Vision

Last night I showed a DVD at my church called "Celebrating What's Right with the World." It's by Dewitt Jones, an award-winning photographer who has done a lot of work for National Geographic. It was made for corporate training sessions, but really has a lot of parallels to the church.

Because what he's talking about is vision and how we see things. He starts off saying that he used to think he had to see something to believe it, but now he knows that he has to believe before he can see it.

And I think that's one of the problems we've got in the church today. We've lost our vision and our imagination. All we see is decline and irrelevance. Ironically, though, being fixated on what's wrong prevents us from creatively addressing it because we lose the vision of what we should be.

"When vision is clear, then the passion and creativity are there as well." I really wonder in my own church and certainly my own denomination if the dearth of passion and creativity is connected to a loss of vision -- vision of what God can and wants to do through the church.

Sometimes it takes a voice from outside to tell us what we need to hear. And I'm well aware that "Celebrating What's Right With The World" is chock full of all kinds of motivational cliches that get thrown around in the business world.

But what he says is true. We have to believe it to see it. And the problem with many churches today is that they don't really believe in themselves -- in who they are, what they have to offer, and what God wants of them.

Council Meeting

Update on our new Council format. I took Chuck Olsen's suggestion and together with my ministerial colleague Jeff Maissan and our Council Chair Dan Plunkett, we structured our last agenda on the same format as Sunday worship. We started off with the Christ candle and prayer, reviewed the past (minutes, correspondence, etc.), did some biblical reflection on Acts 6: 1-7 (the Word) and then used the committee and team reports as the Offering. In my mind, it made a huge difference. Our finance team presented a draft budget with a huge projected shortfall. In the past, the entire meeting would have been taken over with not very productive chattering about what we could do. The presentation was surrounded by prayer and, even though everyone grasped the enormity of it, the usual degree of anxiety was absent, I felt, from the room. Something to build on.

Leadership

I never got around to reading that famous book "Generation to Generation" by Edwin Friedman until just now. Friedman was the rabbi and therapist who adapted family systems theory to congregational life. He was a real guru from the time the book came out around 1985 to his death in 1994. Churches like families are systems, he argued. You can never deal with one component of them in isolation from the rest of the system. As St. Paul said, what happens to one group or person in the Body affects everybody.

There's way too much in Generation to Generation to deal with in a few sentences. I'm still just starting to get a handle on the ins and outs of systems thinking. But one of Friedman's points is that we can rarely change a system by directly trying to alter the behavior of people directly. What leaders need to do is focus on their own self-differentiation -- their own ability to act within the system without being controlled by it -- to act out of a clear sense of self and not simply react to what's happening. When leaders do this in a nonanxious way, they automatically make the system change. Systems resist change, even when it's unhealthy to stay the way they are. Leadership is about enabling a system to get "unstuck" and move ahead.

It's made me wonder what large numbers of more or less non active affiliates means about a congregational system. One of the things I worry about in talking about affiliates is the impression that everyone's fine where they are, that the fact that a church's membership is two or three times bigger than its Sunday attendance is no big deal. I have never meant to imply that. My hope is that keeping connected to affiliates will open the door to their own rediscovery of the riches of Christ.

I'm doing a lot of soul-searching right now, though, about what it means to be a leader in this context. At this point, I haven't got much more to offer than that question.

Spiritual Leaders

Back from a week-long course on transitional ministry. One of the things I picked up that was most helpful is some ways of turning church boards or councils into communities of spiritual leaders. (That's the title of a book by CHarles M. Olsen, from the Alban Institute.) Churches share some characteristics in common with businesses, but they're fundamentally different and require different leadership models. I know our monthly Council meeting is often a big YAWN -- most of the time spent on rehashing stuff that has already happened, or, if you took two steps back and looked at it, isn't really all that important. Olsen describes a church that patterns their meeting agendas after their Sunday worship -- with time for thanksgiving and confession, story telling and biblical reflection. The "offering" comes when the committees place their reports on the table as an act of offering, and the follow-up is in the form of prayerful reflection. This doesn't have anything to do directly with affiliates, but if congregations were more intentional about leadership formation, I know it would have an impact on the way we appear to those on the outside, or on the margins.