The Complex Christ | Signs of Emergence

Top-Down | Bottom-Up | Powers

An excellent week away, helped by the fantastic sunshine that rayed on us every day, while the South got soaked in rain.

Reading material for the train/ferry/bus etc. on the way up/down was this month's Prospect, which contained an article from some old Blairites challenging Brown to move away from top-down centralised governance to a more liberal bottom-up approach:

Labour politicians too often see a social problem—obesity, children at risk on the internet or declining interest in high culture—and make two assumptions: first, that the problem is amenable to a policy solution; and second, that this solution ought to involve the establishment of a council, commission or task force. But many of the issues facing modern society are too complex and too cultural for such a wooden approach.

Coming back I've just received an email from an organization struggling from within over whether they should be taking one or the other approach, and many of the discussions we had on Iona related to the same issue.

In other words, the debate continues to rage, and usually follows the same line: those in power want to preserve power structures because, from their perspective, it's the only way to get things done, while those outside those structures see the world very differently and realise things aren't working as well as those in power think they are.

I've been into this in detail in the book, but, to summarise: power and leadership are about facilitating communication or, in the governance situation, creating environments within which the best possible outcomes for people are likely to emerge. You can't legislate for decency, but you can create the kinds of frameworks within which people are more likely to be decent to one another.

I think this is the tricky situation which both our Labour government and certain wings of the church find themselves: they feel so threatened by some external power (terrorism / biblical liberalism) that they panic and want to legislate hard in an attempt to protect us. I currently feel that I'd rather enjoy freedom and decent human rights / civil liberties and be blown up a free man, than be safely cocooned in a tight-assed, Orwellian world.

Technorati: Liberal | Prospect

Scot McKnight Discusses Signs...

Over at JesusCreed.Org

Some good debate going on about leadership, what it means to be 'emergent', and whether the book is 'concrete' enough.

Thanks Scot.

Technorati: JesusCreed | Scot McKnight

A Party-less Politic? | The Emerging Church Shows the Way

Just been listening to a very interesting report on the BBC about The Power Commission's report into British democracy which has been published today. The parallels with Alan Jamieson's work on Churchless Faith were astounding and, as I mentioned in my book, the church really does have an amazing opportunity to model a mode of change and being to the rest of society, rather than copying it in twenty years time.

The Power Commission - funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Foundation (JR was a fabulous Quaker-Philanthropist-Chocolatier) - initially asked MPs why they thought voter numbers were down. 'Apathy' they said.

Rather like the ministers Alan asked, they reasons they gave for people not participating were totally wrong, and laid the blame at the wrong door. The Commission found very little political apathy. On the contrary, people are up and involved in politics all the time. It's just that Westminster don't call that 'politics', because it's not the 'Politics' of Downing Street in the corridors of power.

Their first recommendation then is that Westminster needs to realize that the solution is not to 'get people more interested in politics' - ie drag people to Westminster to see all the great stuff they do (cf. get more bums on seats in church) - rather, Westminster needs to get back out there and get involved in the issues people are involved in locally.

You simply cannot - whether in church or political parties - expect people to sustain membership of organizations they feel totally alienated from. Unless there is genuine opportunity for meaningful participation, why should people hang around? I have often argued with MPs - especially over the Iraq War - that they are in dereliction of their duties if they vote against the will of their constituents. Our democratic system is currently topsy-turvy. We vote for parties who set out an agenda for action. What the system originally intended was for people to elect a representative to send to Westminster to speak for them. In other words, the motivation for action came from the people. We have lost this original intention, and are poorer for it.

The solutions the Power Commission recommends? Unsurprisingly if you've read The Complex Christ, a move from the top-down to the bottom-up, greater low-level interaction, and feedback loops. . More power to the local, and mechanisms whereby dirt can be dished and people listened to and action taken. Interestingly enough, they suggest that more MPs should blog, but beyond that, they think that there ought to be a system whereby the public can force Parliament to debate an issue if a certain number of people get together and sign for it. Furthermore, they recommend changes that would allow people to stand for election more easily without being swamped by the big parties.

One commentator was an academic who commented that 40 years ago we were debated the role television might have in politics (see previous post). It clearly had a profound one, and he argues that e-Democracy will have similarly profound effect not only on our politics, but on the way we see ourselves as citizens too.

