Alban Weekly for Monday, 22 January 2018 from Alban at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina 27701, United States "How should leaders respond to powerful forces shaping our world?"
Alban Weekly for Monday, 22 January 2018 from Alban at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina 27701, United States "How should leaders respond to powerful forces shaping our world?
Globalization, technology and financialization are interacting to rapidly change our world, creating bewilderment and disorientation. In such a time, we need new and renewed institutions that are creative and vibrant to lead us through the turbulence, writes the theologian. "Why are you talking so much about these 'unprecedented' changes, turbulence and 'tumultuous times'? Doesn't every generation think they are facing such challenges? What's so different about us and our time?"
These questions came in the midst of a daylong workshop in which I was articulating why leaders seem deeply bewildered and disoriented by our present circumstances and the challenges of contemporary leadership. The challenges seem complex and wicked, not just complicated or hard. Business leaders have begun to describe our time as VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous), and to describe leadership as learning to "navigate in a fog." How might we account for the volatility, the complexity, the fog? Could identifying the sources of the turbulence help empower us to make better progress in offering solutions? That was where I was headed in my comments. The particular participant who raised questions about my analysis was clearly frustrated -- and he had a point. There is an all-too-human tendency to romanticize the stability of the past and thus exaggerate the complexities of the present and the challenges of the future. The participant's observation that every era has to address change was a valid one that we neglect at our peril. Also valid was his sense that "turbulence" is a matter of perspective, and that varieties of events cause turbulence and make leadership challenging in any era.
My rhetoric had been a bit hyperbolic, making his point an important corrective, or at least caution. Change is inevitable, and it is always disorienting. And surely our age isn’t the first to discover turbulence. Indeed, Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn’s new book, “Forged in Crisis,”(link is external) a profile of five exemplary leaders over the past two centuries (Ernest Shackleton, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rachel Carson), has as its subtitle “The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times.”
Yet there are risks in minimizing the disorientation and turbulence. There are times when tectonic plates shift more substantially than at others, and eras when the changes and challenges are more profound than in others.
We live in such an era. And because we do, believing that this is just another set of changes and challenges can lead to misdiagnoses that are as problematic as ignoring the turbulence altogether. We need diagnoses that take us to the heart of our bewilderment -- at least, as close as possible -- so that our prognoses and strategies for dealing with it will be as fruitful as possible.
My journey toward the heart of our bewilderment began as I considered the deep trends that we are facing and the need to focus on human flourishing. It continued as I wrestled with various forces of disruption and their impact on organizations, and as I sought to understand the rise of networks and the importance of practiced “intuition” as a “seventh sense.”
But what may take us closest to the heart of our bewilderment, I believe, are three underlying forces that are shaping our world(link is external), as laid out in a recent essay by Colm Kelly and Blair Sheppard. Those three forces -- globalization, technology and financialization -- are not entirely new. Indeed, other eras have seen a great deal of interaction across cultures, and technologies have been developing as long as there have been human beings and cultures.
What is most genuinely new are the ways in which the three forces are interacting with one another, and the accelerated pace of those interactions. The new interactions, together with the accelerated pace, are creating new predicaments that are bewildering and disorienting. Those predicaments are especially urgent to address, because their cumulative impact has been shifting. For many years, people have focused on the ways the impact has benefited society, especially in social mobility and lifting people out of poverty. But in recent decades, the impact has created challenges that are increasingly problematic and even ominous.
Asymmetry: Increasing wealth disparity and the erosion of the middle class
Disruption: Disruption of business models and blurring of industry
Age: Demographic pressure on business, social institutions and economies
Populism: Breakdown in global consensus and increasing nationalism
Trust: Declining trust in institutions and consequences of technology
There is no single cause that leads to these challenges, and no single way to navigate the forces of globalization, technology and financialization. The forces magnify some issues, intensify others and create new ones. In this light, diagnoses such as historian Niall Ferguson’s “The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die”(link is external) both explain and obscure the challenges we need to address.
Many activists think that globalization, technology and financialization should be simply opposed or resisted. But that is not likely to be effective, as the forces are simply too strong and not easily isolated.
