Escape from the Institution & the Journey Toward. Becoming Something New. Transitions

Transcription

1 Escape from the Institution & the Journey Toward Becoming Something New Transitions See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up, do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland. ISAIAH 43:19 Greetings from your sisters and brothers in the Synod of the Northeast. The Synod of the Northeast is a regional community of comprised of 22 presbyteries and 1,100 congregations spanning from New Jersey and New York and throughout the New England. I am grateful for this opportunity to share what we learned through a multiyear journey we came to call the New Way Forward. This afternoon I will be sharing the process that guided our journey, what we learned and what we consider our best practices. The actual results or product of our work is available on our website ( as well as our original documents. When I arrived at the 2009 annual meeting of the Synod of the Northeast (PCUSA), I had been warned that there would be two overtures to disband the Synod as a council of the Church and that its significant wealth would be spread across its 22 presbyteries. Fool for Christ that I am, I accepted the 3-year contract to serve as the Transitional Leader of the Synod just the same. If those overtures were defeated, it would be my responsibility to help this organization figure out what it would do next. Well I m still here and we are still on a journey figuring out what God has in mind for us. Figuring out isn t really the right word though. It s more like listening for what God has in mind for us. Listening through the gifts of prayer, Biblical reflection and community. This has been a process that takes the work of the Holy Spirit and the human spirit in deeply serious ways. Early in the journey we came to understand ourselves as a Community of the Spirit. Most of the time it feels like we are building the airplane while it s in the air the difference is that we now wouldn t have it any other way and that s because we have made the foundational shift from thinking like an institution to something else. Our process of transformation included three steps. Ø Cultivation Ø Articulation Ø Accountability 1

2 We spent two years cultivating, listening, and learning with clear feedback loops. Along the way we would articulate what we thought were hearing and continually make corrections and refinements. The goal was to get to a point that when we finally made formal recommendations, the Synod membership would say things like; Didn t we already decide to do that? Much later in the process we would create clear statements with as deep a consensus as possible within the stakeholder groups. This resulted in new organizational values and missional purpose that we could hold one another accountable to as we moved forward. CULTIVATION The journey began, as I indicated, by listening. I gathered a group of about ten people together and presented them to the Synod Council. The first response from the Council was why weren t more of them included in the group. My response was twofold; 1. A healthy organization maintains a clear distinction and boundaries between a learning group and a governing group. The team I d gathered, which we called the Transitions Working Group, would be a learning group who would bring their learnings back to the governing group, the Synod Council, and only the governing group could act on those learnings and recommendations. 2. Who you place at the table effects the outcome. The Council was majority white and over 55 sound familiar? If we were going to become anything new we needed to have new hearts and minds at the core of the process. It s also important to spend significant time building the team. Building includes establishing strong group norms and expectations, a common spiritual life of prayer and Biblical reflection and identifying individual gifts and temperaments. This work needs to be frontloaded and the leader will occasionally be pressed as to why the group is not just digging into the work. Confession and taking responsibility for our past was the next step. Most mid-councils have at least some part of their past that was perceived by its membership as self-serving and or oppressive. Power was top down. Presbyteries often felts as if they were satellites of Synods, and Congregations often felt as if they were franchises of presbyteries. This is one of the first signs or symptoms of the dysfunctional nature of an institutional structure. Ours had been fraught with abuses of power resulting in fear and resentment and preserved by financial rewards for those who agreed to support the system in place. Now I want to be clear here that this was first and foremost a systemic problem. Personal abuses of power and authority came as a result of participating in the system. Grant programs were established that alleviated some of the growing fear and resentment but only for a short while. Organizational relationships based upon financial rewards inevitably wears thin. The money runs out, someone on the outside of the system begins to rebel etc. In our case I witnessed firsthand grant review committees that were too large, for one thing, and whose members sat with their arms folded across their chests when applicants entered the room, reflecting the hierarchical system they represented. I spent the first year making clear statements of repentance on the part of the Synod and committing to bring this brokenness before the Synod Council. By year two we were shutting off the tap on most of the grant programs that had been in place, in order to create a new way of sharing resources. 2

3 Listening was an essential tool in our process. As the members of the Transitions Working Group made their way around the Synod, we invited our members to join us on the journey to discover if God was calling us to something and if so what that might look like. The primary exercise was simple. We looked for any group within the Synod community open to conversation especially those who may have been marginalized in the past. We invited people to reflect upon what things of the current Synod we would like to take along with us, what things would we like to leave behind and what new things we would need. There was also an option for not going on the journey at all. We went to new places to listen. As we made our way through this listening process would ask if there were other groups that we should reach out to. Once you open the door and people feel you have really listened, it s amazing how they will refer you on to others. We skewed the process just a bit by seeking out what later became identified as marginalized voices. We met with racial ethnic caucus members but then did research to find who was missing from those tables. We created events solely for young leaders. We took notes lots of notes. And we wrote as much as possible down and we created a website with a blog so that those who were rightly cynical would see their comments in the mix. We tested our findings on a quarterly basis not only with the Synod Council but with as many other stakeholders as possible. We adjusted recommendations based upon what we heard. We Wordled. ( In this seemingly silly little process we took all our notes and dumped them in a computer-generated filter. It simply enlarges the words that appear most frequently. Much to our surprise the word that came out large and clear was COMMUNITY. 3

