Calling Out Anti-Semitic Labeling in Research

This piece is a departure for me and for this blog.

This is the first time I have used this blog to post a critique and a call for change by another organization.

But the seriousness of the offense in the work I address here is such that, for me at least (and here I speak ONLY for myself as a baptized Christian who is also an elder in The United Methodist Church), not in my official capacities in any way, I find a need to speak out more broadly.

So this disclaimer: I speak here for myself as a baptized United Methodist Christian. I do not speak on behalf of The United Methodist Church, or my employer, The General Board of Discipleship, or The Consultation on Common Texts, which I serve as Secretary.

The work I am addressing is this: http://www.barna.org/faith-spirituality/619-are-christians-more-like-jesus-or-more-like-the-pharisees

What I am sharing here is my letter in response to this article, sent to Barna Group through the Contact Us page of their website, which is here: http://www.barna.org/contact. I encourage you, if you share my concerns, or if you don't, to let them know your response to this article and research as well.

A bit of background about why I find this article and the labels it uses so terribly offensive and problematic.

First, I was raised as a Southern Baptist while I grew up in a neighborhood that was over 90% Jewish. The casual way in which this article and the research uses the term "Pharisaical" is something I was raised with as well. I don't know how typical it was of evangelicals then, but it was certainly "normal practice" in the tradition in which I was raised. So I used this rhetoric myself growing up, and I used it personally and repeatedly against my neighbors and classmates, many of whom were descendents of persons who had survived or fled the Holocausts in Europe and Russia. Looking back and knowing what I came to know later, I would now call my use of these terms the way I used them a participation in the continuing persecution of these Jewish people. I have repented. I seek to keep repenting.

Second, what I came to learn in college, where I was not surrounded by the anti-Semitic readings of my childhood and youth, was the importance of the work of the Pharisees and what they were actually up to for the most part. I also became aware that the theology of Jesus as revealed in the gospels drew heavily on Pharisee theology. This helped me see that the characterizations I had learned to apply to "all Pharisees" and indeed to the Jewish people more generally (including my neighbors and some of my closest friends) were without historical warrant. And they were not only historically false, but perversely so.

More recently, I have been the addressee of a petition on Change.org calling for the Consultation on Common Texts (of which I am Secretary) to consider changing the Revised Common Lectionary readings, particularly but not only for Good Friday, where John's passion is read, to avoid the profoundly negative stereotyping of "the Jews" (oi Judaioi in Greek) that historically has led to all kinds of violence against Jewish people throughout Christian history, and particularly for several centuries in the West on Good Friday.

We have discussed this petition now as the Consultation, and our conclusion (so far-- we're keeping the conversation alive among us) is the core issue is one of translation and interpretation of these scriptures-- something that each of our member churches has taken up to some degree in the past, but that all of us are urged and reminded to stay vigilant about and perhaps work more diligently on going forward.

This whole situation-- the petition, the folks who have signed it, spending time with the author of the petition (retired Episcopal priest, Susan Auchincloss) at our meeting in Toronto, and our ongoing conversations across the Consultation-- have renewed in me, personally, my baptismal commitment to "resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves," including the way our current resolution on Yom HaShoah, citing an earlier resolution on Jewish-Christian relations, calls United Methodists at every level to take seriously our "profound obligation to correct historical and theological teachings that have led to false and pejorative perceptions of Judaism and contributed to persecution and hatred of Jews."

I believe this article and the way this research is framed are chief examples of such "historical and theological teachings that lead to false and pejorative perceptions of Judaism."

Hence my letter to Barna (included below).

And hence this blog post.

May we all find ways to live with honesty, integrity and respect toward all other persons, and to resist and correct false witness against them as it occurs.

Peace in Christ,

Taylor



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Colleagues,

I am writing to "call you out" on the labeling used in your recent survey seeking to contrast "Christlike" with "Pharisaical" behavior.

http://www.barna.org/faith-spirituality/619-are-christians-more-like-jesus-or-more-like-the-pharisees

The use of the term Pharisaical or even "like the Pharisees" in your article and the research behind it is deeply offensive and historically problematic on at least two fronts.

First, it mischaracterizes the nature of the work of the Pharisees as a whole by taking specific confrontations Jesus is recorded to have had with SOME Pharisees in the gospels and applying them, at least implicitly, to this branch of first century Judaism as a whole. Jesus himself may have been a Pharisee, based on his theological commitments, many of which are shared with them (resurrection, angels, demons, Satan, hell, judgment, new creation, and apocalyptic eschatology). Overall, the historical evidence is the Pharisees were generally far more about the "spirit" of the law than "nailing down every detail," and it was actually the Pharisee version of Judaism that triumphed over the Sadducee version to become the basis of post-temple Judaism, and so of the Talmud and most forms of post-exilic Judaism in the world today.

This brings me to the second point. The rhetoric of anti-Pharisaism employed in your research and this article is in the same vein as the anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic rhetoric which has plagued Christian theology and practice for centuries, and allowed Christians not only to be complicit in but often approving of pogroms, segregation, persecution, exile, torture and genocide of the Jewish people.

It is time for such historically inaccurate and rhetorically dangerous use of such terms to stop. And it is up to Christians, including your organization, to repent where you have participated in such actions and put a stop to them.

I write as an ordained elder in The United Methodist Church, which has pledged in its Book of Resolutions to fulfill our "profound obligation to correct historical and theological teachings that have led to false and pejorative perceptions of Judaism and contributed to persecution and hatred of Jews."

I encourage you to retract this study and this article, and if you choose to re-issue it, to do so with labels that do not generalize about Jewish sects, but rather particularize what I think all of us to day-- Jews and Christians alike-- would agree are problematic behaviors that do not reflect the glory or the will of the Lord our God, who in both Hebrew and Christian Scriptures is everywhere acknowledged as "full of compassion and steadfast love."

Peace in Christ,

The Rev. Taylor W. Burton-Edwards
Elder, The United Methodist Church

Holy Saturday on Twitter #holysat

Companions,

Part of the work of this blog and its collaborators over the years has been to re-imagine Christian community, worship, discipling and mission in light of early Christianity, early Methodism and the realities of the contexts we now inhabit, taking all with great seriousness.

In that spirit, if you are not attending an IRL service of Holy Saturday where you are, I invite you to participate in one via Twitter, this coming Saturday at 10 AM EDT.


If you want to know more about what you'd be getting yourself into, or see what we'll actually do together on Twitter on Saturday morning, hop over to this post  on The United Methodist Worship Blog.

If you just want to join in, and are open to an online service with LOTS of silent spaces, simply follow us at the hashtag #holysat.

A blessed Holy Week to one and all.



Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards

75

Consider this a provocative proposal rather than an absolute bottom line.

Keep in mind that it's my own provocative proposal-- not officially endorsed by or intended to represent anybody else!

