Category Archives: Leadership

Power struggles and how to get beyond them

Building community, Leadership, Marriage and Family, , , , , , , ,

When a marriage relationship or a church community seems to be stuck or even falling apart, it is probably because we are not listening. We must be having trouble hearing one another.

There are often many reasons  for our lack of hearing. But the biggest reason of all must be not listening to Jesus. He is calling us into a transformation that allows us to listen, hear, and love like He does.

It is a strange problem. Jesus wants to nurture us into our true selves, which sounds great, but we resist going there. We have trouble letting Him get through a sentence without feeling threatened and either butting in with an objection or turning away. We have a power struggle with God and everyone else.

Friend or servant?

I was pondering a few power struggles I had identified last week when Julie reminded me of John 15. I have been thinking about our conversation ever since. In that account, Jesus calls his disciples into an intimate relationship with him, like branches in a vine. He warns that a disconnected branch will wither and die. But He assures the disciples that withering is not the destiny for his friends. He tells them he is no longer going to call them his “servants,” as if they were people who merely fulfilled a master’s bidding. They have matured into His “friends,” someone who knows His business and can bear the fruit of love that comes from a renewed life. Most of us have a hard time hearing what Jesus is saying, just like we have a hard time with our other intimates — there are reasons for this.

The main reason for our muddled hearing is that we should have outgrown the servant/master kind of relating a long time ago. I think many marriages and most church communities are still working out of the “lower” level of relationship Jesus describes in which one person is the master and one the servant. I call it a ten-year-old’s sense of righteousness. Pre-teens spend a lot of effort getting things right and understanding how things work. They can be very black and white, dependent on getting praise or punishment by achieving harmony with whatever is dominating them. In Christian terms, they might spend a lot of time in the Old Testament — organized by laws, mastering the rules. But, as Paul says, that process is just a tutor for following Jesus. If they never get out of that stage, they will have constant power struggles with all their intimates trying to get things “right.”

In a church like ours, dedicated to cells and teams, everyone is called into the Lord’s “friend” category. They are responsible for love that overcomes a multitude of sins; they are given the keys of forgiveness and grace to unlock the restored image of God in everyone. But some people persist in the “master” or “servant” category, demanding that the master be followed or getting by with as little obedience as possible. The “master” could be principles drawn from the Bible or the latest cause that becomes holiness for them. The service they do or resist could be sharing money or showing up to a meeting. You might be more familiar with this in your marriage, when one of you is furious over an injustice that consumes all your feelings and you lash out at or withdraw from your loved one who is making you serve their demand.

The five horsemen

Where the power struggle gets exhausting, in a marriage, a cell or a team meeting, is when the parties bring our what John Gottman names “the four horsemen of the apocalypse” to fight for their “rights.” These behaviors are what destroy marriage relationships and undermine any hope of hearing one another. They also destroy cells, teams and whole congregations. Consider them briefly.

The first horseman of the apocalypse is criticism. This is different than offering a critique or voicing a complaint! The latter two are about specific issues, but the former is an attack on your partner at the core.

  • Complaint: “I was scared when you were running late and didn’t call me. I thought we had agreed that we would do that for each other.” (Note the “I” message).
  • Criticism: “You never think about how your behavior is affecting other people. I don’t believe you are that forgetful, you’re just selfish! You never think of others! You never think of me!” (Note the “you” message).

If you find that you or your partner are critical of each other, don’t assume your relationship is doomed to fail. But do pay attention to the danger. Because criticism, when it becomes pervasive, paves the way for the other, far deadlier horsemen. It makes the victim feel assaulted, rejected, and hurt, and often causes the perpetrator and victim to fall into an escalating pattern where the first horseman reappears with greater and greater frequency and intensity.

The second horseman is contempt. When we communicate in this state, we are truly mean -– treating others with disrespect, mocking them with sarcasm, ridicule, name-calling, mimicking, and using body language such as eye-rolling. We shame them. The target of contempt is made to feel despised and worthless.

“You’re ‘tired?’ Cry me a river. I’ve been with the kids all day, running around like mad to keep this house going and all you do when you come home from work is flop down on that sofa like a child and play those idiotic computer games. I don’t have time to deal with another kid –- try to be more pathetic…” 

In his research, Dr. Gottman found that couples that are contemptuous of each other are more likely to suffer from infectious illness (colds, the flu, etc.) than others, as their immune systems weaken! Contempt is fueled by long-simmering negative thoughts about the partner – which come to a head as the perpetrator attacks the accused from a position of relative superiority. Contempt is the single greatest predictor of divorce (and of team failure, church dissolution). It must be eliminated!

It might not be so easy to eliminate contempt (as U.S. political discourse has been demonstrating for years and especially this past week!). We need the Lord involved. We are powerfully motivated to maintain consistency in our thoughts, feelings and actions and to minimize conflict among them. (We don’t like “cognitive dissonance). We even have a place in the brain that researchers have identified as a key mechanism in mediating conflict-reduction. So a marriage partner or team mate may feel a need to control a relationship to satisfy their cognitive dissonance. When they are behaving badly, they might find another way to solve their problem rather than changing. For instance, they might see themselves as a decent, liberal-minded person, and that leads to dissonance between their self-image and their unseemly actions. Since we are all strongly motivated to reduce dissonance, they might unconsciously do so by developing a contempt for their mate or partner which is more in accord with the humiliating way they are treating them.

The third horseman is defensiveness. We’ve all been defensive. This horseman is nearly omnipresent when relationships are on the rocks. When we feel accused unjustly, we fish for excuses so that our partner will back off. Unfortunately, this strategy is almost never successful. Our excuses just tell our partner that we don’t take them seriously, are trying to get them to buy something that they don’t believe, or are blowing them off.