What can we do constructively? Even if we want to avoid counterproductive reactions, we cannot afford to bury our heads in the sand, pretending that the turbulence will pass. Nor can we afford to oversimplify the problems or attempt to tackle them one at a time.
Rather, we need to cultivate networks that will enable us not only to diagnose the complexities of the forces and the challenges we face but also to develop strategies that can build on the positive effects of the forces while minimizing the negative. Central to this work will be new and renewed institutions that are creative and vibrant enough to form people with the mindsets, skills and character to lead us through the turbulence.
The stakes are high, the challenges are daunting and urgent, and the opportunities potentially transformational. There is no time to waste, but neither can we settle for mere technical fixes. We need to adapt, and to cultivate institutions and leadership in a new key.
Maryanne Stevens: Focus on what's core to your mission
The Walking Woman is a symbol of "emboldened women striding into the future with faith, courage and conviction," according to the college's website. Photo courtesy of College of St. Mary
College of St. Mary, a once-struggling Catholic women’s college, has found new life by refocusing on its mission, translating it to today and finding new niches of women to serve -- single moms, immigrants and others -- says the school president.
Twenty-one years ago, when Maryanne Stevens, RSM, became president of College of St. Mary in Omaha, Nebraska, the school was “on the rocks” -- deeply in debt, with declining enrollment.
But now, at a time when many women’s colleges are struggling and even closing, the school’s enrollment is higher than ever, the endowment is up, and finances are sound.
The turnaround happened, Stevens said, because the college refocused on its mission.
“We asked, ‘Who were we founded to be, and how does that translate into these times?’”
The school had been launched in 1923 primarily to educate women teachers for parochial schools in Nebraska.
“So we looked for what I called niches of women that we could serve,” Stevens said.
By design and by luck, Stevens and her team found new populations who would be drawn to a Catholic women’s college, including single mothers, Nebraska’s growing Latino population and more.
“It really is all response to need more than sitting around thinking up a grand plan,” she said.
Maryanne Stevens
Before becoming president of College of St. Mary(link is external), Stevens was a professor of theology and the chair of the theology department at Creighton University in Omaha. A member of the Sisters of Mercy, the college’s founding order, she has a bachelor’s degree in math and sociology from College Misericordia in Dallas, Pennsylvania; a master’s degree in theology from St. Louis University; and a Ph.D. in religion and education from Boston College.
Stevens spoke recently with Faith & Leadership. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What was the situation at College of St. Mary when you were named president in 1996?
The college was on the rocks. It had about $5 million in debt on an $11 million budget -- $2.5 million on a fitness center they built without knowing how they would pay for it, and the other $2.5 was accumulated operating debt.
I’ll be a past president someday, so I’m not going to speak about past administrations. But I would say that the college had suffered from some of the throes that many small private colleges suffer from. They had a lot of hope, but not a lot of resources.
My metaphor was that we were growing not grass but weeds. We were mowing weeds around the campus. It was tough.
I was on the St. Mary board and was chair of the theology department at Creighton University at the time. I told the board that we should give the college one more chance to be really clear about who and what it is.
And in a result that I was not expecting, they asked me to become the president, and we gradually dug ourselves out of debt.
Some of the college’s success since then was because we focused on our mission. We asked, “Who were we founded to be, and how does that translate into these times?”
We were founded in 1923 as a college for women, to educate teachers primarily for the Catholic schools in the region, but also for public schools.
So we looked for what I called niches of women that we could serve.
The first niche we came up with was single mothers. A young woman from a community two and a half hours north of here was a junior, living in our residence hall. She came to me and said she was pregnant and didn’t know how she was going to finish college if she couldn’t bring her baby back to the dorm.
I said, “Well, let me think about it.”
About the same time, the Chronicle of Higher Education had an article about a women’s college in Pennsylvania that had a house where single mothers and their children could live. So I sent our residential life people out there to find out how they did it.
They came back and said, “There are only two rules: the kids can’t be in class, and they can’t be unaccompanied on the campus.”
And I said, “OK.”
We reopened some old convent space in the main building that wasn’t being used well and used it as a residence hall for single mothers and their children. We started with eight students and became known as friendly to single mothers, whether they lived on the campus or not.
