PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
Faith & Leadership
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, ARTS & CULTURE, VISUAL ARTS
James K.A. Smith: The gift of constraints
The gift of constraintsINNOVATION NEEDS CONSTRAINTS & THE IMAGINATION TO USE THEM
Instead of a “completely free hand,” maybe what we need are good constraints and the imagination to receive them as gifts for innovation. A Calvin College professor finds important lessons in Philadelphia’s newest art museum.
Let’s face it: all of us inhabit institutions that we would have built differently. We inherited policies and procedures and even physical plants with aspects that we’d happily do without. Sometimes we bristle under the constraints put upon us by founders and historical bodies that could know nothing of our contemporary challenges.
Many of us have probably daydreamed what it would be like to be free of such constraints -- to “re-imagine” the institution from scratch. Then, we tell ourselves, we’d really be free to push forward our mission and vision. But now, in the real world, these constraints are like millstones, anchors dragging on the bottom as we try to steer the ship forward into new waters.
Could we ever imagine receiving such constraints as gifts? Indeed, is it possible that the constraints of handed-down traditions could be catalysts for creativity and imagination?
I was recently struck by something of a parable in this regard. In May, after a protracted -- and very public -- legal battle, the Barnes Foundation, a Philadelphia fine-arts institution, opened a new building on that city’s famous “museum row.” Called the Barnes Philadelphia, the new museum houses Albert Barnes’ world-class collection of modern art, moved there from its former suburban home in Lower Merion, Pa. The legal wrangling need not detain us here. It’s the result that yields an interesting case study of “traditioned innovation.”
Martin Filler summarizes the dynamics of the situation in his very helpful overview in the New York Review of Books (link is external): “Barnes had insisted that none of his eight hundred paintings or thousands of other objects could ever be sold, loaned, or removed from the elaborate installations he contrived for them. Thus, though the court agreed to the relocation, it stipulated that the collector’s displays be strictly maintained in the institution’s new home.”
Talk about constraints! Basically, the court said, “Yes, you can move the paintings to Philadelphia, but you have to display them exactly the same way Barnes displayed them at the home in Lower Merion.” Permission to move the collection didn’t just come with strings attached; it came with those sorts of wire cables that hold up the Golden Gate Bridge.
You would think that all the Barnes Foundation could do with such conditions and constraints would be simply to duplicate the Lower Merion mansion in an urban context. What else could architects do but fall into Vegas-like imitation and mimicry, simply reproducing a facsimile of the original? Indeed, the new museum wouldn’t really need creative architects; it would simply need good copyists.
But a funny thing happened on the way to reproduction: the architectural team of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien refused simple repetition. Accepting the constraints of Barnes’ bequest, they received them as a catalyst for creativity. Filler describes the result:
The legal requirement to reproduce the old galleries made many observers fear that this would limit the designers to an exercise in cultural taxidermy, with little scope left for architectural originality. Remarkably, Williams and Tsien found unexpected expressive range within the confines they were bound to observe. In that respect the outcome of this project is dazzling -- the new Barnes is infinitely superior to the vast number of museums designed with a completely free hand, and in hindsight, Judge Stanley R. Ott’s 2004 ruling that the display must be exactly duplicated seems Solomonic in its wisdom.
In other words, the new Barnes Foundation building is a concrete example of traditioned innovation. The result is stunning (link is external), both externally and internally. Working within the constraints on gallery space and configuration, receiving them and accepting them, the architects imagined a new future for the collection. One might say that new building is a “faithful extension” of the original site: taking up what has been handed down, but without simply parroting the original. Williams and Tsien’s design is a creative repetition.
The result is illuminating, both literally and figuratively. Visitors (especially at night) are bedazzled by the “Light Box” that sits atop the length of the building, which then fuels a spacious “Light Court” in the interior. The creative admission of light washes over the reproduced galleries. “The most welcome aspect of the new Barnes,” Filler notes, “is the veritable visual resurrection” occasioned by the architects’ collaboration with lighting designer Paul Marantz.
