Church Innovations’ Partners Post

Is it my imagination or do people’s reactions these days tend to go to extremes? Do we label people as extremists too readily? Do we generalize too quickly? Why is this happening?

When there is pain and anxiety in the system, and especially a perceived lack of time, we often get reaction, reactionary-ism, even. I don’t know what systems you are a part of, but I am in several who are feeling pain and anxiety, and who seem to be under time pressure. So it is no wonder that I feel reactive and see that reactionary-ism embodied in some of the folks around me. What I’m interested in is this: who’s NOT being reactive? Who seems to be being PROACTIVE, thinking AHEAD OF THE CURVE? Finding that sort of person and learning from that sort of person is what I want to do.

Leadership is in large part about LEAD TIME.

As Christians, we have all the time in the world. Eternal life. Our Triune God created mountains and rivers and oceans and planets, for heaven’s sake.  There is time for everything. And each of us is endowed by that same Creator with certain particular gifts, to be used for the good of the neighbor.

Leadership is also about knowing your place; that is, knowing what gifts you have that are called for to free others into the relationship we share with God. If my gift is creative engineering, for example, how am I to listen, learn where that gift is called for, and use it for the benefit of others’ relationship with God?

Just thinking about that, I feel less anxious and reactive. I feel more purposeful. I am surely more alert and even, possibly, slightly less bothered by extremism.

I know one congregation that is experiencing painful division.  

Divisions can happen over decisions of a greater church body, over planning by a local church council, or even over disagreements between particular staff members, paid or unpaid.

This division is a painful one, such that the parties have a hard time even hearing one another.  The pain is real.  And yet, they keep coming together, using our model for spiritual discernment (Church Innovations’ Box and Triangle one that you know so well), and they keep listening to God and to one another, pushing through the pain.

And what has happened?

They have discovered that their local church’s mission is bigger than their differences, and they have pledged their energies toward that shared mission which hasn’t gone away just because they are divided.  They are willing to work with those they disagree deeply with in order to co-create with God a trustworthy world.

Do you know other stories like this one?

Peace. Pat

Money. Time. Effort. Caring.  They all cost us.  Plenty.

What would make us give any of them up for one another?

Why would we work to benefit somebody else?

OK, look at the Haiti efforts – quick and huge and dramatic.  People without jobs are donating time and money to people who’ve lost everything, people whom they’ll never ever meet to be thanked.

And why?

A.   It just seems like the right thing to do.

B.   I have compassion on people who’ve lost everything.

C.   If it were me, I’d hope folks would help.

D.   I feel guilty when I see the pictures.

E.   My team/group/coworkers started a fund.

F.    Other reasons

Now what about a tough decision that has to be made in your congregation – related to staffing, budget shortfalls, a quarrel among members, worship styles…

What would make us give up money, time, effort, caring to help find a way forward for our local church?

And what would make us give those things up so that the solution would work to benefit somebody else?

Peace. Pat

When do congregations learn new habits?

Congregations learn new habits only when they have to - just like the rest of us.

When our backs are to the wall

When we’re in danger

When we get bad news

When we want to be helpful but don’t know how

When we realize we’ve lost something important

YES? NO? What do you think?

Peace to your house.

Pat

I have been wondering how we learn our habits. 

Like — how did I learn how to sneak snacks and then think I didn’t have to be accountable for them?  It’s a very well-ingrained habit that I don’t seem likely to unlearn.

Kennon Callahan, the great church growth and effectiveness consultant, always says that you never unlearn a habit. You simply nee to acquire new habits, better ones.  He would ask, “Where did you learn to do that?” and then “How might you learn to do something else instead?”

Our congregations have habits, too, habits learned from individual leaders and even from families who have led in the past…habits like avoiding conflict rather than getting to the bottom of it, habits like keeping our faith personal and private and never speaking of it lest it unduly influence someone else - like our children and grandchildren (almost a direct quote from Thomas Jefferson’s grandson about what he knew of Jefferson’s religious “affections”). 

How do congregations learn their habits, and, of even greater interest to me, how do they acquire new ones? Better ones?

Tell me what you think!  Peace. Pat

It’s usually a bad idea to let a blog go silent for a week or more. I have done that, and I’m sorry.  Next Wednesday I will be back at home in the saddle and far more regular in my posting.  But today I am sitting in Drammen, Norway, waiting for a train, and I wanted to make this post.

 Yesterday I had the privilege of sitting with about 65 Norwegian pastors and their Deans, learning about the challenges of their ministry and what many of them long for. I must simply say that being permitted to dwell in the Word of God with them and be taught by them is an amazing part of my work. 

When we travel to a faraway place, this trip to make a presentation of our research methods and their theological grounding at an international conference, consult with a research project, and speak with some groups of pastors and lay leaders, we as visitors must be taken care of in many ways – housed, fed, and safely transported from one place to another. We are utterly dependent on our hosts’ hospitality. On this trip especially we have reasons to thank our good hosts for their generous support. 

So if I have been silent on the blog, it is mostly because I have been using my energy to be grateful for everything I am receiving during this trip.  I have a week to go, and God willing I will be back online soon.   Peace. Pat

Church Innovations has for 6 years co-sponsored an International Research Consortium that brings together social scientists, theologians, and church leaders.  A few of our partners in that consortium have invited Pat Keifert and me to give a paper at a conference in Århus, Denmark, and also do some consulting and presenting with local church leaders.

So off to Scandinavia we go in late January and early February.  Off to lands where mostly there still is a state church.  Off to the home country of so many of our colleagues and friends in the Midwest.

