Marry the problem, not the solution

This reiterates a question I often ask associate pastors, board members, or members (I rarely ask senior pastors, they’re not given to analytical questions.  It makes them nervous   They’re just trying to keep things together day-to-day with some tenuous veneer of why they’re in charge).

My question is “If Church is the Answer, What’s the Question?” 

It’s a query that’s rarely met with a ready answer.  For most people church is simply an ipso facto equation: we have church so that we can have church.  It is an inelegant tautology, wrapped neither in an enigma nor surrounded by a mystery, but rather gummed together with civic religion and sticky to the touch with sentimental pap and platitudes.

What questions are driving your church?  Some exeptions aside, natch, pastors and staff tend to see church as answering the question of “Where can I get a job?”, “How can I keep this job?”, and “Why do these people keep bothering me?”  Board members, elders, donors come to the church looking for ways to ingratiate themselves into a captive audience where their influence can be felt and heard. “How can I be important?” is their question.

Since these questions are vital to the identity and survival of those in charge, the answers will become manifest in the subsequent church programming and experience.  This is not to say most pastors and leaders are nefarious, they’re just too caught up in the wrong set of questions because their peers and published professionals are pushing the wrong set of questions.

But it’s the other questions that people come to church looking for answers.  Questions dealing with love, acceptance, and forgiveness.

How can I find community?  Where can I find people who will love me and nurture me?

How can I find transformation?  Where can I break free from the thoughts, habits, and environments that keep me struggling, that keep me repeating my past?

These are the questions that people come to church looking for answers to.  They are looking for a life-changing experience.  Being “relevant” is not an adequate substitute for community or transformation.  Where pastors and people become confused is when they start thinking of church as the problem, rather than the solution.  If church is the problem we set about fixing church.  We tweak, rearrange, change the music, change the format, change the carpet.  Church is not the problem.  The problem we are solving is getting people deeply engaged in a community of the Spirit. This is a community where we eat, pray, and love outside of the Sunday morning routine.  We are marrying people, not the church.  Don’t marry the church.  You will begin to dislike people because they mess up your programs, routines, and services.  Pharisees married the church and it didn’t work out well in the long run.

If church is the answer, the question is, “How can we create a community marked by God’s love, overflowing in the Spirit, and connected in Christ’s body?”  The focus needs to be shifted to people, not the church.

What Not to Spend Your Time On

“The question is not who’s best at performing high-priority functions, but which things can you and only you as the CEO get done?

If you don’t ask yourself that question, your time allocations are bound to be wrong. Lots of CEOs who have been great number twos flounder as number one because they are implicitly asking the wrong question. That happens because they usually rose to CEO by being very good at getting things done themselves.”

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/10/what_not_to_spend_your_time_on.html

So the question isn’t, “Who’s the boss?”, the question is “Why are you the boss?”.  Too many pastoral and ministry staff fall into doing the work rather than equipping others for the work to be done.  That’s because many pastors aren’t sure of how that equipping takes place.  So they usually settle for being busy as a means of justifying their role as pastor. 

The pastor’s role is to create the context, frame the discussion, and ensure that empowerment takes place.  Sunday sermons are not the main function of a pastor.  The first role of a pastor is ensuring that your people are being progressively exposed to life-changing experiences within the context of community.  The role of the pastor is to ensure that people are being transformed and maturing, not just showing up and volunteering.  Worship services, healing services, or community outreach are great starting points.  But these are events.  The pastor is not an event director, but the expert in Christian maturity, in development and transformation, and in community.  Anything short of that and the pastor will be doing the wrong work.      

Something Big

Conditions for magic

bobulate:

Howard Rheingold declares teaching and learning goals for his Stanford class:

I want to create the conditions for the class as a whole to make something magical happen. I want students to take away from this course all the learning outcomes I explicitly describe, but I also want to achieve much more: I want to awaken those who have been lulled to semislumber by so many years of desks arrayed in rows and “will this be on the test?” — I want to awaken them to their own powers to use online tools and their thinking skills to not only cope, but to thrive in a world that requires continuous learning. I want to grow more aware along with my students. I want to model and facilitate exploration of and reflection about the impacts of our own media practices. I want to induce student teams to outdo each other in coming up with fun, thought-provoking, incisive, profound, ways to engage with the texts and ideas. I want to inspire so much interest in social media that students read all the required texts and even some of the recommended texts.

He takes risks and teaches this way because:

I’ve learned that if you try something larger than your capabilities, you’ve learned something about doing something big — even if you fail. If you succeed admirably at doing something that you know you can do, you’ve learned something about doing something small. There’s nothing wrong with doing small things well. But I’m here to help those who want to go for it. This century requires thinkers who know how to take on significant challenges.

