Living the Divine Trinity is Living Ministry

A sermon preached at St. Thomas Houston after the flood on Trinity Sunday 2015.

Check out this episode!

The Oxymoronic Idea of Flattened Hierarchies and How It Might Empower Our Mission

Not Quite the Hierarchy I have In Mind.

Recently my friend the Rev. Merrill Wade sent me an article from fast company entitled “What Kind of Leadership Is Needed in Flat Hierarchies?” by Vivian Giang. Giang is a freelance writer. Previously, she launched the entrepreneurship vertical at PolicyMic and the careers vertical at Business Insider. The article is very helpful in offering us a picture of the kinds of changes we need to seriously consider at the highest levels of a bureaucratic church that wishes on the one hand to flatten its ministry in order to empower people and mission BUT at the same time does not want to give up our inherited hierarchy.

She points out that over the last 100 years organizations have moved from bureaucratic to distributed leadership.[i] The Episcopal Church in large measure has not progressed during this same period of time and I believe it is this difference between what people experience in the real work place coming into conflict with outdated models of hierarchy which is frustrating our mission and keeping our structures from change.

Giang introduces us to Deborah Ancona, a professor of management and organizational studies at MIT who talks about how companies in America circa 1920s were "super bureaucracies."[ii] Interesting to note that this was the last period of time in which our own Episcopal structures underwent any major change. We are in an organization that largely reflects the best organizational thinking of men in the 1920s. However, thinking about organizations did not stop with these super bureaucracies they evolved. According to Ancona “in the 1960s, people focused on interpersonal relationships and lots of discussions centered around trust and empathy. In the 1990s, it was all about organizations needing to undergo large-scale changes and vision. Finally, today’s workplace centers on what’s called variously eco-leadership, collaborative leadership, or distributed leadership.”[iii]

What is amazing is that shared leadership between laity and clergy has always been a hallmark of our Episcopal Church. While dioceses and congregations have continued to move along this organizational trajectory – although outpaced by the rest of the culture – our wider church structures have not. We have ground into our deep theology of the prayer book the understanding of a ministry of all the baptized. We value shared leadership. We raise the banner of interpersonal relationships, discourse centered around trust, we value vision, but we have yet to understand the very nature of a networked hierarchy. We remain imprisoned by a bureaucratic model that assigns roles by virtue of an out moded system.

Our mission is holy but our structure is not - it is always and only a means by which we seek to faithfully undertake God's mission.

Ancona in her book X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, and Succeed, as in who do you know outside and inside of your team. "It’s all about your network. If you understand the internal network in your company, you have a higher chance of moving ahead." Every organization has to have leaders and a hierarchy. At the same time a shared leadership and shared power can level the hierarchy and bring people closer into partnership.

You don’t have to get rid of shared relational power and organizational identity to go flat. At the same time clarification of roles, and centralizing convening powers (even if shared between executives) can create adaptive opportunities.

For this to happen the leaders at the highest levels have to look more at what they can accomplish together than spending time compete for power or not working together.

Even Google has hierarchy. Remember in 2007 when they announced a “Chief Culture Officer”?[iv] The work Stacy Sevides Sullivan says is to help the company keep their unique culture keeping the “the core values we had in the very beginning--a flat organization, a lack of hierarchy, a collaborative environment--to keep these as we continue to grow and spread them and filtrate them into our new offices around the world.”[v] They employed Sevides as part of the hierarchy to keep the structure flat. It sounds oxymoronic but it protected a key ingredient that is essential to Google.

The truth is that we must pay careful attention to our own religious history here a bit. Is this flat culture not the culture Jethro advises Moses to use in sharing his authority? It is the same culture as modeled by Jesus in the sending out of the seventy. The disciples and first apostles use a similar flat cultured organization – even if they would not have considered it so. Paul certainly offers us insight into flat culture communities of the first century. In my own book CHURCH I argue that we are seeing a new flat culture in terms of mission develop. Our small batch communities that are local, organic, and sustainable are examples of a mission with a flat culture.