In 2012, we built a free-standing residence hall for single mothers and their children. The students pay the same tuition they would pay without a child, and the child can live and eat here free.
Q: I understand that it received a huge amount of attention nationally.
It did! It got a lot of attention, because it was one of the first in this region, if not in the United States. Many colleges have had family housing for graduate students, but very few, if any, had reached out to single mothers in quite that way.
This fall, 15 percent of our students are single mothers. They don’t all live on campus, but we’ve become known as friendly to and understanding of that population.
Later, we hired a director of single parent success who helps these students. Some are a flat tire away from not being able to get to school and not being able to get to day care or whatever. She connects them with various resources in the community that can assist them.
The second population that we began to reach out to was the growing Latino population in Nebraska. Nebraska would have no population growth if it weren’t for the new immigrants coming in.
Q: They work in the state’s agriculture industry, in the processing houses and so forth?
That’s right. The basis of our economy here is agriculture. So we follow very carefully immigration reform and the DACA decisions that are being made.
When we first enrolled Hispanics, some were American citizens, but some were not. They were undocumented, and there wasn’t DACA at the time. But we found donors to help support them.
Part of our thought process was that we had to grow the enrollment, so who are the new people in town who might be attracted to the college?
For the same reason, we’re beginning to look at the new African populations that are coming into Omaha. We reportedly have the largest South Sudanese population outside the Sudan.
So there are all these pockets of people, most of whom are first-generation college students who will thrive in a smaller environment.
Q: Given the situation at the college when you started, why did you take the job?
Another board member told me, “I think you should do this.”
And I said, “I have a job!”
But I had been arguing that we needed to give it another chance, so I came over that evening and just walked around the campus.
I do believe there was a call that was different from anything I had been conscious of before. I thought, “I really should. This really is something I should do and that I feel called to do.”
That’s why I did it.
I came back the next day, and I said that I wanted to do this right, that the board and the faculty had to run me through all the interviews. But it was a pretty foregone conclusion. It wasn’t exactly an attractive job for anybody.
Q: That was 21 years ago. What was your vision back then?
We had a board meeting in the first year and a half where somebody came in and asked us to “draw your vision.”
I drew a full parking lot. I can’t draw, so I just drew lines, and smudges for cars. Basically, I said that my vision is that we have a full parking lot.
And we do! We just added a hundred more parking places this summer.
Q: That vision was about more than parking.
The vision was that we needed more students, and then, when we were full, we would be asking, “How are we going to expand?”
Today, our residence halls are the fullest they’ve ever been, and we’re asking, “What are we going to do next year?” Our parking lots, even with those hundred new spaces, are still too full some mornings. People park in fire lanes and on the grass.
Q: How’s the college doing financially?
Very good. Our enrollment is up 9 percent this fall. We don’t have any debt, because I won’t build anything or do anything until I know we have the money at least pledged.
We’re in very good financial shape. We have a $19 million endowment, which is too low, but that’s not uncommon in a small private college.
Q: What was it when you started?
$4 million.
I rack this all up to the angels. There’s a lot of God in this. There’s a lot of faith from a lot of people, not just me.
But I really do believe it was a call.
I have a small group of women that I have been friends with for a long time. I told them in the beginning that if it doesn’t work, we’re just going to sell the college’s assets, pay off the debt and put the rest into a foundation for women’s education.
We weren’t sure it would work. But “by little and by little,” it has.
I could have told you how much we spent on copy paper those first three years. I mean, I knew every budget.
Q: You watched it that closely?
I had to, because we were spending more than we had, and I had to cut things.
I cut some programs. At the time, we also had a weekend college, and an evening college where we promised people they could get their degree just going in the evenings.
Within the first five years, I said, “We’ll still have evening classes, but we’re not going to guarantee that you get your degree only in the evenings.” We dropped the weekend college and began to develop some online classes. I cut things that just weren’t working anymore.
Q: How do you explain the college’s success when so many small women’s colleges have closed?
Our largest programs are in health professions, and that makes a big difference. Our largest program is nursing, and the second is occupational therapy. We just started a physician assistant program.