Clearly, the Emerging Church movement has made big steps forward in this area already. e-Spirituality and the emergent, underground blossoming interest in the spiritual has had a profound effect not only on our theology, but on the way we see ourselves connected as Christians too. Spirituality and theology are no longer the holed up in Ivory towers to which only the sacred few have access; what we must do is help politics move the same way. It is, of course, a movement that is irresistible because it's the way of co-operation, the way of inter-relation, the way of the divine. And it is, of course, a movement that will be always resisted by the powerful.

Technorati Tags: Democracy, e-Democracy, London, Politics, Power, Spirituality, Westminster

Leadership and Ethics [...] 5 - What Does This Mean in Practice?

In a comment on the last post on leadership 'Emerger' asked: "What does this mean in real life? The most I can draw out so far is that we facilitate conversation. I don't think that in itself is enough." He/she then goes on to propose some thoughts on work by Carver and Bell ("John Carver talks about this with a seemingly modernist view of clarifying Policy Ends and Executive Limitations. Bell refers to the binding and loosing in the church as an important to help clarify people's freedom.")

I wanted to respond to the thoughts in a separate post, as as I've mulled on things some wider things have come up... which I guess I could summarize as: we are part of Corpus Christi, not ChristCorp™.

Leadership and Ethics [...] 4 - Leadership is disturbing.

For those who might just be looking in, I've been writing a series of posts concerning leadership in the Emerging Church. I say 'concerning' because I have some concerns that unless we actually deal with the leadership issue properly we will simply end up with the same church situation we are critiquing. But with tea-lights.

I have been reading Griffin's book 'The Emergence of Leadership - Linking Self Organisation and Ethics' and attempting to distill some of the highly academic work in there, and draw some conclusions for our situation.

To summarize the previous 3 posts on this leadership issue:

• By locating ethical responsibility in a few 'leader' individuals, and in 'the system', we are adopting a view of leadership in which it is individual leaders who are blamed and punished when things go wrong, and treated as heros when they go right. We too often take on passive roles (the gathered congregation) as victims of 'the system' and of manipulative leaders, and simultaneously locate our salvation in the actions of heroic leaders. Result: we go some place. Get fed up. Bemoan the system. See some other leader we can worship. Go to their church. Repeat.
• We need instead to realise that we are part of a body. We all have corporate responsibility. We are in it together. As equal before God.
• It's my theological contention that this 'corporate' view of the Church, this 'organ-ization' that we are a part of, leads us down the road of self-organization. A bottom-up, emergent, complex, living system is what Christ incarnated. And what we have as a model.

So what is the place of leaders in such organizations. Is there one? As I've argued in the last 3 posts, I think there is.

• Leadership is distributed. Different people ought to be exercising leadership in different situations. Not one man does all. This is about interdependence.
• Leaders are servers. They facilitate communication. They do not act as communiques between people. They simply make sure it happens.
• Leaders have huge power-potential. But as they are constantly devolving it, and keeping communication open, they avoid power abuse.

I want to add something further to that, mostly based on a re-reading of Capra's 'The Hidden Connections'.

Firstly, if we accept that the groups we are part of are living systems, then we need to appreciate that they cannot be changed in the same way a machine can. You can't take them apart, re-grind the pistons, connect rods up a different way. Living systems change by being disturbed. Their equilibrium is removed, they are forced to respond, interact with their environment, and evolve to meet the new challenge. I love the recent Guinness ad, which takes 3 drinkers back in time right to them being tiny sea-creatures on a beach not liking the water... It's only through that disequilibrium - that dissatisfaction - that things change.

The problem is, you can't always tell how a living system will respond to that. But that's the beauty of true freedom. Capra uses a lovely example: If you kick a lamp post, you can pretty much predict exactly what's going to happen. You're going to get a sore foot. But if you kick a dog... well that's not easy to predict. Two living systems are now interacting, disturbing one another and having to work out how to face the emerging challenge.

This of course links in with the 'dirt' aspects of the book. I argue that we need to re-imagine our relationship with dirt in a church 'purified to the point of sterility'. In a sterile church where everything is clean and spotless, nothing can live. Everything is dead in an operating theatre. Christ deliberately challenged the dirt boundaries of those he interacted with. Why? To disturb their equilibrium. To challenge them to think again. To force them to interact with their environment: to not ignore the lepers, the women, the tax collectors, the poor, the trafficked, the infected, the asylum seeking, the struggling...

