Wake up call

Peter Kariuki, leader of a "city" of 12,000 internally displaced
Kenyans, and part of the Africa Rising network.

I just returned from two weeks in Kenya and Tanzania where Gayle and I attended the annual meeting of Africa Rising, an organization we founded, and visited a number of the 14 organizations that are part of the AR network. The trip was very rewarding. We saw that the organizations have grown individually, and they have grown collectively as a network with a common voice. My commitment to grow the organization and spread its reputation as an agent of change in East Africa grew even stronger. But that commitment comes at a time when the finances of AR are in dire straits. With the flagging economy, philanthropic giving has been lessened. But AR also needs to do a better job of seeking donations and grants. We have begun doing that, but it takes a lot of time and effort. And part of that effort is writing about the AR success stories, including in a weekly blog. I'm afraid I have only one blog in me - at best. So I am going to close down this one and move my blogging energies to Africa Rising. If you'd like to follow that blog, you can look for it on the Africa Rising website. Or, if you can't find it, send me an email at jim.thomas(at)africarising.org, and I'll tell you where it is.

Thank you for following this blog and my thoughts on what could be for the church in the Triangle. I will continue that search for a new fusion of Christian mission and worship. If you think of it, please keep  this journey in your prayers.

Jim

Taking a stab

I began this blog three months ago. In that time I have been building friendships in my new church, Emmaus Way, reading about missional communities, talking with informed people, and visiting the Church of the Savior. In that time, I have indeed made some progress in my thinking, even though as some questions have been answered, others have rushed in to take their place.

Up until now, I have been peeling away unnecessary layers of church, seeking what is essential and vital. I now have a rough idea to build on. Please don't hold me to it - it's a  *rough idea* - but I do want to share it so I can receive critique, ideas or encouragement. 

Recall that what I seek is church centered on action which then gives people a reason to gather and share knowledge. This is the opposite of most churches, which are centered on knowledge in the hope that it will lead to action. A cluster of people in conversation with me, and who also want such a church, share an interest in food and gardening. Yes, we all like to eat. But that isn't the point. The point is that food is fundamental, and so is the soil it comes from and the labor that produces it. Food has also become the principal language of ethics among many people today - especially college students and young adults. It is often their basis for caring about fair trade, the environment, farmer's markets, vegetarian diets, and more. (A book on my reading list: Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating, by Norman Wirzba [thanks, Allegra, for the recommendation].)

Now, consider that former refugees from the Congo and Sudan are being resettled in the Triangle area. Anyone coming from a rural area of a developing country is going to miss having their hands in the soil, and miss eating certain foods. If we can get a plot of land that is close to where these people are being settled, they and we can join in gardening and raising the foods they miss (if they can grow here). Working side by side in this way is not a charity - it is a way of building relationships and living out the love of God. It will provide an opportunity for listening to each others' stories and responding to each others' needs.

Carrboro Community Garden

Carrboro has a community garden - for a purpose different than what we intend, and it looks full at the moment. That's OK. We can find a plot elsewhere, and we can learn from the Carrboro experience. They gather to tend the garden from 10 to 12 each Saturday. If we were to do the same, on Saturday or Sunday, we could then wash up at the end and go to someone's home for a shared meal, followed by a time of prayer and discussing the Bible. Whether Christian or not, everyone would be welcome to join us. For three weeks a month, that would be our church service. On the fourth week, we'd join Emmaus Way to stay connected to another group of believers and to encourage and influence one another.

No doubt the relationships formed by hoeing and weeding together would lead to care of other kinds, say practicing English, tutoring students, and helping people figure out American life. We would also want ways the immigrants could help the non-immigrants. We'll learn those in time. These non-gardening activities would become the main ways of interacting in the seasons when things are not growing.

That's about as far as I can go with this idea at the moment. Lots of questions follow. Where are immigrants concentrating in the Triangle? Can we find a mature Christian among them who could be a co-leader? Can we find a plot of ground? Can I put my time into this when I am having to put more time into my job and my other venture, Africa Rising? Who else might help? These are all matters for prayer.

Thanks for reading along. Let me know if you have any thoughts.

Dropping the baton

In my visit to The Potter's House (see last blog entry), my host mentioned that the mother institution, Church of the Savior, had closed down and sold its building as the founder, Gordon Cosby retired. In an exchange with philosophy professor and Christian author Dallas Willard, Cosby posed the question, "Why do churches and ministries so often lose the essence of their founding vision, to the point that the resulting institution, years later, is quite unlike the original dream? What happens along the way?" Willard responded there are exceptional people with a strong vision who start something new. Then,

Organization of their activities takes place, and other organizations spin off from them numbers of talented individuals are drawn to them and make their lives in their wake. But these other individuals - usually, but not always, very well-intending - do not carr the "fire" the "certain something," within them. The mission or missions that have been set a foot begin a subtle divergence from the vision that gripped the founder, and before too long the institution and its mission has become the vision.