The works are the same; the arrangement is the same; the rooms are the same; and yet it’s as if we are seeing some of the works for the first time. The architectural innovation recasts the heritage of the building in ways that highlight the beauty of these works -- just what attracted Mr. Barnes to them in the first place.
Filler notes another example of this mutual interplay between tradition and innovation. With the requirement to preserve the galleries as they had been arranged by Barnes, the designers inherited a stipulated background for all the paintings: an ochre-colored burlap that Barnes had specified for the gallery walls. But with the new illumination, we discover that this color is “so harmonious with most of his pictures that one wonders why it is not widely copied elsewhere.” What would have previously been begrudged as Barnes’ restrictive idiosyncrasies now begin to make sense.
In sum, what might have been debilitating constraints became catalysts for creative innovation, issuing in a new appreciation for the wisdom of the constraints. “Barnes may have been a crank,” Filler concludes, “but he was also touched with some kind of genius.”
Think of the cranky constraints in your own context. Might it be more creative not to wish them away but instead to receive them as gifts? Is there a genius embedded in those constraints that some imaginative leadership could unveil, leading to new appreciation?
Maybe a “completely free hand” is not what we need. Perhaps what we need are good constraints, and the imagination to receive them as gifts for innovation.
Read more from James K.A. Smith »
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: MINISTRY CONSTRAINTS
Achieving organizational breakthroughs in the face of daunting constraints
Faith & Leadership
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP
L. Gregory Jones: Achieving organizational breakthroughs in the face of daunting constraints
In holding together scarcity and abundance, leaning into constraints even as we focus on bolder ambitions, we will discover the greatest opportunities for transformation, writes the executive vice president and provost at Baylor University.
Nonprofit institutions are often constrained by size, funding, staffing and the immensity of the challenges they are trying to address. This has been even more acutely felt in the years since the 2008 economic meltdown, which exposed the fragility of these institutions and intensified their fractures. Christian institutions seem to be especially constrained.
The leader of one Christian institution that supports the work of other Christian institutions recently told me, “Our attendance at our annual meeting and our membership started dropping off in 2008, and neither has recovered. It is as if the organizations we support have shifted into survival mode, and they have difficulty still seeing the larger horizons that we are trying to address.”
The constraints are exacerbated by deep trends that are causing even large Christian institutions to suffer, and their leaders to feel discouraged.
A-Beautiful-Constraint
Yet could it be that the ways we are responding to these constraints are actually making things worse? Might the constraints themselves also be blessings that could enable us, and require us, to find generative solutions to the wicked problems we are addressing?
The authors of “A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It’s Everyone’s Business” (link is external) offer affirmative answers to these sorts of questions. They suggest that the key difference between people who provide transformational leadership and those who don’t is their “core relationship with constraints.” They observe: “While we may see constraints as punitive, restrictive, and to be avoided, they see constraints as necessary, beneficial, and to be embraced.”
They observe that constraints come in multiple forms and vary in intensity: there are constraints of “foundation” (something that is basic to the enterprise, such as a building); of “resource” (funds, people or expertise); of “time” (the ability to control and meet a deadline); and of “method” (possible ways of accomplishing something given the organization’s capabilities and requirements). Often, the constraints we face combine two or more of these forms, and the intensity can seem overwhelming.
The authors’ key insight is in delineating the ways we tend to respond to constraints: as victims, neutralizers or transformers. They point out that these are not so much personality traits as they are reactions we all tend to have at one time or another. We are thus able to shift from responding as victims or neutralizers to acting as transformers (though we can also lapse from a transformational approach back to feeling like a victim). Victims lower their ambitions in the face of constraints, allowing the constraints to defeat them. Neutralizers don’t lower their ambitions but develop workarounds to try to deal with constraints. Transformers see constraints as opportunities to approach things in a fresh way, perhaps even increasing their ambitions along the way.