  • She: “Did you call Betty and Ralph to let them know that we’re not coming tonight as you promised this morning?”
  • He: “I was just too darn busy today. You know just how busy my schedule was. Why didn’t you just do it?”

He not only responds defensively, but turns the table and makes it her fault. A non-defensive response would have been:

“Oops, I forgot. I should have asked you this morning to do it because I knew my day would be packed. Let me call them right now.”

Although it is perfectly understandable for the man to defend himself in the example given above, this approach doesn’t create connection or even the safety he would like. The attacking spouse does not back down or apologize. This is because defensiveness is really a way of diverting one’s guilt by blaming one’s partner.

The fourth horseman is stonewalling. Stonewalling occurs when the listener withdraws from the interaction. In other words, stonewalling is when one person shuts down and closes himself/herself off from the other. It is a lack of responsiveness to your partner and the interaction between the two of you.  Rather than confronting the issues (which tend to accumulate!), we make evasive maneuvers such as tuning out, turning away, acting busy, or engaging in obsessive behaviors. It takes time for the negativity created by the first three horsemen to become overwhelming enough that stonewalling becomes an understandable “out,” but when it does, it frequently becomes a habit.

I think we need a fifth “horseman”: unfaithfulness. This is not a behavior as much as an incapacity to change. Gottman and other therapists assume we can change our minds and move with new feelings, which is true, to a point. But like Jesus tells his disciples, they will not bear fruit that lasts unless they are faithful to Him. Without Jesus we are desperate, withering branches longing for but despairing of connection. We will always be trying to get something and never quite get it. We won’t have a true self to give. We will be drawn into perpetual power struggles, seeking to preserve ourselves or achieve what we want. We need to relate faithfully to our faithful God in order to be faithful friends, mates and partners.

Being able to identify The five horsemen in conflicted situations is a necessary first step to eliminating them, but this knowledge is not enough. To drive away destructive communication patterns, we must replace them with healthy, productive ones. That’s what Jesus is teaching his disciples. They are going to be a community in mission, threatened from without and way over the capacity of their inner resources. If they are not intimately connected with Him, they will just dissolve into feuding factions like the rest of the world.

Four ways to help defuse a power struggle

Without the healing, comforting friendship of Jesus, whatever is pushing our buttons just keeps pushing them. Our unresolved hurts and beliefs continue to scream for attention and healing. As James teaches: “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from the desires that battle within you? You want something but you do not get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want” (James 4: 1-3). Our faith may not have matured much beyond the 10-20 year old era. But no matter how distant, angry or closed we may feel right now, we are called into a safe place with Jesus where we can stop reacting and start reflecting on the source of our disconnection.

Here are four suggestions for creating connection in your marriage, friendship, cell or team:

  1. Listen to your partner’s point of view with patience and respect. You might have heard it all before but try to understand why the situation has become so loaded.
  2. Look for the important things that are not being said. A useful prompt is: “Can you explain why you feel so strongly about this?”
  3. Behind nearly every power struggle is fear. Resist the temptation to placate, rationalize or dismiss these fears. Instead acknowledge them out loud. When someone feels truly heard, they will be more likely to listen to your concerns.
  4. With everything out in the open, you have an opportunity to look for a compromise or for next steps and to move with how God is leading someplace beyond what you presently experience.

Jesus is the vine and we are the branches. Connected to him we can hope to bear fruit that lasts, the fruit of love given freely and nurtured in mutual relationships of empathy and vision. Julie (and Jerome) can see their newly-formed community coming together as everyone re-forms around Jesus — it is a productive new vineyard! But it is also painfully easy to see where people just cannot bear that fruit yet. There will be power struggles. I’m sure they will keep listening with patience and respect, but also with an honest awareness of what it takes to love like Jesus.

[Gwen White adds some good things to this subject in her speech The Narrow Way]

Seven ways we are avoiding the temptation to institutionalize

Leadership, The Mission,

I innocently wandered into “institution land” the other day. Someone lumped our church into the category. It felt strange when they politely said, “I don’t believe in institutional religion.” Meanwhile, here I feel like that bird above — and dead institutions are the cage! I’m one of the people who could have rejected Jesus because of bad institutions! It was a memorable moment  — memorable enough to write about.

The broad definition of “institution” is: a society established/organized/founded for a purpose, often charitable, educational or religious. That sounds fine, right? Then you remember that institutions become big, controlling establishments run by the funders or the leaders for themselves quite often. But Jesus was about as “anti-establishment” as you can get, wouldn’t you say?—isn’t that why the funders and leaders got him killed? When they were about to do it, he said:

“Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out.  And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” — Jesus in John 12:31-2

I’m a Jesus-follower, so I have nothing BUT fear when it comes to being a mere institution. They are, by definition, not all bad. But they are often led by the “princes of this world” who are not drawn to Jesus and are prone to merely preserving themselves. When it comes to the institutionalized church, I am as tired of it as anyone else [previous post]. I even protest its origins [previous post]. I am not interested in turning my relationship with Jesus into a program housed in a corporation that is mainly designed to preserve itself and profit the insiders who own it. So how do I keep people from labeling me “institutional” just because our Circle of Hope “society” resembles other religious people in various ways?

Here are some ways we’ve been trying to have a common purpose without becoming the establishment.

  1. We try to provide real help for people in real need.

Our greatness is in serving others. That’s why we are organized in cells, so everyone gets a chance to be served and to serve. That’s why we support compassion and mission teams so people get a good chance to express their passion, not just conform to expectations.

And that’s why 20% of what we share in our Common Fund is designated for people who are in need or are not us. For an example, read this post about caring for North Koreans. Our thrift stores kick in about $100K a year more for the same purpose.

