The Challenge of Permeability

 

It was a slow summer Wednesday, and I was in the midst of office hours at the church.  I'd worked on the sermon, chatted with some church folks, and done a bunch of prep work for the Adult Ed classes I'll soon be leading in the Fall.

At a certain point, I needed to move around again, so I circulated through the rooms of our nearly 200 year old utility building.  The "manse" currently houses my office, the copy-room, a nice little sitting parlor, two functioning bathrooms, and a number of rooms that are perhaps most generously described as "storage and utility."  In the hotter months, it does get a little warm, lacking AC as it does.  But the structure--state of the art 1827 construction--rests not on a concrete foundation, but on a bed of huge cedar logs, which just set there on the earth below.  That means that in the summer the building "breathes," as the rising hot air draws cool air from below, and I find it...with a ceiling fan...perfectly tolerable well into the upper 90s.

It's blessed with being a permeable space, sometimes a little more permeable than one might expect.

As I wandered into one room on the first floor, my eye was caught by a decoration I'd not seen before.  Did someone put up an artificial vine, one of those greenery decorations one might find in a restaurant of a certain type or a dorm room?  

Nope.

It was wild grape, alive and well and snaking across the ceiling from where it had shoved its way past one of the baseboards.  For a moment, I had a flashback to back when I was writing my first novel.  There'd be mornings where I'd go down into my basement, fire up my PS3, and listen to the music that Gustavo Santaolalla composed for The Last of Us.  The OG 2013 video game is one of the most remarkable and emotionally authentic gaming experiences I'd ever had, and the soundtrack is haunting and lovely.  I'd just leave the opening menu running, and the sorrowful strains of end times music would waft over me as I wrote.  

The menu looked like this:

This is what ruin looks like.  It's more than a little beautiful, in its own way.  But it's cold in the winter, and too hot in the summer, and zombies are everywhere.

My mind being what it is, that got me to thinking about permeability, and what we include and do not include in the life of the church.  Yes, we need to be open, and we need to be able to speak the language of our culture.  Yes, we need to show grace and hospitality, and to be amenable to the growth of the new.  Healthy churches aren't closed off to those things, or to the community around them.  They are places of grace and welcome.

But we also need to take care.

Because some things, let in, will tear our common spaces apart, will open holes through which other decay and rending growth will come, and then what had been a place of Christ's sanctuary and shelter will crumble and become consumed by the world.

It's a question of discernment, I suppose.

A Post on Virginia Gerrymandering, One Day Late

How do we get what we want?

As a Virginian, I’ve been musing about that a bit over these last few weeks, as my state dips into the well of gerrymandering to tip the scales of power one way or ‘tother.

Gerrymandering, as we all know, is the process by which the size and shape of political districts can be fiddled with to ensure that a particular political party has more representatives. Typically, it involves diluting the influence of another party by concentrating their voters in fewer districts, or creatively recombining regions. Gerrymandered maps are filled with snaking, convoluted lines, creating districts that bear no connection to regional identities and that are intentionally designed to disadvantage and disenfranchise opponents.

Across the river these days, Virginians are wrassling with whether to abandon the current, nonpartisan districts, and replace them with maps that…well…they’re not. My congressional district, for example is VA-7. VA-7 would be redrawn to run from Annandale westward, all the way out through the Shenandoah Valley and right up to the border of West Virginia, with another section snaking south to around Goochland…yes, Goochland. 

If the change is made, VA-7 will look something like a stylized crawdad, or perhaps a ghost wearing boxing gloves.

All to regain a political advantage, because Dear Leader has taught us that maintaining political advantage is more important than having a representative democracy. Once you’ve got power, there are countless perfectly rational-sounding reasons for you to use that power to press your finger down on the scales, and for some reason that troubles my soul.

It’s the temptation that power always dangles before us, as we allow ourselves to believe that dominance is our goal and purpose in life.

At the beginning of the season of Lent, rolling ‘round every year, we Christians retell the story of the temptation of Jesus, of his trial and challenge in the wilderness. 

In the first of the three tests, Jesus is tempted with physical need. “You’re hungry, but you don’t have to be ,” comes the seductive voice of the whisperer. “Turn that rock into bread, my friend. Don’t feel limited to matzoh, I mean, you’re the son of God, and those desert nights are cold, so how about some warm-from-the-oven chocolate chip banana bread? Wouldn’t that be just right?” But Jesus responds with Deuteronomy 8:3, a snippet of the Law which declares that our relationship with God is more important than anything else.

All of a sudden, the scene changes, with the Tempter and Jesus up on the highest point of the temple.