As these descriptions suggest, a crucial element of seeing constraints as beautiful is our ability to become even more, rather than less, ambitious in what we think is important and possible for our organizations to accomplish. We need to see constraints and ambitions as opposable rather than oppositional. Our organizations’ ambitions can be for growth, or impact, or quality, or superiority, or delivering a specific experience -- or, typically, some combination of those. When we hold “bold ambitions” and “significant constraints” together in opposable tension, we can discover breakthrough opportunities.
We discovered this at Duke Divinity School in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. Having stumbled across a wonderful distinction by James Surowiecki (building on the work of Peter Dickson and Joseph Giglierano) between organizations that seek to avoid “sinking the boat” (link is external) and those that seek to avoid “missing the boat” in the face of crisis, we focused on the latter. We worked together to double down on our ambitions to be a resource for equipping the kind of leaders the church needs in the 21st century.
We took seriously the constraints we faced, and they were daunting. I moved through many days feeling like a victim of external forces and constraints, and occasionally I worked myself into a space where I felt like maybe we could be neutralizers. But we also stumbled together into a conviction that perhaps our constraints were an opportunity to transform our situation by developing breakthroughs in how we thought about our foundations, resources, time and methods. We held together, opposably, our significant constraints and our bold ambitions. We launched several major new initiatives, including new degree programs, that we might not otherwise have undertaken.
“A Beautiful Constraint” incisively describes key activities an organization needs to undertake to cultivate a transformative approach:
- “break path dependence” by questioning the givenness of “the way we do things around here”;
- “ask propelling questions” that bind a bold ambition to a significant constraint;
- find solutions through “can-if” modes of thinking;
- “create abundance” by discovering assets in our own organizations, among key stakeholders and partners, and perhaps even in competitors that can move us forward; and
- “activate emotions” that help us persevere, including both negative emotions (such as fear and frustration) and positive ones (such as excitement and desire).
Christian institutions are well-positioned to see constraints as beautiful and to lean into the activities that could make us transformers. After all, whatever our constraints, we are called to bear witness to God’s reign and to trust that the future is guided by God rather than us. With our focus on God, we can afford to be even more experimental and bold in our ambitions. And we can lean into both constraints and ambitions, because we are called to embody hope, the virtue that prevents us from lapsing into either pessimism or optimism.
These convictions, though, require Christian leaders to become even better storytellers. We need to be able to help others in our organizations remember the larger horizons of our purpose, our “Why?” in relation to God’s story. We need to tell these stories in ways that cultivate traditioned innovation, drawing our attention to both past and future in ways that enliven the present as a time of hope.
The final chapter of “A Beautiful Constraint” takes up “leadership and the future of constraints.” Based on their study of organizations that were able to transform their constraints and discover breakthroughs, the authors list the following characteristics of leaders who are effective in finding “beauty in constraint”:
- They believe transformers are made, not born.
- They steer their organization toward constraints, not away from them.
- They set a high level of ambition alongside the constraint, and legitimize that ambition.
- They know when to reject compromise of that ambition.
- They get people to believe that a solution is possible.
- They use tension and storytelling to generate a longer-term emotional commitment.
- They encourage and enable their teams to challenge current routines and assumptions.
- They know how to manage the transformation threshold.
The authors observe that in order to be transformers, we need to have high levels of investment in our mindset, our method and our motivation. Our mindset addresses the question, “Do I believe it is possible?” Our method asks, “Do I know how to start?” Our motivation considers, “How much do I want to do it?”
As Christians, our mindset and our motivation ought both to be high if we are truly living into the horizons created by the Holy Spirit. But we often haven’t known how to start; our methods have actually dragged down our mindsets and our motivation into the realm of victims and neutralizers. The activities described in “A Beautiful Constraint” can help us rediscover how to start. As we do so, we will begin to see that constraints and ambitions, held together opposably, can help us achieve breakthroughs for our organizations, and a more faithful and effective witness to the God who is making all things new.
Read more from L. Gregory Jones »Re-thinking capital -- it's more than money
Faith & Leadership
Laura Nichol: Rethinking capital -- it's more than money
Yes, money is essential to the life of any church or organization, but it is other forms of capital that really build the community of faith, says a Houston leadership consultant and UMC layperson.
https://youtu.be/a9emKjLGqx0
All organizations require financial capital, but they also need other forms of capital if they truly are to live out and achieve their missions, said Laura Nichol, a leadership consultant.