Furthermore, sustaining big bureaucracies is costly and in an economic situation with shrinking mission we must chose carefully what it is we wish to fund.

I believe our work is always and everywhere to remind ourselves of the difference between church and God’s dream of the church - ecclesia. We are to make sure that we are clearly focused on God’s dream of the ecclesia so that as we make decisions we are doing so mindfully aware that our own attempts are always falling short of God’s dream. They are always rooted in our earthiness and limited by our human nature.

Now, the reason why this “flat” organization business is getting so much press is that Ancona gave a talk at MIT during last month’s Neuroscience for Leadership class. So lets take her comments apart a little and consider their meaning for Church and for our structures. I want to use Ancona and Giang’s work here to inspire our thinking. So I am keeping Giang’s headings from the article.The first goal of a flatter organization is to allow decisions to be made throughout the organization and to do this transparency has to grow. We are clearer about how decisions are made at every level and we have to empower people to freely make decisions and not to shame them if they go wrong or take initiative.[vi]

RADICALLY INCREASE TRANSPARENCY

There has to be a sharing, or the ability to share throughout the organization, what is really happening at the grass roots level. This is important as it is a bottom up sharing which helps the organization – if it is flat – to adapt to changing mission needs.[vii]

This is important to the Church because what has happened is that the bureaucratic hierarchy is so distant from the marketplace, culture, and local mission field it isn’t really able to help the organization with either transparency or clarity. Not only can it often times not reflect what is really taking place; it sets an agenda that is not helpful to the local mission organization. A supersize bureaucracy muddles the whole thing a bit I think in a complex web where it has, through an old system, tried to give people voice.

In a bureaucratic system that worked - the hierarchy from one organization talked to the hierarchy of another organization and strategy and change was brought about. Today change and mission is dependent upon the individuals in the organization. It is dependent upon motivating masses of people.

We say we believe in the ministry of the baptized we have to then flatten our organization, we need to get clear about what drives us, and we need to orient the whole organization around the furtherance of the mission imperative of the organization. I believe that is on the ground mission through evangelism and service. This is where the work of creating peaceful spaces where difference can dwell together and just communities can be built.

We talk a lot about the value and importance of a one on one relational mission strategy where all are empowered and we (at every level of the organization) at our worst spend a lot of time funding a bureaucracy that undermines our key goals and values. In Texas we are pondering how do we take our old model of Diocesan Council and do this very thing? How do we transform our diocesan staff into an organization that coaches, connects, and collaborates? How does the diocese shift so it is clear about its decision-making, flattens its hierarchy, and truly empowers (vs disempowers) the people?

This work has to be done at the highest levels of the organization too.

TEACH PEOPLE TO THINK WITH A STRATEGIC MINDSET 

The goal of the transparency piece is to help people throughout the organization take initiative for themselves. Sometimes what happens in bureaucracies is that we work so hard to get the power we forget that when we get the power we were supposed to give it away! Instead generation after generation of people climb the bureaucratic ladder and discover they are perpetuating the same system.

The goal in this new mission age has to be a transparency and shared leadership that empowers and gets out of the way of people who are doing the ministry. So here is the second big idea from Ancona’s work: You can’t expect people to innovate and create and move in a rapidly paced environment if they don’t understand how to move.”[viii] So it is that we must move as much money down (not up) the food chain. We have to keep resources at the grass roots level. This helps to financially flatten the organization. But along with financial resources we need to also move away from funding programs to funding people.

We have to fund people to go out and work with other people to help raise up leadership. We have to coach and collaborate and share in such a way that we empower people to be entrepreneurial. I am unclear, honestly, about how much of this is possible at the wider church model. More of this can be done locally at the diocesan level. My guess is that some of this could be done at the wider church level for those dioceses who need it. I would be for supporting that work. As I have said repeatedly Tom Bracket’s work from the Church Office is really good at this. I know there are others. This convening and sharing ministry though is very different than the ministry of program.