And consider it to apply primarily to "typical, established, single point US congregations" rather than to several newer models (such as we've often discussed here!) like the New Day Communities in Dallas and beyond, as well as a variety of neo-monastic and micro-church congregations whose social ties, discipling practices and missional focus, and therefore also institutional power, are substantially more potent per person than the "typical" congregation built still on largely late fourth century assumptions.

So here goes...


It takes 75 people who can be counted on to participate actively when called upon for a congregation to be "competent" in the four core competencies of congregations.

Why 75? Or, perhaps more to the point, how 75?

Two different approaches to organizational capacity land us right around that number.

One is based on the considerable sociological and anthropological work of Robin Dunbar and associates on human and primate brains and the relative size of various levels of social networks, including religious organizations (congregations).

The other looks at the core competencies themselves and asks both how many people and what level of social organization is needed to achieve each of them individually, as well as all four of them collectively within a single organization (in this case, a congregation).

Dunbar's work notes three levels of organization and organizational size compatible with "unit cohesion." Unit cohesion refers to a feeling of bonding between people in groups compatible with the work of the groups as groups. Dunbar's work is credited with establishing the number 150 as the size of "maximal unit cohesion"-- that is, the degree to which everyone in the group will know everyone else personally and be likely to respond toward one another altruistically to achieve a common goal. As it turns out, this has been a pretty stable maximum size for army companies, tribes, religious bodies, and even working units within large corporations throughout human history and across many human cultures. While all of these human organizations can and often do get larger than 150, 150 is the maximum size of any unit within them where people can actually have lasting face to face relationships at any meaningful level.

The next level down is sometimes referred to as the "team," a group of 25-50  who not only know each other face to face, but also associate and work together around common goals with some level of efficiency and proficiency. In early Methodist terms, this might equate to a Methodist Society.

Below that is a smaller group, 10-15, who are capable of basic human support for each other. This corresponds roughly to the early Methodist class meeting.

Finally, there is one smaller grouping still, the inner most circle of friends (not much more than 5) who can "share anything" and hold each other accountable. This would correspond to the early Methodist band, a group of 4-5 people of the same sex who "confessed their sins to each other, and prayed for each other, that they may be healed."

There are two basic rules of thumb for how these groupings work as part of or in relationship to larger groupings of the same organization. First, people tend to function according to the grouping in which they are presently participating or think of themselves as primarily participating at that time. So, for example, if I am with my tightest inner circle, I may share things, say things or do things I would never share, say or do with even the next level up (class meeting). Second, the same people will tend to function within the organization as a whole only to the capacity of the largest grouping of the organization to which they have direct access. This means, for example, if my organization is basically the size of a team, the way I function within that organization will reflect team-based loyalties rather than loyalties to a level of social organization beyond my individual team. 

Now, as we think about the four core competencies of congregations, what level of social organization seems necessary to ensure all four are accomplished competently?

One competency at a time

1. The Public Worship of God
Public events are just that, public. They are intended not simply for a very tightly bound "in-group" but to have enough social space to make newcomers feel at least "not excluded" from the outset. The "band" and the "class meeting" are both exclusive by design. The "tighter" (or smaller) the team (the level from 25-50), the more exclusive it is as well. So for worship to be public, it needs to start with a body of people at least on the larger end of the team, and perhaps somewhat larger than that so the group size is well beyond a mere "our team" mentality.

Going half again as large as the upper limit of team gets us reasonably beyond the the "let's all be our own group" mentality that 50 or less could easily reinforce. And that number is... 75.

2. Teaching Basic Christian Doctrine
While in theory this could be done one on one, or even be self-taught to a certain degree, if what is at stake were merely the capacity to know and repeat doctrinal formulations, the reality is that doctrine has little or no real power in people's lives (and therefore, in a very real sense, has NOT been taught or learned), unless and until it is also externally validated. Sociologist Peter Berger refers to this external validation process as an external "plausibility structure."  The poet T. H. Elliott referred to it as an "objective correlative." John Wesley was getting at this aspect of Christian doctrine when he spoke of there being no religion but social religion.

If we think of Jesus and his disciples, the basic teaching unit size was "the twelve." This is a close parallel to the class meeting of early Methodism. But one important reason his teaching could even "take hold" as it did in his disciples was because parallel basic doctrine was being taught in other levels in which both the earliest disciples and early Methodists participated-- the synagogue and the whole of Jewish culture, epitomized in the Temple, for the disciples, and both the Methodist Societies and the congregations of which Methodists were also a part (usually, though not always, parishes of the Church of England) for early Methodists. The Wesleys were strong advocates for not allowing the Methodists, organized in their class meetings, bands and societies, to become a separate church precisely because they saw how these other levels, particularly the ritual life and teaching of the congregations, were foundational to the teaching work of the class meetings and the societies. (See Reasons Against a Separation from the Church of England, 1758). 

This is partly why when the Methodists in North America did separate from the Church of England in 1784, John Wesley supplied them both liturgical resources for Sunday morning worship only slightly revised from the Book of Common Prayer and a set of Articles of Religion also only somewhat revised from the Church of England's own 39 Articles. If Methodists were not going to attend the Church of England and its parish worship any longer, they at least needed its ritual and the heart of its doctrinal affirmations as foundational for the worship and teaching they would continue to offer in what would now be their congregations, as well as what may continue (if not for long) as their societies, class meetings, and bands.

So, once again, as we think about the size of grouping needed to enable the teaching even of basic doctrine not only to be done, but actually to be sustained by something outside itself, we're probably looking at or above the upper limits of the team level. Maybe around 75?

3. Caring for Members and Participants:
Depending on the level of care needed, the basic caring unit could be one on one, or even handled through groups at the size of bands or class meetings. But what is envisioned here, and actually what early Christians apparently were putting in place even in the first century (see Acts 6!) was a process for ensuring a comprehensive "system of care" both for its members and for the people in the neighborhoods where they lived.

Systems of care require coordination, and the coordination needed across a system of diverse types of care needs to happen at a level beyond any of the individual caring units themselves. To use the analogy of an NFL football team, you have about 45 "suited" players in three distinct "sub-teams" (offense, defense, special teams) as "the team." But that team can't actually play football properly without its coaching and managerial staff (typically another 20-25 people on NFL teams) who coordinate how these three sub-teams play together as one.  So, 75?

4. Being a Reliable Institutional Player in the Local Community:
Because Christian congregations still function as essentially public institutions in most of the West and Global North, and increasingly in the Far East and Global South, there is a need for its "public facing services" to earn, keep and build trust in what they offer. Those who are truly competent in this area do more than offer their own existing services to the public, however. They also function as trusted partners with other groups and institutions in deploying their resources in other ways, as requested or negotiated, to build the common good. Institutionally reliable congregations have reputations as organizations that can get things done in and for the community, not simply as a collection of warm-hearted people with good intentions or effective ministry teams doing their own thing for their own reasons. 