“[Organizational leaders] are used to thinking about raising financial capital,” Nichol said. “That’s where they focus their time and energy. But we’ve found that by getting them to focus on three other forms of capital -- network, service and intellectual capital -- and then helping them understand how they can raise those forms of capital, they become energized and more committed.”
Churches, for example, can easily focus too much on their need for financial capital. Yet it is hearts, feet, hands, words and actions that really build a community of faith, Nichol said. When churches understand the four forms of capital, it changes the whole nature and structure of a fundraising campaign.
“A capital campaign moves from raising money to build buildings, to actually building the community of faith in a much more sustainable way,” Nichol said.
Nichol is a partner with Rio Advisors LP, a Houston leadership advisory firm that works with boards of directors, CEOs and management team members in both business and nonprofit organizations. An active layperson, Nichol is a member of the board of visitors at Duke Divinity School and is past chair of the board of stewards at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Houston.
She spoke with Faith & Leadership about organizational leadership and alternative ways of thinking about and understanding capital. The video clip is an excerpt from the following edited transcript.
Q: Can you give us a brief overview of your work with Rio Advisors?
We work with people and organizations who want to implement long-term, sustainable, positive change. And we do that by addressing and helping them integrate five different levers: leadership, strategy, communications, process and culture.
We focus on the leadership, on CEOs and boards and the direct reports to CEOs. We look at communications, with much of our work in the domains of language. We work on process, trying to understand what processes are in place in an organization and where missing links might be. We can help people create strategy, but often we’re asked to help implement existing strategic plans. And then across the whole spectrum of those four things you create culture. Our work is really the intersection of economics and human behavior.
Q: In your work, you talk about four very specific forms of capital as a way to help leaders think about their resources. Tell us about those.
Over the years, different economists and other social scientists have written about various types of capital. But I first heard about these four forms capital in a talk by Laura Arrillaga-Andreesen, the founder and former chair of SV2, the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund, and the co-founder of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.
In talking about her four forms of capital, the place to start, actually, is a shift in language. When we work with boards and leaders, we often find that they focus a lot on language about the past. Our work is to shift them to language about the future, which is about possibility. Once they begin to frame everything in possibility, then the second frame is to move to investment in capital, particularly for nonprofits. That’s a different way of thinking for them. They’re used to thinking about raising financial capital. That’s where they focus their time and energy. But we’ve found that by getting them to focus on three other forms of capital -- network, service and intellectual capital -- and then helping them understand how they can raise those forms of capital, they become energized and more committed.
So network capital is the ability to introduce other people to the organization. Again, we go back to language. Often in nonprofits, board members think about making a request of someone. We help them shift their language, to understand that really, what they’re doing is making an offer. You don’t ask people to come in and be on a board. You introduce them to the offer that this organization makes. People today are yearning to make a difference. If you can connect your network to the difference that your organization makes, those people will be connected to the organization. Rather than focusing on raising capital and asking you to give money, I’m going to ask you to get connected to the organization.
Service capital is the ability to ask someone to come and lend their hands, feet, heart. Depending on the organization, those can be very different activities. Sometimes we might want to ask someone to go door to door or dig in a garden, or do other work. But many times it’s actually about taking someone by the hand, saying, “Come walk with me and see what this organization does.” You’re helping someone experience the work that the organization is doing. If you can help people experience the outcomes of the work versus the activities, then you will connect people more deeply to the organization and its mission and how they can make a difference.
And then the third is intellectual capital -- the ideas that people can bring. How do you engage people in an ongoing conversation? In our work with boards, looking at board meetings, for example, how do you shift from a once- or several-times-a-year come-in-and-hear-reports session to instead creating an ongoing conversation? How can the board work with the staff and the larger organization to have an ongoing conversation? Innovation comes from having adjacencies. If you have a diverse board that is actually in an ongoing conversation, you will have enough connections and overlaps that new ideas and innovations can be brought together.