What’s more, one of our main goals in the next five years is to perfect our mutuality system, so we can help people with debt and other challenges. We also want to help start businesses so we can provide jobs and have alternative sources for funding what we want to do. What’s even more, that’s why we are not building temples but trying to find out how to do church planting in an expensive market without busting the bank.

  1. We dial down the hype.

We are committed to transparent truth telling, even if it makes the leaders look less than perfect (since we are less than perfect, that is not hard). The leaders don’t particularly trust anonymous, entitled institutions either, so we don’t want to excite everyone’s inauthenticity meter every five minutes.

  1. We are a team. We lose if people don’t play.

People mock the fact that many of us grew up on soccer teams that gave everyone a trophy at the end of the season. Maybe that idea has problems, but we still think everyone is important, whether they are on the travelling team or not. You don’t even have to like soccer analogies or feel comfortable not calling it football/futbol. Older people and younger people lead our church, men and women, people of all backgrounds. Everyone counts. We are a living body, not a program. And if people don’t live it, we are set up to die quickly.

  1. We are honest about debt.

We share money. We make big plans with our money. And we also know that debt keeps people from being a part of sharing or dreaming.

Let me go off on this for a minute, since this is a bigger relationship killer than people think. Debt is the big fact of life for most normal people. Factoids: 1) For households with credit-card debt, the average is $15,799. We know that so-called “millennials” feel the vise grip of debt more painfully than most. 2) We know that the average debt for graduating college seniors is more than $23,000, and recent graduates stumble in paying this back—since the jobs they’re finding are often part-time, lower-paying, service-sector.

When you add in a car loan, and an occasional bad spending decision, and people wonder if they can ever be legitimate members of the tribe. They have little to share. When the church is trying to get some money together for our common purpose the process can feel like another debt collection.

We’re trying to be honest about the struggle.  We need to be part of our common financial life for our spiritual health, for our connection to the body of Christ, and for our own dignity. So we talk about it; we share the problem; we help each other.

  1. We try to stay relational in the virtual age.

Tech is helpful, but God help us if it replaces face-to-face relating!. Even our websites (like this one), blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc., are for beginning and extending relationships. Even if you see us on YouTube it is still very easy to see everyone in person. We’re in cells and we keep the Sunday meetings small enough to be touchable. We’re an anthill more than an agency. We are a gathering more than a show.

  1. We set goals we can meet.

Obviously, we do not meet ALL our goals. But we keep moving right along every year according to what we all think we should be doing. Everyone gets a say, if they want it. Our last few “maps” have been especially visionary, I think. We are in the middle of a lot of productive disruption and growth. It is challenging and exciting. But even when we have big dreams, we are also realistic. We want 100% participation from our covenant members and regular meeting attenders. So we don’t set the bar so high that many people won’t even consider getting over it. Our five-year plans did not come from some faceless bureaucracy; they came from our own dialogue with God and each other.

  1. The leaders are unafraid to be who they are.

Well, maybe we are a little afraid. After all, it is a labeling era—you think you are trying to follow Jesus and people tell you you’re just an institution as untrustworthy as all the others!

Nevertheless, our pastors, in particular, are “out there.” They are honest, they are open to hard questions—even if they can’t answer them! They try to go through depression and anxiety with the same mutuality and hope they suggest to others. They pray, and listen, and try to stay free from the temptations to get established in something that no longer needs Jesus to operate.

So if you think all churches are institutions in that bad, coercive, uncaring, unchanging establishment kind of way, is there any way you can give us an exemption? Jesus doesn’t fit the label, do we have to wear it? It would be interesting to hear your honest opinion when you came to visit us, or, better yet, got to know us. We’re doing something new over here that doesn’t match your stereotype. If we ever stop moving with what the Spirit is doing next, we’d like you to tell us.

Where is a trust system when you need one?

Building community, Film/TV, Leadership, , , ,
Newton Knight leading his strange new trust system.

The world is drowning in an ocean of mistrust—as usual. As we watched Free State of Jones the other day it was even more obvious that the disturbing storms that are stirring up the globe right now are not that unusual. Reflecting on Brexit, a British journalist says,

“When leaders choose the facts that suit them, ignore the facts that don’t and, in the absence of suitable facts, simply make things up, people don’t stop believing in facts—they stop believing in leaders. They do so not because they are over-emotional, under-educated, bigoted or hard-headed, but because trust has been eroded to such a point that the message has been so tainted by the messenger as to render it worthless.” — Gary Younge

Are we filled with that mistrust, too? In the 2016 Map we affirmed in Council on June 25, we included a proverb that says, “We are called to develop a trust system.” But do we mean that? Do we really think that is even possible? Do all of us even embrace the Map? Are we so mistrusting that we didn’t even participate or consider being part of the Council? Those seem to be relevant questions in a day like today, when the airwaves are filled with fear.

There was enough mistrust at the Council meeting to make some people start talking about trust. Some people did not think the meaning of the words were clear enough to be trusted or to show to others. We had to convince them that nothing we do is designed like law; it is designed to be personally delivered. But can the persons delivering it be trusted? It seems like there should be easy answers for those questions, but trust is not that easy. Nevertheless, we are still going for the atmosphere John teaches us to pursue: “We know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” — 1 John 4:16

Can we make a trust system? Even though we communicate a lot about our process and invite everyone into it, some people do not read the mail. Even though we work hard to listen, some people don’t care to speak. They are among us, but they can’t be with us; their trust is broken. Without trust we survive instead of create; we withdraw instead of include; we suspect instead of hope; we avoid instead of transform. We unlearn love. We demonstrate how we do not rely on God.