Certainly this happens. But Dallas Willard is describing rather than explaining. What he is describing is one of the earliest milestones of every institution: passing the baton from the founder to the next leader. The passing is fumbled in many ways. In some cases, the founder holds onto the baton too long, resisting the release of control. In other cases, the founder simply gives no thought to who should lead next and how. In Africa Rising, this is one of the challenges we see in each of the African organizations - how to manage that first succession of leadership.

Examples of failures to manage the transition litter the roadside. Willard gives a few prominent examples. But our societies are built on examples of successful transition. These are the institutions that managed that first transition and reached heights unimaginable to the original founder. One example might be the Ford Motor Company. Another would be the university where I teach: The University of North Carolina.

I consider leadership transitions to be fundamental to leadership. To that, I would add leadership development. In the case of Gordon Cosby and the Church of the Savior, I wonder what emphasis he gave to raising up new leaders. Within the Church of the Savior, there is the Servant Leadership School.  But as you can see in their website banner, their mission is largely classroom teaching. Passing the baton from a founder to the next leader is a specific task that takes place outside of the classroom. It requires relationship development, mentoring, and the gradual transitioning of responsibilities.

Combine the closing of the Church of the Savior building with the lack of young people in the church's missional communities, and it looks to me like they failed in practical leadership development. It saddens me when I think of what they could have sustained, or how they could have multiplied, with attention to the raising the next generation of leaders.

A visit to Church of the Savior

On a business trip to Washington DC last week I had a free afternoon and visited The Potter's House, one of the Church of the Savior missional communities. It is a combination coffee house and book store in the Adams Morgan neighborhood, about 30 blocks due north of the White House. I had been hoping to meet with a person who is well connected with Gordon Cosby, the founder of the church, and who I'd been told would arrange a meeting with me. However, that task didn't make it her "to do" list and the meeting never happened. So, when I arrived at Potter's House, I spoke with the book store manager, Tom, who had held that job for 30+ years. He was more informed than he gave himself credit for.

Tom stepped away from the cash register and sat down at a table with a cup of coffee to talk with me. He periodically got up to take care of a customer. He demonstrated to me the graciousness of the Potter's House ministry, showing patience and hospitality in the face of my interruption in his day.

While talking with Tom, I also observed what was going on in the room. There were about a dozen people there at any one time. They varied in race (Caucasian, black, white, Asian) and income level. They sat at tables in twos and threes, talking. I also fliers for talks on various subjects. The ministry has been doing this since the 1960s. Imagine the number of people who have been blessed by it

I asked Tom a number of questions. I'll write about just a couple of them here.

Q: Do the ministries gather together once a month?
A: No, but they once may have. (This surprised me. I will have to check my recall of what I learned of the Church in the 1970s, when I lived in Washington and visited it. Tom also mentioned that the communities are re-evaluating how they interact, now that Gordon Cosby, their founder and visionary, has retired.).

Q: How many people attend the church gatherings of the ministries?
A: They range from 8 to 20.

Q: Do the communities attract young people?
A: No. This is another reason the communities are evaluating how they function. (What I surmised is that the church and its ministry communities were initiated by a group of "Jesus People" radicals of the 1960s, who have carried it into the present, but didn't find a way to adapt the model to generations after them.)

Q: Why did the Church of the Savior end? (Turns out the Church was considered one of the missional communities, with Gordon Cosby as its founder and head. Some of the people affiliated with the other missional communities didn't have a worship gathering of their own and would attend the Church of the Savior gathering. When Gordon Cosby retired, the Church community sold their building and distributed the proceeds among the remaining missional communities.)
A: I'm not sure.

I have more to say on this last point, which I'll write in my next blog. Overall, though, I came away from my field trip with the realization that some of what I had remembered of the Church was inaccurate - at least it didn't represent the Church of today. Other parts, though, like the ministry of Potter's House, were as I remembered them and were impressive in how they embodied the ministry of Jesus. I am now considering what to hold onto or aim for in their model, and what to do differently. Let me know if you have any thoughts or insights.

Two-fer

If people who are not paid to be Christian teachers or leaders - but who have gifts in teaching or leading - are going to exercise their gifts, they will need to be independently wealthy or get their income elsewhere. To gain an income from a paying job and also do regular teaching or leading in a gathering of believers is to be bivocational. There is a long history of bivocational ministry in the church. The Apostle Paul was one of the first in the early New Testament church. His day job was making tents. Today, many pastors of small churches have another job to help support themselves and perhaps a family.