In creating intellectual capital, it’s about creating space and safety for people to really challenge each other, to think differently and to share their ideas in a way that opens up new ideas.
Q: Safety is probably not a real easy thing to achieve, is it?
Safety in today’s world is hard. It’s about creating an environment where people get to know each other. In our work with boards, we spend time encouraging them and facilitating them to really get to know each other. Not in a game -- what color are you, or what animal are you? -- but instead in a way that they really talk about their personal challenges, obstacles, energies and dreams. When you move to that level of interest, you find so many connections. It becomes safer once people have opened up a little.
It is incredibly important for leaders to create an environment where people can trust enough that they can have meaningful conversations. Again, it’s a yearning for connection, whether to work that has meaning or to other people who are going to help you do that work.
Q: And what about financial capital?
Financial capital is interesting. It’s about money, but again, it’s about making the offer and helping people understand that their money isn’t going to fund an activity but to make a difference in someone’s life. So it’s helping organizations define what the outcomes are, often two or three steps away from the donation. You can fund an activity, but in the end, what will that change?
For example, an organization called “charity: water,” which raises money to drill for clean water in Africa, does a great job of using these four forms of capital. You could say, which they do, “If you give $5,000, you can drill a well that gives clean water.” But the founder, Scott Harrison, does a great job of then connecting all of the dots. That well allows people to stay healthy, children to live longer, women to do something other than carry water. You move on to all the different outcomes that change lives and that connect people to giving more money. We’re finding that if you talk about those other three other forms of capital, the financial capital always follows.
Q: Earlier, you talked about changing language from past to possibility. Can you tell us more?
There are three domains of language: past, present, future. If you listen to the language of most conversations, language of the past is incredibly important, because it’s the language of connection. Language of the present is language of action: What do we do? When are we going to do it? But language of the future is the key language of leadership. It’s the language of possibility.
In working with nonprofits, we look at the way they interact with their board and their donors to help them change their language. In a meeting, it’s important to touch on the past. It’s a way to connect. But we don’t want to use the meeting to hear reports, the language of the past. That’s an inefficient use of people’s time.
Q: It strikes me that many churches get stuck in conversations about the past and problems instead of possibility.
Which is ironic, given that we are people of faith. We live in possibility, right? But it’s so tempting to get stuck in the past. As a leader, you can do your best and be aware and touch on the past, but then move to possibility. That’s where the bulk of your time should be spent in conversation. And then once possibility is firmly rooted in the conversation, then you can move to the language of the present, to action.
People will do their best to pull you into the past: “We’ve tried that before and it didn’t work”; or, “When we did that it was a complete failure.” As a leader, your job is to be aware that they’re stuck in the language of the past and continue to pull them to the language of possibility. When you can get the room to shift into a conversation of possibility, the energy shifts, and people’s faces change, their body movement changes.
The key to creating the agenda for the meetings that we do is to ask the right questions. There’s a great quote that the problem half-solved is a question correctly asked. That’s the battle as we create these agendas: what question is it that we want them to debate and talk about? And once you get that going, it’s hard to get them to stop, because the ideas just begin to build on themselves.
Q: Are the four forms of capital both institutional and personal?
Yes. I mean, we all have four. We all have that huge amount of capital that we’ve raised over a lifetime. Corporate executives can often focus on the network of the moment, their job and the corporation. And we forget this huge network that we have across many organizations and many relationships over a lifetime. The richness is to be able to weave those relationships together. By putting those different relationships together, you get new ideas and the adjacencies that create innovation.
Q: What do these four types of capital mean for institutional leadership?
Their greatest significance for leadership is that they shift your focus from a short-term to a longer-term horizon. If you look at long-term, sustainable, positive change, the horizon is always longer than a year, a quarter. The language of investments and capital allows you to engage people within your organization for a long time, for a lifetime, really. When organizational leaders think in that way, it fundamentally shifts the conversations that they have and how they think about their organization.
Q: What do they mean for church leaders?