Here, then, we're talking about a coordination of services and administration well beyond what just a team itself can do. Indeed, we are at least somewhere well on the way toward the maximal unit cohesion limit of 150. Maybe, at minimum, this might be 75.

Putting it all together

So far we've considered Dunbar's numbers regarding the organizational capacity of specific social grouping in relationship to the four core competencies of congregations in isolation from one another.

From that angle, we've seen we need at least a larger team-level size to address three of the four core competencies. But that also assumes the congregation is focusing just one one of these at a time. In reality, congregations deal with issues related to all four continuously, and in the case of providing systems of care and being a reliable institutional player in the local community, often simultaneously. 

The need for the organization to be attending to all four of these competencies well, in itself, requires a level of differentiation exceeding the capacity of most teams to accomplish. So it would seem that, indeed, given all of these considerations, 75 people who can be counted on to participate on some level in these four systems when requested may well be a "harder" minimum than may have been considered at first.

A more generous angle?
Now, the way of arriving at 75 I have so far suggested assumes that team size (and therefore the "ingrown-ness" of team culture) in a given cultural context tends not to subside substantially until around 50. What if, in a given context, team sizes were socially felt to be like teams closer to 20-25, and that after that number, rather than 50, they became much more socially open and flexible. Given this, might it be possible for a group as small as 35 highly committed people (which is to say, people who are active at least weekly, if not in some cases daily, in delivering 2 of the 4 competencies) to "cover" all four?

In some contexts, maybe. Even in the US, as little as 50 years ago in some places, possibly.
 
50 years ago in the US, "regular" attendance and participation in the life of a congregation generally meant being part of worship and likely one other activity at least weekly. A group of 35 people (and here I mean principally adults) who attended worship every week and were involved in addressing at least one of the other three competencies each week could, back then, have covered all bases.

But here's the rub in the US now. Today, "regular" worship attendance means not weekly, but once per month. That's not simply a change in how people decide what "regular" means. It's an actual change in the rates of participation of persons who are considered to be "members in good standing" by their respective congregations. And it crosses nearly all denominational lines. So while as few as 35 "members" or "regular attenders" may have been able to comprise a competent (if also highly "stretched") congregation in 1963, it is highly unlikely 35  people designated as "regular attenders" by today's measurements could pull that off. 

Now, to say "regular" worship attendance is now closer to once per month on average is not to say these persons are unavailable for participation in the life of the congregation in other ways if asked. Some may attend worship only once per month, but also work in a food pantry bi-weekly or visit nursing homes on the weekend once per month. In other words, instead of assuming the "average participant" in the congregation is actually available to help the congregation deliver on its four core competencies one time in four opportunities, let's assume it's a little closer to one time in three. And let's assume, still, the maximum team size in this congregational culture is closer to just under 25 than to 50.

You still need three times the team size, plus a few more, to deliver on all four competencies with competence. In other words, you need about 3 times 25, or... 75. 


And none of this is factoring in finances... at all. Just core competencies. Just those things congregations have been designed to do and that the wider culture still fundamentally expects them to do, and do well.

75

What implications does this admittedly fuzzy, but still sociologically, culturally, organizationally, and even somewhat historically and neurologically grounded math suggest about the "people-power" congregations, as congregations, need, not simply to be competent, but actually vital in their local contexts?

Discipling and Adaptive Leadership

Ronald Heifetz leading a seminar in Greece, 2010.
Photo by ΠΑΣΟΚ. Used by permission. CC BY-SA 2.0.

Get used to the picture of the man to the right. This is Ronald Heifetz, creator and chief promulgator of the "adaptive leadership" model that is entering our collective United Methodist vocabulary quickly and at an increasing pace.

One of the key questions Heifetz's model raises is whether a challenge any given organization is facing is "adaptive" or "technical." Technical challenges are problems an organization knows how to address given its current resources and practices. Adaptive challenges are those an organization may not yet have, or at least may not have discovered, the resources or even the approaches to address.

Perhaps Heifetz's core insight is that if an organization needs to make substantial changes in order to be viable or effective, its leadership must focus on identifying and moving toward addressing its adaptive challenges. Just doing more of the same, or "operating out of organizational equilibrium," is very unlikely to help the organization take the steps it must take in a changed and ever-changing environment.

This means a key role of the effective adaptive leader is to move and then keep the organization in a state of "productive disequilibrium," which is to say, just enough off its usual ways of doing things that it begins to be able to hear, see, and imagine accomplishing the core values of the organization but in very different ways.

And that, often, means listening to "people with the problem" and then looking to them to end up helping provide first the clues to what the bigger adaptive challenges may be. Such challenges identified, the adaptive leader makes sure its "the people with the problem" who remain actively involved in innovating ways to address it. Sometimes the innovations will fail. Those failures can be contributors both to "productive disequilibrium" and to the learning needed to move, over a longer period of time, toward new behaviors and new approaches that may better fit the challenges at hand.

There's a lot more to it than this brief outline. But perhaps this is enough to start talking about the implications of this for the stated mission of The United Methodist Church: to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

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Everything Jesus said and did in his public ministry is summarized by these two sentences recorded in Mark 1:15:  "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has drawn near. Repent, and believe in [this] good news."

The drawing near of the kingdom of God was and remains a terribly dis-equilibrilizing reality for the ways this world knows how to function. What Jesus taught his disciples and anyone who would listen, by word and deed, was what life under the new conditions of God's reign would look like and how it would work. And he also taught them, by his own example, to keep proclaiming the already-and-still-on-the-way kingdom wherever they went.

Part of this teaching, by word, deed and example, was to make it clear both how poorly equipped people were for what was coming, but at the same time how abundantly resourced they could be if they were attentive to where God was lavishing the richest resourcing. The poor were abundantly blessed, Jesus said. So were people who were in mourning. So were people clamoring for justice. So were the meek. So were those who sought to transform conflicts for the good of all rather than promote them for the good of a few. And so were those who were getting clobbered by the powers most threatened by God's kingdom precisely because they dared to believe in the kingdom and speak and live accordingly.

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So, was Jesus an adaptive leader? And were his disciples being schooled in the principles of adaptive leadership?

If an adaptive leader is one who gets it that the way things work now is unsustainable, and the techniques we use to manage our lives now won't do us much good in light of new realities, then, yes, of course.

But with one key difference.

And it's a big one.

Authority.

If I'm reading and understanding it correctly (and maybe I'm not!), in Heifetz's model, when you start to depend on authority of others, you're more likely in a stage of being on the way to the crisis that precipitates or reveals adaptive challenges than you are toward learning and developing the heart, vision and resources needed to address these challenges.