Taken out of context, not a bad vow to adopt, to adapt, to lead, to move, to live.

_____________________

I like the direction of these ideas, if not the specifics.  There is something to be said for getting students enthused and engergized about learning.  But the problem is getting excited for excited sake.  Why learn all about social media if you’ve got nothing to say? Or if you’re just going to twitter your daily activities, ”going to lunch @ Taco Bell !!!!”.

This is applicable in both churches and schools.  Both spend a lot of time learning to use tools but having no projects.  I like that this teacher ties it to the second quote about doing “something big”.  But the something big is never defined in most cases.  And the something big is rarely about community.  Often it takes the form of raising money for a cause, but hardly ever working on the cause itself.  We like to gather backpacks for inner city school kids, but we don’t find ways to bring those students and their families into community.  That’s big.  Collecting backpacks, small. 

The significant challenges of this century are known: collect people into the community of the Spirit.   

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,because he has anointed me

to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to release the oppressed,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me.”

The significant work of this century is not connecting your small groups on Facebook or using Ipads from the stage.  Forming an open-source, homeschool co-op that provides a real education to the poor, the kids from broken homes, and those who are looking for an real alternative to the bureaucratic system.  These co-ops are formed around community and resourcing those who have been oppressed by this world and it’s systems.  Examples like this are where we can use social media and the new power tech tools of our time.

Churches need to be finding ways to empower the unempowered, and bringing in the disinfranchised.  That’s big.     

Church as Brand

Remember, regardless of what you know or think you know about branding, your church is a brand. 

If you’re just trying to do church, you will end up doing supeficial and gimmicky marketing aimed at simply luring people to your Sunday service.  Like asking people to drink Pepsi instead of Coke.  There’s no substative differences between the two, so the goal is to create pretend benefits for choosing one over the other.  

Most churches think they’re different or better than the church down the street.  But 99% of the times these differences are in intention only.  I’ll concede that many churches want to be different, but then they do the exact same things every other church is doing.  Not a recipe for different.  And certainly no closer to becoming a better church. 

Real brands don’t need cliches, copying, or the next book on being Church Different.  To move beyond good intentions and minor doctrinal distinctions, start helping people lead better lives.  Help people navigate, celebrate, and make meaning out of their lives. Don’t worry about your brand, worry about connecting with people.  A real brand will follow.

Margaret Atwood on the role of church

It seems that this is role of community: bringing out the gifts in people.  People are expressive and creative.  Our job is to create the relationship and space for that to be developed and experienced.

How Real Is Your Community?

Modern Attempts at Reformation

Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top program handed out almost $5 billion to promote these ideas. States leapt to be eligible for the money, promising to open more privately managed charter schools, to fire the principal of every low-performing school, to fire most or all of the teachers in schools with low scores, and to close public schools if their scores are low.

None of these approaches works.

Privately managed charter schools do not get better results on average than regular public schools. Some are excellent, some are awful, but most are no better than their public counterparts. Even the Superman movie admitted that only one in five (actually, only 17 percent) of charters get great test scores. Twice as many charters (37 percent) are even worse than the neighborhood public school. Privately managed charter schools do not get better results on average than regular public schools. Some are excellent, some are awful, but most are no better than their public counterparts. Even the Superman movie admitted that only one in five (actually, only 17 percent) of charters get great test scores. Twice as many charters (37 percent) are even worse than the neighborhood public school.

Education Crisis: Testing and Firing Teachers Doesn’t Work – The Daily Beast (via robot-heart-politics)

 

 

This trend is similar to the non-denominationalism trend of the ’90′s and the unchurch trend of the ‘Aughts.

 

 

1990′s: “If we just leave the denominations and the bureaucracy and the tradition behind, church will be different.”

 

2000′s: “If we just leave the building programs, the hype, and the show behind, church will be different.”

 

2010:  American church is pumping out the same results as 1980.

 

 

Schools and churches both tend to confuse process with results.  You will never achieve a perfect process.  Trying to get the perfect school system or the perfect church is the definition of a bureaucracy.  Anytime process is your focus, people will always be seen as an obstacle or intrusion.

 

You can get 100 students to learn more, you can get 100 people more involved in a church community.  But that is achieved by working with 100 people, not perfecting one system.  See, lots of people are system experts, but they don’t know anything about people.  Lots of people can run a gym, but they don’t know how to get people in shape.

 

It’s possible to run a church or a school, but not be an expert in how people learn or how to develop community.  So, in the end, different approaches to school or church won’t get different results until you learn how to work with individual people in ways that grow and connect them.