Tag Archives: improvement

On Creating More Hassles

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In today’s blog post, “On creating a hassle,” Seth Godin writes:

To quote Merlin Mann, “You don’t let the guy with the broom control how many elephants are in the parade.”

Harsh to say, but the fact is that great storytellers and artists and ruckus makers manage to insulate themselves from the people they’re going to hassle. And the job of those that are being hassled by the commotion is to be hassled by the commotion. No commotion, no job.

English: The eye of an asian elephant at Eleph...

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Perfect words for the church to hear.  Particularly its leadership.  I’ll add to it only this.

We are far too eager to be the one with the broom and far too eager to complain about the numbers of elephants.  If more of us put our efforts into making a better parade, the voice of the pooper scooper wouldn’t seem so loud.  Besides, how many people complaining about the number of elephants do we really need?

Fixing What We Got Wrong

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christmas 2007

Image by paparutzi via Flickr

My mentor during seminary, The Rev. Darren Elin once remarked that we get our two biggest holidays backwards: we celebrate Christmas the night before and Easter the morning after when it should be the other way around.  Boy was he right.

This is my first Christmas in 5 years in which I wasn’t one of the leaders in worship.  I have to tell you, missing Sunday morning Eucharists is one thing, but not doing a Christmas service is just weird.  But I digress.  I found myself in the same spot everyone else was.  We headed to the “family service” at 4:30 pm on the day before Christmas (which, by the way, is ridiculously early for normal people with families.  I’m just saying.) and we aren’t planning on going anywhere this morning.  And it’s Sunday for GOD’s sake.  Ugh.

I wonder what kind of challenge it really is to switch our priorities.  If we really cared about Christmas as we say we do, why are so few of us in attendance when it actually is?  I’m afraid of what the real answer reveals about us.

  • We care more about family traditions than our church ones; and
  • We care more about our church traditions more than their meanings.

I know all of the legitimate reasons for how we do what we do in the way that we do them now.  Hey, I just succombed to it!  I’m just wondering why it isn’t easier.  Why wouldn’t it be easier to get more people to show up on actual Christmas rather than before?  Why can’t we expect people to make room on Christmas morning for worship?

I have to say, considering that whole GOD coming to earth thing, I have to say that it seems like the least we could do.

Flying: how change came before you noticed it

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Remember the old image of flying in an airplane?  The smoky cabin, everyone dressed in suits, the stewardesses pretty and amiable.  Everything with the nostalgic sheen of an episode of Mad Men.  Flying was the purview of the wealthy and the hardworking.  It wasn’t for the common man.

Of course, those that fly routinely know today’s feeling is something like a cattle-car; each person squeezed together, after the indignity of choosing to be patted-down or walking through a giant X-Ray in which you “assume the position” of guilt (hands up and legs spread).  Nothing says high-class and good times like bearing all that you are—and of course, removing your shoes and belt.

A recent flight brought this all to my consciousness because for the first time, I was on a flight with three male flight attendants and only one woman.  This is not significant by itself, of course; and it is clearly a common occurrence for the frequent flyers among us.

What it reminded me of was the subtle shift in not only priority, but in operations in the airline industry.  The old way glorified youth, beauty and service.  It was an expensive luxury for those that could afford to participate and fully represented the cultured-class.  From the onboard meals, to the serving of alcohol, the very nature of flying was decadent and pampering.

It isn’t that way anymore, is it?  Now the planes are designed to offer the least amount of space for you as they can get away with, nothing is free, and the entire process is something of a challenge to each passenger’s will power.  But I don’t long for the old days, by any means.  The priorities have changed.  Look at the difference in the flight attendants and you can see how:

  • Before: youth/beauty/service
  • Now: experience/access/safety

In the old way, the passenger is supposed to feel comfortable; now she is meant to feel safe.  Instead of beautiful waitresses, we have experienced professionals.

The funny thing is that this happened without fanfare and without the public throwing any kind of fit.  There was no political battle over it and no claims of some evil political correctness police daring to try and make people (gasp!) just and considerate.  We went to sleep in the 70’s and woke in the 10’s to find the world is different.  And that old way seems archaic, doesn’t it?  A little unseemly.  Perhaps a tad creepy, actually; the image of old men staring at 20 year-old women is no longer “expected” is it?  The old way doesn’t fit.  And at the same time, the new way makes sense and feels right, if not with a whiff of “new plane smell”.

I wonder what this means for society and for church?  I wonder if our patterns and practices from the 1960s and 70’s feel as stale as that old image of the stewardess.  And what of transforming our witness for the 10’s—transforming to something that is less about youth, beauty, and service, but about real experience, access, and safety.  I wonder if we wouldn’t be more comfortable in a church like that.  And for those that are stuck in the 1970s, I have only one question: why?