So an aspect of leadership I want to add here is this: leadership is disturbing. This is perhaps in contrast to the 'peace, peace' style. Some in the church need to be affirmed in this leadership role (remembering that leadership is plural and distributed) of disturbing the peace. For there is no peace. This is leader as Trickster, if you will. A role Christ played so well.

Of course... there have to be limits. Complexity theory states that for a system to 'self organize' it needs to be held 'at the edge of chaos'. Disturb it too far, you destroy it. Don't disturb it enough, it dies. Life exists in the strange place very close to chaos. And it is a leadership task to keep us there.

Leadership and Ethics [...] 3

To summarize the previous 2 posts:

•    Griffin proposes that we need to think differently about ethics, and this will mean we will think differently about leadership. I have taken this, in our situation, to mean that we must avoid projecting heroes or villains - which is still happening too often in ECs.

• It's my theological contention that the Church needs to become a 'self organizing' system if it is to properly model the holy freedom God has given us post-Incarnation. Griffin would want to call this 'participative self-organization' - which clearly emphasizes the participative element of each person.

•    In such an organization, people are recognized as equal, and all as 'becoming'.

•    As interconnected equals on a journey together to newness - rather than back into tradition - we will need to be interdependent. This will call for distributed leadership in which different people take a lead as their gifting requires. "The eye cannot say to the hand, I don't need you."

What, then, is a leader in such an organization?

In his summary, critiquing some of the literature on complexity and management (such as Leadership and the new Science) Griffin writes that:

Organizations are not things at all, let alone living things, but rather they are processes of communication and joint action. Communication and joint action as such are not alive. It is the human bodies communicating and interacting that are alive... Leaders enhance communications within and between groups.

I think this is a fantastic summary, and an excellent platform from which to look afresh at leadership within the church.

The first observation I would make from this is that leadership is not communication. It is facilitating communication. This perhaps connects back to the post on preaching. Leaders tend to be those that preach. But in Griffin's model, this is not going to enhance self-organization. Quite the opposite. The leader who continuously takes a soap-box and preaches his or her vision is setting up a passive congregation. As quoted in the first post:

"We locate ethical responsibility [...] in a few individuals. In doing this we adopt a particular view of leadership in which it is individual leaders who are blamed and punished when things go wrong, or praised when they go right. The rest of us are allocated passive roles as victims of the system and of manipulative leaders, and our salvation lies in the actions of heroic leaders."

If leadership is about facilitating communication, it means the leader acts in the role of, to co-join the language of the church and IT, a server. Hugely important. But nothing but a means for facilitating communication. This is, of course, a metaphor that has limited use. A server can dictate whether any communication can take place if it decides to 'go down'. Which brings us neatly on to ideas of power, and my second observation:

Leaders have huge power-potential, but, as servants, constantly devolve and distribute it. Because they are communication facilitators, leaders will have the regular opportunity to become invested with information. This information, pooled and centralized, amounts to power-potential. But the emergent leader will always seek to immediately share/open up that information for the public good, or, if sensitive, pass it through to another whose gift it is to minister to that need. This means that the power-potential is quickly minimized and evaporates.

The power question is a huge one. It seems that we've existed in a paradigm for too long that says 'leadership is power'. And, more dangerously, 'church leadership is power ordained by God.' We've got to ditch that one once and for all. Christ didn't die on the cross for us to follow after him and assiduously stitch up that rip in the Temple curtain. There is no holy-of-holies. There is no ark. There is no need for another sacrifice. There are no priests. Through Christ, as Paul put it in Eph 2: 18, we all have access to God by one Spirit.

So church leadership carries no power. Enhancing communication within and between groups is a gift. But it is a gift that exists within a gifted and empowered body. One might see the modernist/enlightenment era as being the era of the brain. Rational thought. Je pense, donc je suis. And, to go back to Paul's writing on the body, it is as if we have bought into that and seen leaders as this powerful brain. Thinking for us. Deciding where we are to go, what we are to do. Being the visionary. In the emergent era we are beginning to see that the brain is not simply the machine that controls the body. Rather, it is the place where senses of all kinds are processed and allowed to interact. The brain is a server.

