its polity from the European church-state models to a completely new context in a then new country; and rethought and reproduced its core values in numerous diverse contexts worldwide through its mission endeavors, has the capacity to revitalize itself for a post-Christendom and increasingly post-denominational context.

In his book on “the natural history of innovation,” Steven Johnson writes about the “adjacent possible.” The “adjacent possible” is the new innovation, the new discovery, that is only possible by first taking one step, or making one decision.  The only way to get from the phonograph to the iPod is through a series of steps.  Innovation does not come through giant leaps, but through one trial-and-error attempt at a time. That first step leads to more possibilities that could not otherwise happen, like how opening one door into a hallway offers more doors that could not be seen from the previous room.  The “adjacent possible” also always allows for the possibility of returning back through the one door we have passed through and trying a different option.

Our proposal invites the church to live into the “adjacent possible”. It invites us to be a people who together take wise, deliberate “provisional” steps; who experiment with ways of being together, who ‘try on’ relationships, who make temporary covenants without fully leaving behind the historical, geographical connections that have shaped our polity to date. 

Steven Johnson’s contention is that all innovation is “the story of a gradual but relentless probing” of what could come next given the pieces and parts at our disposal.  We advance, he writes, “by taking available resources and cobbling them together to create new uses.”  So, while the condition we find ourselves in is dire, our capacity for change has never been greater. As we will show you, not only is our situation urgently in need of all the wise creativity we can express, but the “available resources” available to us are significant, indeed. 

Questions to Consider

1. What theological and historical resources do we as Presbyterians have to draw on that will enable us to be more innovative today? 
2. Louis Weeks said, "“No group of Christians has adaptation more in their DNA than Presbyterians.”  What is your response to that?  What do you think hinders us from being more creative for the sake of the gospel today?
3. What do you think would happen in the church if we truly began to experiment with new ways of being church, new structures of supporting congregations, and new missional experiments in each of our local contexts?
4. In what ways could you envision the recommendations of this report becoming a spur for more trust-building, more connection and more interaction between the 'center' and those on the 'margins' in the church's life?

The Mid Council Report: Seeking a New Openness... #PCUSA

This post comes directly from the Mid-Council Report (p.33-36).  In this section we lay out the clear shared convictions that we find across the church spectrum--convictions that we believe offer us an opportunity to a new openness to experimentation and building trust by giving more authority, freedom and flexibility to presbyteries to reorganize for the health and mission of its congregations. 

 A brief powerpoint The MCC Report Made Simple: Flat. Flexible. Faithful  and links to other resources are available here.

 

 

In Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all creation, the Church seeks a new openness to God’s mission in the world…As it participates in God’s mission, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) seeks…a new openness to see both the possibilities and perils of its institutional forms in order to ensure the faithfulness and usefulness of these forms to God’s activity in the world (F-1.0404)

As we have listened to the church, we heard considerable yearning in every layer of the church’s life, from ordained officers to frustrated folk in the pews, to see these deeply shared biblical convictions flourish once again:

• To discover practices and ways of being church in a post-Christendom context.
• To engage in evangelism that sees people come to faith and be baptized as followers of Jesus Christ.
• To experience more relational and less regulatory ways of being connectional.
• To focus on mission to the world not denominational fights.
• To plant new congregations, to birth new worshipping communities.

We believe this is the voice of the Spirit in the church and we contend that if every structure of our church is committed to the health and vitality of local congregations as the locus of God’s mission in the world, then these convictions will become the practices that bring revitalization.

So instead of affirming structures that only protect us from the dysfunction of a few, we offer a proposal for the “maturing, motivated, and the missional”; that is, those who are willing to work together to draw upon the historic values of our past and faithfully reinterpret them to engage a far different world than any of our forbearers imagined. 