What we must realize is that we may be in a “bad-context command-and-control [environment].” Here what we do is we have a pedagogical model where the wider church model tells everyone how it is going to be and burdens the rest of the church with policy in order to control. We only need point to our ever-expanding canons to see what is taking place. Another area is the liturgy. Instead of empowering liturgical innovation we seek to get everything approved. I love liturgy and I think it can be a powerful tool in the toolbox of mission. I want my people to feel free to do liturgy and not have to follow policy on everything. I don’t mean to be picking on these two areas (liturgy and canonical – especially because I have friends who LOVE this work) I am just pointing out that we need to be lean in our policy and command control if we really want to empower people. I would offer that the religious leaders of Jesus’ day had over 613 laws that were to govern their faith and that one of the primary reason Jesus got into trouble was that he ran around breaking all their rules.

LOTS OF "CONNECTORS" NEED TO BE IN PLACE
If we are going to flatten the hierarchy and we are going to expect people to do the entrepreneurial work of mission then they will need access to resources.[ix] This is why networks are so very important to the emerging organization.

Acona says, "There needs to be easy connectivity because that innovation and that collaborative environment requires people doing what we call creative collisions."[x] What Clay Shirky has taught me is that human beings have a tremendous amount of power for their work if we count the resources of personal gifts and time. This is what he calls cognitive surplus. (You can watch his TED talk to better understand the concept.)

Here is the key concept I want you to understand. Organizations exist for a purpose and in order to accomplish this purpose it has a “management problem.”[xi] The management problem is how a hierarchy of employees managing other employees enforces the goals of the organization. In 1920 our current bureaucracy and managements system was AWESOME at doing this! (It was helped along by the fact that the denomination church was about to enter a unique zenith of American church attendance.) It came with a particular economic structure as all structures do, and an economic structure, and a system that is exclusionary. (This reality hurts us Episcopalians and we don’t like to face it. We want to believe that we are not exclusionary. But our councils that meet during the weekdays, our convention which takes 8 days, and the vast majority of our working groups are dependent upon people who can, in the case of GC, give up 8 days and can spend about $250 a day on room and board, plus the conference costs.)[xii]

The reality that Shirky points out is that you just can recruit everyone into a organization. You have to exclude and you end up with a professional class.[xiii] We in our church have multiple levels of professional classes of people including deputies, bishops, clergy, and lay people who are paid.

The whole reason for flattening the organization is to unlock the limiting power of the infrastructure. Yes, you do loose the power of control. But you gain something very important. You gain the reality that you shed institutional cost and increase adaptability. You create a cooperative system. [xiv]Ancona says “that this is where new ideas come from, because people are able to wander from one place to another, purposely meeting and speaking to people across the organization.”[xv]

Acona continues: "They need to connect and collide with people who have different ways of thinking, and [thus] mechanisms that enable that to happen. Having a culture that enables people to move freely from one part of the organization to another and having connectors in the organization who connect the people to one another are all part of creating that kind of organization."[xvi]

WE ARE A HIERARCHICAL CHURCH BUT A FLATTER ONE
We are a hierarchical church. Nothing in this offering changes the fact we are hierarchical. Yet we need to make changes in order to become a flatter organization; and I don't believe those changes undo the structure of the church in terms of its DNA or nature. The purpose of the church wide organization is to serve the mission of the local congregation. To do this the church wide organization must remember that its value is in sharing, connecting, supporting, and cheerleading the diocese and churches as they undertake the local mission. I do think that in order to hold up the mirror to the organization we must take seriously a few things.

1. We need to create a shared power of the presidents that enables us to close the gap of power struggle and increase collaboration and accountability with very real clarity in job descriptions and boundaries of power that draw them together and not pull them apart.

2. We need to decrease numbers of board members and hierarchical structures while protecting representation. These groups need to have clear roles of authority and accountability.

3. We need to increase participation and voices at levels of the organization through media and social connectivity.

4. We need to have staff with clear lines of authority that are not confused by complex bureaucracies and multiple reporting roles.