In abuse, sex is the weapon, power is the cause

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The sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church has caused a great deal of speculation and fighting–ideological, political, theological–and all (theoretically) for the betterment of the church.

A new study, which I expect to do little to squash the fighting and speculating, attempts to make good PR for the Roman church by countering the arguments of its critics.  But it does nothing to change the debate; it simply adds more ammunition to a war that already has far too many casualties.  And worse, it ignores the real problem: power.

Psychologists have long contended that abuse, and particularly sexual abuse, is not about sex, per se, or deviance, but the exercising of power or dominance over another.  In this way, the study reveals nothing surprising or unexpected.  The abuse of (predominantly) teen and pre-teen boys was not a symptom of the church’s stance on sexuality.  I for one never thought it was.  What it is, however, is something much scarier for the institution: an institutional hierarchy that seems to have driven many men to seek power through domination.

Of course I am not condoning, defending, or supporting the RCC’s handling of anything.  What I am pointing out is that the Church’s ecclesiological problem led to a sex abuse problem.  I do believe that RC clergy would be healthier without the celibacy requirement, but I also believe they would be healthier without a top-down hierarchy.  Their system is all about power–who has it and who doesn’t–and is predecated on people’s respect of the (male) individual in power.  The truth of the matter is that the same hierarchical model would be far less dangerous if women were involved in leadership and holding positions of real power.  I say this, not because women can do it better or that women are immune to this behavior (far from it), but that the diversity of people in power brings a natural balance to the arrangement.  Diversity in leadership levels things, bringing the laity and the clergy closer.

What the study does reveal, and I hope it is used usefully and not as some lame excuse, is that the social upheaval of the 1960s seemed to spark something in the clergy trained in the 1940s and 50′s toward this abusive behavior.  I believe that this only really makes sense in light of the power argument.  This loss of influence, seemingly deteriorating morals, and a profound sense of impotence led a bunch of men to abuse the powerless because of the hierarchy that made them feel powerless to effect the world around them and gave them a bunch of people they could dominate.

The issues of sex, gender, social unrest are only the window dressing of this conversation.  And there will be no resolution until the RCC deals with the institutional crisis.

Seperate and Unequal: income inequality in the U.S.

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Some have spent the better part of the last thirty years describing the dramatic economic shift toward the greater concentration of wealth in the ultra-wealthy, and the adverse effect this has had on the average American.  Some have even chosen to mock this concern in recent years, suggesting that “redistribution of wealth” is something to mock. As if the wealth wasn’t already being redistributed (what is a tax cut but an act of changing the economic flow?)!

A new release of graphs highlighting that inequality are striking.  Produced by Mother Jones, these graphs not only highlight the problem.  Notice the last one in this description piece that shows the gap between what the economic reality is and what people think it is.  Then what they wish it were.

Now look closely at this one:

If you figure out where you fit in the metrics, you can see how much more money you would be making if the economic principles that governed the decades during and after the Great Depression (1930s-70′s) had not been obliterated in the early 1980s.  Look at it.  Ninety percent of Americans, 90%!!!!, would be making more money today.  That means, that the plain-old wealthy (as opposed to the super rich) would also be making more money!  Let me say that again.  Low income=more money.  Middle income=more money.  High income=more money.  Wealthy=more money.  Ridiculously, disgustingly wealthy=less money.  Unless you are the lucky one out-of-100, you are making less money than you would have so that the 96-99 percentile could make almost $30K more and the 100th percentile could make $600K more per year!

It would be one thing to be coy and call it “trickle up economics,” but a more accurate term might be “geyser economics”.  The rapid, immediate, and dramatic shifting of national wealth to the upper echelon has obvious economic effects:

  1. Less money in their pockets, means greater financial difficulty for the bottom half of the country. Living paycheck-to-paycheck as it is, increases in two particular areas: transportation costs and housing costs: coupled with a decrease in real wages, means half of the country is getting by on less with no relief in sight.
  2. If we value peace and hate conflict, then we should also be concerned with the emotional and psychological effects that the crushing weight of income inequality is having on the majority of Americans that are struggling–most of which were raised struggling through the last 30 years
  3. The current economic crisis is not a crisis at all for the highly educated and wealthy. The top 10% have seen no job loss at all.  The middle has seen quite a bit.  And yet, it is the bottom third and the young that are disproportionately hurt by the last few years.  We aren’t all being effected.
  4. Gen Xers and Millenials only know this widened gap. The redistribution of wealth to the wealthy in the form of an economic geyser had no positive impact on my generation or those after me.  This means that many of us have been raised in a time believing we were the weird ones not living the high life–when that high life was all perception.

It seems to me that we have no hope of dealing with the struggles and evils of our time without taking a moral stand in support of improving the economic conditions of the 95%.  We know the obvious link between poverty and school performance, violence, blight, drug abuse, and all of the cancers of society.  But until we make it a moral imperative to change the system that creates poverty, we only invite it to repeat.  These graphs show that we are not repeating a cycle of poverty, but living within a system that ever more pushes the bottom 80% toward poverty, and all of its associated evils.