“You say you trust in God above all else,” comes the sly suggestion, as they teeter on a ledge. “Then jump. Surely God will protect you from harm.” And then, well, then comes the kicker. “Angels will protect you,” he hears. “They’ll bear you up.” Both words from scripture.  Jesus responds with a single verse, from Deuteronomy 6. “Don’t put God to the test.”

Alrighty then, says the Man of Wealth and Taste. Let’s take this higher still. Suddenly he and Jesus are way up on a mountaintop, with the whole world spread out below, like Mufasa and Simba overlooking the pridelands at Sunset, only Mufasa would have to be the Devil and Jesus his Simba-cub-son, so that way of visualizing it breaks down pretty quickly.  

Still, you get the image.

With the whole world before him, Jesus is tempted with political power, with control over all of it. “It’ll all be yours, if the price is right,” smiles the Tempter. “Just worship me.” Again, Jesus responds with a passage from Torah, from Deuteronomy 6:13. And again, he affirms that his relationship with God is central, vital, and unshakeable, and that the human hunger for power doesn’t rule over it.

Each of these tests are trials because they’re entirely understandable. There are strong internal logics to the desire for sustenance, for safety and security, and for control.  Who doesn’t want, no, need food? Without food, we die, or at a bare minimum, get so hangry that we’re not the sort of person you want to spend time around. Why wouldn’t we do whatever it took to get what we biologically require? We want a sense of safety and of being protected from harm, and who wouldn’t want that?

And what wouldn’t we do to be in control, to be the king of the hill, top of the heap, A Number One?  All you need is power, and you'll use it perfectly, the best, no-one has ever seen power used so beautifully before.

Temptation finds reasons to set aside values and virtues when they become inconvenient.

I’ve always found gerrymandering repugnant, to return to the moral question I'd been wrestling with. Politically motivated creative redistricting betrays the purpose and integrity of a republic, and that is true whether political expedients or bald-faced lies are used to justify it.

I know, for example, that the relentless dark-money mailers and texts and calls I was getting "opposing" Virginia's gerrymandering are pure refined weapons-grade hypocrisy.  All of them are in the service of crass kleptofascism, which is only opposed to gerrymandering if Democrats are doing it.  

Which left me, as a voter and a Christian, with a moral conundrum.  On the one hand, a "yes" vote would have violated a bright line about representation in our tattered constitutional republic.   "We know it's wrong, but we're doing it just this once, honest," is always a dangerous ethical stance.  On the other hand, a "no" vote would have affirmed and supported a fundamentally corrupt regime that is doing everything in its power to manipulate and discredit the electoral process, and that couldn't care less about our fundamental right to choose our own leadership.

In that toxic, lesser-of-two-evils binary, I can't choose the good.  

And so I didn't.  As hard as it was to refrain from voting, that is what I did.

But I also didn't post this until after the election.

The Gate

How does one create the most gracious and effective threshold for entrance into a community?

The adult ed class in my little church is reading our way through CALLED TO COMMUNITY, a thematically sorted collection of essays that explore what it means for Christians to journey in the faith together.  It's produced by PLOUGH, the publishing wing of the Bruderhof.  

The Bruderhof, if you don't know 'em, are radical Mennonite communists, and if you're a radical Mennonite communist, doing life together well isn't a tangential concern.  When you share everything in common, and expect every member to freely and wholly embrace that ethic, doing community badly means things get real bad real fast.  

The book presents a rich array of perspectives from across the theological gamut of Christian faith, but the focus remains consistent throughout: how do we do this Jesus thing together?  It's designed for a year long study, but I've condensed it into twelve weeks, which means that our conversations are both rich and dense.  We don't touch on every essay, or every concept within every essay.

This last Sunday, the discussion cracked along energetically, but as has been the case in all of my class preparation, there were things I'd prepared to discuss that we didn't get to.

One of those things came in an essay by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, an advocate for/participant in intentional communities and the new-monastic life.  I'd read him a few years back as part of my doctoral work, and enjoyed encountering his voice again.  What struck me were his reflections on how an individual enters a monastic or intentional community.  

Such communities aren't unwelcoming, and frequently have robust ministries of hospitality.  They're open to strangers.  They're friendly and kind and active in the world.

But they are also, by design, hard to join.  There's no hard sell, no effort at bait-and-switch to suck the curious into their common life.  Entering into membership requires significant work.  In order to join, there are substantial expectations of the seeker.

“Only if these seekers are persistent should they be invited into the community..." as Wilson-Hartgrove puts it.

Which, if one is interested in "growing an organization," can seem a little counterintuitive. "All are Welcome," or so the mantra goes in my dying oldline denomination, and you'd think that'd bring 'em in.