We’ve worked to make those unique. For instance, usually to be a physician assistant, you go four years undergrad and then apply to a PA program. But here, you can do your undergrad in three, and then you’re in until you’re out. If you start with us as a freshman or come in as a young transfer, as long as you meet the progression requirements, you’re guaranteed a seat in our PA program.
We’ve done the same thing with nursing. You can do it in three years if you go in the summers, or you can do it in the traditional four years. And we’ve done the same with occupational therapy.
It’s more affordable, and the students don’t end up with as much debt. We’ve tried to develop those kinds of niches for students.
Q: But so many people think that women don’t want to go to women’s colleges anymore.
Well, they don’t.
They don’t come here because it’s a women’s college. They come here because of the programs.
But then they gain very quickly an appreciation for its being a women’s college.
Also, our property abuts the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and in between, there are all kinds of bars and restaurants and retail. There are lots of young people in this area.
We appeal to a lot of students. The median age of our undergrads is 23. There are a lot of women who come back to school, who stopped or never had the opportunity to go, who see this as a very inviting environment.
Q: How did you get this insight that there were niche populations out there that might be interested in coming to College of St. Mary?
It was an accident! It was an angel, you know? It was a woman from northeast Nebraska who came and said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do if I can’t bring my baby back to the dorm.”
And it was looking at the newspaper and saying, “The Hispanic population is growing. Who’s reaching out to them?”
It really is all response to need more than sitting around thinking up a grand plan.
Q: To what extent does your vision for College of St. Mary flow from theological convictions? How does your vocation as a sister shape your leadership?
I would say that mercy is a response to need. And as a Sister of Mercy, that’s part and parcel of how I have been formed.
I grew up at a time when John Lennon was singing, “Imagine all the people living [life in] peace.” My heroes were people like Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King. Those people, and their rootedness in Christianity, inspired me.
Moses is one of the greatest characters in the Bible. Like, there’s this bush speaking to him that frightens him to death and urges him to go and save his people, and he doesn’t want to go. So those are the touchstones in my life, if you will.
There’s no reason for the College of St. Mary to exist except for our students. They pay our bills; they pay our salaries. Our success has a lot to do with that focus on our students. I’m not saying that every college doesn’t have that, but I do think we have it in a unique way.
Q: What’s the role of risk-taking in your leadership? It must have looked very risky in the beginning.
Well, it was risky. But call can overcome risk.
Sometimes the risk was wondering what donors will think: “What do you mean, this is going to become a college just for single mothers? If that’s the word on the street, will people send their kids here?
“Or if there are a lot of Hispanics?” Nebraska is an extremely parochial state. We were the last state in the union to allow DACA students to get driver’s licenses.
So you ask yourself, “How is this going to go over?”
I certainly had tensions with that, but it hasn’t stopped us from saying, “No, this is the right thing to do.”
Q: To sum up, what’s your philosophy of leadership?
My ideas around leadership have matured significantly over 21 years. When I came, I just had to clean things up. You see things that are wrong and you say, “We’ve got to fix them.”
Now, my philosophy of leadership is to focus on what’s core to your mission and make sure people are well-versed in that so they can choose whether to give their all or else, basically, to go away.
That’s a lot of listening and a lot of culture building, but it’s essential to a successful organization, and to leading a successful organization.
Alvin Edwards: To make an impact, the religious community must work together
The Rev. Alvin Edwards (left) visits with the Rev. Alvin Horton, pastor of First United Methodist Church, during a meeting of the Charlottesville Clergy Collective. Photo by Richard Lord
When crisis hit Charlottesville last summer, local clergy were prepared to help lead, thanks in part to newly rebuilt relationships and trust, says the leader of the Charlottesville Clergy Collective.
Clergy need to be prepared now to work together on the day when crisis strikes their local community, says the Rev. Dr. Alvin Edwards, founder of the Charlottesville Clergy Collective.
“We live in a day and age where anything goes, and we have to be prepared,” Edwards said. “We have to be ready to assist as believers.”
A coalition of Charlottesville clergy and laity from across a variety of faith traditions, the collective helped lead area residents and others in opposing white supremacists who came to the city last summer. Edwards was prompted to form the group two years ago, after the 2015 shootings at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, when he realized that trust was lacking among Charlottesville clergy.
