Thursday, September 19, 2019

A Dissipative Moment for the Church


Leadership for the moment is bound to context and culture. This is a bit of leadership thinking that I think remains relevant.

A Dissipative Moment
Some say the church is dying, but I am unconvinced. Rather, we are living and ministering in a dissipative moment. Ilya Prigogine, a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, helps me with this idea. He won recognition for his understanding of a new concept he called “dissipative structures.”[i] In nature there is a contradictory reality, and that is that disorder can be the source for new order. Margaret Wheatley explains: “Prigogine discovered that the dissipative activity of loss was necessary to create new order. Dissipation didn’t lead to the death of a system. It was part of the process by which the system let go of its present form so that it could reorganize a form better suited to the demands of its changed environment.”[ii]
Our problem is that we in the Church are formed by a perspective that is rooted in Western science. We believe that entropy is the rule and that if we do not constantly work harder and harder to keep pumping energy and resources into the system, then the system suffers from entropy—it loses steam and dies. Yet even now life is flourishing and new life is being born. Of course, you immediately can see that this is a biblical understanding, but as Episcopalians, sometimes it is easier to see it through the eyes of science.
Prigogine offers that in a dissipative organization those things that interrupt and interfere are essential to the health of the system. The system receives the communication and decides if it is to respond, change, or ignore it. Change happens either way. If the disruption grows so that the organization can’t ignore it, then transformation and rebirth are possible. Wheatley says, “Disorder can be a source of new order, and that growth appears from disequilibrium, not balance. The things we fear most in organizations—disruptions, confusion, and chaos—need not be interpreted as signs that we are about to be destroyed. Instead, these conditions are necessary to awaken creativity. . . . This is order through fluctuation.”[iii]
We are in a dissipative moment. We cannot ignore the flotsam and jetsam of the future that is even now washing upon the shores of the Episcopal Church. We can see partly what will only become clearer in time. We have for too long suffered the sin of trying to get it right, and the shame of coming up short. But in a dissipative era we must have a greater sense of process and participation and experimentation.[iv] If we are to move outside of our centralized structures and old exoskeletons, we must shed our skins and put on new ones. Jesus says, “No one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed” (Luke 5:33ff).
A new urban and suburban world is emerging. We will continue to see people move toward the cities of the future. What we are experiencing across the Episcopal Church is globally true. People are entering city life by the millions and will continue to do so for a long time to come. The shape of our cities and the multiple possibilities for Christian community are before us. We have an opportunity. The question for us as we stand in this dissipative moment is, will we shrink from the challenge or face it?
It is important for us to see clearly the changes that are already affecting our congregations and communities in order for us to see the future that is before us. It is time we step into the future and begin to plant these new communities. What will they look like and how will they make their way into the new missionary age? The Christian in the new millennium will bring new challenges and opportunities. For us to be successful, we will need leaders who are digital natives and who can act within this new world. We need different kinds of leaders, and we need to rethink ways of forming and training leaders. This particular task will require that we revisit how we raise different vocations within the community. It has been given to this generation to undertake the dissipative moment and to answer these questions. We are a living church with a vital and necessary mission in the world.



[i] Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2006), 20.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid., 21. Wheatley is getting her information from the landmark paper by Prigogine and Stengers, published in 1984.
[iv] Ibid., 4.

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