On its own, it does not.  Low thresholds for entry produce low levels of commitment.  Low levels of commitment produce a weak shared culture, and a weak shared culture lacks collective resilience.  Monastic communities being the fiercely focused things that they are, demands on the curious are frequently placed early.  

Some Zen Buddhist orders, in particular instance, often make a very pointy point about not being welcoming, in a Fight Club sort of way.  You've got to prove you are worthy, prove you're not a dilletante, prove that you're willing to sit out in the cold and endure being yelled at to go away.

Which, as I consider it in the context of my genuinely friendly little church, isn't at all how we roll.  Nor would we want to.  Visitors are genuinely welcome.  All of them.  We like talking with new folks.  I mean, really.  I hear some pastors lament that their congregations are a circle of backs, and visitors drift alone and ignored through fellowship hours.  My little church is not that way.  At all.

People are welcome to worship, and to join us in fellowship.  They can get their hands dirty in our gardens.  They can help us feed the hungry.  They are, in that place, genuinely our friends, and beloved.  They can stay in that place as long as they like.

When it comes to joining...which isn't that hard, truth be told...I find myself increasingly not pressing the matter.  Just welcome, include, accept, and befriend.  Show interest.  Visit. 

But don't rush it.  Don't grasp, or be anxious.  Let God give the growth.

Fake It 'Til You Make It

A few days ago, I found myself sitting around with a bunch of Jesus folks, talking about the impact of the prosperity gospel on folks who are struggling.  If being "blessed" is best understood in terms of material prosperity, then if you aren't visibly and materially prosperous, there must be something wrong with you.

We shared about folks we'd known who'd been presenting themselves as wealthy, when in fact they were financing their apparently comfortable lifestyle through credit card debt and an endless string of ever more punitive loans.

"Yeah," said one of my good sisters.  "You got to fake it 'til you make it."

The others in the group laughed and nodded.  The idea, as it got bandied about, is that if you project the image of prosperity, you are much more likely to prosper.  People will assume you're successful, and from that assumption, will treat you as if you were.  Work will come your way, and connections will be made, and you'll be in like Flynn.

That's the idea, anyway.  What happens with greater frequency is that our expectations of how we must appear to others drives us to make decisions that are ultimately our downfall.  Our debt-financed lives crash down around us.  The lies we tell the world about who we are back up into an unsustainable mess, and we crumble into nothing.  The only people this mindset serves are the folks who own us.

If the appearance of wealth and material prosperity are our goal, then our efforts to "fake it" will destroy us.  Just ask former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell about how that whole "fake it" thing worked out for him.

Then a day or so later, I found myself sitting around with another bunch of Jesus folks, talking about how we struggle our way through the relationships we have with those around us.  Those people who make themselves really hard to love, who are hateful and hurtful to us, who betray our trust and beat us down?  How are we supposed to deal with them, if we're serious about how Jesus taught us to love our enemies?

We all shared stories, about other church folks who'd done everything in their power to tear us down. How could we love those people?  How could we forgive those folks, when we don't really even want to try?

"Yeah," said one of my good sisters.  "You've got to fake it 'til you make it."  At which the others in the group laughed and nodded.

It was an interesting conjunction.

And I wondered, in those times where I've dealt respectfully with human beings I would really much rather have punched full on in the face in that moment, whether I was faking it.

I don't think so, not really.  In those exchanges...and I have had those exchanges...I recognize that my rage and my anxiety are a legitimate reaction to a broken thing.  I also recognize that the actions of the person in question aren't to be justified or glossed over.

But I also recognize that my primary allegiance is to my faith, and to the path that Jesus taught.  Even if I am required to discontinue relationship with someone, I cannot allow myself to imagine that they are irredeemable or that the possibility of their restoration is impossible.

If I rage at them, not just articulating my anger but being ruled by it, then I am acting in a way that would impede their healing and their growth.  I am reducing the probability of their transformation.

And given my commitment to the Gospel, I just can't do that.

It's hard, but it's not false, any more than duty is false, or faith, hope, and love are false.

Church Leadership

My trundling through the leadership literature for the first of my D.Min classes continues, as does my continuing to subject you to the reflections that will ultimately get cut-and-pasted into the papers I write for the course.  The book I finished yesterday was Church Leadership (Revised Edition), by Lovett H. Weems, Jr.

Dr. Weems will be teaching the first of the courses I'll be taking in May at Wesley Theological Seminary, and let me preface my reflections by saying that this book was the most brilliant, powerful, and transformative work of radiant genius that I have ever been blessed to read.  I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me.