“There were no relationships, because everybody was in their own little fiefdoms,” Edwards said.
Since then, the collective has brought together Charlottesville clergy from across a variety of faith traditions, building trust and new relationships. These new bonds proved valuable when white nationalists poured into Charlottesville last summer to protest plans to remove statues of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals.
One of the lessons for clergy and churches in other cities is to know one another and work together across faith traditions, Edwards said.
“If the religious community is going to make an impact, they need to do it together,” he said. “The Christian community can’t do it by themselves, because of the number of faith traditions that are out there.”
A native of Joliet, Illinois, Edwards is pastor of Mt. Zion First African Baptist Church in Charlottesville. He has a B.A. from Wheaton College, an M.Div. from Virginia Union School of Theology and a Ph.D. from George Mason University.
He spoke to Faith & Leadership about the origin of the collective, and its plans for the future. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: To start, what is the Charlottesville Clergy Collective, and how did it come about?
After the shootings at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, I got together with a few pastors -- primarily white, and a couple of African-Americans -- and asked them, if what happened down there happened here, how many thought I would call them?
And the answer was none. So we started talking about that and about how there weren’t any real relationships [among us]. Previously, there had been a ministers’ conference in Charlottesville, but it had broken up.
So we didn’t have a ministers’ conference per se, and I really wasn’t trying to start one. But it was something that I thought we needed to be aware of -- what if something like Charleston did happen?
We talked about that, and we decided to keep talking. We talk more and more. We spend more time with each other. We get together. We talk about some of the issues we’ve been going through.
Q: The collective’s website says that in this process, you and the other pastors realized there wasn’t a lot of trust among themselves, which would be necessary if the group ever had to respond quickly to a crisis. Why the lack of trust among the pastors?
Well, in order to trust one another, you have to have a relationship. But there were no relationships, because everybody was in their own little fiefdoms. They kind of just do what they do. It was not about what can we do together to make a difference; it was about what we’re doing individually.
Q: How did you and the other pastors go about changing that? How did you build trust?
Conversations. We didn’t come together for that purpose, but it helped bring us closer together.
As we talked and learned more about each other, that helped to build trust and to draw us closer together. Our goal was for each of us to try once a month to get together with someone in the clergy collective and go to lunch or breakfast or have a cup of coffee, to get to know each other, to learn about each person, who we are, what we do, what makes us tick.
The only way you’re going to learn to trust each other and to believe in each other is to talk. You’ve got to spend time with each other, and it has to be time where you really get to know each other, where you open up and can vent and have a safe place to talk to someone. But more than that, it’s about the example you want to set for members of your congregations.
Q: So tell us about last summer, when word spread that white nationalists and other white supremacists would be coming to Charlottesville to protest plans to remove statues of Robert E. Lee and others.
When we found out about that, we talked about what we wanted to do and came up with a three-pronged approach.
One was to completely ignore them. Another was to meet at a church and gather for prayers, and a third was to confront them.
With the plan to completely ignore, we had an event at the downtown pavilion where we had a couple of groups come down and sing and a number of prayers by different religious traditions, and then I made a challenging statement.
The people who wanted to be close to the church met at First United Methodist Church and had prayers and songs.
And some of us marched down the mall. Others marched down the street where the Ku Klux Klan was going to be.
So we tried to hit it at all three different angles, because there was no agreement on doing it the same way. We had to take different approaches to address it, and we did.
Q: How did it play out? Many press accounts noted the very visible presence of clergy.
It was challenging, dealing with the death of Heather Heyer(link is external) and a number of hurt feelings. There was just a lot of grief that went with all that. It was not a piece of cake. It was very trying.
The clergy that showed up came in their robes to make sure that people knew clergy were present, that they were present. There was nothing that they wanted to demonstrate any fear for. They wanted people to know they were for real.
Q: Did the collective go through any preparation or training in the preceding weeks?
There was a training by a group called Congregate Charlottesville.(link is external) It’s a separate entity from the clergy collective. They are a younger group and wanted a different approach. Their approach was direct action against the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Some people didn’t want to go that route, but some did. So everybody had to do it the way they felt the most comfortable with.
Q: What difference did the collective make that week?
