My favorite part of exploring ideas is seeing how ideas affect other people.

The other day I shared an article suggesting that instead of tinkering with Daylight Savings Time or opting out of it, what if we adopted it all year round? It is not as novel a concept as one would think and has far more benefits than it does any of the alternatives. And it is one I’ve selfishly supported for years after living on the eastern side of a time zone and feeling like the 3 O’Clock hour is just a smidge too early to see a sunset.

Of course this suggestion brought out some interesting responses. My favorite, of course is “NO! NO!! NO!!”

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Entering into a conversation of what makes up church was bound to elicit some response. I knew that talking about music, priestly roles, and the creed were bound to get people talking. And I am grateful it did.

I’m much more surprised by what I have yet to hear, which is not just the “this is what I think” and more about how we can make these ideas function for us.

I very much worry that our inertia keeps us from doing what we need to do, what we desire to do, what we’re called to do.

Several months ago, I shared a story of coming back from an event in Baltimore which was to help spark the ingenuity, the entrepreneurial zeal, the fire to create and build the church in new ways. After getting home, I had to turn around and go straight to a clergy conference. I wasn’t there but a few minutes before a couple of colleagues dismissed this zeal and the emergence movement trying to capture it. I tried to explain to them that Emergence isn’t a fad, it’s our era.

It often feels as if conversations are shut down, not because they are wrong, but because we would just rather have a different one.

Finishing

When I thought of this series, I had a very simple idea in mind. I wanted to talk about the building blocks of our worship and our practical theology in a digestible way.

For my own interest, I also wanted to share my affection for deconstruction and try to make a daily practice of writing for a whole month.

The series was supposed to be 250-500 words per day. Nibbles hinting at the bigger truth. Not several bites into that apple of truth.

For me, the pace, and the volume of the writing was pretty exhausting. But I could’ve kept going if not for the fact that I planned for only 31 days. Had I made it 61, I’d still be churning them out. Maybe I’d eventually whittle the topic down to those nibbles I dreamed of.

Isn’t that how it goes, though? Our great challenges are not a question of can we? but how prepared are we? and dare we finish?

Facing Trouble

Since leaving seminary in 2007, I’ve taken as an important part of my ministry the idea that I must help the congregation be prepared to make the biggest decisions of their lives. Decisions which are unpopular and will likely cause pain. We know this matters theologically, of course, but we just don’t want to face that we may have to face it.

I teach our leaders that I’d rather we lead our way out of problems rather than allow our problems to force us into a single decision. It isn’t leadership when we who are called to lead avoid the hard decision by twiddling our thumbs until all but a single option have been eliminated by the passive passing of time.

I believe addressing the hard questions is what leaders should do, regardless of the circumstances. It just so happens that our circumstances in the church demand it more than in generations past.

Some of us are insulated by endowment monies, healthy patterns of behavior, fortunate geographic shifts and migration into our communities for work, and established congregational systems which don’t rely on the pastor or the church office to generate the bulk of the initiative for internal planning. Some of us have wealthy backers and favorable conditions for maintaining things just the way they are.

Many of us don’t.

The Northern Michigan Example

One of my favorite places to serve the church has been in Michigan, in which our four Episcopal dioceses have a collaborative and very forward-looking approach to sharing ministry beyond our boundaries.

This is especially necessary for our friends in Northern Michigan, the diocese which covers the entire Upper Peninsula.

The U.P. has few cities of any size, giant territory to cover, sparse road coverage, natural obstacles, and a terribly cold and snowy winter. Most of its congregations have long, long ago stopped being able to support a full-time pastor to lead the congregation. Many of the communities today cannot support a single church in the old model (1 church = 1 [full-time] pastor), let alone any number of different denominations.

Up there, they’ve had to innovate. There isn’t a real choice.

Unfortunately, the rest of the church hasn’t gotten on board with all of these innovations. Many have made it, at times difficult to serve a more challenged region with a rich history and profound leadership. Dioceses with wealthy endowments, big cities, and favorable migration patterns have not even a clue what their ministry looks like. And more importantly, aren’t listening to what they can teach the rest of us about our ministry.

Yoopers are challenging traditional ideas about leadership, and have for decades. They are using more connection and collaboration. They are making these changes out of necessity. But not entirely out of desperation.

They are leading the way into new territories of leadership and ecclesial theology. They are living out principles of leadership and congregational life that have also been found in the base communities in Latin America and in monastic circles around the world. They are being shaped by a forward-looking, hope-filled theology of community, trusting in the promised presence of Christ and transformative power of the Holy Spirit to renew them.