Seriously, though, and much to my great relief, the book wasn't half bad.  It's a good general survey of leadership concepts, both from the for-profit and nonprofit worlds.  Unlike my recent readings in Heifetz/Linsky and Meyerson, though, there's an intentional...and mostly successful...effort to translate leadership concepts into a congregational context.  That framing, in and of itself, makes the book more overtly relevant to my calling.  In my reflections on this book, several key concepts popped for me.

The Need for Leadership:  The phrase "No organization can function without leadership," (Church Leadership, xix) popped up early in the preface, as Weems laid out what should be the pretty straightforward premise of the book.  That should be straightforward, but these days, nothing is straightforward.

There is, within both academic and related seminary circles, a significant countervailing meme that suggests that leaderless organizations are the wave of the future.  Organizations with leaders are assumed to be hierarchical/patriarchal, inherently oppressive of the generative creativity that occurs in a more "flat" organization.  This is Leadership 2.0.  It is postmodern.  It is emergent.  It's "starfish" organizations rather than "spider" organizations, to use the terminology from Brafman and Beckstrom's influential book.   In a "starfish" organization, the idea is that the whole organization exists in every part, and from every part the whole can reproduce itself.  "Spiders" are hierarchical, rigid, inflexible, and easily crunched.  Or so that idea goes.

In my own experience, though, I've found that the idea of leaderless organizations founders on the shoals of reality.  It jes' don't get 'er done.   Case in point:  Presbymergent.  A few years back, I found myself caught up in emergent conversations within the PC(USA), mostly because I: 1) compulsively blog; 2) am of an essentially progressive and inclusive persuasion; and 3) tend towards owning Apple products, to the point of seeming almost a bit DSM-V certifiable.   As energy levels and enthusiasm rose, a gathering of Mac Using Emergents was planned for Louisville, where the movement was to coalesce and exciting new things were to begin.

Things started out fine.   Though I felt socially on the periphery of the group, folks were cool, and conversation was invigorating, and the glowing Apples on the backs of our MacBooks hummed in a circle of Steve Jobs synergy.

But when it came time to plan, suddenly, we became the starfish.  No-one felt it was appropriate to take on the mantle of leadership, because we were, like, being the starfish, dude.  An "organizational plan" was proposed that started out well enough, but it ended as basically an amorphous blob layered on top of a radiant chaos symbol.  Everyone was the leader.  And when everyone is the leader...no-one is.  With this incoherent decisionmaking structure, I and a few other structurally inclined souls volunteered to try to create legal articles of incorporation so we could get funding.  It wasn't possible.  Not without lying, which is never a good thing to do in legal documents.  Even if we had gotten them past the draft stage...who would have approved them?  No-one knew.

In the absence of clear leadership and the vision and direction that would have provided, the various subgroups spun out into nothing within six months.  What energy was present...and there was energy and real potential...disappated.  It was frustrating.  But not surprising.   Without leadership, groups of like-minded friends can bumble along nicely.  But no organization can function.

Defining the Heroic Model of Leadership:  In exploring congregational leadership, Weems touches on the idea of moving away from the heroic model (Weems, p. 72), which he describes as self-defeating.  (ibid, p. 73)   There is significant truth in that, which he illustrates effectively.  Pastors can make themselves the functional center of an organization, doing everything and deciding everything because only they know how to do it right.   Even if a pastor is truly gifted, this leaves communities radically dependent on their pastors, and fails to equip the church by illuminating the gifts of the laity. (ibid., p.74)  It is a major concern, particularly as well-meaning but overfunctioning pastors steamroll lay leadership into irrelevance.

In defining "heroic leadership" as a style, Weems suggests that it has the following characteristics:  "The leader parcels out work, sets objectives, monitors performance, and fixes whatever is wrong."  (p. 73)   This is certainly controlling and perfectionist, but not "heroic," at least not as I understand heroism.  Heroic leadership is not smotheringly matriarchal.    When I think "hero," I think of unusual strength, unusual integrity, and unusual courage.  I think of an individual whose essential character and grace make them worthy of respect.  If you're the leader, you can't be a schlemiel.  Or a putz.

When I look to individuals for leadership, those characteristics are what I personally seek.  For all of the egalitarian idealism behind the idea that anyone can lead, that truth extends only so far as that individual shows they are worth following.  The final chapter of the book, which asserts that leadership rests first and foremost on values-based integrity, does seem to make this point.  What matters is not training, skills, or formal authority.  What matters is who a leader is as a person.  (p. 109)   If a congregation cannot look to their pastor and feel that they are a credible and profoundly moral person, that pastor cannot lead.  (p. 110-111)

No one is perfect, of course.  But effective leadership requires exceptional integrity, up to and including a willingness to simultaneously admit imperfection in the face of community expectations and defy it inwardly.  It's perhaps the most significant challenge anyone called to lead faces.

Lord knows I feel that weight.