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In our last episode, I left you with this thought: “To bring about the change that God is calling us to here in the Presbytery of the Northern Plains (PNP) we must be willing to live in the anxiety of messiness, nurture that anxiety, and then frame that anxiety into an adaptive question. The role of those of us who are leaders in the Presbytery in this process will be to try to be appropriately helpful as YOU, the Presbytery, begin to work with us to identify the Presbytery’s adaptive question.”

Our next task, then, is to begin to understand the process that has to unfold so that we can begin to frame the most appropriate adaptive question for our Presbytery. This means, according to Gil Rendle, that we must shape our “worthy work” not on the basis of action but on learning. Rendle says that when we are problem solving, when we are focusing on action we can take, on what we can do, to address an issue, we are operating from reactive space. Operating from reactive space usually means we are so busy trying to figure out what to do that we have little time to learn anything new, to have any new ideas.

The space Rendle says we need to operate from is balcony space. Do you remember the first time you snuck up into a church balcony as a kid? Or sat in the balcony at a movie theater (Boy, I dated myself there, didn’t I?)? From a balcony you can see everything in front of you; you can visualize things from that perspective that you might not be able to visualize from a ground-floor perspective. Operating from balcony space allows us to see the big picture, to visualize all of the possibilities that lie before us, because we are seeing a panoramic view of those possibilities and not just a line-of-sight view.

But how do you describe what you are seeing from your balcony view to folks who have been conditioned, as I mentioned last month, to be problem solvers who operate from reactive space, from a line-of-sight perspective, from an action orientation? Rendle suggests that you must begin with a common language. Typically, we use one of two distinct languages in our interaction with one another – descriptive language, or evaluative language. Rendle says that descriptive language opens the door for dialogue and allows for creative conversation to continue over a period of time, during which learning takes place. Conversely, evaluative language cuts off conversation because as soon as an evaluation takes place, a judgment has been rendered and, at least at some level, a plan of action in response to the evaluation is already being formulated.

Rendle suggests a praxis known as communities of practice as a vehicle whereby this task of learning to use descriptive language can begin to take place. In a community of practice we practice talking to each other and learning from each other. The power of this type of conversation is found in the fact that it invites us to ask the questions, “Where are we going today? Where am I in this journey? What is our common ground for embarking on this journey? Where is our destination/desired outcome?”

The concept, “communities of practice,” emerges from the secular corporate world. Rendle took the concept and adapted it to the life of an ecclesiastical body, whether that body is a denomination, a presbytery, or a congregation. At the heart of a community of practice is the recognition that an ecclesiastical body must have a “critical building block of a knowledge-based [organization],” the place where ministry partners doing the real work of the church create, and then carry forward, the competencies that allow that part of the church to be effective in its mission.

According to John Seely Brown and Estee Solomon Gray, quoted in Creating A Learning Culture, by Marcia Conner, “The real genius of organizations is the informal, impromptu, often inspired ways that real people solve real problems in ways that formal processes can’t anticipate. When you are competing on knowledge, the name of the game is improvisation, not rote standardization (emphasis mine).”

Therefore, a community of practice has as its goal the engagement of a group in learning, and then beginning to answer questions such as:

            What is the role of the individual congregation?

            How do we hold each other – congregations and leaders of congregations, - accountable for the work God is calling us to do?

            According to Rendle, this conversation/learning process might look like the following:

1. Gather together 4-6 congregational leaders, and spend at least two hours discussing questions such as;

   • What is the appropriate outcome of my work as a church leader (Elder, Deacon, Pastor, committee member, etc.)?

   • What will be different in three years because of the work I do as a church leader?

   • What is the best use of my spiritual gifts, my mandated responsibilities, and my resources to make the desired difference?

   • What am I willing to try/risk in order to make a difference?

2. Be specific in answering the above questions – write them down, and share them with the other members of the community of practice.

3. Practice doing what you believe is necessary to bring about the needed change.

4. Covenant with each other to meet again in one month regarding how each of you is meeting the challenge of making a difference – test each other, witness to each other, internalize the challenge. Talk about how you have changed thus far because of the learning/work you are engaged in to make a difference.

5. Meet again in one month and ask each other:

   • What have we done?

   • What have we learned?

   • What do we now tell others?

The hope is that the desired outcome of each individual will also contain common threads that will inform other members of the community of practice.

At the Committee on Ministry (COM) retreat March 23-24, I suggested that the regional clusters that are being established as both relational and administrative arms of the Presbytery might be a good starting place for initiating communities of practice. My thought was that this model might be a good one for COM members and liaisons to engage in together, and later for the COM liaisons to engage in with particular leaders of the churches with which they are associated. COM as a whole might want to engage in this process by asking itself what would be appropriate outcomes of COM’s work.

Regardless of whether or not COM chooses to engage in communities of practice, though, I think it would be a good use of time for pastors and Sessions to begin this exercise. Sessions could begin by asking themselves such adaptive questions as, “Who is our neighbor? Whom is God calling us to serve? What is the desired outcome of our service to our neighbor?”

Edwards Deming suggests that an appropriate construct for wrestling with such questions might involve framing the conversation around input, throughput, and output. In other words, to ask questions such as:

·   What information and knowledge is being introduced into our conversations (input) in our communities of practice?

·   How is this information/knowledge being transformed, reshaped, recreated (throughput) as a result of our descriptive conversation about it?

·   What will the transformed/recreated/reshaped information/knowledge look like (output) and how will we use it in answering our adaptive questions?

The ultimate goal of the community of practice is to help people move to a readiness for deep change through conversation with each other, and through the belief that the presence of the Holy Spirit will be revealed in that conversation.

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