We're off (Uniting Church in South Australia) on "leadership" - again!

Why are we in the SA Synod of the Uniting Church off on this "leadership thing" again?
There are leadership books galore wherever you go. There are literally dozens of training courses and seminars to attend, and reams of newsprint devoted to this skill, this vague concept, this largely mythological entity known as leadership.

In part, I believe, because we all recognize, deep down, that we cannot control our organizations, our working lives even our congregations. It’s this lack of real control that makes us so desperate to find something or someone that we just hope might improve our ability to influence events by growing the church, developing worship and all the rest. We want to "get a handle on things and events"; we think we ought to be in control—or we believe someone should be—and so we place that duty on someone and hope it might be true.

There’s also the human tendency to want a scapegoat when things go wrong. Whom can I blame? If someone is to be blamed, that person must have been in control—or ought to have been, if they were not. Look at how regularly CEOs in businesses or football coaches are removed when things go wrong, even though they probably had not a lot to do with it.

Our mythology of the hero-leader, working 70 hour weeks with his or her hands on all the levers of the organizational/church machine, is so much fanciful nonsense. Trying to achieve such a picture is killing people—quite literally. It’s all for nothing too. Why are some many of our ministers "down", "feeling low" with respect to the future of the congregation they serve? Instead of "pop psychology" how about giving leaders/ministers serious opportunities for fun, and proper "time off"?

So what should leaders do?

Truly successful leaders don't even try to control events. They recognize that the only way to direct a large group of people is through some over-arching idea. That’s what they supply: a vision to believe in; a set of ideas to guide the thousands of individual decisions being made every day without any direct input from them.

“Without a vision, the people perish.” These biblical words sum it up. What we should be doing is seeking out leaders with imagination: people who can think and produce fresh visions for others to follow. Naturally, such people will need time and space to do their thinking. You can’t expect anyone to come up with strong strategic viewpoints if their days are filled with pointless meetings and administrative trivia. Nor if they’re exhausted by crippling work schedules and church "stuff".

We need to eschew the myth of leader as “man of action”. Thought without action has long been the stock-in-trade of ivory tower management, but action without thought—one of the hallmarks of the current idea of macho managers—is far worse. Plenty of people can take action, but it requires someone (or some team) with real wisdom and insight to guide that action wisely.

Let’s drop the mythology, forget the unreal versions of corporate leadership, and start allowing people of wisdom and understanding space to think, speak and have fun!.

the open office: Stones

the open office: Stones:
"Stones

If we could all
just stop throwing stones,
and stoop, knees bent
and write in the dust,

we'd see that the dust
was once stone -
grand, and hard, and proud, and tough -
now ground and dissolved
in grace and tears.

So... how much better
to be a grain of dirt
on that kind prophet’s hands
than a stone
in the cold, accusing Temple
of the pure."

Seeking our church demographic ...

The following was a comment on the blog "Out of Ur" dealing with the notion of "well curve" (need to look up not room for full description here) that has to do with demographics in today's western society & thus belonging in the church & the kind of "members"/demographic we seek to attract.

This may not be the place to say it, but I'm going to say it anyway. I'm not sure this post is about demographics, but just in case it is - I'm the demographic that no one wants in their church. No one ever says, "we want God to send us needy people," or "we want God to send us a lot of middle-aged divorced women with children who don't have much to contribute financially and may occasionally require some of our resources." I can't tell you how many congregational meetings I've sat through (in more than one church) while the leaders talk about the demographics they're looking for - upper middle class young couples in their 30s with two children. It's hard for me to hold my head up as I slink out of the meeting before someone, realizing that I'm not their preferred demographic, escorts me out. ... ... I think churches worry a lot too much about this kind of thing, to their detriment.

For reflection

“We can only live changes: we cannot think our way to humanity. Every one of us, every group, must become the model of that which we desire to create.” — Leo Tolstoy

“The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief.” — T. S. Eliot

.. a new breed of readers is sought ..

From the blog of Cheryl Lawrie

"I would like to make a suggestion. There is no doubt that more oppressed voices should and must be heard… But unless there is a whole new breed of readers to take those texts upon themselves, to read in them “new visions of how to live,” not much will change. It is on the readers that we must concentrate, not the writers, on the readers who will make use of the text and “make something happen.” Unless this education of the reader occurs, no number of new voices will change anything, because they will echo among a deaf crowd. And if these readers learn to seek out, to interpret, to translate, to put texts into a variety of contexts, to transform the texts through multiple layers of reading - if we, readers, train ourselves to do this - then we won’t be needing any voices to be silenced, because we will be able to make choices. A silenced voice, whether silenced voluntarily or not, never disappears. Its absence becomes enormous, too enormous to ignore. Surely it’s not another absence we want, another vacuum for a hundred or a thousand years, but a period of redress, in which those voices come up and share the audibility that for so long those in power have usurped.

I am also convinced that hope lies with individuals, and that solutions don’t lie in crowds. One of the greatest triumphs of any oppressor is to convert the oppressed to his methods. A reader need not embrace a writer’s methods, or even those of another reader. A text allows in itself more freedom than we usually think possible, which is why governments are never really keen on literacy, and why it is usually writers and seldom deep-sea divers or stockbrokers who are imprisoned, tortured and killed for political reasons.