5. We need to decrease costs and time spent on distractions and increase efficiency in governance (decreasing time, money, and distractions from mission).

6. We need to increase ministries that build networks, share resources, support innovation, empower collaboration, and add flexibility. In areas where there are populations in need of the Episcopal Church we need to focus dollars and resources under the direction of local mission to build healthy communities. (This may mean also supporting ministries and diocese where there is a church but they do not have resources for support. We need to chose to do this work rather than pay for structure.)

7. We need to stop behaviors that continue to drive up costs through complicated management, structures, and administration.

8. We are running too many duplicate services. For example there are many duplicate services between the General Convention Office and the Church Office at 815. We need to work strategically to combine and bring down overhead. 

In some ways our smaller dioceses and I find smaller provinces or provinces with smaller structures actually do this better out of pure necessity. I think for larger structures that are not built with this particularly flattened out DNA or have been operating as long as we have there is a difficult stumbling block to be overcome. It makes change all the more difficult.


[i] Vivian Giang, “What Kind of Leadership Is Needed in Flat Hierarchies?” Fast Company, May 19, 2015.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Elinor Mills, Newsmaker: Meet Google's culture czar, April 27, 2007, http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023_3-6179897.html.
[vi] Giang.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Clay Shirky, TED Talk Summary, July 2008, http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration/transcript?language=en
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] Ibid.
[xv] Giang.
[xvi] Ibid.

Yes Mr. Cromwell, "I could be wrong." So Let Us Not Build Our Mighty Fortress

I think Oliver Cromwell wrote words to the synod of the Church of Scotland something to the affect of, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken." I am mindful of this reality and pondering it in my heart.

Yes Mr. Cromwell, "I could be wrong."

I could be wrong. I could be wrong about a lot of things. I wonder if the possibility of being wrong isn't actually a freeing one. This enables me to cast a vision, argue my case, lead and listen and know that God will work it out in the end. While offering visions of the future I could be wrong always frees me to ponder every aspect and consider adaptation.

Am I the only one who ponders being wrong?

When we consider that we could be wrong we open ourselves up to the possibility of what better or stronger might look like. We open ourselves up to the idea that the vision of different and difference might actually take hold of us and move us out of the mire we seem to stand in. 

The great unity of the Anglican tradition I have always felt (rightly or wrongly) is somehow that wonderful notion that I and we might be wrong. So, we should hold on to one another and listen to one another and imagine together (from our different perspectives) the future. 

The legacy we leave in the coming months as an Episcopal Church and the legacy we leave in the coming years as leaders will in large part be measured on our willingness to accept that we might be wrong and to open ourselves up to the other who is different than ourselves.

Organizations in crisis can spend a lot of time controlling outcomes by pointing at dissident voices and telling them they are wrong instead of pondering how the organization might be wrong. We can control tightly the voices in committees and at microphones. That is just how the system seems to work.

The task for those in power will be to treat those who are not in power with this amazing grace that even now as we take our place in our seats that - well - we might be wrong. 

Martin Luther wrote "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." I am hopeful that we won't buttress the walls of our fortress believing that it is God's. That would be the most dangerous thing. I am very interested in opening up the doors of discussion and giving cover to those who would like to see change.

I remember sitting as a member of the committee tasked with hearing the special resolutions on structure at the last General Convention. We sat on a dais and listened for over an hour to individuals give testimony about the future of God's church that they believed in. I remember hearing voice after voice call for change. I remember unanimous votes, unbelievable unanimous votes, call for change.

I don't think that vision of the possible future church is wrong. I believe in that future church of God's making. I believe in a structure than can support it. I am hopeful that people across the church will let their deputies and bishops know their vision of that future change is still alive and that our structures have to change. Yes the bishops and deputies vote their mind and are not representatives. But Let the voices be heard at convention and let them sound in the halls of the committees. Let the social media continue to light up with memorials and good ideas about strategies for our future. Together, by listening, by being generous to one another, by believing we each have the very best of God's mission at heart, by making room in our own heart (because we might be wrong) to hear one another we might begin to see the places where our buttresses are misplaced and move and then slowly we might together shift to be the church God is inviting us to be.