And in Heifetz's model, the success (and so the effective authority) of the adaptive leader is found in the leader's capacity to keep the organization in that tense/balanced/"détented" zone of productive disequilibrium rather than letting it revert into its former, unsustainable equilibria or  allowing it to "blow up" because the high degree of disequilibrium generates too much pressure in the overall system for it to continue to function well at all.

I think all of this is really wise advice for organizations of all sorts.I'm less than convinced it fits the nature of discipling.

With Jesus, his disciples, and the process of discipling itself, however, it's a very different ballgame. Jesus did not come to try to lead or organize the whole world to become effective at living into the new reality of God's kingdom in his lifetime. Instead, prophet-like, he came preaching that the new world had drawn near and so there were vastly new values and new rules to play by now-- that is, unless you wanted to find yourself crushed or obliterated by the new world rather than delivered by its very different kind of power.

While the adaptive leader continues to "earn stripes" by showing how well she or he can keep the organization in the "productive disequilibrium" zone, Jesus seemed constantly to push his disciples to deal with the new realities they were encountering each day,  day after day. We never see him backing off or trying to "control the temperature." He was intent on teaching his disciples what it takes to live in this kingdom whether they liked it, complained about it, totally missed the point, or what. And despite their many failures at it, he kept on driving them, kept on trusting them, kept on teaching them. (One hopes a good adaptive leader would do that, too). And, likewise, they continued to be his disciples, even, we can see, when most of them had fled after his arrest and certainly by the time of his execution.

Jesus didn't treat his disciples this way because he was trying to be an adaptive leader. He treated them this way, which is to say he loved them to the end, because he was completely committed to making sure they learned how to live in God's kingdom deep down in their bones not only for their own sake, but well enough that they could preach, teach and disciple others to do the same.

And his disciples didn't treat Jesus as they did-- continuing to stay with him despite truly ridiculous and dangerous circumstances of all sorts, far beyond any reasonable definition of zone of productive equilibrium-- because they judged him to be an effective adaptive leader. They stuck with him and generally stuck by him (with only one notable exception) because he called them to be his disciples, and they had said, "Yes."

Disciples submit to be mastered by their master until they become masters of the teaching and way of their master. The goal of the master with disciples is not to "lord it over" the disciples, but to love them well enough to show them truth as the master has come to understand, proclaim and embody it. The master's goal is so to invest his or her life in disciples so each of them knows, deep down, how and what it means for them, individually and collectively, to live in light of truth. Jesus said himself, there is no greater love than this.

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Discipling others in the way of Jesus well enough that they can actively participate in his transformation of the world and be delivered rather than entirely crushed in the process-- this, it seems to me, may be the adaptive challenge most directly connected to fulfilling our stated mission statement.

Helping people recognize signs of the kingdom of God as they are happening and to learn how to trust the Spirit and each other in the body of Christ well enough to respond and engage with the ongoing work of the kingdom faithfully where they are, these, it seems to me, remain the core tasks at the heart of discipling, then and now. Part of what this discipling to Jesus entails involves getting unshackled from sinful patterns that betray the kingdom's work and way. Some ties have to be let go. Some habits need to get unlearned. And others have to be learned and practiced until they become as natural as breathing.

While for organizations it may be essential to stay in the zone of productive disequilibrium, which means it may take a much longer time frame for some transformations to occur, in discipling, this may be often be a luxury that cannot be afforded. If the model of discipling we see in Jesus in the gospels, in early Christianity's catechumenate, and in the bands, class meetings and letters of the Wesleys in early Methodism are our guides for what discipling looks like, we will have to admit that some things in us may have to break, and others explode. We not only can't be apprehensive about that. We may have to expect that. It seems to come with the territory. 

Whether we are being discipled or discipling others in the way of Jesus (and often, of course, the two processes may be happening simultaneously!), it's Jesus himself we're learning to follow, the Spirit's promptings and power we're learning to rely on, and the Father's saving love that keeps wrestling us toward mercy.

And its with one another we do this.

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Some of the vocabulary of Heifetz may help United Methodist related organizations become more effective at some of what they do in support of our primary mission. I'm pretty confident it will help us defang some conflicts and prevent others that keep us from being as effective as we can in changing environments. And it may also encourage us to hear more diverse voices and so discern better patterns of doing things than our organizations have known before, or at least in more recent times.

But the primary mission remains discipling itself, does it not?

And that we do, if we do it at all, not because we are seeking to become lauded as effective adaptive leaders of organizations.

We disciple and are discipled in the way of Jesus because we've said Yes to the One who calls us by name and says, "Follow me."

One Solution: Implement the Strachan Theorem

by David Oliver Kueker
www.ambidextrouschurch.com

In the mid 1950s the Latin American Mission, worried about the failure of churches to grow, studied three diverse movements that were rapidly growing in their context: Communism, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Pentecostals. With the message and values of each group so different, the commonalities would reveal what was causing growth.

“Each had successfully mobilized their entire constituency in continuous outreach. Latin American Mission put their findings together in a concise statement, the so-called Strachan Theorem: the successful expansion of any movement is in direct proportion to its success in mobilizing and occupying its total membership in constant propagation of its beliefs.” (Source: Richard Peace, Small Group Evangelism – A Training Program for Reaching Out with the Gospel, 25.)

This reflects a significant paradigm shift - to add a completely new idea to the traditional understanding of institutional church growth and disciple making as a process that happens in a building by a program at an event shaped by a professional administered by a committee. We’ve attempted to do that since Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313, which proclaimed tolerance of all religions, including Christianity, throughout the Roman empire. I like to call this method is called “right hand disciple making.”

The completely new idea isn’t new – it’s to make disciples the way that Jesus did. It happens in a relationship during conversations shaped by the Holy Spirit conducted by a praying disciple maker. It results in generations of disciples making disciples making disciples, as Paul described in 2 Timothy 2:2. The desired end result of the Great Commission is not a disciple (Mt 28:19) or a better disciple (Mt 28:20), but disciple makers who obey the Great Commission themselves. I like to call this method is called “left hand disciple making.”

When I played basketball as a kid, I was so right handed that my left hand was useless to me as a player ... I had to learn how to play with both hands. (And I didn't succeed very well at all; it's still a struggle to use my left hand for anything.) When my default worldview for church is right handed, it's hard to remember that God might want to use my left hand as well.

The seed of the Strachen Theorem is sprouting in the United Methodist Church: ¶126 of the 2008 Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church: “Every layperson is called to carry out the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20); every layperson is called to be missional.” Most have not understood the potential of this statement for the future – it opens the door to a whole new world. Jesus stated the problem and the solution very plainly in Matthew 9:36-10:1 – there aren’t enough people trained and willing to work at the task. Disciple making is for every one of us!

 

"Nones" Rising: What Does It Mean for Us?

