christian

Spending enough time below deck

/ daniel p. richards / Leave a comment

Ships.  The church is often compared to a ship at sea in some helpful and some terrible analogies.  A good friend used this analogy to talk about how the church can be a place of faith in a world without faith.  I have used it to talk about our job of saving people from the flood.  Another common one is to see the world as the ark in the flood from the Noah story.  I am deeply uncomfortable with that one because we are called to be about the redemption of the world, not to shut the doors and let everyone else drown.  But on the other hand in one of the better books on constructive theology, Peter Hodgson in Winds of the Spirit compares the theological task to repairing a ship at sea.  There are lots of ship analogies.

My favorite analogy is leadership-oriented.  As a captain, I have a certain job to do on the ship.  It is not possible to captain a certain size of ship without a crew.  You just can’t.  And though there may be times when you are needed to step in and help with rigging, if you are spending all your time on ropes, you are not the captain.  The captain has a role that requires a sense of direction, purpose and mission, and time spent planning.

This latter piece is the one I want to focus on today.  You have to spend enough time below deck with the charts and maps as a captain.  You have to know where the ship is going.  You don’t always have to be the one at the wheel, of course, but the crew and passengers, investors and customers are all waiting on the ship to go somewhere.

As a pastor, this is an important part of our role that is undervalued and underdone in communities that begin to grow.  My congregation is not a Sunday-only institution.  We work all week long.  Our worship is, and should be, the praise of a community that is living the faith and doing the work of redemption during the rest of the week.  Sunday is dessert.  The meal is served Monday through Saturday. (I would love to take credit for the life of Grace Church, but I inherited a busy church.)  Our ship’s problem isn’t speed.

The analogy is not going to hold for long, so let’s look at our primary idea.  As a captain, you have to know the ship.  You have to know the ropes, so to speak.  You have to know the crew, and your first officers especially well.  You have to know what is in the hold and what the scheduled stops are.  You have to know these things and know them first-hand as much as humanly possible.  There is no substitute for time with the crew and pulling on the pieces.  But you can do all of that and get everywhere late, nowhere important, and make everyone involved feel lost and frustrated.

You have to know where you are going, that you have the resources you need, and can plot a course, even if you have to modify it a million times.

Knowing where you are going is one of those mystical sounding phrases that can mean not very much in the real world or it can save your community.  If you don’t know what it means at all, I recommend Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage highly simply because it offers some examples and then practical ways to discover direction within a corporation.  It is especially good when the captain shares the chair with a room full of people, as most of us do.  Another good book is Rainer and Rainer’s Simple Church.  This one benefits from church-specific advice, from a free church congregational model, but it is great on principles as well.  You need to be able to state your purpose over a set period of time in a sentence.  One sentence.

This seems like it would be an easy thing to do, but as already shown the large areas of moving pieces and people involved in a healthy community make it a challenge to get far enough perspective to see it all, name it, and then be able to get people involved with the whole picture from where they currently are.  You cannot “wing” the work of perspective.  It takes time to look down the route, chart the currents, and choose the language carefully.  You have to spend enough time below deck.

In old pictures of captain’s desks there are always piles of charts and maps, old books, and arcane tools.  I feel like a pastor’s office should be the same way.  It takes some basic tools to do our job.  They don’t really change century to century.  You will always need a Bible and a Book of Common Prayer, for example.  But then there are the current events and relevant histories.  Too many pastors and priests get used to our favorite maps and do not update.  We are luddites by attrition and busyness.  But we cannot effectively guide in today’s waters without some relevant maps.  We should be comparing notes with other captains and other sailors.  We should be staying current on the currents.

Time to think and work and compare should not keep us off the deck either, but we do need significant time below to do our job.  The church has gotten used to pastors and priests who are hospital visitors and funeral planners and deacons first.  We are called to a particular role, and if those roles are yours, great; you may not be the person to lead a community.  Leaders lead first.  It is a service that the church needs like the ship needs a captain who knows where they are going.

