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Okay, case study time… Think about this one with me: You are facing a problem in your congregation. Nothing moral, or ethical, or theological, but a good old fashioned practical problem: Something you are doing is just not working, and you are stuck.
You have been trying really hard and not getting anywhere:
- You put on a great program that people say they want, but then the attendance is weak the day of the event. You lose money and the volunteer leaders are discouraged…again.
- Families are more committed to youth sports on Sundays than to worship.
- You preached a great twelve week series on renewal (or prayer, or community) and while the buzz at the door was great, the noticeable change in the pews was, well, unnoticeable.
- Membership is down, attendance is down, Bible study and small group participation is down.
What do you do? If you are like me, indeed, like most people, what you do is default to what you know. You do AGAIN, what you have always done BEFORE. My Executive Pastor, Steve Yamaguchi, likes to tell about how his spiritual director once took a flying lesson in a flight simulator. When he asked the instructor why they use flight simulators so much the answer was, “In the moment of crisis, you will not rise to the occasion, you will default to your training.”
And that is our problem really. We Presbyterians are so well-trained. We have lots of education and experience and had generations of success. Indeed, most of our congregations are mostly filled with people who were deeply blessed by what ONCE worked. And so, we default back to those things. For most of us in ministry, our defaults, that once worked so well, are simple.
We talk longer (and louder!).
We try harder.
We preach, program, or give a personal touch.
But more and more these things are not working. We are getting tuned out, people are no longer showing up, and frankly everyone just expects a “personal touch” in a world where Nordstrom-service is now the standard. For many of us, this is so discouraging. We preachers are such good talkers. In fact, as one of my friends, Morgan Murray, the pastor and head of staff at Walnut Creek (CA) Presbyterian likes to say, “We Presbyterians are so good at talking about problems that after awhile we think that we have actually done something.”
And when we roll up our sleeves and dedicate ourselves to doing something, we—yup—go back to what we know. We hope and pray that THIS time it will work. THIS time we’ll put in enough effort, or preach with enough passion, or give it enough of our personal attention that THIS time it will be different, we say (or even pray!).
And then…usually…it doesn’t.
Okay, when talking or trying doesn’t work what next? Mostly, we turn to “tricks” and “tweaks.” We use PowerPoint. Or Twitter. We add an electric guitar or an accordion. Or, if we have the money, we buy new stuff.
A few years back, San Clemente Presbyterian was visited by the worship committees of a couple of churches who wanted to observe our growing multi-generational services. One group came to our praise band-led worship and I remember it being a particularly moving service. Our vocal team consisted of our middle-aged choir director and a college woman, joyfully demonstrating the true passion they have for multi-generational worship. The Junior High students kept standing up and singing their hearts out, the rest of us clapped along enthusiastically with the relatively limited amount of rhythm we have. It was a wonderful service where we could sense God’s presence and were so deeply aware of the great joy that comes when we all together give ourselves to God.
As soon as the service was over, some members of the visiting church’s worship committee came up to me to talk. They told me they were in the middle of “worship wars” and were losing their youth at the same time. They asked if their pastor could ask me some questions about how we got to this place in our worship. I said, “Sure. I don’t know what I’ll tell him but ask away.” When the pastor walked up to me he had only one question: “So, what did you pay for those screens?”
I didn’t cuss. But I wanted to. The pastor had sat through the whole service and had completely missed the point. And he thought that his worship issue in his church could be solved with screens? He really thought that his church, locked in conflict and hemorrhaging members was going to get better if he used a projector? It’s probably not surprising to know that that pastor has since moved on and that church is still struggling.
Congregational systems guru, Ed Friedman wrote, “When any…system is imaginatively gridlocked, it cannot get free simply through more thinking about the problem. Conceptually stuck systems cannot be unstuck simply by trying harder.”
Friedman provides us a way of understanding the challenge in front of us. We are “imaginatively gridlocked.” We can’t “see” our way to a new way of being, a new response. So what do we need to do?
First of all, we need to say the magic words, “I don’t know.” Literally: “I don’t know what to do and maybe, just maybe, NO ONE knows really what to do.” We need to clearly SEE that what we know to do doesn’t work. We need to have the clear eyed humility to take an honest assessment and recognize that this challenge is really beyond our talking, trying or bag of tricks.
The problem(s) we are facing are very likely what Ronald Heifetz calls an “adaptive challenge.” Adaptive challenges are those that are more systemic in nature. They are part of the very context and culture of the congregation. They are usually those that are a result of the ongoing competing values within the organization itself. Adaptive challenges are never solved through a quick fix. (Believe me, if talking, trying, or tricks would have worked, they would have been solved already.) They are only going to be solved through long, patient, calm, deep insight of the context, the values and the systemic issues at play in the system.
In other words, before we can “solve” any problem, we need to learn to see the possibilities within our imagination. And to see those possibilities we need to learn to see ourselves, and our system (and frankly, pastors, how we contribute even unwittingly to the status quo!) as it really is.
Once we acknowledge that, we can then start looking at the problem differently. We can start imagining different possibilities. Next time you hit a big old problem, instead of focusing on solving, try instead to focus on really seeing.