Companions,

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has issued its latest study on religious affiliation in the United States, and the findings are sobering. From 2007-2012, the percentage of people who claim no religious affiliation has risen by 30.7%, from 15% to 19.6% of the populations surveyed. That is a massive increase in non-affiliation in so short a period of time.

Meanwhile, from the same report, we find declines across the board in the rate of self-declared Christians (5% points loss), including, as hardest hit, predominantly white mainline Protestants (3% points loss) and white evangelical Protestants (2% points loss). Also on the losing end are Roman Catholics (1% loss). Mormons, African American Protestants, and Hispanic churches were generally stable, although when separated out by African American individuals, there was actually 2% point loss there as well (from 13% to 15% non-affiliated). The Orthodox were also stable, but their numbers are so low that they fall within the limits of the statistical error of the sample. Other religions (not other Christian-related denominations) together grew by 2% points.

But the fastest-growing group, by far, are those who claim no religious affiliation. And here the picture gets bleaker for religious groups in the US. 74% of the "Nones" had been raised with some religious affiliation, and a full 88% of the "Nones" are not "looking for a religion that would be right for" them. In other words, these aren't folks we "haven't reached yet." They are, by and large, folks we actually raised and who now don't care to have anything to do with us or any other religion.

This, in spite of all kinds of efforts during these past five years by many Christian denominations and movements to make their congregations healthier or more appealing in some way, or create a new worship service that targets this particular market niche, or to reposition their brand identity in the "religious marketplace." 

And it might be a bit disingenuous to blame the economy. After all, really bad economic times or other significant crises are generally associated with increases in religious affiliation, not religious disaffiliation!

What's Causing This?
The full report from Pew includes four "leading theories" for this rise in folks walking away, along with an assessment of whether each of them is validated and to what degree by the datasets behind this report. They include political backlash (primarily against the "Christian/religious right"), the increasing average age of (first) marriage, the "Bowling Alone" effect, and the predictable outcomes of the global process of secularization (full report, pages 29-32).

Of these, the Pew data seemed to support both political backlash and the "Bowling Alone" effect, but did not correlate well with either the increased age of marriage or global secularization models. On political backlash, the vast majority of "Nones" tend to lean "leftward" on social issues where religious organizations tend to lean "rightward." "Nones" also skew significantly more Democrat in voter registrations than most religious organizations do (most skewing Republican). On the "Bowling Alone" effect, only 28% of the Nones indicated it was highly important to them to be part of a group of people outside their immediate circle of friends with whom they shared common values or worked for some common good, compared with 49% of the overall US population.

So, not only did we raise the Nones, and not only do they not want to be part of a religious organization now, they actually don't value being part of any social organization all that much.

So, What Now?

I think we know what our tendencies have been. We see reports like this, and then we decide we need to "reposition ourselves" again so we're "reaching" these folks better than we had in the past.

That might be a reasonable strategy were in not for one thing. These folks are us, for the most part! They know us. They've left us. They have very little interest in coming back. 

I'm not saying we write them off. By no means.

But what if, instead of  focusing on reclaiming those we're losing-- rapidly-- what if we focus on making it less likely we lose them in the first place?
 
And what if the losses we're seeing now at an ever-escalating rate may be the direct result of failing to live and pass on a compelling vision of Christian discipleship worth living, and dying, for?

This hypothesis is generally supported by the findings of the National Study on Youth and Religion documented in Kenda Creasy Dean's book, Almost Christian. Dr. Dean writes: 

"The single most important thing the church can do to cultivate missional imagination in young people is to develop one as a church, reclaiming our call to follow Christ into the world as envoy's of God's self-giving love."

And for us to develop such a missional imagination in youth, we need to have adults alongside them with both a missional imagination and a lifetime of experience-- or at least some significant experience-- living as disciples on mission with Jesus.

Dr. Dean believes, and I agree, that the dropout we're experiencing, especially among young adults (34% "Nones" in this age cohort, says Pew) may be less about political rebellion or anti-social attitudes (like, why do I need a group that meets in real time when I have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc), and more about boredom-- that the 'moralistic therapeutic deism' we may have actually transmitted really isn't worth living or dying for, nor even the effort church actually takes. 

We don't make it worth the effort by reducing the effort, by the way, but rather by actually being the church, teaching  what the church teaches, and living the way of Jesus that has empowered saints and martyrs in every generation to live and to die under the reign of God, not the reins of "nice."

Saints and martyrs point the way. These are persons who knew (and know!) a faith worth living and dying for. Perhaps if we are also more in touch with their lives and stories-- from the early Church, from our own United Methodist heritages, and those who radiate the love and power of Jesus in our midst-- we may catch some of their compelling vision and pass it on among us and to those we are raising or may be blessed to raise.

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards

A Tale of Two Church Legislatures: Priming... for a Future with Hope

Photo by Alex Upshur. Used by permission
CC-BY-3.0.

Companions,

As some of you are aware, my wife, The Rev. Dr. Grace Burton-Edwards, is an Episcopal priest. She was also a deputy to the 77th General Convention of The Episcopal Church (a rough equivalent to General Conference for United Methodists). General Convention officially started July 5 and concluded July 12. Its Twitter hashtag, for those interested in following such things, is #GC77.

Having been deeply involved in our own General Conference (#gc2012) in April and May, I was interested to see how a different ecclesial body meeting in the same year might address some of the same issues we addressed (or, in some cases, didn't!) at our General Conference.

Indeed, the "big" issues for them were pretty similar. In fact, almost identical: Structure, declining membership in the US, budget cuts for their equivalent of "general agencies," and, of course, human sexuality.

But the feeling and spirit (not to mention the outcomes) of their process in Indianapolis were strikingly different than what many of us experienced in Tampa.

I've written before on this blog that I came away from General Conference hopeful, and that I witnessed the Holy Spirit do many amazing things there. I stand by all of that. I am hopeful for us. The Spirit did many amazing things there. And... this all happened in the midst of what many of would describe as the most negative, contentious, even at times hateful General Conference any of us can remember. Often some of us watching the events there unfold were asking ourselves, "Who are they going to go after next?"

By contrast, watching the TweetStream, occasionally the LiveStream, and, over the weekend, being present with folks and friends and family there-- my younger son was also on the floor as part of the Official Youth Presence-- the feeling of the General Convention was nothing like that of General Conference. The overall mood seemed generally serene, content, respectful, often fun, and actually hopeful through and through. There were no undercurrents of "if we don't change everything right now, and in this particular way, we're doomed." There were certainly disagreements about many things. But everyone was treated with dignity and respect, by everyone else.

And everywhere-- not just in committee or plenary sessions. One of the hotel staff told one of the delegates-- "You are the first group of Christians I haven't had to get mad at. Come back, anytime!"

And, unlike the General Conference, the General Convention made some rather dramatic changes, even from what had been been proposed coming into the convention.