The biggest difference is that it demonstrated to the city that the clergy were concerned about this group coming into Charlottesville trying to label us as a bad place. It let the community and the citizens know that we are here and that we are involved and that we’re going to stand up for what we believe is right as clergy.
We’ve been very focused on trying to make a difference in our community and showing unity and respect among different faith traditions.
Had the clergy collective not been there, I’m not sure what message would have been sent or what people would have heard. It probably would have continued to be that “those preachers are only interested in what they call ‘spiritual things’ rather than social things.”
For me -- I should say, for us -- it was about more than that. It was about letting people know that we care genuinely about them and that we’re interested in their well-being.
I believe we had some effect. I don’t know how to measure it or to even ascertain what it was completely.
But one thing for sure, we were there to comfort people and to let people know that we care and that we were there to assist them to make an impact, and that we also were not going to stand for hatred and injustice to continue to perpetuate itself, and that we wanted those things that represent injustice, hatred, slavery, etc., not to be around either.
Q: You’ve been long active in political and civic life in Charlottesville. You’ve served on the school board and on the city council. You were mayor from 1990 to 1992. What’s the proper role for a pastor in the public square today? How does a pastor navigate that space, particularly in today’s political climate?
African-American pastors have always been involved in political life. I was raised like that. My late father-in-law was a pastor who was very involved in the civil rights movement and justice and making sure that there wasn’t discrimination in hiring.
He always fought for that, so I guess I was kind of a chip off the old block. I was taught that way, and it’s what I believe.
For me, wherever there is a need [to speak out], I believe preachers, pastors, need to do it. Some Caucasian pastors would have a hard time doing that because of their congregation. But my church has been, for the most part, very free and supportive about letting me do those things I feel led to do.
My preparation came from years ago. My standing up for that which is right came as a result of learning from my late father-in-law/pastor in Joliet, Illinois.
Most churches are going to have their challenges. Mine are minor, to be honest with you. I’ve been here 36 years, and it’s been a pretty good run.
I have no regrets. Virginia was not on my radar screen when I first started looking for a church. But I believe I’m where God wants me to be, and as long as I’m where he wants me to be, I do have a strong sense of peace of mind about what I do and my involvement in the community.
God has just given me so much favor with so many people in Charlottesville. I’m thankful for the opportunity that God has brought my way, but I think any pastor, if you care about your community, you’re going to do things.
For example, I have a real issue with how we keep looking past children who cannot read on grade level. It bothers me. Even when I had to do the funeral service for Heather Heyer, one thing that I challenged them with was, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all of us took a child and made sure they were on grade reading level?”
I said, “If we did that, think about the impact it would have on our educational system, just to teach one child how to read or to make sure that they are on grade reading level.”
That would just make a significant difference.
Q: What lessons does the collective offer for other churches in other cities?
One, if the religious community is going to make an impact, they need to do it together. The Christian community can’t do it by themselves, because of the number of faith traditions that are out there.
But together, we could make a greater impact on the lives of people.
The other lesson is that we’re not in this for ourselves. We need to make sure that people know that we care about our community and that we want the best for our community.
Q: Is there a lesson as well just about getting ready and being prepared? Did you ever dream that something like this would ever happen in Charlottesville?
I never dreamed it, but it happened. And just like the tragedy that happened the other day in Sutherland Springs(link is external), Texas, who would have ever thought that somebody would walk up in the church [and start shooting]?
We live in a day and age where anything goes, and we have to be prepared. When things like that happen, we have to be ready to assist as believers. You can’t get hung up on the fact that you belong to this church and others don’t.
You’ve got to do what you believe the Lord would lead you to do, and that is to help people as you live.
My motto is, “If I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a word or song, if I can show somebody they’re traveling wrong, then my living shall not be in vain.”
That is, my goal is to help people. No matter where you are or what your walk is with God or anybody else, my goal is to help people and to make a difference in their life.
Victoria Atkinson White: Leaders need not choose between improving and creating
Bigstock/Jonathan Weis The church needs both those who are loyal to existing religious institutions and those eager to usher in what the church will look like next, writes the managing director of grants at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
My small town has a Lowe’s and a Home Depot. In practice, I don’t prefer one or the other, typically choosing the store that is closer when I remember I need something for a home improvement project.