It is telling in Acts that the community complained about the inequities of help and service and the response of the apostles was to assign some people to do the work, after prayer and clear delineation of duties.  Too many pastors do the work of the laity.  Too many captains spend their days pulling on ropes and holding the hands of those who should be working.  We are called to proclaim the Good News and teach and preach.  We do have to make sure that the work of the community gets done.  A ship with no sails has a captain who isn’t doing their job too.  But we do that work, our serving, in relation to the whole ship.  Our job on the ship is to know where the ship is going and to get everyone working toward that destination.

Our service is leading.  We are no more or less necessary than the kid who swabs the deck so that our crew doesn’t slip into the sea.  But that kid can’t do my job, and I can’t do his, at least not all the time.

As a pastor I have cleaned a lot of toilets and wiped down a lot of counters and set a lot of tables.  It happens.  But if I am always doing those things and not praying, studying, and preaching and teaching, then I have failed as a leader in the church.  And my ship is adrift at sea.

How do we discern what is the leader’s duty and what belongs to the crew?  How do we clarify roles?  Lencioni can help with this process.  How do we set aside time with the charts and maps of your community?  What tools are necessary?  What new maps do you need but don’t have?  Who are your first mates, your crew, your investors, your customers? If you are not the captain, how do you make sure your captain has time to do their job well?

 

 

How Not to Get Blindsided

/ daniel p. richards / Leave a comment

In seventh grade, I came into Junior High Football as the fastest kid in my class, or at least that is how I remember it.  My ninth grade brother, who was post-growthspurt, was waiting for me.  On my second or third day, I got a hand-off up the middle and was just breaking the line when the sky appeared and pain erupted from my chest and chin.  My brother had let me get loose enough to not see him coming and blindsided me.  

Getting blindsided is one of those experiences that can either make you better or bitter.  I was both, but that was a long time ago.  Now as a leader I have been thinking a lot about the kind of community that I want to build and what kind of leader I have to become in order to build it.  

After just writing about the dangers of the father knows best kind of leadership, it may seem ironic to think that a leader can and should determine the kind of community they are forming, but that is what stewardship means.  As a Christian, the kind of community that I want to create is one that does naturally what Jesus said that we should do: love, be compassionate, forgive, offer mercy, bring peace, and tell the truth.  

A natural leader affects the systems they are in without necessarily thinking about it very much.  You have seen the eight or nine year old who just changes the way the kids around them act.  That kind of leadership is a gifted form of what we all have: influence.  Influence is real power.  It is not necessarily the power to change a single event, but rather it allows over time the changes to whole chains of events, if it is allowed to work without manipulation.

Influence may or may not come naturally to you, but you can grow in your influence as you grow as a human being.  Following Jesus, you have to attend to the log in your own eye, rather than the splinter in your neighbors.  You have to go into your closet and pray.  This work that turns inward in terms of discipline and law and outward in terms of gentleness and peace, think repentance within and mercy without, this work allows us to actually follow Jesus and to grow the kingdom.  It brings wholeness and peace that begins to look a lot like our Lord.  It makes for integrity.

Integrity is a subtle thing to notice in someone, but it allows your gravitational weight in systems to grow exponentially.  People notice when people are consistent and humble and still honest and strong.  People begin to give what you say more weight and what you do more influence.  

So, what does influence have to do with not getting blindsided? In leadership people are always going to be angry and reactive to change.  Most leaders cause change simply because as we try to move the world closer to the Rule of God that movement is change from the previous status quo.  Since we can rest assured in a world post-Eden that the we are not in God’s Rule completely yet, we should be leading change somewhere.  Even good people resist change.  Even saints are held down by gravity and back by inertia.  So as systems change and pull on people around you, someone somewhere is getting pulled, and if they resist, then something will give, and there will be a reaction.  