Why Should We Wait Until The Day After Tomorrow

The other day my wife and kids decided they would watch The Day After Tomorrow. This is a 2004 movie wherein Dennis Quaid as Jack Hall tries to convince the powers-that-be that rapid climate shifts and desalinization of the worlds oceans would bring about a cataclysm. Of course, because this is a disaster movie, Quaid is correct and a new Ice Age is sprung on the world. If you think about it the Ice Age, while accelerated, was predicted and its signs were clear once you look back making the movie all the more frustrating. This made me think of the interconnection of creation. The idea that we as a global community are in fact connected intimately with the climate, geography, and habitat. People continue to wait until "tomorrow" for change.

The task it seems to me is to make the changes in opportune moments as emerging energies synergize for positive steps forward.

It made me think that we truly live and minister in an ecosystem of interconnected pieces. Eschooltoday defines an ecosystem as: An ecosystem includes all of the living things (plants, animals and organisms) in a given area, interacting with each other, and also with their non-living environments (weather, earth, sun, soil, climate, atmosphere).

As we have approached the General Convention of the Episcopal Church (#GC78) there has been a lot of talk about how the structures of the church should change in order to create a more adaptive organization in the changing context of the world around us. The debate often ends up in an either or category. "We should change or we won't survive." vs. "Why would changing our governance change anything - really?" We have the same discussions about congregational development, judicatories/diocese, the vocations and ministries.

Eschooltoday offers this example of an ecosystem, "Consider a small puddle at the back of your home. In it, you may find all sorts of living things, from microorganisms, to insects and plants. These may depend on non-living things like water, sunlight, turbulence in the puddle, temperature, atmospheric pressure and even nutrients in the water for life."

The ponds live with a delicate balance. Snooping around on the internet I found this helpful description of the delicate balance in a pond.  This website we learn that "balance is the key word. In a balanced body of water the life in it is in harmony. Things come into being, live, reproduce and die at a rate that is for the most part in perfect proportion to the need. That is to say 'what lives and then dies is beneficial to the entire environment.' Each living organism is nourished and dependent on other living things contained in the same ecosystem."

When the balance is affected eutrophication can happen. "A pond that is out of balance or becoming unbalanced might have an over abundance of algae and weed growth. This happens because the available bacteria are not absorbing the decaying organic matter from previous growth at the natural cleansing rate... Eutrophication means over fed. The main reason for this is pollution. [When there is too much] nitrogen, phosphate, potassium, sodium, iron and calcium. All these elements greatly [stimulating] algae, aquatic plant and weed growth. In turn more and more plants die off, which in turn end up on the bottom as organic sludge. If the bacteria can not keep up and dissolve (decay) this heavy loading of organic matter the pond begins to deteriorate. Left unchecked, sooner or later the pond fills with dead plant life and becomes a swamp. Side note: Actually this also happens in the natural order of things. Natural pollution can cause a pond to become a swamp, then a bog and finally a meadow."

I say all of this because the pond is an ecosystem. The world is an ecosystem. Organizations have an ecosystem too. (I am not worried about the church dying because just like the pond the ecosystem doesn't change if complete eutrophication happens. The pond is simply transformed. So I know that the church's ecosystem will be transformed.)

We cannot change only General Convention or congregational development, or ministry. The reality is that as the ecosystem of our whole denomination as it lives within the ecosystem of our culture is shifting and needs to change. All of it will and must go through change - either adaptive or reactive change. Now I don't want to get overly metaphorical and start labeling the "decaying organic matter" that was previously "growth" in our system. I am just offering that we cannot believe that any one change will begin to shift our ecosystem. We cannot believe that any one area will go unchallenged by the shifting ecosystem. Moreover, as a system there has to be systemic change in order to keep everything in balance.

