Bandits No More

October 27, 2009

Three Cheers for Failure!

Filed under: Health Care,Uncategorized — rheyduck @ 1:53 pm

“Too big to fail.” we’ve heard that more than we like lately. A euphemism for businesses that are so intertwined with other businesses and societal institutions that we must do whatever it takes to keep them from failing, lest even worse things happen. This “whatever it takes” has amounted, of late, to pouring billions and billions of dollars into these failing enterprises.

Some commentators have said we should just let these organizations fail. If we don’t have an organizational ecosystem in which organizations are allowed to fail, they simply won’t be able to make judicious use of risk. “Sure, this action is risky, but not to us. We can rake in huge profits if it goes right, and if it doesn’t, well, the taxpayers will bail us out.” If there is no downside to risk, then more irrational risks will be taken.

Other commentators observe that our mistake is in letting organizations become so large and intertwined as to be “too big to fail.” They argue that we need more smaller enterprises that can fail without taking the whole system down with them.

Because I am sympathetic to both directions of thought, I’m concerned about one sector of our economic ecosystem that is getting larger and larger. At the same time we decry business organizations that cost us bundles of cash because we must, at all costs, keep them from failing, we are seeking to centralize the health care ecosystem, a huge part of our economy. While centralization and bigness can enable us to save money by the economy of scale, such giants are often clumsy.

By creating a system – that right from the beginning – is too large to fail, we are overly optimistic about our ability to come up with the best system on the first attempt. Our aims are so high that I’m concerned whatever we come up with will not be allowed to fail – even if it’s horrible, that the best we’ll be able to do, without the whole system crashing, is to do little tweaks here and there.

Or are we already at the stage? Are we already at a place where we’re unwilling to tolerate failure?

October 22, 2009

Our Audience

Filed under: Discipleship,Ecclesiology,Evangelism,Jesus,church growth — rheyduck @ 7:39 pm

Eric Bryant asks, “Has listening to church attenders led to the decline of the church?”

Declining churches, in his experience, focus on the people they already have. What do they want? How can we keep them happy?

Innovative churches, on the other hand, listen primarily to people outside the church, people they want to reach.

My first thought was: Which was Jesus’ strategy?

If we consider the establishment represented by the scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees to be the insiders of the day, they were clearly not Jesus’ main audience. Jesus spent much of his time with outsiders – people those insiders didn’t think worthy of inclusion in the work of God. The insiders were increasingly peeved at him for his actions.

But that’s too simplistic. From an Israel point of view, all of Israel were the insiders. The Gentiles and the Samaritans were the outsiders. Jesus spent most of his time with the insiders. Sure, he had a few dealings with Gentiles, and at least one with some Samaritans. But most of his ministry, at least as depicted in the Gospels, was with Israel. When he sent out the twelve he explicitly commanded them to go only to the “Lost sheep of Israel.”

Notice he didn’t call them “the sheep of Israel.” They’re the “Lost sheep of Israel.” While all of Israel is, in a sense, on the insider, Jesus puts himself on the outside, and approaches them with the voice of the outsider. Not just any outsider, however, but an outsider whose design was to be the insider who defined their very essence: God.

There’s more to this insider/outsider picture. It is not exactly correct to say Jesus spent most of his time with outsiders. Rather, he spent most of his time with his disciples. These folks, drawn from the periphery of Israel, became a new Israel – the Remnant, to use OT terminology, or to use contemporary jargon, Israel rebooted. It was specifically with these peripheral Israelites, these insiders to the new work of God, that Jesus went to the outsiders, both the “lost sheep of Israel” and to those who were not Israel. Going to those folks was not what these new insiders desired. They were profoundly uncomfortable with the places Jesus took them.

So if the church wants to reach people today, to whom do we listen – insiders or outsiders? That way of putting the question guarantees the wrong answer. Our starting place is Jesus. We begin by listening to Jesus. When we leaders listen to Jesus, Jesus will lead (or shove?) us out of our comfort zone. He will direct us to those on the periphery of the church and to the outsiders.

The trouble with listening to Jesus first, is that comfort (except comforting the broken hearted) never comes into play. We don’t relax in church, comfortable with the way we’ve always done thing. We don’t morph the church into a spiritualized version of what the world calls comfort. We’re taking the message of Life to a lost and broken world.

Church ministry – or innovation – is never about tickling the itching ears of either church members or currently-outside-but-maybe-future-church-members. I know I never would have been reached by the church if they had only sought their own comfort. I also never would have been reached by the church with the Gospel if they had only sought to meet my “felt needs.” I was an American teenager. To the extent that I recognized my felt needs, many of them were misguided. The innovation that built a bridge to me enabled me – over time – to gain a clearer and healthier understanding of my needs (to begin to feel some needs, and to stop feeling other needs) and to see Jesus as not merely the meeter of my needs, but as the Lord of the universe who calls me to follow him.

I want to lead a church that follows Jesus, a church that is willing to tolerate discomfort, change and innovation to be faithful to him, and to connect with people we aren’t now connecting with.