I have been bivocational for about ten years. It started when I was the chair of the elders for a year in my church. During that year there was a church crisis that required a significant amount of my time. Although it was a challenge, I learned how to attend to two major roles without being irresponsible in either. Fortunately that level of activity only lasted a year. When I rotated out of the position, I stayed involved in church leadership, but at a more manageable level. Even so, I carried the title of pastor (albeit volunteer and part-time) for several years. In that role, and over a five year period, I shaped how church related to other cultures, both internationally and locally. I also started a non-profit organization, Africa Rising, that supports the work of African social entrepreneurs. Today, that is the biggest part of my non-day-job work. (In case someone reading this doesn't know me, in my day job, I am a professor at the University of North Carolina.)

A few things I've learned about being bivocational: (1) It helps if both jobs are of real interest to you. It is much harder when one of them doesn't also give as much emotional energy as it takes. (2) If you are married, your spouse must believe in what you are doing. (3) I have been able to do what I do because I have physical and mental health, a good marriage, healthy and well adjusted children, and a good day job. (4) I don't watch TV, not even on the computer. I know that I am missing some really entertaining shows. But what I gain in having a significant impact on the lives of others is incomparable. (5) I strategically place meetings and other tasks in the margins of my days. For a while, I had lots of early breakfast meetings on weekdays, before I started my day job. Now, with a new job, I meet with people over lunch, or a glass of wine at the end of the day. Then I aim to accomplish just one thing each evening. It could be writing a blog entry or answering a number of emails. I say "just one thing" because thats all I have time for after spending time with my family, washing the dishes, helping with homework, or whatever.

Now on that note, I'm going to go for a walk in the woods with our dog on this pretty Sunday morning.

Literacy and leadership in the church

In God’s kingdom, people are organized by their gifts, be they gifts of compassion, hospitality, teaching, discernment, and more. But somewhere along the way, something that isn’t a gift got introduced into the mix, and it even dominates the organization of the church: education. We hand over the leadership of our churches to those who have been educated the most, or in a particular way. Usually, it is years of seminary. Acceptance to a seminary is based primarily on academic performance in college. So if there is a gift involved, it may be the ability to do well on exams. But there is little call for that in the life of a community of people following Jesus.

In a kingdom where the last are first and where the wisdom of God confounds the wise of this world, how did the educated jump the queue to direct everyone else? And this even when no matter of education can give a person the gift of teaching or leadership. It could be that the educated use their knowledge to get to the front of the line, or to establish systems that give authority only to others who are highly educated. These could be true, but I have another idea.

Knowledge *is* valuable when teaching others about the kingdom of God. It is helpful to know the stories of the Bible and the admonitions of Jesus, for example. Being able to read helps one gain this knowledge. So, although having knowledge doesn’t make one a good teacher, it helps.

At the time of the early church, very few people could read. According to one source, as few of 0% in the rural areas and 5-10% in the cities could read. Since societies then were mostly rural, the country average would fall between one and three percent. And because of gender biases of the day, all but a very few would have been male. This, I believe, laid the foundation for patterns of church leadership. The ones who could read were the ones who were looked to for teaching.

But why does the church stick to this pattern today? In many countries, the literacy rates have flipped, with only a small minority of adults left who cannot read. And the number of books available today – just one copy of each - would probably cover all of Jerusalem several feet high. Not to mention other resources, such as the internet. A studious high school student of today knows vastly more than a learned scholar of Jesus’s day. With widespread literacy and a superabundance of information available to all, there is little reason for the church to make education its primary criterion for selecting teachers and leaders. We can now revert to the kingdom way of gifts.

In the church I envision, that would be the rule – those with knowledge of the kingdom and gifts of teaching would teach, and those with that knowledge and gifts of leadership would lead. That knowledge need not come from a seminary. There is an embarrassment of books available and others in the community to sharpen one another’s knowledge and teaching. This is not to say that seminary education isn’t useful. It is to say, however, that teaching in and about God’s kingdom should not be limited by the number people our seminaries can graduate. Nor should we assume that those graduates are gifted at teaching or leadership. Instead, may God’s Spirit empower those of his people who don’t have a seminary education, but who he has gifted, to teach and to lead powerfully in his kingdom.

Missional Communities

I've recently tapped into a pipeline of information that seems directly relevant to the type of church I've been thinking about. Thanks go to Randy Russell for sending me the links. I've begun reading a 23-entry blog series by Mike Breen, but I haven't finished it yet. So I don't want to comment on it or raise questions because the answers may be in the entries I haven't read.

One of  the blog entries has a short video interview that references vergenetwork.org. I found there much more to explore. Rather than wait until I can write down processed thoughts, I'll connect you to these resources and we can read along at the same time. I'll share some of my thoughts later.