Note: I originally posted that 95% lost money.  It was changed to correctly read 90%.

“First, imagine this is bread…”

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“…everybody got it?  OK, because you’re never going to believe what else it is.”

I found this picture online and that is the first thing that popped into my head.

Jonny Baker, in his blog, directed his readers to an article in the Church of England Newspaper entitled “The Eucharist re-examined“.  You’ll find the picture there.  But more than that, you’ll find a discussion about the history of the Eucharist, how it was practiced in the early church, and how it changed in the Medieval period to resemble something similar to what we know of it today.

It really has me thinking about the way we celebrate together–and more importantly–what Jesus intended for us.

I’m glad I’m not the only one that thinks its weird that we take a round piece of something that tastes like paper, sip a little wine, and walk back to our seats.  And for those that toast with thimbles of grape juice, don’t think you’re off the hook, either!

simplicity

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Through Lent, St. Paul’s is holding a Lenten Program about Simplicity.  The concept, as I see it, being this:

  • We have complicated lives and live in a complex world, but it need not be so.
  • This complexity separates us from one another and from God.
  • To achieve balance in our lives, we must remove what separates us from God.

Another way of putting it is that we have a lot of stuff in our lives that creates sin, and we need to get rid of it, not because the stuff is itself sinful, but because it prevents us from knowing God.

I’m excited about the program because this is something I need; something I care about.  I have a lot of ideas swimming about and hope to engage them in the weeks ahead.  But I would like to engage your thoughts about simplicity.  What are the things that make your life too complicated?  What are the things that you need to make your life better?

Finding the conservative voice

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“The Conservative voice has left the church.” This is the statement so often repeated throughout the coverage of the 76th General Convention of The Episcopal Church.

As the argument goes, since 2003, virtually all of the conservatives have left and all that remains are a bunch of crazy liberals and a few loan voices crying out in the wilderness. If this were even remotely true, it wouldn’t be so laughable.

Somewhere between 7 and 10% of Episcopalians left the church in the last six years. That includes the attempted mass exodus of several dioceses. Let me now rerun the phrase: The conservative voice has left the church. Let’s do the math. 10 + X = 100%.  So the conservative voice was only 10% of the church? Another phrase that was tossed around: “most of the conservatives have left.” Most implies the majority, so again using the upper maximum 10%, then as of 2002, conservatives accounted for 19% of the church. In other words, simple arithamatic discredits this argument wholesale.

So why have so few journalists done the math? And why is “most of the conservatives have left” a convenient excuse?

The inherent trouble has nothing to do with a ‘conservative voice’ or numbers of conservatives in our midst. It is with our understanding of who “owns” the church. In The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle calls this the greatest argument in any reformation era: the question of authority. But in our American, brutish and thuggish understanding of authority, the more appropriate word is ownership. This is the phrasing the ‘conservative voice’ of The Living Church uses when it bemoans the departure of “the orthodox”. Othodoxy (literally, ‘right belief’) has at its core, not only an implied certainty, but a strict sense of ownership, as in “we hold the right belief and therefore must lead the unorthodox”. When one claims that they posses ‘right belief,’ it inherently implies that differing theologies are wrong, and by small extension, heretical. This is the very volley lobbed at The Episcopal Church with regularity over those 6 years. It should read in the news as “small splinter group believes The Episcopal Church is run by a vast Left-Wing Conspiracy.”

Believe me, conservatives haven’t left the church. A few political ideologues have for sure. But walk into a rural or suburban Episcopal church and take a random sampling, asking these questions:

  1. If money were no object, what would you want done to your church?
  2. If your church burned to the ground, and you had millions of dollars to work with, what would you do?

You would no doubt get a wide variety of answers, especially in college towns and in areas of dramatic change. But for most Christians, and especially Episcopalians, I think the responses would look a lot like this:

1.  If money were no object, what would you want done to your church?

  • “Redo the roof.”
  • “Fix the windows”
  • “Install that elevator we’ve been putting off.”
  • “Go crazy: get all new carpeting, restain the pews, and buy some brand new linens!”
  • “Buy new choir robes; we’ve had these for 10 years!”
  • etc.

2. If your church burned to the ground, and you had millions of dollars to work with, what would you do?

  • “Rebuild it.”
  • “Make a facility that meets our current needs.”
  • “Tear down the Parish Hall, that’s what needs to be redone!”

Of course I’ve prejudiced the responses.  I also know that the second question would get people to think outside the box, especially in terms of using the money to invest in mission, not a new church building.  But what I don’t expect from either question is a truly radical (or liberal) response: let’s build something new.  All of these responses represent the ‘conservative voice’ in the church, because even when the freedom to change for the better is given, the choice is to live with, fix, or replace.