My intention is to continue making blog posts and even posting on my Facebook page as often as I can. So watch for those. I am really interested in your opinion, so post some replies, if you would.  I plan to share with you some stories of local congregations, their triumphs and their sorrows and their questions. Wouldn’t it be great to connect in meaningful ways across such distance and seeming difference in settings? 

I mean, what’s it like to offer worship services in a 900 year old building?  What happens when thieves break in and, instead of stealing sound equipment for the contemporary worship service, they make off with a 500 year old altar painting?  What is worship attendance like when everyone in the neighborhood of the local church is actually a member in that church since their infant baptism? How does the music compare with ours?  

Can’t wait!  Come with me!  I leave in a couple of days.

Peace. Pat

Hang in there with me. I have a question for anyone reading!

The 2010 Church Innovations Think Tank, co-sponsored this year by World Mission Initiative and Pittsburgh Seminary, where it will take place, will be entitled “How does the Missional Church look?”

Some people who read this blog may not know anything about the missional church movement. It is a large and complex set of small waves which, taken together, become like the movement of water in a giant bay or gulf. That makes it hard to sum up in a short phrase or two. Having made that disclaimer, you might think of the missional church movement as growing awareness and activity that leads local churches and the systems that support them toward mindfully being taken up into the very life and mission of the Triune God.

So how does the missional church look?  Three kinds of answers are possible:

1) it looks Ok or not OK; it seems to be doing well or not so well

2) it looks like a busy seaport where all different kinds of vessels are coming in from a trip, being outfitted for another, or being sent off with supplies and support for a big voyage

3) it looks carefully at its neighbors as well as its members for the gifts and relationships it needs to do and be what God has in mind for it to do as part of God’s life

This blog is written first for the congregations in the Bremer project, where churches study themselves and their neighborhoods in order to better live into God’s missional calling for them.  The project equips those congregations with a spiritual discernment conversation tool as well, so that they can discern what God might be calling them to be or do in their particular location, a calling that might cause disagreement or multiple possible directions to decide amongst.

So Bremer project congregations, or anyone else reading this blog, what do you know that you didn’t know last year about yourselves, your neighborhoods, and God’s call to you? What disagreements have arisen about your life and work, if any? How are you planning for a future looking to God’s life and mission for your direction?  If you can tell us that, we’ll know a few answers to the question “How does a missional church look?”

When we used to walk along the gulf in Thessaloniki, my Greek friends would assess the state of the water:  ripple-free was Dead, and churning was Alive. And Alive was good and abundant (shalom).

For our Bremer Grant congregation partners, who are each in their own ways encountering their communities and engaging in their challenges (Sudanese immigration, denominational affiliation, being supportive as they raise teenagers, steering a faithful course as they encounter new needs), peace, shalom, and abundance are especially valuable commodities.  This peace of God is not placid, free from waves of disagreement, but energetic from riding through the roiling sea.

In the US you can still find persons who have been life-long active members of local congregations.  If those life-long church goers are honest, they will tell you there has never actually been a time in the church without some controversy or another. In the intervals between big social controversies, the local church had its own disagreements over money or staff or direction. And between all of those conflicts, individual persons have had their own times of struggle and pain over life and death and their own faith walk.  It might be said, in fact, that congregations are the only persistent form of large-group voluntary social interaction where, at any given moment, war is about to break out somewhere with someone. 

The thing about Christian communities is that they are exactly the places to be during times of struggle. Individuals wrestling with life need to know they are cared for by others who also wrestle. Groups struggling with one another need to know that, as they disagree over particular issues, what holds them together is that they are all called to a place in God’s mission in the world, a mission bigger than any number of sides on any number of questions.  At Church Innovations it is really our privilege to walk with churches as they decide how to keep being trustworthy places where you can wrestle and still do the work God has called you to share, striving side by side. Such striving side by side means that while you may profoundly disagree on some key issues, you agree that your disagreeing matters less than your responding faithfully to God’s call to God’s mission.

Learning #2: Laughter and fun can beat Fear Itself, a big obstacle

Learning #3: I need a habit that reminds me of what I am seeking

Learning #4: When you feel as though you can’t find the peace, extend peace to someone else and watch what happens.

Learning #5: When I am interrupted in my awareness of peace, abundance, shalom, I will extend peace to the interrupter or to someone else

Well, dear readers, that is pretty much what I learned and what I continue to practice. I’m gifted at noticing the obstacles and interruptions, and those things often seem very large. But spending energy on them distracts me from what is usually present all along, God’s peace, abundance, and shalom.  We are blessed to have it with us, or near at hand, always. So near that, even when we feel beset, adrift, alone, and lacking, we can always extend that peace and abundance and shalom to someone else, perhaps even to the thing that seems to stand in our way at the moment.  When I don’t participate in this extending of the peace, I am crippled in my missional vocation. I am held back from being who I am called to be.

For two days (since my last posting) I have endeavored to extend the peace to interrupters. The effect is not always instant, but 8 times out of 8 that I can count, it has made me aware of the peace and where it is resting. And sometimes it is resting on me!  You may not think so, but that is breathtaking.

Think of the persons who have taught me on my quest – old classmates, high leaders of church bodies, Weight Watcher buddies, my colleagues, and family members I might not have expected to know much about peace.  As the author of Hebrews says, “We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.”  My confirmation pastor and my grandmothers are watching.  I want them to witness me participating in the peace of God.  I pray the same for all of you.

Peace to your house.  Pat