Our newest pastors have already experienced a few pinpricks of mistrust. Most people make their leaders prove they are trustworthy. We say the opposite, that it is our love that makes a leader. Our support can make a weak-kneed leader learn to walk confidently in the shoes of responsibility. Yet someone can still hold themselves off to the side and question the process. When I sent a report about the Council to the covenant members I “brazenly” included a list of the Leadership Team with all its new members. They might not like to have their names out there in an age of mistrust. Leaders are thought of as likely liars. But we have to build a trust system.

Building a trust system begins with trusting the Lord, of course. When we trust the Lord we have the confidence to trust others. They have to prove their untrustworthiness rather than the other way around. Our confidence embraces others and gives them a place to recover from the constant trauma of living in the world without God and his people.

But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,
whose confidence is in him.
They will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit. — Jeremiah 17:7-8

Whenever the domination system lies (which is nothing new) we have somewhere to go.

When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.
In God, whose word I praise—
in God I trust and am not afraid.
What can mere mortals do to me? — Psalm 56:4

When my lack of trust is growing, I always end up back in 1 John, where John is struggling with churches threatened by liars and full of people who are not too adept at discerning among all the spirits wandering the world. Our trust system heeds his call: “We know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them” — 1 John 4:16.  A trust system is built from the ground up, not the top down. Jesus followers who live in love build it. The leaders can deter them, but not defeat them because God lives in them.

Build community in hard times — it is more than surviving.

Building community, Leadership, ,

I do a lot of talking so I went on retreat—not just to stop listening to myself all day, but to listen to God. Why talk if you’re not talking to God—and listening?

In the course of my retreat, I heard a lot from a book by Esther de Waal. It is a good one I picked up after one of our friends helped us explore it not long ago in Circle of Hope Daily Prayer :: WATER: Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict. Benedict of Nursia is one of those spiritual ancestors we love. He is one of the most influential Christians you may have never heard of.

I am telling you about him today because we are had an About Making a Covenant meeting and twenty people considered entering our community in a more intentional way. Benedict caused a revolution by considering the same thing in the 600’s. Before Benedict wrote his new rule for the communities of monks he was founding, most radical Christianity was solitary; spiritual athletes were the people who entered it. Benedict was one of those atheletes, but he attracted a bunch of people who were not. He realized that following Jesus is mostly for ordinary people. What’s more, a group of individuals sitting at the feet of a “sage” is not very Biblical. His breakthrough was to emphasize the love among the members of the community as elemental to authentic spiritual life; multiplications of those communities are still shining the light of faith today.

His rule says: “The monks are to bear with patience the weaknesses of others, whether of body or behavior. Let them strive with each other in obedience to each other. Let them not follow their own good, but the good of others. Let them be charitable towards their brothers with pure affection.” (72.5-8).

His communities were all men, but women applied this rule in their houses, as well (thus, his language).

DeWaal says that within a hundred years of Benedict’s death, his rule had provided a collection of communities that wrapped Europe in a cloak of faith. “Whereas in the very earliest days monks had gone out into the desert leaving behind them a comparatively sophisticated life, now that pattern was reversed. In a world in which barbarian invasion, political uncertainty, and the power of the sword seemed the most immediate realities, [sound familiar?] and in a simple agrarian world where parishes were served by priests of humble peasant birth, [sound like many of our neighborhoods?] the monasteries came to stand out as centres of light and learning” (p. 20).

Who is that person sitting in the cell’s “second row?”

Radicals in covenant are important lights in deteriorating circumstances. They not only take care of one another, they provide opportunities for people to know God, learn love, and create sustainable community. Our cells are like Benedict’s little communities wrapping our region in a cloak of faith. We focus on God in prayer and worship, we study to deepen our faith and life, we work for one another and serve those we can touch. The Benedictines were known as change agents by Cruce, libro et atro—cross, book and plough. We have our surprisingly useful version of that.

It was and is all done in love by normal people. When some of those normal people make a covenant to be Circle of Hope at the end of the month they will deepen our capacity to make a difference in this upended world. I think they will reflect a story Pope Gregory I told in his biography of Benedict.

“A certain hermit named Martin had chained himself to the side of his solitary cave near Monte Cassino. When he heard of it St. Benedict sent him a message: ‘If you are indeed a servant of God, do not chain yourself with chains of iron. But rather, let Christ be the chain that binds you.’”

Like Benedict, we point to Christ. It is as simple as that: in the cell where Jesus is the agenda and in our covenant to live as the Body of Christ. That is where the transformation starts and where it continues to astound me.

 

Burnout lessons

A life in the Spirit, Leadership, Psychological growth

Last week the Cell Leaders met at our Marlton Pike site for their monthly training and relating as a team. I thank God for them! The main topic was burnout. If you are interested in a more extensive review, you can find it at our Way of Jesus site. This post is a taste.

Most of us have days when we feel bored, overloaded, or unappreciated. Those might be days when the dozen balls we keep in the air aren’t noticed, let alone rewarded. Those might be the days when dragging ourselves out of bed requires a lot of determination. That’s just life. However, if you feel that way most of the time, you may be experiencing what people call burnout.

Burnout is a state of exhaustion—emotional, mental, and physical, usually caused by excessive and prolonged stress.

Generally, burnout occurs when you feel overwhelmed and unable to meet constant demands. As the stress continues, you begin to lose the interest or motivation that led you to take on a certain role in the first place.

Burnout reduces your productivity and saps your energy. You are left feeling helpless, hopeless, cynical, and resentful. Some would say you are depressed—so you are probably angry, snappish, messing up relationships, so you get isolated, and don’t want to face things. Eventually, you may feel like you have nothing more to give.

Mostly this is a workplace issue. But Americans work all the time. They seem to think life is working or vegging—two choices. For exercise they work out. For family fun they do activities. Their devices make them multitaskers all day and night. Since people work all the time, they apply the word for this workplace malady to everything. They burn out on Taco Bell. They burn out on relationships. And they burn out on church — people burn out from being a cell leader, or a team leader, and maybe the pastor—although we seem to retain those rather well.