We can't just change the parts of the system we don't like in order to spare ourselves from the pain of change. In our system one house wants the other to change, one wants this or that presiding officer to change, one wants that group over there to change. It is all out of whack and it will take systemic change to give us the opportunity to regain our mission footing.

It is my opinion that we must seek to discover those places within the ecosystem where there is health and balance being restored already. We must create safe spaces for life and innovation. We must create new communities and new ponds. We must realize that we must hold onto the very important pieces of our DNA as a church that are necessary and jettison those things that are no longer helpful or that no longer serving the health of the mission. We must channel resources towards growth and mission and away from decay.

I don't believe that everything that exists within our church will itself somehow die or that all of it has to change. I do believe that we must be focused on systemic change. Tinkering here or there will not in the end bring about the change needed.

In order for us to move into this new era and navigate it, we will need to become comfortable with a measure of chaos and complexity and their effects across the church system . “What is being sought,” writes biologist Steven Rose, “is a biology that is more holistic and integrative, a science that is adult enough to rejoice in complexity.”[i] We need to remind ourselves that God is a God of chaos and disorder and is always playing and molding and making. It is true for the church that comes next. It will have to mimic and invite God into co-creative work. Yet, not unlike the faithful people of Israel who believed in the Creator God, we may find God’s hand is already creating in the world around us.

We must be willing to allow ourselves to become accustomed to volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, we must allow our “fear to be transformed into prudence, our pain into information, our mistakes into initiation, and our desire into undertaking.”[ii] We must also realize that we are going to have emotions of anger about these changes and that we need to capture and harness that energy into action and invest in good works. As the author of Hebrews writes: “Do not neglect to do good and share what you have for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.” (Hebrews 13.16)

It is not too late for The Episcopal Church to transform itself into the kind of vessel needed to navigate the waters of the new world of tomorrow. We are a church of tradition and innovation. We are a church of resources spread across seventeen countries. We are a church made up of every kind of human being; with every kind of gift; and with multiple resources. We are a church that has never been afraid of facing difficult tasks or asking hard questions.

The answer is that it is not too late. God has a mission and God’s mission has The Episcopal Church helping to undertake God’s reconciling work on earth. Our vision is clear and it is up to us to breach the gap between the vision God has of God’s reign and the reality we experience. It is our work to think intentionally about the shape of the once imagined and future church that even now lies before us.

Bob Johansen reminds future leaders that it is up to us to make the future.[iii] Leadership, organizational vision alignment, and governance all must shift from being a locked system to an open and usable organism. On the one hand, we must be permission-giving; on the other hand, we must take initiative. The Church exists to invite people to interact with the God who has repeatedly sought to enjoy the diversity of God’s creation. The Good News of Salvation, the love of God, and the unique witness of Christ are to be possessed by all God’s people and not held captive by the Church.

In the Diocese of Texas we are not simply asking questions about old structures and staffing we are changing the ecosystem. We are talking about change and adaptive leadership at every level from the attractional church, the sending church, the missional community and diocesan structures. We are seeking to discover new models of lay ministry unchained from the internal work of the church (altar, lectern, usher) to leading communities. What does it mean to have a diocese and be a bishop in a different kind of church that is adaptive to the ecosystem it is called to do mission within?

We are going through a 360 degree review of our canonical structures and our diocesan staff. We are moving from an old pedagogical model of telling people how to do things and running programs to a new model of coaching and connecting people to people and resources. We are putting as much money into congregations as possible. In fact we gave away more money this last year for congregational projects than we took in by directing our foundations and budget to community work. Why? Because we believe the church is an ecosystem and like an ecosystem the the whole thing must be moved into a sustainable, healthy, mission focused organization based upon the context in which we find ourselves.