I never suspected that my brother would hit me.  I just didn’t.  I should have.  He was on defense, and he had been hitting me for years for fun.  If I had more influence and more integrity, someone would have warned me, maybe even my brother himself. 

In leadership, influence allows us to move the system through something more like God’s way of being in the world.  We can cause change through goodness, calling, love, forgiveness, healing, influence.  We don’t have to resort to violence in our relationships.  This more subtle change allows people to join in and respond without build up of reactive energy, but it also allows time to deal with build up constructively, chasing down those who are left out or hurt by the changes. 

The work also should give us clear enough vision to not be blinded to real dangers by ego, pride, or false reality.  We can hear God’s warnings in the subtle movement of the Spirit, but also in the words and warnings of others.  Because we are not led by our blind pride, we can move with others and see more clearly what they need.  

Leaders change systems.  They influence others, hopefully towards love and peace with gentleness and mercy.  As I grow, I am seeking ways to call more clearly for the leaders around me to own their own weight in the system, trusting that influence is more powerful than either inertia or reaction.  I am also more able to admit that I don’t know where the next hit is coming from and to ask for help from others, especially when I feel vulnerable.  

Finally, I have to say that I do believe that if you lead, you will get hit.  Systems don’t like change.  The crowd prefers Barabbas because though he represents violence and danger, they know violence and danger keep things the way they are.  In football I learned to take hits because I had a larger goal.  That is still true.  I have to turn my cheek if I want to see the kingdom.

 

Don’t Call Me Father – Part II

/ daniel p. richards / 1 Comment

So how do you teach this as a new way of leadership?  It has been one of my contentions since seminary that we were given Biblical studies, theology, even prayers that demanded a new way of leading communities to follow Jesus, but we were not offered any particular way of making that real in the systems and ethics that we bring to the Church in our congregations and parishes.  We may have good ideas in our head, but until we create systems that embody those ideas, we keep falling back on the old Roman model of Caesar.  Maybe we have a somewhat functional committee or Senate to support us.  Maybe we even have a retainer class of “people who really get what we are doing here” and a military police to keep us safe.  I call that last one the altar guild.  No one protects the old ways like the altar guild.

We fall back on rule by law and order embodying, or so we claim, the will of God.  We, the priests and pastors, become the persona of Christ, usually not understood as the sacrifice or the servant, but rather the one who should rule.  

The temple and throne have the same structure.  High priest, Sanhedrin or Bishop and Council.  We keep rebuilding the old system of rule and control because it works.  I know it works.  I wear a collar to some meetings because I know people will behave differently and defer on things I need them to defer on.  I don’t usually wear a wreath of laurel crown, but I have thought about it when people were really chaotic.

The claim of this model, which you can read in the Latin of Marcus Aurelius or the speeches of our Presidents, is to provide safety and order against the dangers and chaos of the world out there, by which we mean both outside our community, but also outside the inner circle within our own community.  The problem is that this model is that is based on the enemy’s view of the world, and not on God’s.

If we take the Bible seriously, God intended humanity to be caretakers of the world and each other in relationship to God.  We were made to be God’s children, and we become the royal priesthood of God when through Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit we are taught to live and love, forgive, heal, and feed as God does.  We restore the world, not control it.  We heal, not destroy.  Where the enemy sees chaos and danger, we see children of God in need of healing, love, belonging.  

We lead within communities by learning to be within communities as Jesus is in community.  We serve.  Among the Gentiles, Jesus said, the leaders among them lord it over them, but it is not be so with you.  The greatest among you is to be the least.  And the leader is to be servant to all.  We cannot even pretend to be following Jesus by lording leadership over others, reminding them to call us “father” and greet us with honor in the marketplace.  

“Father” puts us at the head of the Table, in the place of honor, and it doesn’t take long for God to come as host and move us down a little.  

So, how do we lead without titles and honor, power and control, threat and enforced order? This is a real question that I have been struggling with for a long time.  I cannot read and study Jesus and think that my leadership instincts need some real reform.  