They certainly aren’t alone in this pursuit. Other dioceses and religious groups in many different regions are exploring the impact of an evolving theology of congregational leadership.

Led by necessity, they haven’t come to these decisions because of spreadsheets and logic. They are moving where the Spirit is leading them. What if the Spirit is leading us to follow them?

Forward

We are in a defining moment in our church’s* history. A moment of transition and real change. The true challenge we’re facing, however, is that few of us will see the other side of the transition.

I like to make use of Phyllis Tickle’s theory of Emergence. She famously spoke of Christianity (and most of the religious world, actually) as having a great rummage sale every 500 years. This is when a big question wrecks the church and we are forced to not only deal with it, but the fallout. We’re left to decide what we keep and what needs to go. Hence, the rummage sale.

She further developed that theory to describe the process more fully. She saw that each of our 500 year periods were made up of three parts:

1. A period of dealing with the serious question and rejecting the old.
2. A period of exploring the way forward.
3. A period of peace as we live into the new way.

It may seem like cold comfort to those living out the battles of doctrine and whose very lives and vocations have been wrecked by our church fights, but we seem to have moved out of the first stage and entered into the second. We are less rejecting and wrestling with whether or not stuff is happening (like climate change, for instance) and instead moving into making sense of the way forward (how to deal with it).

We won’t have universal buy-in, but we already have vast majorities of Christians actually recognizing what many of our problems are. We’re also seeing much greater interest in actually fixing our problems and moving beyond the bickering of the past.

* Please see my introduction to the Deconstruct Church series for how I prefer to use the term “church”.

From Here

There is important teaching about the church which I internalized a few years ago. Actually, I stole it from Christian A. Schwartz. It was about holes in a bucket.

If we imagine a bucket and we recognize that this bucket’s work is to carry water, then we want to make sure that the bucket can hold enough water to make our trip from one place to the next worthwhile, right?

Now imagine this bucket has some holes in it. Many of them, actually. And they are all over the sides of the bucket. Knowing what we know about buckets, we’ll want to fix those holes, right?

Now imagine that the water is already pouring and our job of transporting the water has already begun. We need to already be acting.

Which hole is the most important? Which should get our attention?

The lowest one.

We’ll need to fix all the holes, but right now, the water is always going out the lowest hole. And that is the hole we need to focus on. Eventually, we’ll fix it and a different need will arise and we’ll have to treat that one. We’ll fix that different hole in the bucket. The next lowest. But right now, while the water is flowing out, we need to patch up our weakest place.

There are many holes in our great church for the water to stream out of. And it streams out of very different holes in each of our different congregations. In that way, each local congregation needs to focus on its lowest hole. And each of us as Christians are called to loving the people in our local communities.

But nationally, globally, there are lowest holes for the church which we all could address. I have one idea of where we can start. Here is another: renew our commitment to love, honesty, and learning.

• Renew our personal commitments to reading Scripture with other people, gathering for book groups, and reading about new discoveries in scholarship.
• Forming our local congregations into peace centers and places in which its members not only know what love is, but share it, giving hope and healing to the local community.
• Speaking honestly to one another in the midst of real struggle, not papering over the problems, but providing honesty and encouragement in the face of our common adversity.
• Developing higher standards, not for the sake of punishing nonconformists, but to build up the character of our members to bring love and peace to the world, rather than hatred and discord.
• Sharing the love we know in Christ, rather than the minutia of belonging to an exclusive club.

And perhaps most importantly: We need to get out of our heads about learning.

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Learning is experiential. Learning to follow Christ doesn’t only come in the classroom, but it comes from living as one who follows. We can learn through life experience, through serving, through being with others who tell stories of how GOD has been a part of their life. Better, though, is learning with intention; following as a disciple who seeks to be more Christ-like in all of these experiences.

This means we must couple our learning with service, prayer, and worship.

For some, this is a radical notion: particularly as we are often taught to learn in our heads and hearts before we can experience with our bodies. But that experience must be part of the learning process. We must receive communion to know Christ; we must serve the poor to know love; we must share of our wealth to know generosity.

Our first step to renewal of the church is millions of little steps, acts of defiance and new birth; of experiential learning and giving hope to our neighbors. But the first step is our first step. For GOD is in our gathering and GOD is in those exits; those first footsteps onto the pavement.