PCUSA General Assembly 223 + Day Two.

Day Two.

1.

On Sunday, a group of us went to worship at Third Presbyterian Church, on the outskirts of St. Louis.  The choir was fantastic and led almost the whole service.  There was an excellent and inspiring sermon on the Good Samaritan story by Rev. Portis.  I had a wonderful and lively time with this growing African American congregation!  It gave me hope.

2.

Referencing in his talk Liz Theoharis’ presentation from yesterday on poverty, Stated Clerk J. Herbert Nelson called for transformation in the way we function on many levels.  Of the four qualities we hope God inspires in people as they are ordained — energy, intelligence, imagination, and love — Nelson indicated that love is the most important… but we are weakest in the area of imagination.  Imagination is where we could us the most significant growth.  He called for a church that cultivates a "sanctified imagination,” that is able to think in different ways.  Instead of being wedded to our often crumbling, increasingly empty, but overly beloved buildings, our congregations need to address the deep and crushing needs in local communities.

Nelson is right about imagination.  Too many churches have none.  Instead of imagination we have a crippling nostalgia as an expression of the denial, anger, bargaining, and depression stages of grief.  Too many Presbyterians want things to be the way they were, which pushes out of their consciousness any imagination about they way God wants us to be in the future.

But we are beginning to get glimpses of a new future for the PCUSA.  Things only imagined a few years ago are beginning to be realized.      

3.

Speaking of imagination, among the issues facing the General Assembly this year are some groups set up to peer into the future and start reorganizing new ways of doing mission.  In Presbyterian fashion, and as perhaps an indicator of part of the problem, we turned this over to not one but three different entities: Vision 2020, the All Agency Review, and The Way Forward Commission.  Each deals with different but related things, from casting a general vision, to restructuring the denominational bureaucracy.

This is often couched in hyperbolic language, as we try to psych ourselves up for this or that vision and change.  So: “The way is clear, all we need do is arise and walk.  The survival of our denomination is at stake!”  And: we are “Stepping boldly into the new epoch!”

Let’s not go overboard here.  This is largely a bureaucratic structural rearrangement.  There is nothing “adaptive” about it.  That doesn’t mean the recommendations of these groups are not needed and helpful.  Sometimes technical change works.  And I hope that their work does at least keep us afloat and more or less together while real transformation happens.

4.

 Theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz came up with the brilliant word, “kindom,” to reimagine the word kingdom as really referring in the NT to an alternative structure to the Empire. Perhaps the most important word at this General Assembly is “kindom.”  It is a reimagining of “kingdom,” which is a translation of the Greek NT word, basileia.  The NT uses basileia in an ironic and oppositional way against the pervasive and oppressive power of Rome, the secular basileia of the time.  The gospel community presented itself as an alternative basileia or an alternative basileia, or kingdom.  Jesus himself uses the word to describe the central focus of his ministry, the Kingdom of God.  It is a new, oppositional order of relationships and community, giving us a totally different kind of social organization.  Where Caesar’s kingdom was centralized, top-down, extractive, exploitative, and oppressive, the new kingdom proclaimed by Jesus has all of us as equals under God, with an economy of sharing and justice rooted in inclusion, forgiveness, and non-violence.

Unfortunately, the church has misunderstood kingdom language for most of its history as if it blessed and authorized the very power structures and rulers Jesus rejects (and which crucified him).  I guess irony and oppositional language is hard to maintain over generations under the pressure of wealth and power.

Anyway, at this General Assembly, the approach is to use the English word kingdom, removing the g in the middle, which leaves “kindom.”  Kin, of course, is an old English word for family relationships.  Kindom, then, expresses a social order characterized by equality and sharing, as in a family, under one divine Parent.  And it presents this as the alternative to kingdom.  Kindom is the anti-kingdom that Jesus declares and establishes.  Kindom is what the NT means by using the word basileia against the earthly kingdoms that were agents of oppression and violence.

