| A Letter From the President Click here to return to the Church Innovations web site. Over the last 8 months I have interviewed well over 80 mid-governing and church-wide leaders mostly in the Old Line Protestant churches. Some of these leaders are university or seminary classmates; others are former students. This is the blessing of teaching for over 30 years in a denominational seminary. Some are partners of Church Innovations and some have no idea, at the beginning of the conversation, what Church Innovations is. The research project wants to access the practices in place within these leaders ministry that crate a matrix for a local missional churches. In some cases, my very open ended questions elicit rich data for the question for which I was gathering data; however, like any qualitative research, the great learning takes place in the surprises. Exploring those surprises leads to critical discoveries for the research. Carefully describing those surprises and how the researcher gains the discoveries and insights becomes the meat and potatoes of the researcher’s argument. While it should not have come as a great surprise to me, the levels of trauma and in many cases panic among these leaders struck me hard. Some of the executives could not maintain sustained and coherent focus on the questions asked; consistently they returned to the immediate causes of their panic or trauma. They act like most victims of trauma that displace their emotions to other places and issues because the violence they are experiencing is too immediate for them to get appropriate distance. Some are spending most of their weekends meeting with local churches contemplating leaving their denomination. Others are working with the remainder of a diocese that has left the denomination. Still others have had no immediate significant loss of membership at the level of congregations and bravely speak of moving forward in mission. However, almost without exception they are not doing so as they recount a crisis in financial resources and low trust among local church, spiritual leaders, and other parts of their denomination. Exceptions to this general pattern clearly exist but they are quite rare, rarer than I anticipated. The language of trauma seems to fit in a technical way because the behavior of these leaders fits that of persons experiencing trauma or living in the immediate aftermath of a very traumatic experience. They remind of me and my wife in the first couple years of our youngest daughter’s life. She was born with a congenital birth defect that required a number of planned surgeries in her first three years of life and many, many unplanned visits to the emergency room. We learned to care for her in ways that while the physical crisis was taking place we could distance ourselves enough to do what had to be done to preserve her life and to limit the harm to her. We disassociated from the immediate matters the rest of the time, did some healthy and unhealthy escape, and struggled to care for the other children and ourselves and carry on the beginning careers of a seminary professor and medical doctor. The power of disassociation and the practical uses of denial have their place in such times of trauma. Denial, however, is a lie we tell ourselves to do what we have to do. It remains a lie. So lots of the behavior on the part of these leaders fit within what I have been calling a couple of decades of adaptive denial to the ongoing profound transformation of denominational systems that has been taking place over the past thirty years. We have heard our thought leaders, especially church historians and sociologists of religion, tell us of the crisis. We have also heard many of them tell the truth in such tones and genre so as to say it is really not as bad as in fact their data which they faithfully report might suggest. Time and time again our church historians tell us that it has never been easy to have faith. The church has always faced tremendous challenges and has overcome them. Seldom do we hear how more than half of Christians ceased to be in less than 100 years east of Damascus with the rise of Islam. Time and time again, the historians take the stance of the aloof scholar or the breezy reporter to de facto lie, deny the profound death that accompanies the transformation of these denominational systems. Adding to this adaptive denial syndrome is the half true wisdom that leaders must provide a non-anxious presence. Time and time again I hear this half true wisdom offered without reservation to these executives. I see them trying mightily to be non-anxious presences. I dare say few things create more pain and a strange desire to laugh and cry at the same time than watching these executives trying to appear non-anxious because they accept this half true wisdom as the full truth. Indeed, effective leadership knows how to lower anxiety when it reaches dysfunctional levels; however, trying to appear to be non-anxious does not stop the passing of anxiety. Anxiety plain and simple is pre-rational and communicates to those pre-rational parts of what it is to be human. When massive amounts of emotional energy are being used to appear to be non-anxious, those connected so powerfully to that leader go away deeply ambivalent and certainly not less anxious. They cannot, however, turn their unfocused anxiety into fears that they can rationally attend to because they are being told everything is okay. My guess only a few of the leaders I interviewed consciously engage in this adaptive denial; most are unconscious of their adaptive denial; like most persons experiencing trauma, they do it to survive, to do what they have to do. In the Christian tradition we have very practical, time-tested, and powerful ways to respond to this trauma, the adaptive denial, and the temptation to believe we can control our anxieties well enough to hide them. These practical, time-tested, ways grow out of the tradition of dwelling in God’s word, especially the lectio divina tradition, in its Catholic and Evangelical forms. These practices of prayer and attending to God’s word directly address the whole person, including the irreducibly anxious self. They are, within the Christian tradition, a very present way of attending to the movement of God in our lives and in the world. As the General Secretary of the Reformed Church in America over the last couple decades, Wes Grandberg-Michaelson had plenty of opportunity to experience the trauma of the transforming denomination he served. Indeed, he led one of the oldest traditions of the Old Line denomination. As both a consultant to that denomination and as a researcher within its system over 15 years of time, I had a chance to watch Wes in good times and bad times and I was always amazed at his capacity to be transparent to his fears and anxieties and to focus, even in truly traumatic times, upon the missional church. While one might disagree with some of his actions or theories, it is hard for me to imagine anyone who has watched his leadership or the journey of the RCA over the period of his leadership with anything less than respect at his non anxious presence in most times and open transparency to his anxiety and fears at other times. Luckily, we have a rather substantial description of many of those moments in his life, and the years in other roles of leadership before his coming to RCA, in his memoir: Unexpected Destinations: An Evangelical Pilgrimage to World Christianity (Eerdmans, 2011). At a later time I want to mine this powerful testimony at greater length and depth. To my present point, however, Wes’ memoir time and again points to his own discovery of the power of prayer practices and dwelling in the word day in and day out. The importance of significant period of retreat in very different settings with different retreat hosts or guides becomes a drum beat to his pilgrimage. The memoir slowly but surely shows an Evangelical youth grow into a man, a friend, spouse, father, pastor, leader who draws upon these practices to provide a deep unassuming presence in times of trial. If for no other reason, I hope the book gets read. More importantly, I pray that the leaders in the churches of the land set aside a good deal more time attending to the movement of the Holy Spirit in their lives, listening to the living Word of God, in prayer, praise, mediation and other spiritual disciplines. Out of such practices we might take the bit of wisdom borrowed from family systems theory about non-anxious presence and make of it a mighty set of practices of leadership and followership in this new missional era. In Christ's Peace, Pat Keifert |
|