  • Burnout is the situation where too much is going out and not enough coming in.
  • Burnout is a mismatch between effort and recovery.
  • Burnout is the gap between expectation and reward.

Burnout can be prevented and healed by Jesus.

I do not think the way Jesus works burns us out. I think Jesus keeps filling us with enough to do what we are given to do. There are important words in this promise:

  • Jesus – We need a relationship with the living God.
  • filling us – This takes experiences, discipline, community.
  • given to do – Not what we can imagine, or feel guilty about, but what we are given. This takes discernment, commitment over time.

I believe Jesus can sustain us in a world that might destroy us, but we’ll have to be serious people to access the possibility.

The spiritual core of burnout is often missed when psychologists write about it. Burnout is often about the need to move on. The move could be to a new location or job. But most likely it is to a deeper place inside.

Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5 NRSV)

Jesus says in this quote that he will fill you with what you need to do what you are given to do. You will notice that Jesus does not think there is another world, another reality, where you can do things without him. If you do things without Jesus, you burn out, permanently.

I think burnout points us to a deeper place where we can experience what God has given us. “Do not let your hearts be troubled” Jesus says. “In this world you will have many troubles, but take heart, I have overcome the world.” Burnout may be a time when we have passing troubles and Jesus helps us overcome them. But burnout may tell you that the way you have seen your life is wrong and you need to go a new direction. I think burnout may tell you another kind of job is needed. But it may also tell you that you need another kind of life.

How do YOU think people see your church? : Examine it

Leadership, The Mission, , , , , , , , , , ,

The first question we asked our cells in order to gather some discernment about where God is leading us was this:

“When a newcomer or unbeliever gets to know us, whether in a cell or Sunday Meeting, through one of our events or teams, or through an individual, what are the things they will most immediately notice about us and what gifts will they find easiest to access?” 

What do you think?

We dared to take Paul seriously when he tells the Corinthian church:

Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you—unless, of course, you fail the test? (2 Cor. 13:5).

If we can be honest about what others see in us, we will not just follow the scripture, we will probably follow our humility right into spiritual growth! We are who we are, but who knows what we might become if we listen?.

Our cells had a LOT to say about this question (and all the other questions!). When I set my mind to sort all their responses, I came up with eighteen different headings for this first one! I was encouraged by what the cell members thought people see in us when they first get to know us. I thought you might be encouraged too. I am not going to list all eighteen things! But I thought I would give you ten. I’ll give you my heading and then one of the answers I culled out which intrigued or moved me. So you get my heading and one answer verbatim.

Whether you are part of our church or not, these things might give you something to think about. What’s more, I don’t doubt someone who is in our church will think the person I quote does not completely know what they are talking about. So we all might have more to think about, too. Regardless, I think we’d all like to be a church moving in the direction these thoughts signal.

Whether you think your church is seen in these ways or you think it just ought to be, let’s pray that we get there. Yesterday was Pentecost, and the Spirit of God is moving to take us into our fullness.

Here are ten ways the cell members think newcomers see us:

We are welcoming/hospitable/friendly/open.

  • You can be who you are.  You are relevant.  You have an opportunity to an actual path where God is leading you.  Walk with us – not your fear or a stereotype.

We create a distinct atmosphere.

  • We create an atmosphere where we try to attract those who are timid with things like the bible through our vulnerability showing it is OK to have doubts and disbelief.

We are a connected community.

  • We are not an obligation – this community is real and authentic and people are here out of choice.  We are not a thing to do.  We want to know you.  

Leadership is respected and varied.

  • Leaders don’t have to be older, mature people who have all their stuff together. Anyone can potentially be a leader and should see their gifts and insight valued and nurtured (not just for white male extroverts).

We have an open seeking spirit.

  • Vulnerability in sharing by both women and men. It’s good modeling by those in leadership because it sets a space to be real and to address deep set needs – we are a deep people because of this.

We are devoted to compassion.

  • Our good works are a natural progression from our togetherness

We share.

  • It is not hard to get resources of spiritual direction (informal), counseling, financial help, job connections.

We take action, are ambitious, intentional.

  • We are doers of the word. While other may talk about examples of how you may get involved the overwhelming expectation is that we are people who live through action and action particularly for both one another and those with need.

We expect people to participate.

  • They can get connected to anything (cell, team’s, leadership, etc.), the church is their oyster.

We are committed to dialogue.

  • It is the judge-free zone.  We all pretty openly discuss a lot of topics, personal and otherwise with widely varying opinions sometimes, and no one is upset.  

When you answer the question about your church, what are the answers YOU get? Let’s keep praying for the Holy Spirit to move us into the place the Lord would like us to be.

[Originally published on Circle of Hope’s blog]

How to recover from bureaucraseizure

A life in the Spirit, Leadership, , , ,

The whole Pope thing came with a giant bureaucraseizure. It is no wonder we had our own temptations to bureaucratize last week. To bureaucratize is a “tendency to manage an organization by adding more controls, adherence to rigid procedures, and attention to every detail for its own sake.”

Being from the land of bureaucratization, I am subject to a malady: bureaucraseizure.

Bureaucraseizure means:

  1. I can be seized by the need to bureaucratize. I might obsess over getting things to work out according to their assigned procedures and I can make more and more procedures in order to make sure nothing uncomfortable happens.
  2. More ominously, bureaucraseizure means I can be seized by bureaucracies, by giant, faceless processes run by “the great other.”  The tendency of our society is to add more controls on us, make us adhere to rigid procedures and provide endless details for us to consider as if they were crucial.

I am not alone in being subject to this malady.

