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I was going to write this column after
the Council concluded its retreat with Diana Barber, Associate Executive for
Leadership Development for the Synod of Lakes and Prairies, Feb. 26-27.
However, the little snow and ice storm we enjoyed the preceding weekend not
only caused the retreat to be postponed but also forced me to cancel my trip
to worship with and preach before the good folks up in Westhope. My
apologies, Friends. I look forward to rescheduling my time with you.
Therefore, since my two present options
are to shovel snow off my driveway, or write this column, I have discerned
that the Spirit is leading me to write the column.
Feb. 13-16 I attended a conversation with
other middle governing body leaders regarding the future of presbyteries and
synods within the Presbyterian Church (USA). This gathering, “Communion and
Conversation: Beginning a Dialogue on the Future of Middle Governing
Bodies,” was organized by the Task Force on the Vitality and Vision of
Middle Governing Bodies. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) General Assembly
Council formed the task force in response to a request from the Synod of the
Southwest and the presbyteries of Santa Fe and Sierra Blanca in September.
Organizers invited each middle governing body to send a representative. Out
of 173 presbyteries and 11 synods, about 170 (including several national
staff members) registered for the event.
Conference facilitator Gilbert R. Rendle
said during the past five years all the middle governing bodies with which
he has worked was going through a process of downsizing. “Two primary
motives have driven that: First, economic realities. How do we pare back to
be able to do what we want to do? … Second: What is our output? What does
our church need from us at the moment?”
Rendle is a senior consultant with the
Alban Institute and author of several books, including Leading Change
in the Congregation: Spiritual and Organizational Tools for Leaders
and Behavioral Covenants in Congregation: A Handbook for Honoring
Differences. A minister and former parish pastor in the United
Methodist Church, he has provided consulting for many churches and regional
governing bodies in his own denomination and others.
Mainline churches are all suffering
identity crises as their role in American society has changed over recent
years, outlined Rendle. “One of the plagues of the mainline tradition is
that it spent a main part of its life being a part of the establishment.
When you are part of the establishment culture, you don’t need to have an
identity. Our purpose was framed more by our culture than by our call.”
Obviously, we in the Presbytery of the
Northern Plains (PNP) are very familiar with the implications of economic
realities for our ministry. We have minimal staff and a minimal budget.
Consequently, we are limited in the types of ministry we can engage in with
the churches of the Presbytery. Rendle suggests that smaller Presbyteries
(communicants-wise, not geography-wise) like PNP are much like the smallest
congregations in our denomination. We have an important niche in the culture
and communities in which we live and move and have our being, but we face
the daunting challenge of very limited resources with which to do ministry.
We have to make difficult choices: “We can’t resource all churches equally.
Which churches are we best able to resource? Which churches can make the
needed generational transition to a new ministry reality? Which churches
will not be able to make this generational transition and will ultimately
close (or, as I say, ‘Be loved into heaven’)?”
“What is the function/purpose of PNP
today? Ten years from now? What should we be doing to resource and serve
churches? What do our churches need? What is the desired, Spirit-driven
outcome of the Presbytery’s work?”
When I invited Diana Barber to lead our
Council retreat, these were some of the questions I wanted her to help us
answer, to which she offered a strained, incredulous laugh in response. But
these are exactly the questions that we need to be asking as a Presbytery if
we are going to be able to discern the future God has already prepared for
us.
Typically, what we Presbyterians do when
faced with these types of challenges is to tinker with our organizational
structure; realign staff, realign money, office space, etc. But what we are
really doing in that type of work is realigning our resources without
first identifying the goals and outcomes we desire those
resources to produce. As leaders of the Presbytery, we must ask ourselves,
“What is the most appropriate response (Rendle’s term) to these
challenges?”
The difficulty, Rendle says, is that most
of us who are Presbytery leaders have been trained to be problem solvers. We
have certain tools with which to solve problems, he says, and “when all you
have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” There are limits to the
efficacy of problem solving, Rendle says, and, in fact, too much reliance on
problem solving can exacerbate the challenges a Presbytery faces instead of
meeting and overcoming those challenges.
One of the exacerbations problem solving
brings about is that leadership is met with resistance. Now, Rendle says,
resistance should not be automatically seen as opposition to
leadership (a statement that made my little ears perk up). Resistance, he
said, is natural and normal, is part of an organizational system, and, in
fact, is evidence of a healthy system. The conundrum is that when leaders
meet with resistance to proposed change we tend to frame the resistance as
the next problem. The temptation leadership must resist, Rendle says,
is to view every resistance to change as a problem to be solved.
“Well, riddle me that!” I said. “Okay,
Brother Rendle, what should leaders do when facing this conundrum?”
His response was that leaders must
examine how systems such as Presbyteries respond to deep change. Some
assumptions that we can make about the response of the Presbytery to deep
change include:
1. When a
Presbytery doesn’t know what to do, it does what it knows.
2. When a
Presbytery doesn’t know what went wrong, it wants to know who
went wrong.
3. Change
within a Presbytery should always occur at the place where there is the
greatest leverage, i.e., a congregation, because a single congregation
changing can force the entire Presbytery to change. Rendle said that change
in any one part of the Presbytery will result in the rest of the Presbytery
changing to accommodate the change in the one part.
4. To bring
about deep change, Presbytery leaders must be willing to “exceed the
authority the Presbytery is willing to give them.” No Presbytery ever calls
a leader to make it uncomfortable,” Rendle says, but no leader can help
bring about change in a Presbytery without causing discomfort. This is the
point at which Presbytery leaders are most vulnerable, Rendle says, because
when people become uncomfortable with what is happening within the
organizational system they go outside the organizational system to sabotage
the leader.
5. Deep
change within the Presbytery requires adaptive work, Rendle says.
Presbytery leaders must avoid the temptation to resort to problem solving,
or technical, work, because we are afraid of adapting.
Presbyteries, Rendle says, are being
confronted with “an adaptive moment.” The challenge before Presbytery
leaders is to find the “adaptive question” that most clearly addresses the
change issues facing the Presbytery, and then to help the Presbytery answer
this question.
Rendle suggests that there are three
foundational adaptive questions that Presbyteries need to ask themselves:
1. Who are
we, now, in the present?
2. What has
God called us to do, here and now?
3. Who is
our neighbor?
Presbyteries can only deal with one
adaptive question at a time, Rendle says, and the addressing of adaptive
questions is inherently messy. Deep change is messy. “Tidiness does not
produce change,” he said. “Tidiness is the enemy of change.”
To bring about the change that God is
calling us to here in 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.
To be continued…
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