There were about 60 competing items related to restructuring, and two or three major proposals coming in about just how to do that right now. (Sound familiar?). After hearings on all of these, the Structure Committee leaders discerned the issue was the body as a whole was not ready for the question yet. So they developed and had multiple hearings on a proposal for creating a brand new group of folks not invested in the current structures to start meeting, provide a mid-triennial report, get feedback across the whole church from that, and then bring a unified finalized proposal to the 2015 General Convention for further consideration, perfection and possible adoption. And that proposal passed, unanimously, in both houses ("Deputies," who are laity, priests and deacons, and "Bishops").

Yes. Unanimously.

It surprised even them.

But there it was.

Then there was the question-- many questions, actually-- about budget. Coming into the convention, it was unclear actually what the budget proposal was supposed to be. Several members of the body that had submitted the budget for consideration had indicated that the version that was actually published in the Blue Book (their equivalent of the ADCA) was not the budget they had actually approved. So even before the get-go, there were two versions going around.

Then the Presiding Bishop added a third-- a more "narrative" budget that was based on the Anglican Communion's "Five Marks of Mission." That budget, built with input from denominational staff and others, started from zero and asked "What kinds of things do we need to do if we're serious about engaging in these Five Marks across this church?" 

So now the Budget and Finance Committee had three different proposals coming in.

And after some hearings about this, that committee decided to scrap all three (in terms of actual numbers) but use the Five Marks framework to build a new budget there, on the spot. And it involved cutting funding for denominational staff by about 25%-- a process the denominational staff were directly consulted about and both agreed to and supported. And they approved it. Approval for this wasn't unanimous in both houses, but it was pretty resounding. I'm sure there were regrets in some corners on some issues (cuts in communications budgets got a particularly harsh review on Twitter!), but the overall feeling across the floor about all of this was pretty positive.

Oh, and they stated their intention to find a new location for their church headquarters rather than continue at Church Center in New York City. (They did not, as some have rumored, put up a "For Sale" sign at 815 2nd Ave. as an act of desperation to "raise money." The stated aim is to find a location that is "more economical and more accessible to a broader spectrum of Episcopalians," which the imposing New York offices decidedly are not!).

Proposals about human sexuality were discussed thoroughly in both houses, with people on all sides of the issues often remarking that even where they strongly disagreed with the proposals before them, they appreciated the fact that they were being given a serious and respectful hearing-- and intentionally so. These conversations truly did no harm and often seemed to do good. While The United Methodist Church will not likely reach similar conclusions on these issues, we might learn a thing or two about the process of holy conferencing about them from our Episcopal siblings in Christ.

We know what happened with us. Advocates for specific re-structure plans would not budge to consider alternatives, so the General Administration Committee brought no recommendations to the floor. PlanUMC got cobbled together and agreed to, somewhat unenthusiastically, by 60% of the delegates, and then was declared "constitutionally unsalvageable" by Judicial Council. What the budget would be depended on the outcome of the PlanUMC votes, but then when PlanUMC was "blown up" it, too, had to be re-cobbled and re-approved at the last minutes, literally. And we proved ourselves completely incapable of having any civil conversation about human sexuality at any level-- either in committee or in plenary-- and so put all such legislative items at the end of the calendar where they were doomed to be tabled. 

How could two similar bodies with fairly similar polity, two similar sets of issues before them, and in such a similar time frame, be so divergent in how they approached and resolved these issues?


The Priming Effect
While there are without doubt many possible factors in these differences, let me suggest that at least one of them may be what neuroscientists and social psychologists call "priming."

Look at the cup of coffee at the top of this post. Notice that it's piping hot, nice and warm. Imagine, if you will, what it would be like to be holding it in your hands, even for just a few seconds, on a somewhat chilly day. Got it?

Now, imagine that the person who gave it to you then asked you to look at some pictures of different people and have you tell them what you thought of them, just by looking at the photos.

Guess what. You may now be likely to think "warm thoughts" about these people in the photos. And on this chilly day, people who didn't get to hold that cup of hot coffee, for just a few second, or that may have been given a cold drink-- yep, they're likely to have much more neutral or negative thoughts about these folks.

Don't believe me? Listen to the study and the evidence on RadioLab. It's just one of literally thousands of studies that have duplicated pretty similar results.

What's going on? The brief sensory input "warm," perhaps combined with other unconscious non-verbal cues from the experimenter, "primes" or sets the baseline for what happens next.

And priming doesn't always have to be physical. It can be numerical. Numerical priming is often used by salespersons in negotiations on price for items whose value may not be concretely established. And they can even be attitudinal. If you start a conversation with a lot of negative imagery, for example, and then later in the conversation ask someone to evaluate photos of people, that will also lead to a greater likelihood that their evaluations of those photos will be negative as well. 

Possible Priming Effects before and during GC2012 and GC77
In my post "Beyond Death and Crisis Metaphors for the UMC... Please?" I noted how pervasively the rhetoric and language of death, decline and crisis had imbued media presentations, conversations and proposals for the future of the denomination both prior to and at the 2012 General Conference. The impression given by many of our leaders over a period of three years leading up to GC2012 and in major plenary presentations at GC itself was that this body had to act, right now, and both decisively and  dramatically, following a specific set of sweeping changes, including major changes to make our "ineffective" leaders "more accountable," else the denomination faced certain death in perhaps as little as two or three decades.

What might three years of conversation like that, reinforced by presentations on the scene, tend to prime? A sense of future with hope? A more passionate commitment to make disciples of Jesus to transform the world?

What had our Episcopal siblings been up to for the past several years? While this is not an exact quote of any one statement, I think it's a fair summary of what I've observed them saying and doing over the past several years. "We have real challenges to face, and real mission to engage. No one of us has all the answers. We are in this together. We are not afraid. God is leading us as we listen to and 'respect the dignity and freedom of every person' among us, as our baptismal covenant calls us to do." 

What might three years of conversation like that, reinforced by the daily celebration of the liturgy and the modeling guidance of the leadership on the floor, tend to prime? 

Priming a Different Conversation in the UMC

If it is a future with hope that we seek as United Methodists, perhaps part of what we need to arrive there may be much the same as our Jewish ancestors experienced when their prophet, Jeremiah, told them about God's intention to offer just that kind of future. They were in exile at the time, you may recall. There was not to be any quick end to that. Instead, accompanying that promise of a hopeful future was a call: To work together for the welfare of the cities where they now found themselves. The hopeful future was not to be the outcome of any "organizational fix" the people would come up with.  It was rather to be the bountiful harvest of the fruit of lives lived with love of God and every neighbor. It wasn't to be about an anxious pursuit of the right structure. It was to be about the patient, daily confidence that as they loved God and one another, including real enemies, God was opening new doors.