Maturing

By this we mean that we need structures for lifetime learners, for continually adapting disciples, for those who are restless to keep pressing on, growing, discerning, surrendering, and humbly staying open to the word of God and the voice of the Spirit. We need structures that give freedom to fail and encourage self and communal expression.  We need structures that will call us to live in mutual submission and growing trust as we grow in wisdom, understanding, faithfulness and fruitfulness.  We need structures that adapt to and accommodate those who are committed to building trust through transparency, accountability, and congruence of belief and life.  We need structures that allow for both clearly communicated convictions and the patience to respectfully be with others who we believe are in error.  We envision many more structures where the system honors, values, rewards, invests in and even adapts to those who are willing to take responsibility for shaping the healthy and the good; permission-giving structures that are built around shared agreements, covenants, values and convictions rather than around top-down enforced alignment. 

Motivated

Creative people in presbyteries all over the country are experimenting and innovating – aligning around shared missional passions and faith convictions – giving a fresh expression to their deepest beliefs. We are constitutionally called to be an elder-led, context specific, collaborative church. While we need regulations that enable us to fulfill our fiduciary responsibilities, provide accountability and insure that all decisions that are made are consistent with our theology and polity.  We also need room to try new things, to affirm risk-taking and give space for discernment.  We need structures that reward passion and motivation; that generously celebrate innovation; that respectfully collaborate in one creative leap of faith after another; that encourage big risks, big failures and the deep learning that comes from them

Missional 

Missional congregations are those where the central organizing principle is personal and communal participation in the mission of God in Jesus Christ to redeem and heal all of creation.  To be a missional congregation means that the discerned calling of a community of believers to serve in the world as Christ’s witness is the result of their gathering, worship and sending.  To be a missional PC(USA) means that we live in the conviction that every structure beyond the congregation exists so that congregations can fulfill their mission.

In today’s culture, many are weighed down by endless debates, issue politics, and suspicion of other’s motivation. The church is hindered from being missional within this environment. As a result, many congregations and councils are not thriving because they have turned inward, focusing on survival.  

If there is one clear missional conviction that is growing into a chorus of shared enthusiasm throughout many diverse contexts in the church, it is making a fundamental priority of new church development.  A church-wide initiative envisions 1001 new worshipping communities. We contend that number is way too low.  Can we imagine mid councils that would enable us to conceive birth, nurture and mature new generations of missional worshipping communities? How would seminaries and other entities charged with the development of leaders support this conviction? 

At the heart of adaptive change is the requirement to “give work back to the people most affected.” We believe that the constitutional changes we propose are an expression of the conviction that health and vitality, faithfulness and fidelity will only come about through more congregational engagement, more personal responsibility-taking, more passionate convictions, more freedom and creativity within safe, clear shared boundaries than ever before.  We must have structures that encourage adaptation toward health and faithfulness, toward those who are willing to keep maturing, who are motivated to take on the mantle of calling and personal responsibility by continually re-engaging and re-committing to each other, and who are from start to finish utterly committed to the missional principle of the local congregation as the primary locus for participating in the mission of Jesus Christ in every context.

To that end we offer these questions to encourage this larger conversation:

• What if presbyteries were formed and shaped by diverse and multi-dimensional relationships and missional convictions with the purpose of serving missional congregations?
• What would it look like, what would change, how would we reconfigure our presbytery life if the very essence of it was relational, communal, and covenantal?
• What if the only purpose of regulations (which are indeed necessary) was to safeguard those defining values?
• What would it look like if we had structures that encouraged each congregation to discern whatever configuration of presbytery would nurture its unique and shared missional calling as it lives its life in mutual submission to other congregations? 
• What would be the possibilities for presbyteries shaped around specific callings, including birthing new missional communities, the unique challenges of a particular context, or shared partnership in specific mission endeavors?
• What if we allowed change for our denomination to come NOT only from a centralized strategy of a GA Commission, but instead from every locale of the missional frontier, the congregations and presbyteries that are actively engaged in the mission of God in particular contexts?