Stories of bureaucraseizure

1) We decided to get new water meter at our project the other day. I was given the mission to procure one. So I called the Water Department, home of fascinating bureaucracy that is usually inscrutable to them, too. Four phone calls into the mission the meter shop told me to go to 1101 Market, 5th Floor, to get a permit. I did. That address is the Personnel Department! But the clerk called a number on my notes and found my contact who said I needed to talk to Vincent Brindisi who was her boss, but he was out on the road. I called him anyway. He answered and happened to be in the neighborhood! He went to the property and personally explained to my plumber why he should already know how the whole process works. I had a bureaucraseizure. All I wanted was a discernible process that did not take me two hours to discover. Instead I got Vinny.

2) Then the Pope showed up and I got bureaucraseized with the rest of us. There were National Guardsmen patrolling Broad and Washington. (Now you know what the government is prepared to do!). I was in Allentown on Thursday, listening to the last static-filled gasp of WHYY when I saw an alert sign telling me about Pope traffic (in Allentown?). At the same time a New Jersey bureaucrat was lamenting  on the radio that only 50 of his 1700 parking spaces had been sold for $44. All I wanted was to be uncontrolled and unterrified for a minute. But I think we have been on orange alert, at least, for ten years. We are seized by forces who can shut down the city for four days.

It is no wonder we become bureaucraseizers. We are constantly being trained. We are trying to navigate some inscrutable bureaucracy that holds the keys to what we need and then some giant bureaucracy rolls over us and floods the whole city with road closures for four days.

Tangled in procedure

At the Imaginarium, l was leading the council of the church, asking for general agreement on direction for quite a number of items. As soon as I laid some things out people immediately became entangled in procedural questions. Almost everyone gave a pass to the ideas — they appeared to be not nearly as interesting as the procedures that might follow their implementation. I was kind of Vincent Brindisi, bumbling around thinking I was fronting the system and they were me wondering where the procedures are!

Afterward, I met with the Cell Leader Coordinators. They wanted better data on the weekly reports they get from the pastors. I finally protested that I did not think there could be enough data to satisfy their itch for assuredness. “At the end of the day,” I said, “you’ll have to feel it.” Organizing data can’t really quell anxiety or achieve wisdom. They felt a bit like big government demanding that everyone fall into line and be justified by filling out the form properly.

Recovery from bureaucraseizure

So everyone is having bureaucraseizures and being bureaucraseized. How to we recover from the trauma?

Pray. Yes, that is the number one Christian answer to everything. Thank God some of us do it. If we don’t pray, we are too weak to withstand the onslaught of bureaucratizing and we begin thinking it is central to how the world works. Jesus upends the powers and sustains us as they flame out.

Relate. It is so wonderful to relate face to face rather than rule to rule, isn’t it? We do well at this. Sometimes we do too well, of course. The Pastors are going through a sea change right now, so they had a four hour meeting on Tuesday. Much of it was about the injustices of recent procedures, I understand. When do we just go ahead and trust God in each other rather than needing to be constantly reassured that nothing bad will ever happen again? It is a hard answer to discern in the moment. Trusting the rule can be easier than trusting a person.

Serve. – We are getting better and better at this, don’t you think? The other day I washed the steps for our tenants. Kind of unexpected for everyone, me being a relatively unlikely washer and the owner. But I overcame the seizure coming on to do what is expected and make them wash their own steps or at least get mad a some worker somewhere for not having it clean already. It was so tempting to ask, “Who’s job is it to keep these things clean?” What bureau is in charge of serving the needy and redeeming the world?

Was Jesus ever tempted with bureaucraseizure? Not in the first century. But every time he calls the water department with you, he gets what it is like to live in 2015 Philly. I imagine he found the popocalypse somewhat ironic, at least, as well. I imagine he agrees that hope comes by praying, relating and serving as the body of Christ assured by the Spirit, not just relatively comforted by how well everything is controlled.

Praying with Jesus in the weeds

A life in the Spirit, Leadership,

The parable of the weeds among the wheat could be a parable about prayer. Jesus is wheat among all us weedy humans. At the end of his days, he is lifted up on the cross and prays his final prayers among the weediest of the tares who are crucifying him. Those people, sown by the enemy, are doing their best to choke out the wheat and take over God’s field for themselves. The Lord’s prayers from the cross are the basic prayers we have to pray to endure, to end up giving off the beautiful aroma of Christ and not the ugly scent of mere morality or ambivalence.

Try them.

Face your feeling of being alone.

And at three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). (Mark 15:34)

The weeds of loneliness can choke out the wheat of connecting with God. That is probably enough said for most of us. Especially if you don’t feel connected to people, or you are fearfully clinging to someone right now, you may have pulled up the wheat of your faith a long time ago to get out the tares of loneliness.

We need love. We will take any facsimile. The real thing starts with connecting with God, when prayer has turned our loneliness to solitude. Ask the question, like Jesus prayed, about why you feel disconnected. Embrace the need to stay on the cross of your fears until resurrection comes. That is praying in the weeds.

Get to the place where you can forgive.

When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him there, along with the criminals—one on his right, the other on his left. Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they divided up his clothes by casting lots. (Luke 23:33-34)

The weeds of self-serving justice and retribution can choke out the wheat of forgiveness. The people of Mother Immanuel in Charleston took their opportunity to be public Christians when the spotlights turned on their tragedy a few months ago. It was beautiful morality and they smelled good. You might step up too. I hope you never have to. It is usually less in the big places and more in the small that we are likely to harbor hate – the memories of past hurts and slights, the wounds that get reopened when people do “that thing” that gets us, the transfer of our neediness on to causes that purport to be about justice but are really about us.