I believe we do have a hopeful future before us as The United Methodist Church. I also believe that if this past General Conference was a wake-up call to anything, it was a wake-up call for us to begin placing as our first priority finding every way we can to get to know one other, work together, and respect and love one another across our global church, even and especially where we disagree, all the while trusting that as we pursue being body of Christ with one another, not being afraid, God is opening many new doors for us, too.

What if, during this next quadrennium, we United Methodists and our leaders started many new conversations about where we see the kingdom of God already happening across our Church? What if we were to create more opportunities for the witness of lives being transformed by discipleship to Jesus across the many cultures and places we may occupy on all kinds of spectra to be heard, honored, and respected? What if we found as many ways possible to live into our baptismal vow to "confess Jesus Christ as our Savior, put our whole trust in his grace, and serve him as our Lord in union with the church which Christ has opened to people of all ages, nations and races?"

What if we put "being the church" far ahead of trying to "fix the church?"

What might a few years of conversations and relationship-building with God and neighbor like that begin to prime among us both here and now and as we anticipate our next General Conference in 2016?

The New Boson and Missional Methodism

Announcement from the CMS project of CERN, September 2010.
At that point, what the project could announce was greater
clarity about the sort of evidence that would be needed
to verify that they had discovered something like the Higgs boson as predicted by the
Standard Model of particle physics . The slide says it, in French:
"The presence or absence of an energy peak when 4 leptons pop
into existence" (Groups of 4 leptons are an observable decay product
of a Higgs-like boson). Photo by PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE, used by permission
under a Creative Commons LIcense.

Companions,

I freely admit I'm a science geek.

I set an alarm to wake me a little before 3 A.M. (EDT) on Wednesday, July 4 to watch the live webcast of the seminar and press release from CERN announcing the discovery of a new boson and the extensive work done to verify that discovery, in two parallel projects, to a significance of 5-sigma (i.e., the statistical certainty that what was discovered is a new boson and not something else is now at least at 99.99999%).

It's still not certain that what has been found is the Higgs boson exactly as the current Standard Model of particle physics predicts it. More tests will be done and much more data analyzed over the next several months to determine more of the properties of this newly discovered particle. Some of them may fit what the Standard Model predicts, and others may not. Results of this further collection and analysis of data may result in alterations in understanding what this boson is or in the Standard Model itself.

What is certain, a certainty ratified by every scientist who spoke at the seminar and the press conference, is that getting to this "preliminary result" was the outcome of much tireless work for years, and even more work with little sleep or downtime in the past two months, by thousands of persons, both employees at CERN and, especially, collaborators in the same and complementary fields worldwide. For now, there is reason to pause just a bit to celebrate what is the without question the most significant discovery in experimental particle physics in the past 50 years.

Let me suggest that what we have witnessed in this historic announcement is the outcome of disciples of physics collaborating worldwide to live out their discipleship and deliver on a common mission. They allowed no barriers of culture, language or time zone to get in their way. Each performed her or his part of the effort with efficiency and excellence, never stopping until the work was done. 

And their outcome-- the discovery of this new and apparently Higgs-like boson-- is manifest to the world.

So, what about us?

As Christians, we are disciples of Jesus charged with making the kingdom of God manifest to the world. As Wesleyan Christians, we further understand our role to be one of announcing and being living witnesses of God's desire to save us, and save us to the uttermost-- to bring us to nothing less than entire holiness, to perfection in love in this life. As United Methodists, we speak of making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

Where are there examples of ways we are clearly serious, on a global basis, about making the kingdom of God manifest to the world?

Where in our local areas are we announcing and being living witnesses of God's desire and capacity to bring persons to perfection in love in this life?

Where do we have the clearest focus on what it means to disciple people in the way of Jesus?

What specific indicators have we identified that can tell us-- and help the world to see, with great certainty-- that the world is being transformed through Christ and his people called church?

Where are we engaged in something like the level of committed collaboration we can see in the CERN projects?

Probably, all of us can come up with negative answers for these questions.

I'm asking the questions positively. Where are the bright spots we can build on? And then how might we go about connecting these bright spots into a global network through which the Light of the World may more brightly shine?



Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards

Beyond Death and Crisis Metaphors for the UMC... (please?)

"Death." Scupture at the Cathedral of Trier.
Photo JBuzbee. Used by permission. CC-BY-3.0

You hear it. I hear it. More than once, most likely, you or I may have said it: "The United Methodist Church is dying."



But if we're serious about actually delivering on our mission,  it's time for everyone to stop saying it. Okay?

Why?


1. Key Overall Numbers Do Not Bear It Out
 As a global church, we are not even declining. In fact, the UMC grew in professing members substantially, by 25% between 1999-2009. Part of this growth represents adding Ivory Coast to the UMC as of 2008, but that accounts for only about 30% of the total addition of over 2.4 million professing members during that decade.

Even  financially, while we're down a bit in overall giving, we have actually done better than might be expected given the severity of recent economic recessions.  (Source: 2011 State of the Church Report).

To be sure, our patterns of growth are financially unsustainable if we depend on current funding practices, where the US churches support well over 90% of all General Church ministries across the global church.

But that is in part a side effect of the amazing growth of our churches in the Global South in the past two decades. We simply have not yet adapted our funding models to deal with these dramatically different realities. If we want to continue to function as a global church, we are going to have to work at dramatic, adaptive changes in our funding models.

And keep in mind this isn't because the church is either declining or dying, but actually because it is growing! So the assumptions we use in developing new funding models will have to be based on the realities of dramatically growing mission contexts, both outside and inside the US. Approaching this task with a mindset based on any idea that "the UMC is dying" just won't give us the right set of tools or the Spirit-driven creativity to approach the situations we actually have.

2. It's a Category Mistake
Second, to speak of organizations as "dying" is very likely a category mistake. A category mistake is an error in thinking where one applies characteristics of one kind of thing to another kind of thing to which those characteristics do not apply all that well.

Living things and systems can and do die, all the time. Indeed, all living things and living systems exhibit inevitable life cycle patterns of birth, growth, decline and death.

But to apply the analogy or metaphor of "death" to human organizations turns out not to be all that accurate. Organizations do not have "inevitable life cycles." This is no small or incidental difference. It's actually an essential one. An organization with a sufficiently compelling mission, access to resources and ways of doing their work that are aligned with its mission and effective in using its resources to deliver on that mission in its context over time can continue and even  thrive for centuries with no "inevitable" period of decline, much less "death." Indeed, that's one of the reasons people create organizations-- to keep a mission they care about thriving long after they themselves have died.

Organizations, I might submit, then, do not "die." Relative to their capacity to deliver on their mission they can thrive, wane, drift, gain or lose influence,  or cease to function. But none of those is the same as dying, or even "living" for that matter. 

3. It Inhibits Adaptive Change
 
The term "dying" when applied to a human organization messes too much with our emotions in ways that don't do nearly enough to help us turn the organization in more prosperous directions.

