Blog by Abram K-J
Listless? Lost? Maybe not:
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
“Our Real Work,” by Wendell Berry
I came across this powerful description of Jesus this morning:
Jesus, the poor layman turned prophet and teacher, the religious figure from rural Galilee without credentials, met his death in Jerusalem at least in part because of his clash with the rich aristocratic urban priesthood. To the latter, a poor layman from the Galilean countryside with disturbing doctrines and claims was marginal both in the sense of being dangerously antiestablishment and in the sense of lacking a power base in the capital. He could be easily brushed aside into the dust bin of death.
John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 1: The Roots of the Problem and the Person, p. 9. Quoted in this awesome Richard Hays book. Emphasis mine.
I have been thinking more about intentional discipleship. There are the classic questions of scope and sequence to consider. And the end results: if we are seeking to make disciples of Jesus—in this youth ministry, in this church, in this denomination—what does a disciple look like? What does a disciple know, do, and feel? What are the identity and characteristics of one?
Then there are programmatic questions to answer. How do we walk into the future where these disciples exist? How do we get there? In other words, what is the “discipleship pathway” of our ministry/church/denomination? What is the process we hope people will engage in to grow as disciples of Jesus? Here’s one church’s answer.
Thinking through a pathway for the congregation I pastor, I got excited because I came up with (or thought I came up with) a possible sequence that all starts with the same letter: Gather, Grow, Give, Go.
Turns out, lots of churches are already on that!
Once a framework is in place, the real fun begins. What opportunities do we provide to just gather? Worship services, parties, meals, etc. And what settings do we create where we invite people to grow? Membership class, life groups, and so on.
I starting thinking about a discipleship pathway again, because I’m reading a book called 8 Virtues of Rapidly Growing Churches. The authors Matt Miofsky and Jason Byassee make a case for the importance of having a specific, articulated discipleship process. Although the Holy Spirit can do anything, anywhere, any-how, discipleship tends not to just randomly happen:
“One thing rapidly growing churches (RGCs) do is they have a clear and effective discipleship process. Some call it connections, some assimilation, others new members orientation—but the purpose is the same—to help a new guest become a deeply committed follower of Christ. They make this discipleship process transparent for what they want people to do. User friendly, accessible, clear. They don’t shower listeners with a thousand options for nice things they might do. They focus: do this, not that. They keep it simple, often linear. Start with this class. Next join a small group. Finally serve here. Think of the difference between sitting down and eating at the Cheesecake Factory, which famously boasts over 250 different menu options made from scratch, or eating at a cozy French bistro with a prix fixe menu. One offers a dizzying amount of choice; the other leads you through one carefully curated, skillfully crafted, and masterfully presented meal. RGCs act more like the prix fixe restaurant. They work on a simple, effective, and clear process that helps new people become disciples of Jesus. Everything and anything that takes away from that focus is cut. As Matt often puts it, rapidly growing churches are like ducks. They look placid on the water. But underneath they’re paddling like crazy! The work is not so much in getting people in the door. It’s in laying out for those people the next obvious steps to take in being a disciple.”
I realized, too, that a tool I used to use in consulting—the Logic Model—can be powerful here. More on that in a future post.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear in the comments how your ministry, church, denomination, and especially how you think your own life might be following some kind of discernible discipleship “pathway”?
Complicating the process is that I’d imagine most of us look back down the road and see lots of zigs and zags… not quite sure how you “program” for that reality!
I don’t listen to many podcasts, but I started listening to one recently called “Beneath the Surface” from Stripe Press. The podcast is all about infrastructure, and the first episode is about “new cities” or “charter cities,” that is, “new urban developments built almost from scratch through financial investment and political will.”
Here’s the episode description:
Each year, tens of millions of people migrate from rural areas to cities—mostly in emerging economies, where populations are growing faster than governments can create basic infrastructure. To address the challenges of urbanization without industrialization, development experts, economists, and policymakers have proposed solutions spanning from increased immigration to better family planning.
In this episode, we ask: could charter cities—a model inspired by the successes of places like Singapore and Shenzhen—be a path to accelerating growth in emerging economies?
The actually sustainable ideas about city-building really show up in the last 10 minutes of the episode, but the whole thing was interesting to hear, especially about the development of Nkwashi in Zambia.
Find the podcast here.
For any of us who write, curate, or teach curriculum, it’s good to remember that what we usually call “curriculum” is just one of (at least) four kinds of curricula that shape all of us.
One of the best seminary textbooks I read was Teaching the Faith, Forming the Faithful: A Biblical Vision for Education in the Church. The book is so rich that even its footnotes are thought-provoking.
In one footnote, authors Gary A. Parrett and S. Steve Kang talk about three kinds of curriculum:
To consider one example of null curriculum: trauma responses may not make sense to someone who is not trauma-informed, so if something like “trauma and its effects” or “where Jesus is present in trauma” are not in a church’s explicit curriculum, they are now null curriculum, and a student may not have robust categories and language to process difficult events.
I’d add a #4 to the above three kinds of curriculum.
The church doesn’t do spiritual formation in a vacuum. So we also want to ask: what is the external curriculum all our people are already being formed by, in their other 160+ hours/week?