That’s when we are praying in the weeds. The enemy sows tares hoping you will pull up your confidence and enter the endless cycle of power-grabbing, undermining others and protecting self-interest. We need to roll down the streets praying, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Does that prayer come to mind when you feel like you are getting killed? getting doored? getting dissed? getting used? If it does, that’s praying in the weeds.

Come to the end of your life, the end of each day trusting the Lord

 Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last. (Luke 23:46)

That prayer was the beginning of the end for the spiritual weeds sown by the master’s enemy and the beginning of forever for the wheat planted by his servants. Likewise, when we pray that prayer, it is the beginning of our day or our moment that puts to death the influence of ugly instincts that threaten to take over our spiritual field. It is a prayer that begins where we want to end: in the hands of God.

Last week we planted this prayer at the future police headquarters, right in the middle of territory that has been seeded with tares for a long time. “Into your hands,” we prayed, “we commit this police building, we commit the police, and we commit all the people who would like to bring their weediness right into this building and undermine peace.”

Lots of people had problems with the implicit demand that all of us do this. They were afraid they would be on the outs with their friends or relatives that see praying for the police as an act of criticism. Or I think some thought prayer was too wimpy a response because they cannot forgive anything that has happened in this country. Or maybe they didn’t believe much in prayer because they don’t really trust God.

 

But I think praying right there in the weeds made us beautiful and gave us the aroma of Christ. We didn’t just stay living with death until we smelled like it. Jesus is on the cross with the death and sin of the world on him. His suffering makes him beautiful. He is praying in the weeds. His groaning prayers are just the painful kind of prayers we need to pray in order to get to our own resurrection. In the weeds we pray for connection and reconciliation and hope and we are also lifted up. We also suffer the tares and bring connection, reconciliation and hope.

People who pray in the weeds, like Jesus prays from the cross, end up smelling like Christ. They don’t have to fight in a way that is as ugly as the world. They have a beautiful morality that people experience whenever they show up, having just come from prayer, having just realized, again, that they are one with Christ and Christ is one with them.

Subscribe to Development! Hit the “follow” button after you type in your email. Thanks for reading!

My second act — and a love note to Circle of Hope

Building community, Leadership, ,

Tonight Scott Hatch and I reminisced about when we met. I had called the number I found in his zine, Burnt Toast. It was on the zine rack in Tower Books on South Street where I hung out a lot. He said, “Sure. Come over.” Scott Clinton rumbled down the stairs at some point while I was in their living room and I met him for the first time, too. I was in the middle of a big risk: planting a new church based on a new movement of God’s Spirit in my life. Those guys ended up taking a risk to join in, too, and they are still doing it. (Tonight we also remembered how Scott was responsible for the six cop cars that met me one night on Tenth St. But that’s another story).

I have enjoyed being the pastor for the Brethren in Christ of Philadelphia/Circle of Hope Center City/Broad and Washington/1125 S. Broad so far. There have been a few tough times; but if you ask me how it has felt, I’ll tell you it has been fun. Not all pastors get to say that. Thanks everyone.

I have enjoyed teaching every week, leading a cell, being on a PM Team, beginning and leading mission teams and compassion teams, even finding buildings and rehabbing them. I liked being available for emergencies and counseling, answering the door and the phone for strangers and figuring out where money was going to come from. Being the congregation’s pastor is varied and joyous if that’s what God gives you to do. When I saw the Instagram of Rachel blessing Jeffy and Toni’s new house on Saturday morning, I thought, “Yes! That’s what a pastor gets to do.” I couldn’t go because I was elsewhere, but it felt right to see her there being a blessing like pastors get to be.

I will get further opportunities to do the acts of love and truth that have led me, but not just like I have been doing for so long. Now is the time for a second act. We are taking a new risk together and this month brings it all to a head. Most of the time when a founding pastor makes a move it is “out to pasture!” Or a younger king deposes him. Or, like in some corporate dynasty, he moves into a ceremonial role to preserve his sense of power. We are trying something different. We are more like a tribe that sticks together, and continues to develop. So I am changing. It seems natural.

Late last year we had an inspiration and we have been letting it mature all this year. So far, it looks like our risky Map is going to lead us where we thought it would. As far as our staff goes, we shook things up. We took Nate to lead the new Hub and installed Ben as a new pastor in Pennsauken. I could feel the excitement at the Love Feast in New Jersey last week. And the team in the Hub has already proven indispensable. Now we are going to unleash Rachel as pastor on S. Broad and maybe even see how we are going to multiply that creative, resourceful congregation again.

That means soon I am out of the job I’ve had for nineteen years (well, it is not exactly the same job I had in 1996!). What are we going to do with me? Some people have wondered why I am retiring! Some have wondered why they are ending my job before my term is up. I tell them, “I am not done. I am still part of the team. What I am going to do is what I have been doing more and more. The leaders, are just recognizing what God has done and are moving with it.” The 2015 Map says I “will mentor leaders, speak to vision, generally oversee the Leadership Team, provide spiritual direction, give relevant training and teach among the whole church.” As this year has unfolded and I have begun to take on that new role as Rachel takes on hers, my new/old assignment seems to be more than enough to take up my time and imagination. Some see it as an honor, an elevation into a CEO role. I see it more as one of my favorite spiritual examples, Francis of Assisi, might see it. Like he called his order the “little brothers,” I want to become smaller. Some of that means I want to become more focused, I want to lead more from below, more one on one. That seems right to me.

Someone noticed that Rachel was speaking more often now and wondered when I was going to get to do it! They felt bad for me, since it seemed to them like speaking is what I do. I will be speaking, but that has never been my first calling or my great love. I want to lead people to Jesus and help create an environment where people are safe to become their true selves and members of a living incarnation of Jesus, the church. I am still going to get to do that. I am grateful that I have been called into a unique opportunity to use my gifts and experience, and use them among the people I love in the region to which I am called. It will strain me to change, of course, but I expect the suffering to be sweet.