4 Discovering community as a core value; as I said, was a bit of a surprise and a bit of a no-brainer. But it reframed our work. We had expected the emphasis would be something like justice or diversity or perhaps church growth. The refocus on community significantly redirected our journey to what became our pursuit of the Beloved Community. Identification with this aspiration and vision became almost sacred. Team members worried if we dare even use such a term for something like a midcouncil. We continue to hold that term with great care and humility. This was a watershed moment in our journey and leads to what I really want to talk with you about this afternoon. We discovered that the people who comprise our Synod wanted to gather and share company together they just didn t want business meetings. We had uncovered the beginning of a transformational arc. There was something calling us out of old institutional structures toward something else something life-giving something that redrawing boundaries or restructuring midcouncils wouldn t possibly achieve. A new way needed to be explored. I use the word something because naming it too soon or at all runs us into the danger of just creating a new institution. I watch mid-councils do this all the time and for years. We usually call this restructuring, but restructuring is an institutional pattern. These restructuring projects used to last maybe five years and then we were back at it restructuring again and again. These restructurings of mid-councils often don t even last a year before people become dissatisfied. The first symptom of this dissatisfaction is anxiety and the fear of scarcity. In the Synod of the Northeast there is an incredible amount of wealth, and yet even those presbyteries and congregations will cry poor, complaining about the salary of their presbytery executive or their pastor. We have come to see this as a symptom of a dysfunctional institutional structure rather than a money problem. Worn out institutional structures become a barrier to passionate mission and ministry. Its reflected in many of our building structures. I recall a sad story from years back when I served another Synod in another denomination when the pastor came to me quite rattled. He was in his early sixties, and he had just returned from vacation when a delegation of his board came to him with the news that the sanctuary would need a new slate roof and their fundraising efforts had failed to raise even close to the $900,000 needed, and so they would have to cut costs, including his salary. Three months later he was unemployed, and two years later the church closed but hey it was dry inside! They had believed what Walter Brueggemann identified as Pharaoh s myth of scarcity rather than God promise of abundance. Let s go back to that arc I was talking about. 4

5 At one end we have institution and the other we have something else. On the upward side of the arc we have the work of cultivation: looking back, reflection, confession, prayer, biblical discernment and deep listening. At the top of the arc we have articulation. This is the transparent and open communication that isn t afraid to make changes or corrections. The articulation becomes the vision but only after it is tested vigorously in community. We learned that transformation must have a very high view of the work of the Holy Spirit. I would call our attention to the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit You know the story Paul and Barnabas have disturbed the system with their discovery that circumcision isn t necessary for everybody. By bringing the Gospel outside of the walls of the institution, they had been forced to consider what was the heart of the Gospel and what was really just institutional preservation. In this story, the council worked hard to listen, and to be in silence, and then to pray. In the process, the Holy Spirit did her work and broke open a part of what was already becoming institutionalized so that mission could occur so that the teachings of Jesus might take root in a new place and a new way. In our own process, we discovered that making space for the work of the Holy Spirit time in silence, prayer, and Biblical reflection provided the space for open and honest conversation. We ultimately adopted a consensus model of decision making, which allowed for more open and free flowing conversation. At the end, our decisions were almost always unanimous. But that takes time and patience it requires careful listening and graceful space for disagreement. Rigid, formalized decision-making practices most often end up protecting the institution by limiting debate, striving toward the minimum agreement needed to win a majority vote, and privileging those familiar enough with the process to enact sometimes-obscure legislative maneuvers to tilt the process in their favor. The something new, or something else as I have called it so far, is what happens as we move down the other side of that arc toward the Beloved Community as a Missional Community. The arc moving from the aspirational peak, the vision, the new missional purpose, is the work of becoming a community of the Spirit. 5

6 For leaders in the journey, it s essential to maintain the ability to look toward the horizon from the top of that arc. It s not about pushing forward the leader s own particular vision, but the stewardship of the community s vison. Coming down off the high of this new vision will be fraught with pushback and fear and anxiety. Some call this servant leadership and it is but it s more than that it s a leadership that holds the vision created within the Community of the Spirit and keeps that vision before the community, holding them accountable to stay on the journey even when the forces of Pharaoh, or the finance committee, or wherever else the pushback might come. Leaders can do this with confidence because it s not their work it s the work of the community and of the Spirit. Now let s look at symptoms of Institution and signs of the Beloved/Missional Community. Symptoms of Institution: Scarcity mindset Focus on buildings Fixation on rules Anxiety over membership as loss of revenue Clergy as elites with institutional power Leadership dependent upon power Insider language Fear and anxiety about the future Polarized and segmented organizational structures Decision making by majority vote Signs of Beloved Community Abundance mindset Buildings are seen as resources Governance is understood as agreed upon ways to live together Membership is celebrated as welcoming a person into community Leadership is welcomed in a variety of ways Leaders are servants of the community New vocabulary Passion and enthusiasm bring courage, creativity and vison Communal based structures with clear values and purpose Decision making by consensus 6