Sometimes there’s a lot that needs to be said, but I’m unable to say much at all. There are so many problems to ponder, perspectives to consider, and questions to ask. My ponderings seem shallow, though. My perspectives are commonplace. My questions aren’t original; they are echoes. More than at any time in my adult life, I feel stunned and invited into silence. “The nations are in an uproar; the kingdoms totter” and it is both a gift and a necessity to “be still and know that God is God” [Psalm 46:6,10].
Most Sundays, however, I stand up somewhere to preach, a privilege I don’t take lightly. As a coach and consultant, I’m responsible for helping the people I work with to raise and wrestle with good questions, to look at their challenges and opportunities from different angles of vison, and to take faithful and effective action. I can do these things from silence but not in silence. I often have in mind and heart the familiar prayer from Psalm 19: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer” [v.14]. People can’t hear the “mediation of my heart”—the siftings that take place in quietness. If I’m to help, “the words of my mouth” (or my keyboard) matter.
Lately, as I’ve listened for words that seem alive-enough to say, two themes–two fields of ideas or clusters of concepts— have been suggesting themselves to me: simplicity and boldness.
Of course, by simplicity, I don’t mean determined denial of difficulty or convenient avoidance of unpleasant realities. I mean what Oliver Wendell Holmes said in his well-known aphorism: “For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig; but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life.”
Almost everything seems confoundingly complex these days, doesn’t it? That’s why Adaptive Leadership and Family Systems theories are crucial to a congregational leaders’ understanding and practice.
Among other things, Adaptive Leadership theory tells us that we can’t solve problems or answer questions until we know what they actually are. Discovering what they are is an iterative, investigative, courageous, and collaborative process of learning together. Our problems are, in part, with the ways we describe our problems. Sometimes the best thing we can do with our initial questions is to question them.
Family Systems theory reminds us that, in a congregation, nothing happens in a vacuum. It’s all related. Even when there are disconnections and cutoffs, we have a kind of relationship to the brokenness. To paraphrase a movie title, it’s “everyone, everything, everywhere, all at once,” and congregational leaders must know who they are and what they most value as they “relate to the relationships” in their systems.
Simplicity on “this side of complexity,” like one of its cousins, toxic positivity, won’t help us; but we need (at least I do) some simplicity on “the other side of complexity.” We will have to deal with the complexities, but there are some “simple” truths that will hold us as we do:
- God is like Jesus. God is as good, gracious, and loving as Jesus said and showed. As former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey said, “In God, there is no un-Christlikeness at all.”
- We are who baptism says we are: beloved daughters and sons of God in whom God takes great delight.
- We are never separated from God. “Nothing in all creation”—including the most complex and threatening realities—” will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” [Romans 8:39].
- We can experience joy because of the gifts and fruit of the Spirit of Jesus. In his 1991 Beecher Lectures on Preaching, Leander Keck said: “I do not know why so much of mainline Protestantism has become a joyless religion. Perhaps we are more impressed by the problems of the world than by the power of God. Perhaps we have become so secular that we indeed think now everything depends on us; that surely ought to make us depressed [published as The Church Confident, Abingdon Press, 41].
Increasingly, for me, the energy and hope to deal with complexity comes from renewed affirmation of the simple truths which survive its crucible.
By boldness, I mean something like adventurous risk-taking. I recently reread Alana Newhouse’s provocative essay “Everything is Broken And How to Fix It” [https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/everything-is-broken]. Like most writers I find helpful, I don’t agree with everything she says. I resonate, though, with her claim that most, if not all, of the institutions that once provided “structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives . . . have been decimated.” She includes communities of faith. She suggests, and I think that she is right, that one of the things we need is to build new or radically renewed, institutions. She says bluntly: “Give up on our current institutions; they already gave up on us. . . Sometimes the task of rebuilding—of accepting what has been broken and making things anew—is so daunting that it can almost feel easier to believe that it can’t be done. But it can.”
It’s empowering to speak and to hear the assurance that, even amid so much institutional and personal brokenness, the work of building anew and building again “can be done.” We can find new ways of being and doing church. We can envision and fashion communities of faith centered on Jesus and committed to his purposes in the world, communities which don’t desperately cling to brittle wineskins which won’t hold the new wine of God’s saving ways. We can relinquish with grief what we have lost and is no longer possible, and we can receive with gratitude the newness which God is giving us now.
Boldness is empowering. It’s exciting to dream and speak of “going big and going home” and then to go there, to the home of God’s future, together.
I have a hunch that the words we most need are to be found at the intersection of simplicity and boldness. That’s where I’ll be living for a while.
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