I think it’s fundamentally tied to who we are as people of faith -- that those four capitals are what we’re asked to go out in the world and to exhibit from our faith standpoint. We’re supposed to show the work that we can do. We’re supposed to be able to share the Word in a way that’s compelling and captures people’s hearts. We’re supposed to be continually building a community of faith.
And I’ve really struggled personally with, what is a church? What is a church? And it is this collection of people who are together for a time doing the work of God, sharing the ideas and love of God, being together. And one of the fruits of that is financial capital to allow you to do more work. But too many churches focus on money as the main engine, and it’s really the hearts and the feet and the hands and the words and the actions that we have that build this incredible, ever-expanding community of faith.
So if we could change to thinking about raising those capitals, I think it’s so exciting. And churches that I’ve worked with, once they get that language, a capital campaign becomes something very different. A capital campaign moves from raising money to build buildings, to actually building the community of faith in a much more sustainable way. And the energy around that, the excitement around that and the contribution that people can make. People, whether or not they have financial funds, all of a sudden understand what they can do to help build their church and to build the kingdom of God, here, now. It’s all four of those capitals that each of us have to tap into.
Q: Why do words like “capital” and “investment” have such resonance for people today, even church people, instead of more theological language like “grace” or “gifts” or “talents?”
Language is important obviously, so I’m always looking for a connection language. And the world where I work is the business world. So much of the church today is populated with business people. A language that connects them to a long-term horizon and speaks of investment instead of need shifts the energy. There’s a lot of work being done in universities and social entrepreneurship about non-profit worlds and business language. Those two together create a tremendous amount of innovation by letting that conversation happen.
Q: Can you give us an example of how you have used the four forms of capital in your work with church-related organizations?
I did a board retreat for a church with a terrific new pastor, who’s been there only a few years. When he came in, the church had a lot of debt and factions were fighting. So we did a series of meetings where I invited the board members to first tell stories of when they had had successes, when they had dreamed together, when they had built things together. I wouldn’t allow them to use the language of the past, only the language of possibility.
They said, “This is hard.” But when they shifted into that, you could see everyone relax and begin to have a dialogue. The next meeting, we introduced the four forms of capital and got them to start brainstorming around them and what they could do to raise those. The next meeting, we began to build a document that would guide them, that had their vision and then what they wanted to do to implement that vision -- what their values were, how they were going to act when they were with each other. And then, from the strategies, we moved into an action plan. So their action plan is built on the kinds of capital that they want to raise.
In this particular church, we did an exercise where they came into the sanctuary and we asked them to dream about what that space, emotionally, could feel like, what could be accomplished, and then write on Post-it notes the things they wanted to keep that they thought were important and what they thought needed to change to help the body of Christ grow. When we were finished, the entire sanctuary was covered with stickers. And it allowed people then to have a conversation about what they loved and treasured about the church and then what they were willing to change.
If the discussion is framed as, “We’re going to change or we’re not going to change the sanctuary,” you’ll never get them to agree. But if you go underneath that, emotionally, and explore people’s interests and their dreams, you’ll find all sorts of overlaps, and that’s where you meet. Then you can start dreaming about what it means to actually implement those interests. Now they’re beyond the sanctuary. They’re talking about building affordable housing. They are dreaming big. It’s stunning.
How difficulty nourishes creativity
Faith & Leadership
INNOVATION
How difficulty nourishes creativity
What are the most burdensome constraints of your work in ministry, and how might you re-imagine them as opportunities for innovation?
ON SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP
In Dying We Are Born: The Challenge and Hope for Congregations by Peter Bush
Deeply ingrained in Western culture, and in the minds of most church leaders, is the belief that there is a solution to every problem.
Peter Bush offers a powerful challenge to this approach, arguing that for new life, energy, and passion to arise in congregations, they must die -- die to one way of being the church in order that a new way may rise. Bush identifies two types of dying congregations. Some congregations need to close their doors, bringing to an end years of ministry. Other congregations need to dramatically change their culture and ways of doing ministry. Such change may not entail literally closing the congregation's doors, but it will require people giving up deeply held understandings of the life and purpose of the congregation. All congregations, Bush contends, even ones that see themselves as healthy, need to be prepared to die, to take up their cross, so God can make them alive.