Peter Block has been a huge help to me though.  In college I was supposed to write a paper on fundraising for a class on non-profit management intended for pastors-to-be.  Instead I found a book entitled Stewardship that radically changed my ideas about leadership, organizations, and power.  I read it cover to cover sitting in the upstairs of the Phoenix Public library.  I still own it and apply the lessons of that book today.  A few years ago during my post-Christmas travels to see my family I walked past a new book of Block’s called Community.  It promised to offer what I was looking for in forming and leading communities where the belief is that the real Wisdom and Spirit reside in the people, and the leader is one of them who serves that Wisdom and Spirit.  

To take one small lesson which Block gives, when you want to get the wisdom of the group and form a community on mission together, you focus not on leading the conversation but on setting up the room and asking the right questions.  That sounds like servant leadership, or butler priesthood.  When you focus on the setting up the room so that people relate to each other intimately and as equal partners, you help form community and allow the group to function as children of God discovering God’s call and wisdom together.  As a leader, the job becomes centered in set up and asking good questions, something Jesus excelled at.  The focus is on getting people to think and act as the children of God that we believe they are, rather than as either an army out to control the chaos of life or chaotic enemies that need to be conquered by either or reason or power. 

This is one step toward the Rule of God embodied in our systems of leadership.  It takes, as Weisbord and Janoff point out in Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There, a lot of self-control and maturity to not take control of the conversation and overpower the quiet voice of the Spirit.  That maturity comes from living into a theology, ethos, and expectations over time, but that self-control and tactics of calling forth our brothers and sisters into community can be taught, as can the room layouts and methods of facilitation that can set up the family to be family.  

But we have to think differently.  It is as if Jesus has sent us ahead to set up for the Passover, let us not set up the dinner as if it were something other than the supper of the Lord.  Let us not forget who the true host is and who the guests are.  Let us take up our towels and serve if we are the leaders in the way of Jesus.

Don’t Call Me Father – Finding a New Way to Lead or at Least a New Way to teach Leadership

/ daniel p. richards / Leave a comment

Over lunch this week a good friend and parishioner reminded me of the call to teach others what we are learning about leadership and this vision of Christianity, which is both old and new.  Frankly it doesn’t feel new right now, but there is a vision of pastoral and priestly ministry in the Anglican tradition that is emerging.  I like to think of it as a reclaiming of that is really old, rather than something truly new, but it shocks some people to hear the implications. 

No priest should be called father.  I think it usually points to an unformed pastor or worse a system of anti-kingdom work.  This sounds harsh, and I have good friends and people I respect who will argue for the pastoral merit of letting people respect your role and relationship to them.  Fair enough.  But there is no theological warrant in the New Testament for the title of “father” outside of Paul’s calling the people in several places a “little children” and stating that he was like a father to them.  I think this should be held with Jesus’ direct command to “call no man father.”  Why? 

It is systemic thinking.  The question to ask is “What kind of system are we setting up in order to embody and systematize the Rule of God in our local church or diocese?”  Are we setting up systems that recreate the temple or empower the royal priesthood of the called/gathered?  Ultimately we are trying to create and recreate systems that reflect the teachings of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and he had some particular things to say that speak directly to those systems.

The Gospel of Mark has a deep theme of suspicion towards “fathers” because “you have but one father, your Father in heaven.”  It is important to ask why this suspicion was so prevalent. The analogy of “fathers” and “sons” was a social meta-narrative that presented social, political, economic, moral, and even religious norms to all participants.  Roughly in every social interaction there was a “father” and a “son” or “sons.” A patron (root word pater) would be addressed as father by someone he supported and cared for, his “son.” This support and care while primarily financial would imply a great deal more about the ethics of the relationship, expectations, and norms of behavior.  In actual father-son relations, these were true, but they extended far beyond.  A father provided the ethos of the behaviors and expectations for the son in all interactions.  Who you worked for determined how you were expected to act, behave, and even think.  As with all social norms, this was probably true and also an incomplete picture.  But we do see in Latin the remnants of the system in the words that remain in use even today.  Everyone was a father or son in every relationship, but the supreme “father” was known and embodied in the emperor and his rule.

In several recent works of scholarship the relationship between Jesus and the imperial state of Rome has been lifted up as one of protest and threat.  The emperor was proclaimed on coins and statuary as the Son of God.  The God of Rome was immutable, unchangeable, and just.  The emperor embodied that God’s rule on earth and was seen as either God’s emissary or God himself, often supported by claims of virginal birth.  I would point to works by Herzog, Malina, Crossan, and Borg, but there are countless others who have explored the social and political world of Jesus in great depth.  I owe a special debt to the works of N. T. Wright who works along the edges of these claims from the side of studying the claims of Jesus and Paul.

So if we believe as orthodox Christians in the claims of Jesus as the embodied Son of God who came to a particular place and time in history, and if we are going to take the claims of Jesus, the Bible, and the Creeds seriously, we have to look at them in the complex of their time and place in history with some care, at least as much as we are able to.  This is commonly accepted in scholarship, but it can seem overly difficult for many lay people or less-learned pastors.  I won’t claim to be more than a medium-learned pastor, but I am an avid reader who has been stuck on this issue of the meaning of the Rule, or kingdom, of God for a couple of decades.  

So if there is a father-son system of ethics, rules, and expectations or norms in the first century, what does Jesus say to it?  In some way Jesus co-opts the system in his teaching about God as Father, or Abba, and both his claim of sonship and what he makes possible for his followers.  I would go farther to say that Jesus uses this social language to explain and embody his ethics, rules, and expectations.  It should not be surprising that Jesus’ way of understanding should upset the accepted patterns of interaction, but how complete this system and its implications for our life as his disciples may surprise you.

First off, Jesus calls God “father.” This is well known and accepted.  You should have heard sermons about this and you should be teaching it.  It is simple and orthodox.  Jesus also says that as God’s son, you can know who God is, what the ethics, rules, and expectations or norms of his kingdom-family are through Jesus himself.  God is the one who provides the ethos, but we learn it from Jesus and later from his apostles and the Holy Spirit.  We are not to call anyone else “rabbi” because we have one “rabbi” or teacher of the way of God, the Holy Spirit.  

But there is a twist here that is again well-known, but still surprises many people: Jesus calls God Abba and not just Pater.  Pater is directly translated from both Greek and later Latin as “father.” It represents a particular relationship-dynamic.  It is a formal word, just as “father” is for most English speakers today.  Abba is a little more subtle.  It is an Aramaic word that gets brought into the New Testament a number of times directly.  Aramaic is a local language that represents the mix of Arabic (geographically local) and Hebrew (religiously local).  It is what Jesus and his first followers probably spoke at home.  They probably used Greek in trading or when talking to non-locals, of which there were quite a few in even the rural places of Palestine and Israel of the time, due to Greek and Roman imperialism and trade and geographic centrality.  That is a lot to explain that while the Gospels that we have were likely written in Greek, although I would argue that Mark was probably written in Aramaic and then translated into Greek.  There are very few Aramaic words that come through untranslated.  Abba does.  Why? It represents a different way of relating that “father.”  It is a primary language word, the language of infants and intimacy.  Abba is more like “Daddy” in English.  

The father-son relationship dynamic is one of formalism, obligations, and strict hierarchy.  “Daddy” is intimacy, safety, provision, and care.  Father is cool; daddy is warm.  When Jesus refers to God as his father, he is pointing to rule, ethic, and expectation. When Jesus refers to God as daddy, he is pointing to love, relationship, and reciprocity.   It is important to note that Jesus uses both terms.  We should try to understand and live into the implications of both.