There is more to all this change than I am jotting down. I am just feeling full and eager, so it is spilling over into print. Circle of Hope is great – not just the idea of it, but the people of it.  I love you. I want to be a part of you as God has developed me. I am glad for the opportunity to help us develop. Thanks for making that possible.

What does it take to make a church happen in your 20’s and 30’s?

Leadership, The Mission, , ,

Our church will be talking a lot about children for the next month or so. Not only do we love them, we know a lot of them. (They seem to be popping out all over like tulips). We want to strategize for raising them together.

Many people who have raised this generation of twentysomethings are second-guessing what they did. We can probably learn from them as we raise the next generation, since many of us are their children! A lot of Gen-Y/millennials (destructive labeling) seem a lot more helpless than expected, more than a few can’t work well enough or get along well enough to keep a job, and they expect a lot to be delivered into this very moment (like emotional delivery by drone). There may be reasons for this:

  • They may have been told they are special – for no reason. They didn’t display excellent character or skill, but were treated as if they had. Now they assume they are innately special and are frustrated if they have to prove it by doing something.
  • They may have been told to dream big – and now any small act seems insignificant.
  • Their parents may have made their happiness a central goal. Now it’s difficult for them to generate happiness — the by-product of living a meaningful life.
  • They may have been given every comfort – and now they can’t delay gratification. (Mickey Goodman)

Surprisingly enough, at our last Imaginarium, when we asked the question, “What is God saying to us?” we started talking about the same things. We are the “young” people who are learning new traits from God and one another that allow us to serve our cause. And yes, we think we are special and at the same time doubt anyone who says someone or something is more special than someone or anything else. We are often bumping up against the reality that we actually have to do something to live up to our ideals. A lot of what we talked about matches the quotes above. Here’s my summary of our rich dialogue:

Being and building the church is often hard — trust God

In the great scheme of things, we can’t instantly change the world. We have to take small, first steps – which seem like no progress at all to many of us.

One of us planted a tree in their back yard. Someone actually came into their yard, yanked up the tree and stole it! They had to figure out what to do with all their anger. They had bought the house, taken the step to plant something hopeful and now they had this irrational, cruel opposition. It was tempting to move out. Instead they managed to let it go and plant another tree.

stewingThe church has forces yanking on it every day. If it gets planted where anyone can see it, it might be  sitting duck for cruel opponents. We have to deal with that. The fact is, if it were easy to grow the church, that would probably mean we were doing it wrong. But easy is expected, nonetheless. The fact is, frustration might be good for us. We tend to think, “I don’t deserve this frustration. Look at how great we are!”  — sometimes we stew in that rather than acting in trust.

We need to risk being led by Jesus and leading people to Jesus. Even when we are ill, over-scheduled, or in the middle of chaos. We need to note how our distorted vision of our capability gets disrupted and take another step. We need to act on our few best ideas.  We need to admit that change = resistance — even our “second act” meets resistance although we all agree it needs to happen! We need to see that the domination system is likely to step on our sprout.

Encountering resistance to meaning is challenging — stay vulnerable

Happiness is not a commodity we can earn or deserve, really. It is a by product of living a meaningful life, a life for God, a life for others, a life for the common good, a life in line with with what we were given to be.

Nehemiah-wallOne of our leaders told the story of planting a tree in his sidewalk. He and the neighbors took a turn at sledging the sidewalk to bits. He saw it as undoing what true haters, the kind that paved his neighborhood a long time ago, have done. They got a tree in the ground. Two new people came to the cell meeting as a result. We are like Nehemiah and his allies re-building the wall around Jerusalem. The joy of the Lord is our strength. There is even joy in being able to suffer, able to sledge.

Unlike the domination system, we are killable. We are like sheep. We meet resistance with vulnerability.  A hospice worker talked about how vulnerable she feels whenever she enters a home where death is imminent. She has to let people know that if they trust her, she can do something. But it is not easy to trust, especially when the homeostasis is disrupted — as it so often is for us.

We obviously go through the same kind of resistance with God and others. Going through our internal resistance is much harder, even, than facing the outer. We do things in old ways and resist letting go of learned behavior.

The fact that it is bigger than just me is not always comforting — look farther than your reaction

Now it is time to relay the importance of waiting for the things we want, deferring to the wishes of others and surrendering personal desires in the pursuit of something bigger than “me.”

Our clean-up day T-shirts gave us a good example of doing something uncomfortable for the greater good. A surprising number of us are T-shirt resistant, even T-shirt phobic! If you grew up in a T-shirt-wearing youth group you may actually want to run from people on the street wearing matching shirts. They look like some kind of overbearing, coercive army.

One person told a story, however, about how he met his neighbor when he was working on his house. The neighbor wanted to know what his shirt was about, after a while of getting to know each other. He was kind of “trapped” into talking about something bigger than himself because he was wearing his earth shirt as a work shirt.

ghosts on grassAnother person said they wanted to be marked. They want to demonstrate solidarity. They want to be in the coalition. They thought our T-shirt redeemed bad T-shirts. We like the idea of adding a colorful part of the big story. We are not the beginning or the end, but we are happening.

Sometimes being part of something big can be really hard — like we might be like a tree that gets ripped out and transplanted. That can be good. But it is not comfortable. Multiplying a cell always feels something like that for someone — getting ripped up. One of us said it was like C.S. Lewis’ image of “spectres” becoming solid as they acclimated to heaven (in The Great Divorce). We might not even know what true comfort is until we obey the voice of God calling us into what is truest about ourselves and our place in the world.

We are God’s children. Perhaps we were ill-raised. But what a great parent we have to usher us into an improved adulthood in faith!