PCUSA General Assembly 223 + Day One

Day One.

1.

The highlight of today’s activity at the General Assembly happened at the beginning of the day with a talk by Rev. Liz Theoharis.  Theoharis is the the author of Always With Us?  What Jesus Really Said About the Poor.  She now serves as co-chair with Rev. William Barber II of The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. 

Theoharis spoke with understated dignity as she rattled off horrendous and tragic statistic after statistic concerning the situation of poor people in our country today.  This is epitomized by the current administration’s godless and inhumane policy of forcibly separating parents and children at the border… and then, adding blasphemy to injury, claiming to be following the Bible in committing such an atrocity.  Theoharis wondered allowed what Bible these people are reading.  She skimmed over the social justice emphasis that emerges throughout the Scriptures, from Genesis and Deuteronomy, to Jesus and Paul.  

She brought the good news of the amazing — and wildly underreported — witness being made by poor people and their supporters all over our country in the past few weeks.  She and some of the other people on the stage with her have recently been jailed in protests, experiencing deliberately difficult conditions. 

Poor people are subjected to a variety of catch-22 dilemmas, like when they cut off (or severely overcharge for) your family’s water, and then come to take your children away because you have no water.  So public school teachers specifically instruct children not to tell them if they have water in their homes because the teachers are legally bound to report it.  See how this works?  She mentioned several people whom she knows who lost loved ones to completely preventable and treatable diseases, simply because health care in our country is unaffordable to many.  

There are 140M poor people in America, 75% of whom are women and children.  Fifty percent of the children in this country are poor.  And so on.  None of this is right or moral

Not to have anger over this is to be a soulless trafficker in human misery.

Theoharis was “proud to be PCUSA” because the denomination has exhibited such a commitment to social justice.  It is certainly a plus for us to have her in such a position, next to Barber, whom many consider to be the most important African American leader since Martin Luther King.  

Commenting on her book, she said that “God hates poverty and has commanded us to end it.”  It is not God, but our own “charity” and hypocrisy that ensure that poverty will always be with us.   

2.

I am getting tired of the “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” language clearly being used instead of Trinitarian language.  The triune God does indeed create, redeem, and sustain all things.  But there is no division of labor in the Godhead, as if only the first hypostasis of the Trinity creates.  On the contrary, the Word and Spirit participate in the work of creation.  The same goes for God’s redeeming and sustaining.  These are things accomplished by the triune God, and should not be delegated to only one hypostasis.  The Trinity is one of the central affirmations of Christianity.  It is basically a way of talking about how God is inherently love and relational.  The distinctions within the Trinity have to do with the character of the relationships between them, not the jobs they supposedly do as individuals.  Everything God does, God does as Trinity.  It’s not an assembly line.  

3.

Our Moderatorial elections continue to be spectacles of self-promotion.  At this point this is just part of being a church in American culture, I suppose.  I don’t think we know how to do it any other way.  In my view, wanting this job should automatically disqualify someone from getting it.  As it stands, we have candidates running little “campaigns” for it; “offering themselves” is the least offensive way to spin this.  

A lot of our practice here is based on what I suspect is a misunderstanding of the idea of a “call.”  In a culture as individualistic as ours, we have this fantasy that a call is something that comes directly from God to an individual, in isolation from their community.  Actually, a true call needs not just be ratified or validated by the community somewhere down the line, but needs to come in and through the community from the start.  God’s call is horizontal; it comes through others.  Its “verticality" is communal, it descends, like the Spirit in Acts 2, on all gathered together.  Anyone who imagines God is speaking to them directly and apart from the community probably needs a reality check.  I wish we had a tradition of allowing the Moderator to somehow emerge from the body itself, by the power of the Spirit, without people deciding to put themselves forward.  But to Americans such a concept is almost beyond imagination.

