Resources in Response to “Plans, Prayers, and Possibilities”
Readers of the June 15, 2009 Alban Weekly (“Plans, Prayers, and Possibilities“) may have recognized themselves, their boards, or their congregations in the situation Graham Standish describes. At times your congregation’s leaders may have been reactive, trying to resolve problems or handle crises that had already arisen. At other times they may have been proactive, trying to anticipate and stave off problems before crises arose.
But Graham points out that both of these approaches can be frustrating because our world changes so fast; reactive leaders end up feeling they are constantly facing new problems, while proactive leaders end up feeling they have failed to accurately assess all of the ever-fluctuating variables in their current situations.
What to do? Graham concludes that the “church needs a kind of leadership that is able to anticipate the future while simultaneously discerning God’s path for getting there.” Perhaps the key phrase here is “discerning God’s path.” As Graham’s book, Humble Leadership, notes, leadership becomes transformational when it is “radically open to God’s guidance and grace.” Such openness requires what Graham calls “mystical intelligence”—intelligence that is aware of God’s presence in all situations, accepts and expects God’s activity in our lives, and passionately desires to “make God’s will a priority.”
This week’s Alban Weekly suggests some valuable resources for developing this mystical intelligence and capacity for discernment. In addition, I’d like to point you to Graham’s own website, which offers reflections through blogs, sermons, and resources that he has developed or found helpful. And let me also suggest the chapter on “Discernment” in Diana Butler Bass’s Christianity for the Rest of Us, as well as the slender classic, Grounded in God.
What are your thoughts—on the practice of discernment or on other elements of this week’s Alban Weekly? And what resources have you or your congregation found helpful when discernment was needed?
Colleagues of the Church:
I’d am far more interested in the details behind the church leaders’ decision to remain rather than follow the architect’s advice to move from an ecclesiological point of view. This article fails to speak to the larger issue of a church’s mission to a given location, in
spite of the “wisdom” of an architect. Are we now selling our souls to designers of land and buildings? What theology of the church informed the decision to remain vs move from an ecclesial view? What I was hoping to read more about was the proactivity of the leadership to remain based upon commitments to location from a pre-destined [after all, it was a Presby congregation]ecclesiology to location which seems to me to be the higher priority after which the size and shape of building space follows. Wasn’t the cart before the invisible horse in this article? “Mystical intelligence” sounds too gnostic when a thougtful ecclesiology may mandate a commitment to a neighborbood, its people and its needs, after which the maintenance, re-design and construction of appropriate worship and education space follow given sound data about the locals and tithe-payers of the church. Would prayer have revealed that God no longer cared about the people living around the building and loved the wider open spaces more?
Rev. Dr. Paul O. Bischoff
Transition Pastor – Evangelical Covenant Church
Love the ideas of humble leadership and mystical intelligence. In my experience of working with turn-around congregations, finding ways to surface the mystical intelligence of the whole community, the seeds of renewal that God has already sown in their individual and collectives souls, is the place to start. What do they value most about the congregation? What’s the congregation doing to deliver that value? What are the most critical challenges the congregation faces? What local dialect do people use to talk about these things? Having listened and learned from the answers to these questions, leaders then convene conversations that explore how the values get applied to the challenges. It’s a humble and mystical process for ongoing discernment that guides adaptive practices.
I enjoyed the bi emphasis occuring here: (1) recognition that the future was on top of us and needed us to move and (2) recognition that we needed the Holy Spirit’s leading to both make decisions workable and to focus both our goals and vision toward what was right in God’s eyes.
Like an earlier comment, I would like to have more information on the reasons for the decision about staying or moving that, I suggest, may have been major decisions that were made. Without knowing more beyond the immediate decisions, I am glad to get the feeling that the congregation felt and has continued to feel that they moved in the right direction, and will continue with the search within the congregation with the Spirit about what ministry goals and visions are still there for the congregation’s focus.
Colleagues in faith,
I teach courses in both Congregational Studies and The Christian Life. I have many students who are comfortable with language like “It became clear that God was calling us to . . .” but I confess my uneasiness with that kind of language. It does not help me, either, to speak about “mystical consciousness”.
This language seems to posit a “personal Providence” that I find suspect. Does God really plan out paths for us down to the specific details (“buy this house”; “accept this call”)?
I approach the life of faith with a “hermeneutic of suspicion” that self-deception is always a danger, although I do not want to negate the truth that is any individual’s.
Reactive? Proactive? Or Reflective? Maybe the last is the best term – reflecting meaning thinking slowly and carefully, and also in terms of Spiritual Reflection. It seems to me the most helpful attitude of Calvin Church’s leadership is that they ‘waited on the Lord’ and not just on the architect, and that the pastor trusted them to do this.
I’m an Episcopalian, and the language I’d use to describe the impetus to stay in the same place as ‘incarnational.’ God works through places and is (to a lesser degree) in places. I’m at one of four churches in a small town and it would be so much easier if we consolidated down to three. But we are so fond of our places, and God has formed us in each one. What to do? Wait on the Lord and consider design options, I guess.