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Mid-Council Commission Report: Beyond Quick Fixes #pcusa

This post comes directly from Mid-Council report (p. 32-33).  In the next few posts, I will build on Commissioner John Vest's good series that highlighted the dramatic changing cultural contexts that we face in the church today.  In this post, I want to highlight the rationale behind our key "adaptive shift": Giving presbyteries the authority and flexibility to recreate themselves in anyway necessary to serve the missional health of its congregations, including allowing them to grant permission for a congregation to join another presbytery within the larger geographic region or to create new presbyteries beyond traditional presbytery boundaries.

A brief powerpoint The MCC Report Made Simple: Flat. Flexible. Faithful  and links to other resources are available here.

 

The American Protestant church is in a wholesale struggle about what it means to be a denominated group of Christian believers…Doing traditional functions in new ways is likely inadequate. Eileen Lindner

Beyond the congregation, however, mainline Protestant institutions are in a state of deep crisis and desperately in need of renewal. After this journey, I am more convinced than ever that if American religious institutions are to regain their spiritual grounding, they will need to listen to and learn from the spiritual practices of local congregations.  Diana Butler Bass

As we have already demonstrated, we are living in a moment of rapid, intense, global and cultural change.  Every sector of public and private life–every institution, every organization and, for our purposes, every church–is facing a moment of intense transition. (Indeed, even our Commission was renamed in the middle of our work because the denomination adopted a new Form of Government.)  In this report, the Mid Council Commission of the 219^th General Assembly sought to answer one looming question that was at the heart of our very formation:

“How are governing bodies best organized to be responsive both to the Spirit of Christ and changing opportunities for discipleship?”

To answer this question, the Mid Council Commission offers two bold recommendations that will require the engagement and assent of the whole church and changes to our constitution.  This is not a quick fix.  Nor is it anything near a final or perfect answer.  But these recommendations alter the way we address our deepest challenges and engage the church in processes of learning and reinvention that could shape the church for decades to come. 

We believe that the changing cultural contexts of our day require deep adaptation as opposed to anxious striving for simple solutions. Our proposal creates the conditions for adaptive change at the mid council level–change that is consistent with our theological values and for the express purpose of revitalizing missional congregations in a post-Christendom world.

Scholars and practitioners of adaptive change call for an approach that has large scale, group learning as the core practice.  As disciples (literally, “learners”) of Jesus Christ, this is an expression of our most treasured identity.  Adaptive change requires creating organizational “safe holding environments” where experimentation and risk taking can take place.  As members of communities founded on the grace and forgiveness of God, this is familiar terrain. Adaptive change requires group transformation in order to address our greatest challenges. It addresses underlying and competing values, and especially “giving the work back to the people who are most affected” to experiment with new approaches for addressing their biggest challenges.

If we can recapture our own conviction that, as theologian Emil Brunner stated, the essence of the congregation is the fellowship of believers who are joined in love for the mission of God in its local context, then the essence of the presbytery is the covenant relationship of those congregations, (which Darrell Guder helpfully defines—and will become our working definition—as “Covenant Communities of Missional Congregations”). 

Further, if the essence of the presbytery IS the covenant relationship of the churches that are joined together for missional ends, then exploring and experimenting with the practices and possibilities that arise from this understanding will be at the heart of any faithful and lasting adaptation.

Questions to consider:

1. The focused goal of the Mid Council report recommendations is to “create the conditions for adaptive change at the mid council level” in order to “revitalize missional congregations in a post-Christendom world.” What is your response to this goal?
   
2. This report calls for long-term adaptive change rather than a quick fix approach.  What do you think hinders us from engaging in this type of experimentation, learning and communal transformation?
   
3. What conditions are necessary for the kind of experimentation, ‘bottom-up’ flexibility and shared authority that the report envisions?
   
4. If the essence of the presbytery is the ‘covenant relationship of its congregations’ then what do you think would best help us renew and strengthen those covenant relationships?

 

The Mid Council Report Made Simple: Flat. Flexible. Faithful #pcusa

Download Mcc-report-made-simple

For more quick links, see our MCC Blog site here.