October 15, 2009

Ancient-Future

Filed under: Culture,Ecclesiology — rheyduck @ 8:26 pm

I sure have heard the adjectival phrase “Ancient-Future” thrown around a lot these past few years. As one who sees value in recovery of historic Christian doctrine, I can see “ancient” as embodying a willingness to be associated with the apostolic and patristic church. Within modernity, not surprisingly, the ancient was associated with the “out of date,” the “passe,” the “primitive,” as opposed to the “up to date,” “with-it,” “thoroughly rational” modern. “Ancient” brought to mind the dark ages, the opposite of this age of light.

Matched with my desire to recover historic doctrine is a desire to reach people so we have a church in the future. When it comes to theology, most folks would label me a “conservative.” But when it comes to methodology, to how we do things in the church, I’m pretty much a radical. Well, at least in what I’d like to do. I see so much of the way we’ve always done things, though some might call these methods ancient, ancient in this case means only a couple of generations old (for a quick illustration of how recent this form of ancient is, consider the dates of the hymns people in your church consider the “old timey songs”).

In my own congregation – and we’re doing better than some in our denomination – about 40% of our active and committed people are aged 70 or above. Chances are those same folks won’t be as active and committed in ten years. When you consider this with two other current facts, (a) we’re not reaching the younger generations well enough, and (b) I’m doing lots of funerals, we’re going to be in trouble in the near future. I really want the church to have a future.

So you’d think I’d be part of the pro-Ancient-Future demographic, right? Maybe. My first thought on hearing this however, is that it’s a way of saying “anything but now.” Let’s escape into the past or into the future – anything but now.  However much we admire the past and seek to learn from it, however much we yearn for a happy and healthy future, we’re here now. Now – the current time – is the bridge (and it can be a mighty short bridge, considering what you mean by ancient) between ancient and future.

But maybe that’s all they mean. Maybe they’re just trying to say the same thing I’ve just said. Maybe we are on the same page after all. We’ll see.

Asking Questions

Filed under: Discipleship,Spirituality — rheyduck @ 6:58 pm

From ancient times, theologians have had a motto, “Faith seeking understanding.” As followers of Jesus we don’t start from doubt or from skepticism. We don’t even start from a position of knowing nothing, from a blank slate. We start from faith. Our faith may be at its beginning stages, it may be mature, it may be hard-won, it may be bursting at the seams. But we start from faith. Starting form that position, we then seek to understand that which we believe. Sometimes the understanding comes easily and quickly. Sometimes it takes a long time to gain some understanding, and we’re left with more that we don’t understand. We take more on faith than we can explain. When we see things way, questioning is an expression of faith (as it seeks understanding), not a challenge to it.

In saying this about questioning, I don’t think I’m saying the same thing as some who speak up for doubt as a Christian virtue. Doubts, like questions, are not best dealt with through a strategy of repression. Doubts can lead to questions. Sometimes, however, doubts are merely allowed to lie there. Faith is our starting point. Understanding is our ending point. Seeking is the work of exploration and questioning that leads from the one to the other.

There are some aspects of our faith that we do simply take “on faith.” A doubt or set of doubts might arise, calling attention to one of these aspects we had never closely considered before. (Doubt is by no means the only instrument that calls attention to our assumptions. Other instigators of questioning can be love, joy, and simple curiosity.) In this role doubt is not a fusillade of questions to bring down the edifice of faith, though if doubt is unaccompanied by a desire to understand and an underlying trust in God, it might do just that. Rather, doubt says, “Consider this. It doesn’t seem to fit. We need to look more closely.”

The overcoming of doubts would be the arrival at a state where one could say, “I have considered this issue and explored it to a degree that I have reached satisfactory understanding.” What counts as a “satisfactory understanding” is relative to where we stand in our faith and where the particular issue sits in relation to our faith. If it is a marginal issue, a satisfactory understanding can be still attended by many doubts and continuing questions. The solidity of our faith lies elsewhere. If, however, the issue is of greater weight or more central to our faith, the substantial that satisfactory understanding will need to be.

Some questions we ask are our own, some come from outside us. Some of those that come from outside us do not originate in faith – or at least in anything we recognize as faith. They come to us, to where we stand, as challenges, as provocations to doubt. Sometimes we are in a place where we can help people with these questions. Sometimes we aren’t. When we aren’t it is still of value to be able to direct people toward sources where they might explore their questions (or to put it in a more philosophical way, to question their questions).

I hear too many stories of young people today – or people who were young recently, who tried to ask questions – questions generated by their faith and its interaction with the world and life – who felt discouragement from the church. They (for the most part) find themselves unable to bury or forget their questions. So they choose the alternative – burying or forgetting their faith. I major part of my calling in life is to help people deal with questions. Since I had had so many throughout my life, I am relatively comfortable with other people asking questions. It breaks my heart to see the church losing younger generations – for this or any reason. Part of my calling is to turn this around. For that very reason I encourage people to ask questions and invite them to join me on my own journey of exploration.

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