- Alberto Manguel, The Age of Revenge"

Voices of the Virtual World: Participative Technology and the Ecclesial Revolution

PRESS RELEASE (Download PDF HERE)

Publication Date: 23 July 2007
Distributed by: Lulu.com
Wikiklesia Press, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-9796856-0-6

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 9 July 2007

Voices of the Virtual World explores the growing influence of technology on the global Christian church. In this premier volume, we hear from more than forty voices, including technologists and theologians, entrepreneurs and pastors… from a progressive Episcopalian techno-monk to a leading Mennonite professor… from a tech-savvy mobile missionary to a corporate anthropologist whom Worth Magazine calls "one of Wall Street's 25 Smartest Players." Voices is a far reaching exploration of spiritual journey contextualized within a culture of increasingly immersive technology.

ABOUT WIKIKLESIA: Conceived and established in May 2007, the Wikiklesia Project is an experiment in on-line collaborative publishing. The format is virtual, self-organizing, participatory - from purpose to publication in just a few weeks. All proceeds from the Wikiklesia Project will be contributed to the Not For Sale campaign.

Wikiklesia values sustainability with minimal structure. We long to see a church saturated with decentralized cooperation. The improbable notion of books that effectively publish themselves is one of many ways that can help move us closer to this global-ecclesial connectedness. Can a publishing organization thrive without centralized leadership? Is perpetual, self-organizing book publishing possible? Can literary quality be maintained in a distributed publishing paradigm? Wikiklesia was created to answer these kinds of questions.

Wikiklesia may be the world’s first self-perpetuating nomadic business model - raising money for charities - giving voice to emerging writers and artists - generating a continuous stream of new books covering all manner of relevant topics. Nobody remains in control. There is no board of directors. The franchise changes hands as quickly as new projects are created.
tags: collaborative ecclesial nomadic participatory publishing wikiklesia

Alan Hirsch's "definition" of "missional church"

The phrase ‘missional’ and ‘missional church’ originated in the work of a group of North America practitioners, missiologists and theorists, called the Gospel and Our Culture Network (GOCN) who came together to try and work out some of the implications of the work of that remarkable missionary thinker Lesslie Newbigin. It was Newbigin who, after returning from a lifetime of work in India as a missionary, saw how pagan Western civilization really was. He began to articulate the view that we need to see the Western world as a mission field, and that we as God’s people in this context, needed to adopt a missionary stance in relation to or culture. Just as we would in India for instance. His work captured the imagination of a church in crisis and decline and shaped the thinking of generations.

However, the word ‘missional’ has over the years has tended to become very fluid and as it was quickly co-opted by those wishing to find new and trendy tags for what they themselves were doing, be they missional or not. It is often used as a substitute it for seeker-sensitive, cell-group church, or other church growth concepts, thus obscuring its original meaning. So, do we dispose of it and come up with another term? I think we need to keep it, but reinvest it with deeper meaning. The word sums up precisely the emphasis of the radical Jesus-movements that we need to rediscover today. But more than that, in my opinion it goes to the heart of the very nature and purpose of the Church itself.

So a working definition of missional church is that it a community of God’s people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God’s mission to the world. In other words, the Church’s true and authentic organizing principle is mission. When the church is in mission, it is the true Church. The Church itself is not only a product of that mission, but is obligated and destined to extend it by whatever means possible. The mission of God flows directly through every believer and every community of faith that adheres to Jesus. To obstruct this is to block God’s purposes in and through his people.

If we can embed this inner meaning into our essential identity as God’s people, we will be well on our way to becoming an adaptive organization. This mission can express itself in the myriad ways in which the Kingdom of God expresses itself—highly varied and always redemptive.

St Andrew's by the Sea Uniting Church Glenelg South Australia

City of Churches
Originally uploaded by marj k

Democracy?

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.

H. L. Mencken
US editor (1880 - 1956)

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
Gore Vidal

"My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opportunities as the strongest...no country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak... Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism...true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village." : Gandhi

Change?

"If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less."
--General Eric Shinseki, former U.S. Army Chief of Staff

Emerging Church - from Kester's blog

We've seen so much, seen so many projects with such great hopes flounder, so many prophecies of impending revival fall flat, that we're just prepared to give up on any grand vision at all. And the corollary of that is: we stop pushing the dirt away at all. We abandon any difference/distinction from the society we are in.

Having spoken to many people over the years about the Emerging Church, I've heard people get really excited that 'finally this is what we've always been looking for'... and then, more recently, say 'I just don't care and I want to jack the whole thing in.'

So is the Emerging Church conversation just another hopeless utopia? Should we just abandon any grand vision and admit that it'll probably just end up hurting people?

I've been thinking - again!

If you want to slow down and live life more deliberately—and you should, there’s little doubt of that, unless you’re chronically idle—start small, then keep it going. Stop one task you don’t need to do. Take one extra hour a week for thinking time. That should be possible for everyone. And when you’ve done it, do it again: another pointless task dropped, another useless meeting cancelled, another hour added to thinking time.