The reality is that the ecosystem that we live and minister within is already changing our church organization. General Convention and the Episcopal Church structures are already changing. The ecosystem is changing because there are not enough dollars to support the work we want to do and so we are gradually cutting the budget bit by bit and changing the shape of our ministry and impact in the community reactively and based upon income. Slowly we are, for example, pulling dollars from our mission dioceses and ministry to the least of these in order to support structures. Our retired clergy in poorer diocese are going without benefits or enough to live on.

We are tasked with the responsibility of leading our church in proactive decision making that supports the mission. The questions we ask ourselves and the decisions we make are important at this General Convention. Will we be a Convention that supports the new and emerging forms of mission leaving ever more dollars in the diocese accounts to do local mission or will we continue to believe that what we do at convention is the highest and best use of our time, energy, and dollars?

We are writing the story of our time. We are writing, year by year - triennium by triennium, the story

of how our generation responded to the Gospel imperative before us. Each generation writes this narrative. It is our turn. Who we chose as our Presiding Bishop, who we chose as our executive council members, our board members, what legislation we pass, and how we chose to spend our money tells a story of our priorities. These choices matter. 

Our time and our actions tell the story of the pond and its health. It tells the story of a church ecosystem. The words that are written will reveal if we are an organization in eutrophication. Our actions will tell a story and reveal if we are waiting until the day after tomorrow.

I personally am invested in writing a different story than I believe we are writing today.

---

^[i]  Wheatley, New Science, 12. 

^[ii] Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (New York: Random House, 2012), 151.

^[iii] Johansen, Leaders Make the Future, 32.

A Response on Tradition and "Regressive Language"

I like this last paragraph of Jim Littrell's comment below a great deal! What a wonderful vision for God's invitation into community. He writes:

"What I long for is a community of wanderers and wonderers, held together by compassion and faith, joined in some kind of Godly excitement, made safe on the unknown journey by the touch of those with whom I share the journey, and summoned forward by the always transcendent call toward justice and mercy. Digging sewer sludge out of flooded basements, standing firm against massive weapons of cosmic destruction, putting lives on the line for human well being, freeing the oppressed and the prisoners, welcoming the billions of struggling poor into our fortunate plenty--all this defines and exemplifies my imagined community as it wanders. The rest is chaff; or if not, will find a way to serve."

I love this paragraph and want to work towards that idea of a divine community surely.

I offer a word on what is referred in the comments as "regressive language" - and here we may disagree. The Episcopal Church is a Christian Church and while we may wish to find new words and new ways of having conversation around the meaning of our tradition we are also at work dealing with sin int he world. Certainly Paul Tillich worked in this fashion throughout his career. Yet, we cannot hope to affect our communities if we are not willing to talk about our sin and brokenness in very real ways. How can we talk about compassion without forgiveness or redemption? If we are to dig sewer sludge out of flooded basements, stand firm against arsenals, and put our lives on the line for one another we must in my opinion do so through the lens of our tradition. "We should do this for the good of humanity" isn't getting us very far at this moment and hasn't for some time.

I am unabashedly a Christian and an Episcopalian. I would like to reclaim the words redemption, forgiveness, sin, confession, and reign from the past malignancies for I think they speak profoundly to our present condition as a church and as  a society. Our church and leaders have led with racism, sexism, classism, and many other isms. These were sins and in need of naming, confessing, redemption and forgiveness. Whenever I or the church have been remiss or in error we pray that God would correct it. I am certainly not without my faults. And, it is this working on and accepting my own brokenness that is at stake here. It is in the working on these defects that my character is built and I am molded. It is in working on this brokenness that organizations and society is formed. It is working on these things that enables creativity and innovation to flow. So honesty and a reclaiming of these words is important.

From where does the waging of war, the killing of innocents, the persecution of people, the injustice in society, the rich poor gap, the lack of health care, safety, and shelter come from if it is not deeply rooted in humanities ego centered self-absorption which we call sin? Are we to simply say that those things are not good so we should stop? As a Christian Church we speak of God's creation and desire and dream that a different reign be brought about - rather than the reign of man's inhumanity to man. We talk about Jesus' invitation to follow, forgive, heal, reconcile and redeem the world. This is our unabashed Episcopal and Christian witness.