There is family, greater society, school, friends, advertising, media, etc. But this “curriculum” is only “external” from the vantage point of the church. These character-shaping forces move from external to internal for all of us. We have an internalized curriculum that has formed and is forming us. And we each bring our formed self to any event, group, gathering, or relationship where explicit curriculum is present. There are no blank slates.
As a full-time vocational minister for 20+ years, knee-deep in the life of a church or Christian community for 40+ hours a week, I’ve tended to focus on #1 and #2—explicit and implicit curriculum.
That’s necessary, but I’m realizing it’s not enough. I want to pay more attention to null curriculum and external curriculum.
Even in strategic planning and documenting discipleship pathways, how can we take into account all four of these kinds of curricula?
As we go about learning and growing in the faith, we can ask: what areas have we missed, glossed over, or refused to engage in (null curriculum)? Are there things we Christians need to un-learn, or re-learn? What other lived contexts do we need to take more seriously as we do spiritual formation (external curriculum)?
And—most important—how does the good news of Jesus speak into all of the contexts that shape us?
Attending to more than just explicit and implicit curriculum requires more creative thinking and deeper work, but the result—more fully formed disciples of Jesus— is worth it.
15 years ago, I kept another blog. Because the Internet is forever, it’s still up.
I particularly enjoyed writing a four-part post about youth culture. I noted four elements (HT: Whis Hays) that make up culture:
While I still think all those categories are relevant, I’ve been thinking in simpler terms lately:
Culture = Behavior
That’s it! Culture = Behavior.
This idea comes from the awesome Manager Tools podcast, that I have listened to since the days of my early blog.
They put it this way:
“Culture is nothing more than the sum total of all the behaviors of all of the people in your organization.”
Culture = Behavior.
And behaviors come from specific people.
More from Manager Tools:
“We managers are the guardians of an organization’s culture, because we can see and hear the individual behaviors that make up its culture. The organization’s leaders… really can only proclaim, pronounce, educate, tout… and they can hopefully set an example. The key is: managers are the ones who make culture happen by communicating about effective vs. ineffective behaviors.”
And:
“As managers, as leaders, we have to do what we can with what we’ve got. And the way we can do that is at a behavioral level, where the results (are what) matter anyway.”
Of course, an organization has its own life, more than just “the sum total” of its parts. This is why the Yankees (and the Red Sox, for that matter) still can’t buy their way to a World Series. Systems dynamics matter.
But something as amorphous as “culture change” comes much sharper into focus when considering that culture change = behavior change.
So the leader looking to preserve organizational culture can ask: what specific behaviors are working well for us, creating this irresistible environment, and advancing our mission? And the leader can find specific actors who practice those behaviors, to hold them up as examples.
Similarly, the leader looking to improve organizational culture can ask: what specific behaviors are hurting us, creating this harmful environment, and working against our mission? And the leader can address those specific behaviors and actors, starting with one-on-one conversations.
Mobilizing others (and ourselves) for behavior change is still hard work. But at least it’s more specific than the more intimidating “culture change.”
Click on the thumbnail above for a short reflection I shared with the church I pastor. It’s something important–but easy to overlook–that happened before Jesus fed 5,000+ people.
Here are great lines from Czech playwright and activist Václav Havel (shown also in the image above):
A genuinely fundamental and hopeful improvement in “systems” cannot happen without a significant shift in human consciousness, and… it cannot be accomplished through a simple organizational trick. It’s hard to imagine the kind of system I’ve tried to describe here coming about unless man [sic], as I’ve said, “comes to his senses.” This is something no revolutionary or reformer can bring about; it can only be the natural expression of a more general state of mind, the state of mind in which man can see beyond the tip of his own nose and prove capable of taking on—under the aspect of eternity—responsibility even for the things that don’t immediately concern him, and relinquish something of his private interest in favor of the interest of the community, the general interest. Without such a mentality, even the most carefully considered project aimed at altering systems will be for naught.
I think he’s right. As a leader who seeks to effect change in systems (and in individuals), I find this sobering and ultimately liberating. There’s only so much change any one person can actually bring about. In the end, each needs to take responsibility for themselves.
(It’s been a long time since I read this quote in context, so I don’t know if Havel makes this connection, but the Parable of the Prodigal Son uses this same phrase to describe the younger son’s turnaround in Luke 15:17–“he came to his senses.”)
As a Christian, I would add, there is the power of the Holy Spirit at work in the “senses” of humankind. That can significantly change any person, system, and organization–if we would let it.
Inspired by The Prepared Leader: Emerge from Any Crisis More Resilient Than Before, I recently wrote about the inevitability of crises in organizational settings.
The authors of the book, Erika H. James and Lynn Perry Wooten, write, “Crises are never one-off events. They happen again and again, although we never seem to expect them.”
James and Wooten wrote The Prepared Leader to help leaders prepare for crises, but why don’t we already? They write:
A crisis can feel like it hits you and your organization out of the blue. In reality, certain types of crisis can simmer in the background until the conditions are just right for disaster to materialize. These smoldering crises can be hard to predict, even if they are technically foreseeable.