If I were given unlimited funds, I would salvage a few beautiful things from this church, tear it down, and start anew, not only shaping it to our present needs, but trying to anticipate the needs of the future.  This includes a worship space that allows for a liturgical team that is disabled, a facility that is flexible and can accommodate significant changes in attendance, and allows us to express the theology we profess.    That’s a pretty liberal voice.

Go ahead and ask the people at your church this Sunday those two questions.  I am utterly confident that the ‘conservative voice’ is alive and well.  I dare you to prove me wrong!

NOTES and LINKS:

I have long-argued that we have over-simplified our understanding of liberalism and conservatism, especially since the 1990s, when sexual ethics became not only the center, but the exclusive province of the political debate.  The church has similarly fallen prey to this misunderstanding of these classic terms.

One of the most misunderstood notions of the church’s role in the liberal/conservative debate is to occupy “the middle”.  This is often interpreted narrowly to mean abstaining from debate or by not taking a stand for an issue that is perceived as liberal or conservative.  This position, is, in its practical application, conservative.  For instance in voting, the threshold requires 51% of quorum to vote YES.  So not casting a ballot, leaving the room after quorum is established, or voting to abstain all count as voting NO.  This applies the conservative ideology of maintaining the status quo.  For more thoughts on the moderate position, visit here.

Lastly, I have written many wonkish blog posts about this subject on my other (political) blog.  If you want to read extensively my understanding of political affiliations, visit this sequence here and here.

Seminary Truths 102

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I loved seminary.  I continue to believe in it.  I would be completely unprepared for the priesthood had I not done seminary.  In fact, I might be the poster child for pre-seminary idiocy and indifference to the workings of the church.  Seminary is the training ground, afterall, for the future leaders of the church.  Seminary changed my life.

My own experience, and the experience others tend to discuss, is what isn’t covered in seminary.  So often, even in seminary, I would hear people say derisively “we should’ve learned that in seminary” (insert random insignificant subject).  The belief being that seminary is not supposed to raise up church leaders and priests/clerics, but church middle-managers that are adept at juggling church finances and soothing the hurt egos of parishioners.  The subtext of these discussions is that the role of the priest in a local congregation (which therefore must define the roll of the priesthood within the church at large) is as an office manager that spends his Sundays blessing crackers and his afternoons visiting nursing homes and hospitals.  If this is the true corporate identity of the priest, then count me out.  Get the bishop to take the ordination back with a “psych!”.  In that case, I don’t want it!

But it isn’t.  What we learn in seminary isn’t supposed to be about being a better middle manager, but being a disciple of Jesus, a worker for the Kingdom of God, and a vessel for the Holy Spirit to lead the church.  We read scripture, we wax theologically, we laugh at our ancestors and we get our hearts broken in internships–that’s seminary.

What I described in the previous post was a dim view of the influence of politics–not in the issue sense, but the bureaucratic one.  The influence of who gets to say what when and who is allowed to have an opinion.  You know, typical hierarchical BS.  Except that I do think there is something else that is interesting about what seminaries are supposed to be: an insurance policy.  Yes, a bureaucratic insurance policy, but a useful one.

Though some may feel stifled by seminary, it is an institutional insurance that its leadership will be exposed to new and different thinking.  In my experience, the people that had a hard time with seminary fell into two camps: either they lost their sense of call or they didn’t want to be exposed to new ideas.  In my mind, I wonder if the Tony Jones’ friend is representative of the former.  But just as often, it is the latter.  I had several classmates that hid behind an image of something like “liberal intolerance” that was more like “the stupid professor is making me read books that say things that offend me” or “here is my list of assigned reading that my fringe denomination condones as orthodox”.  For these students, reading any Biblical scholarship that didn’t automatically agree with their preferred dogma was inherently heretical.  In other words, they were afraid that their faith may not hold all of the answers.  Shocking!

For this latter component, seminary serves as the opportunity to discern the openness the postulant for ordination may be toward learning new things and being exposed to different ways of thinking.  This is an obvious and necessary safety net.

Why shrinking is a good thing

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A new story in the New York Times by David Streitfeld highlights an initiative underway in Flint, Michigan.  The basic principle is to use the existing Land Bank to shrink the city.

The principle is this: the city’s footprint is too big for its foot.  In the 1950s, some 200,000 people lived in Flint, and the city anticipated that it would grow to 350,000.  Today, it is at 110,000.  There are blocks of the city with noone living there and even more with only a few residents.

The plan is to orchestrate a mass reimagining of the city, inviting people to “trade up” to a new home in a better part of town and then return the old property to wilderness and green space.

It is definately worth a read, and the page includes an audio interview as well that is worth listening to.  I think this is great stuff and should be taken up by other cities.