We will tend to say an organization such as the UMC is dying with two different, though often intertwined, emotional motivations: sadness and fear.


 
Sadness keeps us stuck or delays us moving on
Some of us  may say "The UMC in the US is dying" to convey our feelings sadness and loss. We have lost people in the US. Fewer people attend our services or join our congregations as professing members now in the US than in the past. We are closing many congregations. Of course, we have also planted over 600 congregations here since 2008, a higher rate than at any time since the early 1920s.  And nearly half of these are non-white ethnic or multicultural new church starts! We used to have  great influence in the culture and politics of the US, but not any more. The proportions of children and younger, more affluent or upwardly mobile adults active in our congregations are shrinking while the older adult populations on limited incomes and facing more health challenges the longer they live are increasing. But we forget or possibly aren't aware that the average life expectancy in the US has climbed substantially (and will likely keep climbing!),   religiously active people live even longer,  birth rates have declined, and death rates are low and predicted to remain low and fairly stable through 2050.

If we say, "We are dying" and then we point to such perceptions of our situation (anecdotal or statistical) to back them up, we are claiming all of these situations as losses subject to our sadness. In fact, not all of them are "losses." Indeed, the "aging" of the UMC in the US puts us in grand position to reach the fastest growing age segment of the US population from now to 2050! But we frame even these opportunities as losses to support our sense of sadness over those things which can be seen as dramatic changes, if not also losses. And then we share the burden of our hearts with others around us, making a contagion of our sadness.

Let's be clear. Sadness in the culture of an organization does not motivate adaptive change. It is far easier for sadness to move toward depression, and depression to keep our minds stuck on what was lost and what used to be, and thereby priming us to try to restore a past state than to discern and make adaptive organizational changes that better fit current realities.  To be sure, remembering and feeling the pain of what is lost is essential when we grieve. But the growth stage of grief, that might lead toward adaptive change (finding new patterns of life in the changed circumstances of the losses incurred), happens long after we have processed the sadness.

And here's the deal. We don't actually have to process this much sadness, much less full-blown grief, if we don't frame the changes we are seeing in the UMC in the US in such powerfully grief-laden emotional frames as "death" or "dying" in the first place! And in fact, apart from the popularity of the "UMC is dying" meme, there is no sound reason to do so.


Fear and crisis thinking may get us "off the dime," but that's all
In more recent years, some more strident voices among us, anxious to get UMC leadership to do something dramatically different,  have underlined, boldfaced and put an exclamation point on the end of those three simple words, like this: "We are dying!" They point to similar stats, but with a very different emotional edge, one of alarm rather than grieving resignation. The next words are, "Do something! Do it now! Do this particular thing, right now, or we shall surely die!"


The purpose is to provoke "motivating fear," the sort of fear that would be powerful enough to get otherwise "rational" adults to jump 100 feet off of a burning oil platform at night into a dark, cold, oil-laden ocean strewn with bits of flaming debris.

Now, if the situation one faces is indeed a burning oil platform, for some persons, at least, that fear-inspired leap to what may be a burning, oil-soaked, watery grave may actually be the better alternative than a nearly certain fiery demise on the platform itself.

As we saw from the massive BP fire and spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010,  the primary issues that led to truly catastrophic outcomes weren't primarily "technical." And they weren't merely structural, either. They were cultural, and they pervaded the entire culture of both BP and its contractors. There were  breakdowns in disciplines of inspection, parts replacement and communication compounded by unclear lines of responsibility and authority for key business and safety processes. Issues of this sort and scope do more than lead to disasters. They're also incredibly costly to the businesses of every partner involved, and, by extension, to everyone who uses petroleum products.

And these are issues that require not simply a few "technical fixes" (like, "jump off of a platform if it is on fire!") but rather long term, systematic "adaptive changes."

The attempt to "be honest about our situation" by provoking a contagion of fear and panic may get some individuals (though rarely a whole organization!)  to "take the plunge" for an emergency technical fix in the face of what is perceived as a life-threatening crisis.

But it simply does not have the capacity to motivate individuals, much less organizations, toward the kind of long-term, culture-transforming, adaptive changes they must take not simply to avoid catastrophes but actually to thrive in their current and projectable future contexts.

Why? Because we know what fear does. Fear as a process in our brains actually shuts down parts of the visual cortex so we focus only on what is right in front of us. It also disables creative thinking and reasoning paths. It does this to enhance our capacity to take immediate action to evade an immediate threat. No time for over-thinking, or even much thinking, in such situations! When there are immediate threats, it's helpful to have a process hardwired that gets us to take immediate action to avoid immediate life-threatening or painful outcomes. Fear can be a gift in such situations.

But if it's long-term, systemic, adaptive change we want, something that pervades the entire culture of an organization to make it better able to deliver on its mission effectively through multiple means in changing environments, fear is not our friend. For adaptive change, Ron Heifetz et al are clear that we need all the creativity, multiple ways of viewing our environment and understanding our resources, and strategic, long-range forecasting capacities our brains are wired to muster -- the very capacities fear disables or impairs.

If Not Death or Crisis, Then What?

What if we took the idea of adaptive change seriously, and not merely as a slogan to try to push particular legislative or structural initiatives (actually, more or less varieties of technical fixes)?

And then what if we began allowing the kinds of thinking adaptive change demands to shape our rhetoric both about our current situations and our possible futures?

Heifetz and Laurie describe the essential role of what they call "the balcony view" to discern adaptive ways forward.


Adaptive work is required when our deeply held beliefs are challenged, when the values that made us successful become less relevant, and when legitimate yet competing perspectives emerge... Business leaders have to be able to view patterns as if they were on a balcony. It does them no good to be swept up in the field of action. Leaders have to see a context for change or create one. They should give employees a strong sense of the history of the enterprise and what’s good about its past, as well as an idea of the market forces at work today and the responsibility people must take in shaping the future.
 
And they must do all of this not by providing solutions, but by raising the right questions, they note.

So in that spirit, rather than arriving at frames for describing the solutions (such as "organizational death" or "crisis!"), what if we started asking some key questions?

And further, what if we take seriously the Six Principles for Adaptive Leadership Heifetz and Laurie developed, and so try to elicit a conversation that makes sure all voices, especially "those from below," are taken seriously?

This post is an attempt to begin to do just that.

So here are some questions that come to mind, directly from Heifetz and Laurie's requirements for adaptive work, as quoted above.

1. What deeply held beliefs about the place of The United Methodist Church in US cultures are being challenged by our current situations?

2. What values that used to make The UMC (and its predecessors) "relevant" in the US now seem to make it less relevant or even obsolete?

3. What legitimate and competing perspectives are emerging about the mission and operation of the various systems of The UMC in the US?

What questions come to mind for you?


Let's talk!


Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards