cha-cha-change...defining moments

Last week I wrote a post, " emergence under pressure...in your church." It tweaked some nerves, poked some old wounds, and also revealed some circumstances that people find themselves in now. I must say in the process of e-mail conversations with a few people, some old wounds I thought had been healed re-surfaced and started to bleed ...causing me to reflect.

Now in the post, I talked about pressure on faith communities from the prevailing postmodern culture that surrounds us from all sides. We can't avoid the reality that these pressures should cause change. Again, I want to say, the pressure of post modernity does not change the Gospel...what changes is how we engage the culture with the Gospel.

But in this post I want to talk about inside pressure...that can be as deadly to the life of the community as pressures from the outside.

I write out of my experience from a few years back, and I'm finally at a place where I can confront the mess that I had basically swept in to a dark corner of my mind. So this is therapeutic for me, and also I hope my old friends from St. Stephens will find some understanding in it.

This was a community that wanted change, they asked for change...and they understood the reason for change. But the failed to understand a couple of important things...

• in order to change a complex system it must be disturbed
• systems resist change...disturb a complex system and it will attempt to return to stability, the status quo.

It's interesting Scott Peck talks about Pseudo-community. It’s the group where we meet together and smile, even when hearts are breaking. We are polite and avoid conflict.. and honesty and growth. The only way to achieve community is to pass through chaos.. and emptiness. Because systems resist change, most groups cycle through chaos back to pseudo-community. That doesn’t bode well for churches attempting to come to grips with the changes around them.

Pseudo-community on the surface can look like the real thing, but it is very deceptive and is only the illusion of real community. This community took a survey by a group called " Natural Church Development Institute. " The community scored highest in loving relationships, and community. The down-side, the survey doesn't differentiate between pseudo and the real thing.

Scott Peck also says this about community:  community is not achieved once for all… it requires constant effort and vigilance; and community is not sustainable unless it has a clearly defined task and that change is a constant variable in communal life.

“The only obstacle to building and maintaining community within an organization is not structural. It’s political. If you get somebody at the top, or who are dominant in the community,  who are not willing to relinquish the structure, even temporarily, or who have to dominate everything, there’s no way you can have community in that organization. So the people in the community, particularly the domineering, have to be willing to temporarily lay aside their egos and their agendas.”

Institutions seek stability, and a couple of ways they do it is through tradition, well defined roles and structure. Anglican churches are embedded in hundreds of years of this kind of organization and are about as stable as a mountain...and changing direction is near impossible, unless you have dynamite. Any change that is likely to happen will come in infinitely small increments, noticeable only under a microscope. It might take the form of a committee, years of discussion...and eventually the conversation dies like fading wind.

But by miracle, if it does get to the point where the community is ready to think about changing direction, sorting and packing the things that make up the community, things begin to teeter a bit...and instability sets in. Relational alliances begin to shift, new allegiances are formed, undermining will happen, power struggles within the community...and the blame game starts.

Any of this sound familiar. This is sort of what Moses experienced in the wilderness with his faith community. So when the boat that the faith community lives in begins to rock... instability, predictability, and control are like waves on the ocean...folks start to look around. They never seem to look ahead to the horizon to the future. Everyone seems to strain to look backwards to where they came from.

It is here where faith becomes monumental, this is where the community will be defined and shaped. This is the place where the community builds altars, this is the place they truly meet God. This is the place where the community has the most potential and creativity.

This is where we can truly say we have changed...or

Comments

[wilsonian]

I'm really struck by your distinction between real and pseudo-community. I'd hazard a guess that most who have pseudo-community don't know it, and discover it when the community attempts to move out into change... which just cannot work in that circumstance.

No suprise then that so many are reluctant to attempt change a second time... "No, we tried that-- it didn't work". They're hanging on to the answer to the wrong question.

Great post.