Another thing we are developing is the practice of having “Co-Moderators.”  On the one hand, this mitigates any personality cult focused on a single individual.  It also spreads out the workload in what is now a two-year responsibility.  It is an example of our willingness to do something imaginative and different.

On the other hand, the practice can sour into a kind of “ticket-balancing,” as Moderatorial candidates seek more votes by teaming up with someone from a different demographic.  This kind of scheming can cut both ways.  That is, a worthy candidate may be brought down by their partner.  Voting for a team can also dilute the message and focus that we have when dealing with single candidates.  It remains to be seen how this plays out.    

 

4.

How can we talk about white privilege and racism without ever using the word repentance?  The answer has to be more than simply conversation and education.  What would repentance look like? 

  

Do We Really Want Adaptive Change?

Adaptive Change.

In the church these days leaders reflexively use language developed by management guru Ron Heifetz.  The main words describe two different kinds of change: “technical” and “adaptive.”  I have grown tired of hearing people throw these terms around as if “technical” change is bad and “adaptive” change is good.  Worse, I have witnessed leaders push their own agenda by wrapping it in the language of “adaptive change,” and criticize the opinions of others because it is merely “technical” and therefore woefully inadequate for our present situation.  

Heifetz himself says that adaptive change has to involve the whole community.  Secondly, he distinguishes between technical change, which is something we know how to do, and says that the main thing about adaptive change is that we don’t yet know how to do it.  This means that the very idea of adaptive change advocated or imposed by a visionary leader who must be followed, is wrong.

In The Practice of Adaptive Change, Heifetz then sets out these five characteristics of real adaptive change.  (P. 16ff.)    

1.  “Adaptive leadership is specifically about change that enables the capacity to thrive.”

2.  “Successful adaptive changes build on the past rather than jettison it.”

3.  “Organizational adaptation occurs through experimentation.”

4.  “Adaptation relies on diversity.”

5.  “New adaptations significantly displace, re-regulate, and rearrange some old DNA.”

In my experience, too many church leaders are talking a lot about adaptive change, but do not appear to want to engage in these 5 things.  

First, we have no consensus in the church concerning what it means to “thrive.”  Is it all about numbers of members or worshipers?  The size of budgets?  Expansion?  Missional faithfulness?  Even if leaders agreed on the definition of thriving, there is a wide disparity among the people in our churches about this, some of whom still harbor nostalgic fantasies about bringing back the glory days of the 1950’s.  Until we have some ballpark agreement on what a thriving church looks like, I wonder if continued conversation about adaptive change is even intelligible.

Second, some pushers of adaptive change seem allergic to the church’s past altogether, and will gladly jettison almost any tradition in the name of transformation and relevance.  Until we figure out how to interpret our past — what to lose, what to recover, and what to cherish — adaptive change is not happening.

Third, few churches and presbyteries allow themselves space for real experimentation.  Too many are looking for quick fixes and silver bullets, and are ready to hang it up if any idea fails or doesn’t succeed well enough.  We are suspicious of some churches that do engage in experimentation, even reacting violently to close them down in some cases.  Furthermore, many leaders are more interested in their own model being imposed rather than any kind of experimentation.  Finally, experimentation needs space and some kind of safety net so that people are willing to try different things without being paralyzed by a fear that failure will be prohibitively and personally costly.

Fourth, we still seem often to have an understanding that the goal is a new one-size-fits-all version of the church, and our processes are geared usually unconsciously in this direction.  Our polity and structures militate against diversity, privileging the old guard, the experts, and the veterans, almost all of whom happen to be older white people.  

Finally, adaptive change is real and deep.  It changes some basic values and practices of the organization.  It does require loss of some cherished things.  Few leaders are willing to go there, fearing that disrupting an already disoriented and traumatized organization will finish it off.  To be more blunt, they don’t want to alienate the sources of money that want and expect a return to the glory days.

So.  Leaders who are not moving in these directions should basically shut up about “adaptive change” because they are really not interested in it.