Leaders in the current model of church have been seen as 'do it all' people. Multi-gifted people who can preach, teach, pray, minister, pastor, lead forward, visit sick people, chair meetings, organize services, plan committees, arrange flowers, conduct weddings... And thus have had an easy time arranging an aura of power and authority. Leaders in the new model should be seen as having one gift: the ability to facilitate other people's gifts... And thus will be dis-interested in power.

Leaders, as Griffin sees it, should not be extolled as something exemplary and set-apart. Rather,

"They are who they are only in the evolving context of local interaction in which they and other participants are continuously recreating their identity as they construct their future in terms of the enabling constraints of the past."

This may be a hard pill for some leaders to swallow. They will have to step down from pedestals. And we must help them to do that with good grace. But, more than this, we must all take our parts, so that there is not a vacuum into which some hero might step and take responsibility for us. We must begin to participate and take responsibility for our corporate journey together. Unless we are prepared to do this, to become adults in our journey of faith we can have no complaints if we suddenly realize that we are children being taken for a ride.

Leadership and Ethics [...] 2

To summarize the previous post:

• It's my theological contention that the Church needs to become a 'self organizing' system if it is to properly model the holy freedom God has given us post-Incarnation.
• In Griffin's 'The Emergence of Leadership - Linking Self-Organization and Ethics' - he posits that there is an apparent paradox in much of our thinking about groups: while they are actually made up of individuals, we attribute them status 'as if' they were single entities.
• The attempt to resolve this paradox usually leads to us neglecting the 'as if' and seeing groups or organizations as single entities responsible ethically, led by a few key individuals. These leaders are then projected as heroes or villains.
• Griffin proposes that we need to think differently about ethics, and this will mean we will think differently about leadership. I have taken this, in our situation, to mean that we must avoid projecting heroes or villains - which is still happening too often in ECs.

I want to think a little further about what leadership in a self-organizing context might mean.

Leadership and Ethics in the Self-Organizing Emergent Church 1

This is a long post I know; hope you persevere with it.

The issues of leadership, in particular whether people ought to work full time for the church has provoked some wide debate on this blog before. [ see posts and comments here and here ] It's something that I've been thinking over for a while now. I seriously believe that the issue of leadership - and the style of it that people are intentionally going to make decisions about - is perhaps the most crucial one that the Emerging Church has to face. If we get the leadership issue wrong, then I believe that the movement will not mature into the radically new model that it currently promises; I have to admit to some concerns already.

To set out my stall again:

I believe that if churches are going to be effective organ(isation)s - incarnating the gospel in the places they are, speaking in the forms that the culture they are immersed in understand, - then they are going to have to learn to be 'self-organizing.' Self-organizing systems are ones that can grow and adapt organically to changes in their environment. With their boundaries being porous, they can sense the environment around them, and adapt themselves to it quickly.

I also believe that this model of organization is one that is initiated by Jesus in the establishment of the early church. The 'viral network of the Spirit' and the emphasis on everyone being part of the body (not machine) of Christ suggest to me that self-organization is not only sociologically, but theologically a better model of church than the top-down, hierarchical, client-server model of the Temple that Jesus critiqued so heavily.

The question then comes: how does leadership operate in a self-organizing, bottom-up system? Is there such a thing as leadership in these systems, or is it an anarchy?

The first part of my answer would be, yes, there is such a thing as leadership in such systems. But the model and style of leadership is so radically different to that which a) 'leaders' are used to using and b) 'followers' are used to experiencing that it is enormously tempting to quickly revert to old models of leadership where 'leaders' feel in control and the 'followers' can abdicate responsibility for their spiritual journey to them and just jump on the bandwagon.

Hence, there needs to be a real decision on both sides to make the new model work: leaders need to stop organizing everything and followers need to start taking more responsibility. (As an aside, it's because of this need that I feel that full-time paid leadership is a massive hinderance to the establishment of self-organizing systems.)

In order to get into some of the detail of this, I'm going to be posting some thoughts around Douglas Griffin's book The Emergence of Leadership - Linking Self-Organization and Ethics, which is part of the Routledge series on Complexity and Emergence in Organizations. [Hence the new category of Leadership.] Thanks to Jon for generously putting me on to it.

Some initial thoughts then from the introduction: