What Is the Great Commission, Part 2: Three Good Things about the Mission Statement of The United Methodist Church

Companions,

In Part I of this mini-series we looked at English translations of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20) spanning four centuries and the ways in which those translations both reflected and then underwrote prevailing ecclesiological and missional assumptions of those who used these translations in their day and going forward.

Here, I invite us to look more closely at relationship between the Great Commission and the official mission statement of The United Methodist Church. By now, any of us who are United Methodist will be able to quote it from memory.

"The mission of The United Methodist Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world."

It's a powerful statement in many ways. It commits this church to discipleship as its aim. And it commits it to discipleship to Jesus that embraces both personal and social holiness. In that way it's a thoroughly Wesleyan, and deeply missional vision.

It's powerful in other ways as well. It is being used intentionally and widely to direct conversations, planning and budgeting in congregations, districts, conferences, General Agencies, the Connectional Table, the Call to Action Committee and the Council of Bishops about how we will organize, manage, evaluate, and pay for our work as The United Methodist Church.

Because this mission statement is actually that powerful, it was selected as the theme statement for the General Conference that will meet in Tampa, Florida in April-May 2012. And a version of this theme is also incorporated into the logo chosen for this General Conference, reproduced above.

As the General Agency staff person assigned to the assist the Council of Bishops in designing worship for 2012, I am working closely with Marcia McFee (chosen as director of worship for 2012) and the Council, among others, to help design worship that will help us embody and experience that theme with as much depth and integrity as possible.

So this matters to me-- professionally and personally.

I hope it matters to you, too!

What I want to do here is look at three ways the United Methodist mission statement embodies the Great Commission well and invite your comments or questions to share similar or other perspectives you may have from your setting and experience.

1. The United Methodist mission statement reads the Great Commission as the work of the whole "institutional" church in a variety of ways, not just its leaders, agencies, congregations, or individuals.

As we saw with the English translations we reviewed in the previous post, each of them seemed to underwrite or later get used to support a reading of the Great Commission that applied primarily in one particular way to one particular group of people.

For the KJV, it applied initially to the hierarchy of the Church of England, and then to missionary movements and agencies and a colonialist vision of Christian mission as well.

The RSV continued to be read in light of missionary agencies, which at that point were largely the work of major US and British Protestant denominations who, despite the political collapse of the colonial empires were still predominantly approaching  "mission" and the Great Commission from a colonialist perspective-- a task "we" in the US or Britain paid "others" to do "for us" "over there" in order to get "them" (the folks who'd been "over there" all their lives for generations) to come round to our way of doing religion in the world. 

TNIV (2005) reflected a vastly different scene for a vastly different audience. It at least apparently individualized the text and made it apply to all Christians wherever they were, encountering folks from whatever nations (people groups) they may find themselves with. This reflects a situation both of the individualization and sort of "customized consumerization" of Christianity, devolving everything to the individual or to perhaps to the congregation with whom the individual identifies, and, concurrently, the ongoing downsizing of denominational mission enterprises everywhere, partly due to finances, but perhaps as importantly due to a fairly widespread embrace of an indigenous approach to missions most powerfully voiced by folks like Lesslie Newbigin beginning in the middle of the 20th century, though actually already embodied by the Jesuits as early as the 16th.

The United Methodist mission statement, by contrast, reflects a reading of the Great Commission that embraces the "y'all" of the Greek, and that then seeks to employ it using the "we all" of the various sorts of leaders, agencies, congregations, and other organizations that make up the United Methodist "connexion." We're not saying this is all on the bishops (KJV) or GBGM (KJV and RSV). Nor are we saying it's all on the congregations or individuals (TNIV). It's on all of those, connected and finding new connections, and each of those levels/forms/formats of community in ways each can contribute what each has to offer.

It's no secret that I think we're still putting too much emphasis on congregations as the "basic missional unit" most competent to deliver on "discipling" itself. Our denominational founders, the Wesleys (along with their EUB confreres way back) gave up on congregations actually doing this well. That's why they started the Methodist societies and particularly the class meetings, which could and often did do this better.

Congregations didn't and wouldn't and many likely still won't. That doesn't mean the mission statement is flawed or congregations are flawed. It just means we need to add more pieces into the network that long to and can, in cooperation with congregations and others, actually do "discipling" with folks and do it well.  

We're Methodists. We know how to do that! It's in our DNA, even if in a bit of a recessive way just now. But it's there!

2. The mission statement of The United Methodist Church privileges "making disciples."

Yes, there are problems with that phrase, "make disciples" in industrialized Western cultures, at least. I looked at those problems in some depth in the previous post.

But the language here of "disciples" is still impressive. It's not "church members." It's not "more United Methodists." It's "disciples." And it's "disciples of Jesus Christ."

And I have to say that's impressive because of some ecumenical encounters I've had over the years where the language of discipleship to Jesus is apparently absent, or at least not understood as part of the "currency" of conversation. One of these conversations recently was with a pastor (with good connections!) in the Disciples of  Christ. That one really shocked me. Maybe it wasn't representative. I don't know.

But here we United Methodists are talking-- at every level of the church-- about discipleship to Jesus Christ.


And we seem to be serious about doing more than just talking, but actually praying and doing all sort of things about it.

As long as we don't "water it down" by confusing actual discipleship to Jesus with other things, and as long as we don't get too misled by the "production model" inherent in the English phrase "make disciples" (rather than "discipling people"), I'm very, very hopeful about this. Disciples present in any of these conversations can, and will, I trust, always try to draw us back from potential precipices.


3. The mission statement of The United Methodist Church may just get the apocalyptic timeline.

Or at least it's possible to hold the apocalyptic timeline within the United Methodist mission statement.

Here's why. The "event horizon" presented here-- "the transformation of the world"-- seems to presuppose that this is happening and ongoing here and now. It doesn't propose a delay to the end of secular history. It also doesn't propose a terminus in "the by and by." It instead places before us a world being transformed by God and with and perhaps at times through us who are disciples of Jesus Christ. It leaves the question of when the "complete fulfillment" might be out of the picture entirely, and so, at least one could suggest, up to the mercy and the wisdom of God who alone could know when "all things are completely fulfilled."

For Your Discussion and Comment

How do you read the mission statement of The United Methodist Church related to the Great Commission?

Where do you see us living it out faithfully-- or at least potentially doing so?

Where and how are we not doing so?

What can we do better?

And what are you doing about it?

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards

What Is the Great Commission? Part I: Text, Translations, and Culture

Companions,

We probably all think we know the answer to the question.

But do we?

  

Here are three Protestant translations of the text-- Matthew 28:19-20-- King James (the standard English translation prior to the middle of the 20th century), Revised Standard (the mid to late 20th century "standard" or "mainline" translation in the KJV tradition) and Today's New International Version (2005, but heading for the dustbin because it was deemed "too radical" in some of its translation choices by some of its primary "market" of North American Evangelicals). The image above contains a fourth-- from the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saint Patrick in El Paso, Texas. And for good measure, I've included an image of the Greek text below, with gratitude to Anthony Fisher's Greek New Testament project.  

19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: 20 Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo , I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen. (KJV)

19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age." (RSV)  

 19 So wherever you go, make disciples of all nations: Baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. 20 Teach them to do everything I have commanded you. "And remember that I am always with you until the end of time."(TNIV)

 Read the translations, and the Greek if you can, and see what observations you might make.

Here are a few of mine.

Some Observations about the Greek Text:

1) The Greek text itself has only one main verb in verse 19-- matheteusate. All the rest are participles. That includes the opening word, poreuthentes-- which might be best rendered something like "As you've journeyed." The TNIV and the Roman Catholic translations got this right. The KJV, RSV, NIV, and the upcoming Common English Bible translate it as an imperative, "Go."

2) The main verb of verse 19-- matheteusate-- is an entirely different verb than the opening participle of verse 20-- didaskontes. Both have some reference to teaching, but in very different ways. Matheteusate comes from a verb which we have no "normal" English equivalent for. We tend to render it "make disciples" as RSV and TNIV do (and NRSV does as well), but even that is a bit misleading in our post-industrial culture. The construction "make X" for us just automatically implies production-- doing something like making widgets. Our brains just go to that interpretation without us ever having to think about it. It's that imbedded. With such an immediate, unconscious but incredibly powerful response to this construction, we then approach "making disciples" as a programmatic issue handled by systems, assembly lines or black boxes. In our day, given our collection of "normal" ecclesial systems, particularly in The United Methodist Church, we see it as the desired end product of a congregation. 

Our own cultural frame here over-determines and distorts the translation and the interpretation.

A quick note about culture and translation. Of course, one's current cultural frames at least somewhat determine both the translation and to some degree the interpretation. If that doesn't happen, the meaning is entirely opaque to the readers today (or in any day or culture for which a translation is intended!). But at the same time, there has to be every effort at trying to capture what the original hearers, writers and readers of a text from another culture were trying to communicate in their particular cultural context. The work of translation needs to be about privileging that "original" set of meanings  within the frameworks of the culture for which it is made as much as possible. It's a tricky balancing act, and always hard to do, and impossible to get precisely right-- all the more the greater remove one is from the original culture or reliable knowledge of that culture. 

The problem I'm suggesting here then is precisely that of balance. I'm suggesting that those who choose to translate this "make disciples"-- precisely because of our culture's automatic equation of  "making X" with a mechanical process or some kind of product, AND because that connotation is entirely absent from the original culture that used this term-- have, perhaps unwittingly, left wide open our culture's usual readings to over-determine the text in ways easily misinterpreted as production. 

And that's unfortunate, because there is no "production model" implied at all in this verb. 

None! 


If there were any interest in conveying the notion of producing or making anything, the Greek construction would have been "poiein mathetes"-- "to make disciples." THAT would mean production. But the idea that one could produce people like one produced a pot or even a poem (poem comes from the same root as the verb, to make) would have been beyond bizarre to the mind of any of these cultures, and so also to Jesus. So it's no wonder the Greek uses the verb, and not a verb plus object construction here.


The "thought world" behind the verb and the actual practices that embodied it were instead deeply relational. It's about "discipling people"-- initiating and engaging discipling relationships with people, just like Jesus did with his own disciples. It's about the hands-on, 24/7 watchcare of a shepherd for sheep (to use another biblical metaphor, though not quite as rich as that of discipleship). It's about investing deeply in the lives of others "laying down one's life for friends"-- and yes, that is the primary meaning of that phrase in Greek, too, by the way!-- so that they begin to live as you do, so that you pass on what you have received from those who discipled you just as Jesus passed on what he received from the Father. It's through that process that people move from being servants of the master to being friends of the master-- not "by nature," and not by fiat, either our own or that of the master. 

We just don't have "to disciple" as a verb-- at least not as easily understandable as "teach" or "preach"-- in part because we no longer have as many instances of actual "discipling" going on. Where we do, it's considered exceptional, or a luxury, or something done by "fanatics," or something we do, sort of, to prepare people for ordained ministry. It's certainly not viewed as an expectation or even a realistic hope for "ordinary Christians." 

3) The participle for "teaching"--  didaskontes-- does mean "teaching" in more of an "ordinary" sense, but even here the content being taught-- "to keep everything I have instilled in you"-- relates again far more to hands on discipleship (matheteuein) that to transmission of "facts" or formal doctrine per se. Where do we have teaching that actually does that?  (Ritual can do this-- if indeed we keep it and don't keep playing with it so it can actually transmit nothing because everything changes too much. General Rules can do this-- if we keep them for conscience sake rather than mend them for our own convenience).

4) The promise to be with us in verse 20, across the four centuries of translations represented above, presumes a fundamentally historical timeline with a beginning, a middle (now) and an end. The Greek text itself points to a fundamentally apocalyptic timeline that is simultaneously being unveiled every day here and now and that also has a linear aspect, but in a very different way. A more literal translation might be, "I am with you all  the days [historical timeline] up to and including the complete fulfillment of the age [apocalyptic timeline]." 

So the existing translations underwrite a version of history that keeps delaying the possibility for parousia ("presence alongside" or "arrival" literally!) while the Greek says parousia is happening at any time fulfillment is happening rather than only after some predetermined number of historical years or the collapse of life or civilization or some such (implied in language of "end"). Augustine's meditations on time in the Confessions were still taking that sort of apocalyptic timeline seriously in the West. Augustine was clear that the only time we have is the present, and both the future and the past are present in the present. Few others in the "mainstream" Western tradition followed in that path-- the visible trail almost completely ends there, or goes underground, as it were, resurfacing in a variety of millennialist and spiritualist movements (often at the center or the fringes of heretical movements) ever since. 

Some Observations about the Translations

First, an overarching observation. All of these translations seem at least to reflect (and probably also to promote) the epistemological, ecclesiological and missional assumptions of their translators or those for whom the translations were made.

As I've noted above-- one would and should expect that. 

As I've also noted above in at least one instance, what this means is that every translation-- including the observations about translation I've offered-- have to be considered carefully and critically to "suss out" to what degree those overarching or underlying assumptions of the translators or readers of their day may be overdetermining and therefore distorting the meaning of the text.

So here are some observations about how each of the translations on offer may have been doing just that. Feel free to add your own-- or disagree with these!

King James Version (1611, with minor alterations of spelling and wording along the way)
"Go ye therefore and teach all nations... teaching them to observe all things... even unto the end of the world"-- 

There would have been no virtually no "discipling" functions anywhere in 1611 in the Church of England. The monasteries were closed, their lands given to the crown. The monks were either banished or in hiding. Preparation for ordained ministry might still have carried this function, but that may have been about the extent, at least, of any non-underground activity in this direction. So, if only because of that, it's little wonder that "teach" was chosen for both terms.

It's also possible that the distinction in the Greek between the meanings of these two verbs (matheteuein and didaskein) was unknown to the translators in this period. 

In its day, most readers and teachers of this text would have applied its meaning primarily to the apostles then and their representatives "now"--  the bishops directly and proximately the priests. This also fits with the Reformed view of the "pastor" as "chief teacher"-- and teacher on an academic model. That's also why you see clerical garments looking like academic ones out of this larger Reformed tradition that was deeply influential on the English church in that period and to this day. 

"Teaching them to observe all things" in this culture would have been about getting people to conform to the basic customs and laws of the church and the realm-- remember, this is a state church!

 

"Even unto the end of the world" underwrites the then current Western secular linear view of history. 

Now-- there's one more important word here, though less important in 1611 than it would become not much later: "Go."

The translators had to know that the verb before them was a participle and not an imperative. The Vulgate had it as a participle (euntes). Every Greek text had it as a participle. Yet they chose imperative-- or at least what later generations would clearly read as imperative. 



Here-- a side note about the English of the day. "Go ye" could actually have been understood either as an imperative ("get ye going") or as a participle ("as ye go"). So it's not entirely that they were wrong, but rather, perhaps, that they went for vague rather than clear. 

Unfortunately, by the 18th century, if not earlier, the latitude in meaning of such constructions appears to have generally collapsed, so it could only be understood as an imperative.

This one word choice then came to underwrite much of the fervor behind the religious rationale for the British Empire and the English-speaking missionary movement through the 19th century and well into the 20th. Combined with "teach all nations" it supported the notion that the means of the missionary work was to take "the stuff we know" (because we know the right stuff) to "all the nations" and seek to make them know it, too, verbatim, just like the English (or the Americans!) did, because "the stuff they know" is totally wrong and we've got to teach them otherwise. Jesus said so. It's a command. Go! Teach! Can someone say "Colonialism?"

The one major missionary movement that didn't follow this model of "everything about us is right, and everything about you is wrong, and we can't possibly mix them or presume you have anything to offer" was that of the Jesuits. They were doing what we'd now call "indigenous mission" back in the 16th and 17th centuries in India, China and South America-- and getting into real trouble for doing so!  

So who was this commission for? The Church hierarchy who take care of this "for us," and later, also for missionaries and the organizations that sent them. 

Revised Standard Version (1946)

"Go therefore and make disciples of all nations... lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age"

Though it placed itself intentionally within the King James translation family, the RSV was pre-eminently the work of biblical scholars who were trying to get the findings of their scholarship since the 19th century reflected in the translations used in the churches themselves. 

That work shows up in two places in this translation.  

First, the scholarship in ancient Greek was such at this point that it was very clear that one could no longer equate "matheteuin" and "didaskein" in the translation itself. 

Second, there had also been enough work on apocalyptic literature and apocalpytic world view in the academy-- even if such perspectives were viewed as "pre-modern" and "mythological" in mainstream scholarship-- that translating "aionos" as "world" was a non-starter. 

But "Go" remained. 

This was "The Christian Century," after all, with the missionary movement, now led largely (though not entirely) by the US still very much on the "offensive" (especially after World War II)  to "reach all nations" (nations understood at this point as political entities-- the term would have referred to people groups in the first century) with the gospel. So in the "mainstream" communities that were using the RSV, this text was seen as a lively prod to the ongoing missions movements and used primarily by the "established" denominations and their "foreign missions" agencies both to sustain financial support for their operations and to recruit persons to work "in the mission field."

A major case in point-- the hymn "O Zion Haste"-- appeared in no less than 360 different hymnals of all sorts from its first publication in 1894 through 1979, and still appears in 12 hymnals (including the UMH, # 573) since that time. Its last verse-- the "payoff line" if you will-- is "Give of thine own to bear the message glorious; give of thy wealth to speed them on their way; pour out thy soul for them in prayer victorious; O Zion haste, to bring a brighter day." (Source for statistics: The Hymnary).

So make disciples of all nations" was often read in a way that presumed that America was already essentially Christian-- and more particularly that its WASP establishment at every level (with the possible initial exception of the Germans and "communist sympathizers" early on) certainly was.  Most of the content and manner of teaching the gospel at this point was still "colonialist" in its assumptions, even though the British Empire and all the other European empires that had extended their reach-- and their versions of Christianity-- into the Global South and East-- were tottering on the verge of collapse.  

Lesslie Newbigin was a voice in the Protestant missions wilderness advocating indigenous mission-- but it was a very big wilderness at the time! That he was heard at all was probably more because of his work and the relationships he was able to forge with recognized leaders on ecumenism, which would have been respected by the "establishment. " If he had not had those powerful friends, the established missionary interests might otherwise have found his missionary ideas deeply threatening to the still deeply colonialist mission enterprises they also represented and tried to keep funded.

Today's New International Version (2005)

So wherever you go, make disciples of all nations... I am always with you until the end of time.

The TNIV was billed as a revision of the NIV with better attention to the biblical texts-- a more literal reading and less of a dynamic equivalence reading, which had informed the NIV-- for today's Evangelical Christians in the English speaking world. 

I think you can see that audience clearly in view in this translation.

First, we're back to something approximating the King James at close of verse 20-- "the end of time." "The end of the age" may have been too associated with "liberal" usage to pass muster. So the apocalyptic timeline proposed in the Greek is again buried, and a secular chronological one put in its place. 

Second, it makes no distinction between y'all and you (singular). It's y'all in Greek. For an individualistic audience (which American Evangelicalism tends to be) the default reading would be singular. Wherever you go, as an individual, make disciples. Always be about the business of producing disciples-- yourself.

That kind of message almost sings in a variety of strains of the larger evangelical missional and emerging church movements. 

It doesn't play as well, though, for those entities that have significant investments in "missionary companies"-- whether "old school" (colonialist) or "new school "(indigenous). If this commission is now transferred to every single Christian, as an individual, it's much harder to make the case that my first and most financially costly response will be to support a denominational or other missionary organization with my money and effort. Maybe on the side-- but not as job one.

It also sings with the sense of the original Greek about making disciples of all nations-- at least a little better. "Nations" is still problematic, frankly-- still too politically defined in any US default reading. "Goyim" would have been better! (Well, at least in the Jewish neighborhood where I grew up!). Maybe it's there as a reflection that a lot of evangelical assumptions, even within the missional movements, are still Constantinian at this point. 

But if it's up to me to be making disciples of all nations wherever I go, and I really only go in the US for the most part, then we do have something a little closer to the Greek. This translation recognizes the nations are those right around me. It recognizes that the US is a nation of many ethné-- many people groups. And it recognizes that Christianity is thus fundamentally multi-cultural from the beginning. WASP won't cut it anymore. Even the homogeneous unit principle made popular by the church growth movements of the 1970s and 1980s is now a non-starter. That's real progress!

But we're still left with "make disciples"-- language that we're still pretty hardwired to interpret as some sort of a production demand. And we're still left with this at a default individualistic level. It's my job as an individual to go make more of these "disciple-widgets" out of people, whatever those may be. 

Maybe my congregation gives me some tools I might be able to use to do this. Maybe it doesn't. 

Or maybe the idea is that it's really my job to get more people into things my congregation is doing-- get them into the black box of the congregation-- and then they'll become disciples, like I did. 

How you read this might depend deeply on how the interpretive communities with which you mostly interact make sense of it with you-- or perhaps more likely, for you.

So What Is the Great Commission-- Today, Now, Where You Are?

I'll leave that for you to answer and discuss on this blog or elsewhere.

For another look at how this plays out in evangelism more broadly, see Frank Viola's blog article, Rethinking Evangelism.

And in Part 2 of this mini-series, I'll look at and invite your conversation about what some of the insights here might mean relative to the mission statement of The United Methodist Church.

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards

Photo Credit: Image of The Great Commission, 19th Century Stained Glass in the Cathedral of Saint Patrick, El Paso, TX. Used by permission under  GNU Free Documentation License.

 

     

Inception and Christian Mission, Part 2: Neuroscience, Plausibility Structures, Newbigin (and Mystico and Janet!)

Companions,

And now, for something completely different.

("Mystico and Janet: Flats Built by Hypnosis"-- starting at 4:40). 

And now for something else, a must-read interview with Lesslie Newbigin from 1998.

And now, from Inception, Cobb's warning to Ariadne that if she creates things that are implausible to the dreamer or the projections in a dream, or tries to re-create things from memory, the result will be that the dreamer and other characters in the dream will no longer believe what they are experiencing is real, may seek to attack the architect of the dream, and the dream itself will begin to collapse.

What do these three have in common? 

Two things (at least!).

1) Peter Berger's term "plausibility structure" and all that it stands for-- as well as all that its absence for religion in the Western world stands for now.

2) What memory can continue to carry over time, and what it takes for that to happen.

Whether one uses Peter Berger's language from the 1970s and 1980s, or talk of the demise of Christendom that became popularized with Loren Mead's The Once and Future Church in the early 1990s, and then perhaps accelerated a bit by (now Bishop) William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas in Resident Aliens, or the whole spate of church and congregational research studies (Hartford, Pew, US Congregations, etc) over the past three decades, there's one thing they all agree on: Christianity is in significant decline in the United States, at least in all the ways we thought we knew it.

But if Inception is right, trying to pin the "big reasons" for this on the "end of Christendom" or "the rise of postmodernism" may not be going quite far enough.

Maybe the big reason isn't that the culture has moved beyond Christendom, and we've joined it in doing so, and no longer really believe in it, and therefore its tower has fallen (cf. "Mystico and Janet").

Maybe we've actually gone beyond the carrying power of collective memory of what the church, as we knew it, was.

(The past tense here is intentional).

Every time we try to remember something sufficiently complex, our brains actually alter it-- at least twice, and perhaps three times. First, memory isn't like an optical drive, taking in all data made available to it and storing it in a sequential order for playback in the same sequential order. It's more like a hard drive, taking in data available to it and storing it wherever it can on the disk, then using some identifier in the file and the file allocation table to reconstruct it when needed later. And even that's not quite accurate, because a hard drive doesn't discriminate between what parts of the data are more important to be retained and what parts aren't, but our brains do. Which means, actually, that our brains store less information than we actually take in-- and often in a much more scattered way-- if at all! In short, the very first operations of memory are very "lossy."

That's the first problem.

Then, when you remember something, what's happening is your brain is reconstructing that memory out of whatever bits of information it had stored, plus whatever inputs were involved in creating the reconstruction in the first place-- meaning what it presents to you as a memory is already altered, even before it gets to your awareness. Then as it's "replaying" it's likely being altered all along. And then as it's re-remembered, it's altered some more. (That's four, four alterations!). In short, the more you remember anything, the less accurate the memory itself becomes-- the lossier, the more unstable and the more unreliable the memory in relationship either to what happened or what you think or feel about it.

A sufficiently simple idea can survive this deconstruction-reconstruction-alteration process for a very long time. It's less prone to alteration in itself. Indeed, it can become an unquestioned, nearly automatic, unconscious basis for altering other perceptions and for creating new realities and even new memories-- whether one calls this false memories or corroborating memories or whatever. The "new memory" may be something you can now see in a previous replay that you hadn't seen the first time through. But now that it's associated with that replay, it can also get associated as part and parcel of the memory itself, and so as integral in the story you tell about yourself.

What this means, in effect, is that the more one tries to recall and press a sufficiently complicated memory for details, the more it falls to bits under the examination. 

But not only that. That's only one part of the phenomenon of memory. Another part, also clear in Inception, is that whatever has instantiated itself as sort of core reality in the recreated memory-- whether directly related to the original generative idea or not-- may well seek other means to reassert itself and create its own plausibility structures, sometimes out of ravels or wholecloth, and even, at times, defend itself fiercely.

We know in part... we prophesy in part... we see through a glass in paradoxical riddles.

So what I'm beginning to ponder is whether the declines we see all around us in Western Christianity can still be attributed solely or largely to cultural changes to which we simply haven't adapted yet-- but potentially could, given enough time and effort. 

I'm beginning to wonder whether perhaps we may be facing a sort of biological limit, built into our neurons, and then transmitted across cultures that emerge from them. 

I'm wondering if it's possible that we've tried to live out of re-reconstructed and so ever-degrading memories for too long-- and so if both the declines in the West and some of the "pushbacks" we see from fundamentalist movements or from Rome (over women's ordination, for example) are symptomatic of that syndrome, which may be progressive and irreversible, even more than what the family system therapists refer to as "systemic inertia" which might be amenable to change if we could just find the right place in the system to reframe things and enough time for such reframing to take hold.

If we have reached such a hard, biological limit with church as we knew it in Western cultures-- whither here (do we know how we got here?), and whither from here?

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards

"Inception" and Christian Mission, Part I: Postmodernism and Other Realities

Companions,

This past weekend I got to see Christopher Nolan's new film, Inception. I've been a Nolan fan for several years, not only because of his fascinating way of story-telling, but particularly because of his incorporation of both "big questions" and neuroscience into his films.


One of the very big questions in Inception is the nature of reality. 


No spoilers here!


But  there is a line that Mal, wife of the main character (Cobb) says to her husband at one point that I think bears some discussion here.


I don't have the quote exactly. But the gist of it is something like this:
"You know there is more than one reality." 


Throughout the film, that point is made eminently clear. The deal is that not all "realities" are equally stable, but as long as they seem plausible, those who are in them are convinced the experience they are having is completely real.  


Call it postmodernism, pluralism, or the product of far more constant exposure to all of the varying views, perspectives and realities of the global community-- including the idea that there is a global community-- and you see that Mal's statement can also be understood as a frame for the context in which we are sent with God's mission announced by and in Jesus.


A frame-- not the only one. 


But a frame that is becoming increasingly relevant on several levels of reality in this world.


Though not all.


And it's a frame that causes significant degradation of any frames claiming there is only one reality on such levels. 


Or at least, in such multi-realitied levels, one might expect to find the collapse and ruins of "dreams" that there is just one reality.


But again, that multi-reality obtains on some levels does not mean it obtains on all. There are some where it does not-- or does not do so sufficiently yet to be noticed or even noticeable. 


So we find ourselves in a challenging situation-- living not simply in "the world" but in multiple worlds-- some of them acknowledging only one reality, and others aware of multiple realities-- and still called to be not "of the world" or "of the worlds." 


It's not a new situation for Christians. The apocalyticism in our earliest roots had already embraced a multi-worlds and multi-reality paradigm. A challenge is that that very apocalypticism has also been deeply buried, rejected, even forbidden-- and in some ways forbidden most of all in the modern world. 


We have resources-- biblically and historically-- for such a time as this. But since most of us (if not all of us) have grown up in modernism, a modernism that at once declares there is only one reality and enacts that belief in such a thoroughgoing way that it easily enacts a relativistic nihilism, we may not know how to access or use them-- and may have considerable reticence about doing so now.


How do you seek to live and engage God's mission in the multi-realities or singular reality where you find yourself?








Peace in Christ,




Taylor Burton-Edwards 

No Black Box: Willow Creek's Reveal Study

Companions,

Above is a still from the one of the videos from Willow Creek's RevealNow website (http://www.revealnow.com).

In this segment, Greg Hawkins is saying, "Increasing level of participation in these sets of activities does NOT predict whether someone is becoming more of a disciple of Jesus Christ."

In case you can't see the the set of activities clearly, it is services, classes, small groups, caring ministries, and servant ministries.

And again, the finding-- simply doing more of these things, or even generating more participation in these things, does not predict that the outcome is discipleship to Jesus.

Even creating a system that makes all of these things available and somehow gets lots of people into them does not generate discipleship to Jesus Christ of its own.

 In other words, there is no black box.

The Black Box

Okay, so what's a black box? A black box is a component of a system that takes inputs and does something mysterious with them to produce certain desired outputs. The mystery is that even if you know what the components inside the box are, you don't really have much clue how they work. It's just known (or at least believed!) that they do. 

Now, black boxes actually work very well in a variety of iterative mechanistic functions. That is, when you have to do a lot of the same kinds of calculations on similar kinds of data over and over (such as when you're testing software for bugs), or when you have to keep generating a part in exactly the same way, and you also need to make sure nobody can mess with or even learn exactly how that happens (trade secrets, that sort of thing), the black box is exactly what you need. And when a given black box is no longer generating the results you are looking for, then you either replace it or get someone to diagnose and repair a faulty component or adjust the outputs of the components relative to one another.

Black boxes really do work-- for numbers, data and things-- at least within reasonable tolerances.

Many of our approaches to thinking about congregations since at least the 19th century have believed there is a black box, that the congregation is that black box, and that the programs of the congregation-- its small groups, its caring ministries, its servant ministries, its worship services, and its classes-- are the components. There's no particular explanation of how it is that these things are supposed to generate discipleship, but it is surely believed that they do. The awareness is also that one has to keep cycling through the various components of this black box over time before one expects a lot of measurable outcomes. The iterative nature of the system (weekly public worship, weekly small group meetings, regular schedules of classes, organized training and servant ministries over time) strongly suggests that few expect that one-time experiences with any part of the system will lead to dramatic change that endures. At the same time, there is openness to the possibility of "quantum experiences"-- dramatic encounters or movements of the Holy Spirit in our lives-- where sudden, major leaps forward can and do occur, though on a fairly unpredictable basis.

We have believed that if you have those components in place, and you are doing them the "right way," (whether defined in terms of procedure, doctrine or "relevance"), and you're doing them where people actually are, then you should have an increasing number of inputs (in this case, people) entering your black box (congregation) and a correspondingly increasing number of outputs (people becoming and maturing as disciples of Jesus Christ) as people continue to interact with the various components of the congregation over time. 

A corollary is that if the result is not measurably improved discipleship, the best way to address that is either to replace or fix a faulty component (maybe a dysfunctional small group, or a worship service that has become less "relevant") or tweak the arrangement of the components just right (change schedules or places or the amount of time when particular groups or services happen).  Do that right, we think, and you'll get back to producing the expected outcomes again.

We do believe in the black box version of congregational mission, structure and vitality. We teach this. And we build or seek to plant, transform, revitalize or redevelop congregations on the basis of this.

Yet the Reveal study says there is no black box like this.

Well, of course the black box does exist. Reveal's point is it does not actually work as we may keep believing and advertising it does. There's no question that the black box (the congregation) influences people, and sometimes profoundly. So do many other kinds of organizations with which people may be involved over a period of years. If we want to equate that kind of influence with actual discipleship to Jesus, then we might say the congregational black box does work. But if we want to equate discipleship with discipleship-- Reveal says the black box approach does not work. 

At least not well.

As Hawkins goes on to note, what Reveal shows is that the congregational black box can be pretty good at helping people have an initial encounter with Christ, and even at fostering a "falling in love experience." But it generally doesn't move people very far in terms of maturing, much less maturity. As the Wesleys might have put it, it can help them encounter Christ and even decide they want to follow him (prevenient and justifying grace), but it does little to help them learn actually how to follow Christ or come to "have the mind of Christ" (sanctification moving on to perfection/maturity).

Going Beyond Unexamined Faith in the Black Box

So if Willow Creek's conclusions in the Reveal study are true, and they've been out there now for nearly six years (for Willow Creek itself) and over three years (with further work with over 20,000 other people in hundreds of other churches), why would United Methodists or others still try to proceed as if the black box actually can produce disciples of Jesus, or (which I think may be more of our situation), that maybe the problem really is a matter of optimization-- updating or repairing or rethinking or adding more instances of the same parts or retuning the components of the black box-- and not a problem of far more basic engineering... namely, that the black box itself does not generate the desired outcome well, and maybe never has?

I think we all have ideas about possible answers to that question.

But being able to list why something doesn't work isn't the same thing as being part of designing and implementing something that does.

And there's something more at stake here. What Reveal also shows is that the more people had matured and become Christ centered, the more likely they were actually to leave the congregation altogether!

That is, the black box actually has the opposite effect of what it claims. Instead of making Christ-centered disciples, it often tends to get rid of them!

That's why before we leap to conclusions about what to do instead-- and thereby perhaps actually substitute one black box approach for another-- we need to spend some time first  in examining and naming all the ways where we still apply "black box" thinking to our lives as disciples of Jesus and our work of discipling others in his way. 

A fearless, searching inventory.

And then confession.

And part of that confession may need to be that we are powerless to overcome how habitual and entrenched black box thinking has become for us. Truly, Western Christianity may be so steeped in a black box enculturation of doing and being church, that we need something like an exorcism, cleansing by the Spirit and re-wiring of our synapses to set us free.

So... to begin that process, two questions.

1. Where do you find yourself or your worshiping community falling or falling back into black box thinking?

2. What will you do to confess that, and seek God's grace and power to repent and find a better way?

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards

 

Photo credits: Black Box, by Ken Goldberg. Used by permission under a Creative Commons License.

Michael Scott and Leadership in the Post-modern World

Companions,

A quick set of observations about a fictional world (The Office) that may or may not play out in any real life applications-- but may be worth talking about.

1. The Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin was noted in more than one episode of the series either to be the most profitable of all the branches, or actually the only profitable branch in the entire company. That's why it alone survived as a unit in the takeover by "Sabré," as Michael Scott initially pronounced it.

2. Michael Scott and two other branch managers are asked to go to Corporate to present an annual report. The other two make PowerPoint presentations with detailed financial information, action plans and fiscal projections. Michael brings a video about how the Scranton branch is a family.

3. When Michael Scott gets called in by Corporate to describe to David Wallace what makes his branch successful, he can't come up with any coherent answers.

4. When Charles Miner is brought in to replace Michael Scott at one point, his approach to management is to "buckle down" on the "core disciplines" and do much more to demonstrate progress against corporate's defined "success metrics," "best practices" and "standards." The result is not only that Charles is hated (everyone but perhaps Dwight Schrute is glad to see him go!) but that the Scranton branch performs worse under his leadership. In fact, the branch becomes so threatened by the upstart Michael Scott Paper Company (which has essentially no assets, few sales and no financial hope) that Dunder Mifflin Corporate ends up buying out Michael Scott's company and moving Charles Miner to another branch.

In other words, Michael Scott must be doing a lot of things right.

And that in spite of his complete blindness to his colossal flaws as a leader and even as a person.

He really does waste people's time. His meetings are never productive. The most important and powerful "working group" in his management scheme is the Party Planning Committee, which is also the source of some of the most dysfunctional behavior in the entire system.  

So what's the Michael Scott secret sauce? How does someone so thoroughly awful at nearly everything he does end up leading the only profitable branch in his company, a fact made even more remarkable since that branch is in Scranton, which had the most depressed economy of any of the other communities that had branch offices?

Let me hazard a few observations... and invite you to suggest any others you can think of.

1). Michael Scott acts as if paper sales and customer service will happen at Dunder Mifflin Scranton. That is, he basically trusts that his employees will do their jobs and he lets them do them pretty much their way. He sees overall performance as the organic rather than the mechanistic outcome of what he does.

This isn't laizzez-faire management. That is, he's not letting people do whatever they want all the time. He does call frequent, time wasting meetings. He insists on lots of parties. And everyone has to participate in those-- no questions asked. So he is setting a corporate expectation and holding folks accountable to it-- they represent Dunder Mifflin to sell paper and provide the best customer service they can in the greater Scranton area. It's just that the way he reinforces that corporate identity isn't by pushing people on sales targets, but keeping them connected to each other. Dunder Mifflin is about that connection. And that connection is, in his mind, what drives the brand promise-- paper sales with the best customer service to back it up. He has connected them. And they deliver on the brand promise better than any other branch.

2) Maybe another way of saying the same thing-- Michael Scott believes in the brand and in his team to deliver the brand promise. Always.

3). Michael Scott usually does not add to the personal misery of his employees by setting forth policies that make their lives or their work harder to handle. Yes, each of the employees has some personal quirks, and two of them (at least-- here I'm thinking of Dwight and Angela in particular) are probably generally miserable people. But without Michael adding to their personal misery, each of these otherwise miserable people is actually able to channel energies  to generate excellent results. Dwight is consistently Salesman of the Month (and one February he won the award twice!). And Angela keeps the finance department running in a way that their work never impedes that of the sales staff. And both are proud of the work they do.

4). Maybe it's just because he's so incredibly socially oblivious, but Michael Scott is not at all insecure as a leader. No one threatens him in that office. And that means, actually, no one is threatened by him, either, and thereby inhibited out of fear of displeasing him and/or retribution from him to take whatever steps they need to to do their jobs-- sell paper and serve customers.

Those four come to my mind right off the top.

And it strikes me that a lot of these qualities are likely valuable in leadership in all sorts of places in an increasingly postmodern world where the usual tools of "management" just can't produce the robustness or creativity of a team necessary to thrive in an ever-changing environment-- whether organizations, or congregations, or other formats of Christian community. 

What others do you see? And what implications do you find for the nature of leadership in the organizations, congregations and missional communities where you are? Or in the United Methodist Church?

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards



Photo credit: Jennifer Snyder. Used by permission under a Creative Commons License.

Of Banks and Churches

Companions,

It's been a day for strange experiences.

I'll tell you about one of them.

Maybe it's because I still had a tweet in my mind from a friend who just got fired from his church job about the church acting a bit too much like a business sometimes... I don't know.

But I was listening to Marketplace (American Public Media's daily financial news program on NPR) on the way to lead an Evening Prayer and Eucharist at the church I attend during the week in Nashville. And on came a story-- in fact two in a row-- about banks. 

Nothing unusual there. It's a finance show. One expects them to talk about banks, right? 

But as I was listening to these stories, instead of "big banks" and "small banks" I started substituting in my head "big congregations" and "small congregations." And instead of "businesses" (as in small businesses, which primarily depend on small banks to provide them loans) I kept hearing "small communities" or even just "communities."  

Here's the eerie thing. Just about all of these mental substitutions seemed to work. I mean, it seemed to make no difference whether they were talking about banks or congregations, businesses or communities. Then I started substituting "denominational leadership" for "government" and... well.

Oh, and the second story was about "shadow banks," and my mind went straight to all sorts of non-congregational forms of Christian community through the whole thing. And that worked, too!

Go ahead and download today's Marketplace podcast  (July 14,2010)-- you can get it for free from iTunes. I started the substitutions at around 2:10 into the podcast. Try it out, and see what you hear!

And then let's talk about it.

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards



Picture credit: Citigroup Center in NYC. Public Domain.