Crucially, this is because these crises “are often tied to failure in organizational culture or procedures—the same failure that allows them to happen while also making them hard to see or track.” Bury sexual harassment claims, for example, and it will eventually turn into a crisis. (And, worse than whatever “crisis” befalls an organization, real people get hurt behind this stuff.)
I think of Charlie Brown and Lucy and the running football gag by Charles M. Schulz. Like a crisis that could have been avoided or at least prepared for, it gets Charlie Brown every time.
Why is this?
James and Wooten list five biases (“cognitive distortions”) that prepared leaders need to recognize—and overcome:
The Prepared Leader calls all of us to hold these cognitive distortions up to the light right now, because “the next crisis is already heading your way.” Or you’re in one right now. They warn readers not to “let your guard down,” which may be our default mode, especially when our biases almost hard-wire us to miss warning signs.
Is there good news here? Yes! Chapter 1 of The Prepared Leader profiles Adam Silver, commissioner of the NBA, and his brilliant (and seemingly lightning-fast) move to implement a “Bubble” when COVID-19 hit, so that the season could continue.
Silver’s actions remind us that we have agency, even in the midst of a crisis. In short, we should “have a learning organizational culture, with processes and protocols in place to surface and share information and to resolve any blockages in knowledge flow.”
Leaders and organizations that try to wish a crisis away (tempting as it is) won’t do much better with the next one. Examining and trying to overcome our cognitive biases is an important start.
Erika H. James and Lynn Perry Wooten are experts in organizational leadership, especially leadership through crises. They each moved into major new roles of leadership at the start of 2020: Dr. James became Dean of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; Dr. Wooten became the President of Simmons University. They describe what would already be a set of daunting, exciting, high-stakes challenges in leadership positions.
“Then,” they write, “COVID-19 hit.”
I can relate (albeit on a smaller scale). The church I pastored for nearly eight years was confronting its own constellation of challenges as Fall 2019 turned to Winter 2020. I was already experiencing the reality James and Wooten describe: “A crisis will invariably test your leadership to the very limits of your abilities.”
Then COVID-19 hit.
In early 2021 I accepted a call to pastor a diverse, urban church in the heart of Boston. When I began pastoring there, the church was still not far removed from the previous Pastor’s departure; there had been about a year of the Pastor position’s being vacant; COVID-19 was still raging; and we didn’t have a building to meet in.
It seemed the congregation had experienced loss upon loss. Loss may not always be the same thing as crisis, but the congregation that had just called me had had its leadership tested “to the very limits of [its] abilities.”
We’ve stabilized since then, thanks be to God. I’m a month away from the two-year mark as Pastor there. Most if not all of us have been vaccinated, with all the boosters. We rent space in a church just a block or two away from our previous location.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t face new crises—now or lurking around the corner.
Against those backdrops, I eagerly began reading James and Wooten’s new book, The Prepared Leader: Emerge from Any Crisis More Resilient Than Before, recently published by Wharton School Press. (Thanks to the press for the review copy, provided with no expectation of me.)
As I started the introduction, I realized this book would be powerful and instructive for me, even if there had never been a COVID-19. But seeing how Drs. James and Wooten integrate findings from that new (and still present) global health crisis make their work especially relevant.
Without downplaying the negative disruptive potential of a crisis, they describe how crises can be opportunities:
If there’s one thing we have learned about crises in our research over the years, it is that they bring opportunities as much as they bring risks. Crises are opportunities to sharpen your leadership skills and to unearth new expertise—often in surprising places. They are also opportunities to learn—to determine which important lessons a crisis has to share and to embed those lessons in your leadership practice going forward.
There’s so much wisdom to receive and unpack here—and this is just in the Introduction! As I read these lines, here are all the opportunities a crisis brings, according to the authors:
I know that crises, loss, and threats all bring opportunities with them. I’ve heard this before. And I don’t disagree, but it’s a truth that—if I’m honest—I’ve had a hard time appreciating. “Consider it pure joy,” the biblical book of James says, “whenever you face trials of many kinds.” No, I consider it pure joy when I don’t have to face any trials!
But James goes on, “Because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work, so that you may become mature and complete, not lacking anything.”
Trials mature us. The testing of our faith forms our character, even makes us more like Jesus.
Do I like that reality? Not really. If I were God, would I try to create a set of conditions whereby people could develop perseverance without the trials? Maybe, but then again, any sentence that begins with “If I were God…” (especially when I write it) is a bad one.
I believe that Apostle James, Dr. James, and Dr. Wooten are not only right about the formative effect of crises/trials—I think they are preaching an essential life truth.
Crises are inevitable, The Prepared Leader says. Jesus said, “In this world you will have much trouble.” The Psalmist wrote, “Many are the afflictions (troubles, dangers, trials) of the righteous.”
The questions are: how will we respond to a crisis, what will we learn from it, and how will we prepare for the next one?
It’s rare the book that I want to write about after just the introduction, but The Prepared Leader has been as good as a cup of coffee with an engaging Executive Coach (or two, in this case).
Next time I’ll write about James and Wooten’s insights about why we fail to foresee crises, even when a crisis give us hints that it might be coming.
Words on the Word 