Others may in fact have other words. These are our words. They have meaning for me and for many.

In point of fact when we use our particular vision and vocabulary as Christians, stand against the powers of this world which seek to corrupt and harm God's creatures and creation, and we do so hand in hand with others who use different words but stand for the same just society we are stronger.

Only by losing our particular revelations and words is our character lost, is our voice silenced in the halls of power.

I truly believe as Harvey Cox believes and writes in his musing on the secular city, “The failure of modern theology is that it continues to supply plausible answers to questions that fewer and fewer people are asking.” Not unlike the twentieth century, we are largely continuing to answer questions and problems from a period that no longer exists. It is our very theology that has birthed nihilism and moralistic therapeutic deism. Cox reminds us of our history and how we have gotten here:

"[Theology] 'projected' its own cramped situation into a statement about God and the [modern] world. Now not only was theology incompetent and uninterested in politics, science, technology and the rest, so was God.  These fields, the faithful were assured, were autonomous realms with their own built-in self-guiding mechanisms. If managed competently by experts skilled in such  matters, they would eventually serve the good of the commonwealth. One had only to be patient, work hard, not meddle in the things one knew nothing about, and - above all - not tear up paving stones. Having been squeezed into a corner by the modern world, theology made a virtue of necessity and wore its own reduced status into the being of the divine."

So it is that we wrote ourselves out of the conversation. The work of a more progressive non traditionally tied vocabulary has led to an abandonment of our tradition and loss of further ground which in effect has left us speechless or maybe even audience-less.

I think that Robert Bella puts it best using the words of Reinhold Neibuhr which I offer here from his essay entitled Habits of the Heart:

"Reinhold Neibuhr, I think, tries to get at that when he contrasts two dangers: secularism, on the one hand, which would simply admit the emptying out of any religious content of culture; and, on the other hand, religious triumphalism that would assert something like a Christian America as we've heard lately from certain quarters. He argues instead for what he calls a religious solution to the problem of religious diversity. 'This solution makes religious and cultural diversity,' Neibuhr writes, 'possible within the presuppositions of a free society, without destroying the religious depth of culture. The solution requires a very high form of religious commitment. It demands that each religion, or each version of a single faith, seek to proclaim its highest insights while yet preserving an humble and contrite recognition of the fact that all actual expressions of religious faith are subject to historical contingency and relativity. Such a recognition creates a spirit of tolerance and makes any religious or cultural movement hesitant to claim official validity for its form of religion or to demand an official monopoly for its cult.'"

I would agree whole heartedly with both Neibuhr and Bella's assertions. Bella continues:

"The point here is as communities, as churches with a strong sense of corporate identity, we enter into the public sphere and speak to our fellow citizens out of our faith, not in some triumphalist claim for special privilege, but also without renouncing the fact that we carry a tradition that is deep and that forms our lives. Neibuhr goes on to say,'Religious toleration through religiously inspired humility and charity, is always a difficult achievement. It requires that religious convictions be sincerely and devoutly held while yet the sinful and finite corruptions of these convictions be humbly acknowledged and the actual fruits of other faiths be generously estimated. Whenever the religious groups of a community are incapable of such humility and charity the national community will be forced to save its unity through either secularism or authoritarianism.'" [Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 134-35, 137-38]"

So yes, humbly I offer, that our tradition actually has something to say of value using the words which not only occur to us but to a great sweeping history of us. And that this particularity within the wider conversation is actually essential for the health and vitality of the public discourse.

I think that the structures that we continue to invest in need to change to free this conversation to happen more adeptly within our mission context.  We pray often:

Gracious Father, we pray for thy holy Catholic Church. Fill it with all truth, in all truth with all peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in any thing it is amiss, reform it. Where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in want, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of Jesus Christ thy Son our Savior. Amen.

This is a good prayer for us all, now and as we approach a discussion on the future structure and mission of the church.