A skillful storyteller, Bush shows readers why churches must confront their mortality. He examines the role of the prophetic leader, who proclaims both the congregation's death and its resurrection. He explores spiritual practices and the habits of wonder, remember, and risk taking for congregations that know they are dying--or need to die. Only by dying, Bush says, will a congregation find resurrection life, given by God who raises the dead to life.
Learn more and order the book »
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Copyright © 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Alban at Duke Divinity School
Christian leaders are hemmed in at every turn with constraints and hindrances, wrapped tight in the unyielding coils of denominational, institutional and even personal histories. Faced with extraordinary challenges, they might wish to sweep away the old forms and limitations that dog their steps.
But this impulse, suggests Ian Leslie in “The Uses of Difficulty (link is external),” is a terrible mistake, because constraints are gasoline on the fire of human creativity. He documents just how inseparable are resistance and creativity, or, put differently, tradition and innovation.
Leslie canvasses human experience to flesh out his hypothesis that human thought is driven by difficulty. He observes the strange alchemy that brought the Beatles’ brilliant Abbey Road out of the primitive confines of that studio’s outdated recording technology. He notes the odd fact that test subjects bombarded with random numbers while attempting to decode anagrams actually “displayed greater cognitive agility: they were more likely to take leaps of association and make unusual connections.”
As Immanuel Kant put it, “The light dove cleaving in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels, might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space.” The enveloping difficulties that we think are hindrances are in fact the basic conditions of all thought. The challenges that lie in our path do not only block our way; by resisting us, they give us the traction we need to move forward.
James K.A. Smith recently extolled the “Gift of Constraints,” in an essay describing the beautiful designs crafted by a group of architects required to reproduce huge sections of an older building: “what might have been debilitating constraints became catalysts for creative innovation, issuing in a new appreciation for the wisdom of the constraints.” “Maybe,” Smith muses, “a ‘completely free hand’ is not what we need. Perhaps what we need are good constraints, and the imagination to receive them as gifts for innovation.”
Robert Frost famously quipped, “I'd no sooner writefree verse than play tennis with the net down.” Frost had meter; Christian leaders have budget shortfalls and funding stipulations or liturgical formulae and intractable congregations. Such difficulties offer the gift of rough ground against which we find traction to press forward to solutions, and learning to receive such resistance as a gift is the heart of “traditioned innovation.”
What are the most burdensome constraints of your work in ministry, and how might you re-imagine them as opportunities for innovation?
Read more from Brendan Case »ON SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP
In Dying We Are Born: The Challenge and Hope for Congregations by Peter BushDeeply ingrained in Western culture, and in the minds of most church leaders, is the belief that there is a solution to every problem.
Peter Bush offers a powerful challenge to this approach, arguing that for new life, energy, and passion to arise in congregations, they must die -- die to one way of being the church in order that a new way may rise. Bush identifies two types of dying congregations. Some congregations need to close their doors, bringing to an end years of ministry. Other congregations need to dramatically change their culture and ways of doing ministry. Such change may not entail literally closing the congregation's doors, but it will require people giving up deeply held understandings of the life and purpose of the congregation. All congregations, Bush contends, even ones that see themselves as healthy, need to be prepared to die, to take up their cross, so God can make them alive.
A skillful storyteller, Bush shows readers why churches must confront their mortality. He examines the role of the prophetic leader, who proclaims both the congregation's death and its resurrection. He explores spiritual practices and the habits of wonder, remember, and risk taking for congregations that know they are dying--or need to die. Only by dying, Bush says, will a congregation find resurrection life, given by God who raises the dead to life.
Learn more and order the book »
Follow us on social media:
VISIT OUR WEBSITE
Copyright © 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Alban at Duke Divinity School
1121 West Chapel Hill Street, Suite 101
Durham, North Carolina 27701, United States
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