Father gives us a system of being and relationship.  If God is to be a father to me, and I am to be God’s son, I have to know what God expects, what God’s rules are, and how I am supposed to act.  

Jesus tells us all three of these.  God is compassionate, knows you intimately and cares for human beings, especially the lost.  God is concerned with mercy and forgiveness, embodied in healing and return. God provides for needs and is good.  It is important to note that these are not the only attributes of God known or taught in Jesus’ day or in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Jesus teaches these.  He does not refer to the God of Armies or Hosts, a common phrase in both the Psalms and Isaiah which he quotes extensively.  He does talk about God as just, but then locates that justice in the city gates with concern for the poor and widows.  When he proclaims the Lord’s day from Isaiah 61 in his hometown, he edits the quote from Isaiah to leave out the wrath of the Lord and replace it with the “year of the Lord’s favor.”  He then points out God’s concern for the foreigner is several stories from the Hebrew Scriptures. (See Luke 4).

Jesus gives specific rules that he connects directly to God’s attributes.  The most obvious and often repeated example is forgiveness.  As followers of Jesus we are to forgive as God forgives.  We are to forgive seven times seventy-seven times, meaning an infinite amount.  We are to be perfect in compassion.  This verse has confounded and confused many people because of the word perfect, but it is connected to the teaching that God is compassionate and gives good gifts to his children. 

7 ‘Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. 8For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. 9Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? 10Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? 11If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

So Jesus has used the father-son relationship as a lens to show us how to relate to God and to each other.  He also used it to directly counteract the systemic ethics and abuses of his day.  He did this by showing that we are to relate to each other as God’s children.  This implies treating each other (and others) with compassion, mercy, and forgiveness.  We are to heal and feed others.  

Jesus asks the crowd in Capernaum when his mother and brothers came seeking him,  “Who are my mother and my brothers? . . . Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” Mark 4

Jesus warns against calling others “father.”  He does this because of the role that fathers play in the systems of his day.  Who your father is determines your way of being and relating.  You are the son or daughter of the one whose will you do.  I think the mistake of the church to adopt this model of relating again is that the model teaches dependency on who the father is.  The called community ekklesia becomes the priest’s community as they become the one who sets the ethics and expectations and norms of the community around them.

This is precisely what Jesus was fighting against.  God is Abba to his children.  That is not dependent on the person who leads some part of the system.  In fact, the leadership of Jesus’ disciples was to be one of servanthood, not privilege, to be one that embodied God’s rule basileo not the clergy.  The leadership was to embody something even more than others because of the danger that we would become “father.”

The reality is that most communities are made up of humans, who we know are incomplete, non-divine, unholy creatures who have become so desperate over the centuries that if found the Tree of Life we would chew the bark off after selling the fruit for profit.  We who are trying to lead know that we must take control of the systems of our communities if we are to change them.  And control is exactly what “father” gives us.  It is honor and privilege.  It gives us our “due place” at the table.  It is the damnation of the follower of Jesus.

I want to play nice, but I can’t.  I know why we like the title.  In Benedict’s rule the head of the monastery community is the “abbot.”  Abbot is derivative to Abba.  It encapsulates something that Benedict was trying to say about what was needed in his day.  An order based on family obligations and even love.  Abba, remember, implies love, care, and intimacy.  It also implies one who gives identity and provision and place.  I could find a place for “abbot,” I suppose.  But Father is so dangerous, so counter to everything Jesus taught that I find it anathema.  I join the Protest of Protestants and say no. 

Don’t call me father.

Rather, I am learning to lead by serving the community with love, care, and yes even intimacy.  I think the only way to find our “due place” at God’s table is to stand at the side with a towel and tray, ready to forgive, offer mercy, and heal and feed.  I would rather be a butler in heaven than face the smoky future of false fathers.  

Oddly, in my slightly obsessive compulsive exegesis “mother” stands up as safe.  Funny.