But Lowe’s has gotten me thinking lately about more than just DIY projects. Its two recent advertising slogans, while for the very same store, feel at odds with each other.
Since 2011, Lowe’s advertising has told us that we should “never stop improving.”
From 2006 to 2011, it said, “Let’s build something together.”
I was reminded of this as I read “Faithful,”(link is external) a report on the future of religious institutions from Harvard Divinity School Ministry Innovation fellows Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston and several colleagues.
In the report, they explore the natural tension between “loyalty to what has been and a desire to be part of what is next.” In doing so, they reflect on the need for religious institutions to embrace “two concurrent and vital jobs that need doing: improving and creating.”
They draw an important distinction here. Improving is learning new ways to do what we already know how to do; creating is learning new ways to do what we don’t yet know how to do or may be prevented from doing by polity and practice.
Some churches lean toward a “never stop improving” mentality. They are established and know how to “do” church. They have been successful in the past, as evidenced by their physical plants and generations of tradition. This stability and legacy can be an asset, both reputational and social, yet at the same time, as “Faithful” notes, the associated bureaucratic structures can stand in the way of creating new ministries in the face of the unknown.
Improving, while it might sound like the lesser of two choices, is an important job. If a church already knows how to do something well (for example, children’s ministry), then it is only good stewardship not to abandon what works but rather to “never stop improving” it (for example, with technology, safety and training).
Church starts and new faith communities operate from more of a “let’s build something together” posture. They see needs that are not being met and create new gatherings to address them. These initiatives are often experimental -- coffeehouses, yoga studios, after-school programs, Christian social entrepreneurial ventures -- which means many of them fail.
Nonetheless, they are learning new ways to do what we don’t yet know how to do, new ways to minister, that established churches may find more challenging.
Without a doubt, improving feels safer. It is doing what we already know how to do, only better. It involves little risk and predictable reward. Creating feels more exciting. It opens up new possibilities for faithful community, but it entails more risk and a greater tolerance for failure.
Many leaders, much like churchgoers, are more attracted to and better at one or the other.
The good news, as the authors of “Faithful” write, is that the work of improving and creating need not be an exclusive choice. Both jobs must be done. There is a place at the table for both those who are loyal to existing religious institutions and those who are eager to usher in what the church will look like next.
In a world of finite resources, “improvers” and “creators” often see themselves as rivals. But as the authors of “Faithful” affirm, in order to flourish in faithful community, each must appreciate the church’s authentic need for the other.
“New expressions of community need support, stability, and access to the wisdom of our traditions,” they write. “Established religious institutions need the joy of nurturing new expressions of our own highest values.”
While I might have a philosophical preference for “improving” or “creating” in terms of advertising, both of the Lowe’s slogans promote fundamentally the same goal and seek to equip their customers with the same tools (pun intended).
Isn’t the same true for both established churches steeped in tradition and stability and new Christian communities taking great risks to address communal needs with agility and innovation?
The goal is the same -- to bear witness to the reign of God on earth -- whether by improving upon that which is old or creating that which is new. Why not take the best of both and do it together?
Doing the Math of Mission: Fruits, Faithfulness, and Metricsby Gil Rendle Over the past ten years, the North American mission field has experienced dramatic changes, which in turn have required congregations, middle judicatories, and denominations to adapt. Among these adaptations is an expectation for clear goals and quantified progress towards those goals. Church leaders who have never needed to measure their goals and progress with metrics may find this change daunting. The use of metrics -- denominational and middle judicatory dashboards, and the tracking of congregational trends -- has become an uncomfortable and misunderstood practice in this search for accountability. Doing the Math of Mission offers theory, models, and new tools for using metrics in ministry. This book also shows where metrics and accountability fit into the discernment, goal setting, and strategies of ministry. While there are resources for research on congregations, tools on congregational studies, and books on program evaluation, there is a gap when it comes to actual tools and resources for church leaders. This book is intended to help fill that gap, giving leaders a toolbox they can use in their own setting to clarify their purpose and guide their steps. Learn more and order the book » Follow us on social media:
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