How (not?) to sink without a trace

Jim Collins, having studied over many years the difference between good and great business undertakings, presented at this year’s Willow Creek Leadership Summit on the decline and fall of the great. He says “whether you prevail or not depends a lot more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.”

Remember Titanic? — the supposedly unsinkable is holed below the waterline and denies it; the cap’n carefully checks the lightbulbs, to avoid the uncomfortable truth that the whole ship could be going down. Meanwhile the passengers apply themselves to ballroom dancing, not finding things that float. Major functionaries begin to behave like minor functionaries, obsessing about how to protect the White Star Line’s property, when they ought to be inspiring and resourcing people to find effective means of survival. As the ship’s prow rotates downward, the officers grasp at silver bullet solutions, perhaps even a radical new cap’n. By the end of the night the “unsinkable” lies broken on the ocean floor anyway.

He diagnosed five phases of mighty falling:

1. Arrogance / Hubris — “We are just not the kind of outfit that could ever sink without a trace... anyway, our troubles are basically down to other people.”
   
   
2. Sense of entitlement — “We have a right to carry on in our own way, regardless of what others think... Here’s to us — who’s like us?”
   
   
3. Denial of risk and peril — “After all, more people go to Church than footie...”
   
   
4. Game is up — “but with a really big new idea/ initiative/ leader we can still make it...”
   
   
5. Game Over — “glug, glug, glug, [“I’m an officer!!”] glug, glug, glug [“Hey, that’s White Star Line property!”] glug, glug, glug... glug.
   

Jim suggested ten basic disciplines which can help an organisation avoid such a fate, especially during phases 1-4:

1. Careful diagnostics — the facts are your friends, even unpleasant ones
   
   
2. Count your Blessings — you are blessed by large numbers of good things you didn’t cause, and these will help keep you real and resource you
   
   
3. Increase (Double?) your leaders’ Questions : Statements ratio
   
   
4. Recruit fantastic people — and if your organisation can’t recruit or retain them, ask hard why.
   
   
5. Apply your diagnostics to your teams
   
   
6. Take inventory of the most brutal facts
   
   
7. Get a good “Stop Doing” List. get out of stuff that’s draining you for nothing, even venerable habits and sacred cows
   
   
8. Define results — clicks on the flywheel that indicate progress. This staves off depression.
   
   
9. Extend your reach to young people — Change your practices, but never your essential values
   
   
10. Find a Big Hairy Audacious Goal rooted in your purpose and values — not some silly little target setting thing, but something everybody would recognise as real victory
    

As a bishop of the Church of England who learnt in the playground that “if the cap fits, wear it,” I wondered, “Does he mean us?” And if he does, what does our diocese/ parish do about it?

Chicago 2010: Cleaning the Bean

August brings the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit; followed by a time back home of catching up with various jobs off the guilt list.

This year’s GL included another bit of cleaning — reconditioning the disshevelled fish tank in our front hallway, but that’s another story...

From GL to GLS —

Chicago was in fine fettle. Every year I think there cannot be a new angle to photograph on Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, and every year I come back with another thirty new angles! Look on the cleaning of the bean in glorious clean early morning light as a metaphor for the whole trip.

For a start I realise that learning about leadership is something worth giving a couple of days of regular sustained reflection to, among friends. I will comment separately on what I think I’ve learned this year in particular, but if life is a “school for the Lord’s service,” a period of structured reflection and learning helps, I find, to sharpen up the whole pattern of my work.

People this side of the pond sometimes seem to think it’s clever to be superior about US Evangelicals. Some of them, of course, are doubtless the most appalling people — but then so are some UK Anglicans, and others. Lay all that stuff aside, engage the irony over-ride, and there’s plenty to learn and to enjoy. The warmth, honesty, openness, empathy and positive faith of many US Evangelicals I meet refuses to be bound by all snotty stereotypes, and brings its own honest inspiration.

I found worship this year, especially on the Friday of the Leadership Summit, brought me directly to where my journey in faith began forty years ago — faith in Jesus Christ. I see I have 2.4 days of Bach in my iTunes library to enjoy back in Blighty, but at for a couple of days a year it does me nothing but good to learn and throw myself wholeheartedly into an American Evangelical environment. It’s also good, every year, to catch up with Anglican friends from the Diocese of Chicago. We are sometimes prey, this side of the pond, to a rather flat and stereotypical view of the Episcopal Church, and it’s good to be disabused of that by contact with real people. Real people, real faith, is the great reality checkpoint.

Microfinance: trading Real Futures

One powerful moment in the Leadership Summit was an appeal by Andrew Rugasira, founder and CEO of Good African Coffee, social enterpreneur from Kampala, for Trade not Aid. He drew attention to the distorting effects of aid on economies with significant proportions drawn from overseas aid, that could unintentionally suppress the life and economic skills of poor people, whilst feeding a huge and sometimes corrupt panjandrum of dependency. We need a new paradigm that will read Africa in terms of potential as well as need and deficits.

This is not to say all aid is simply bad, but that it has to be applied for emergencies, short term or infrastuctural pump priming, not as a substitute for regular economic activity. By analogy, you can employ people in a social or vokuntary enterprise, but there is a law of diminishing returns about the benefit, and whatever you do, it is important to build, not kill off the voluntary capacity of the organisation.

This put a great context around the session with, IMHO, the most impressive entrepreneur at the summit, Jessica Jackley, founder of Kiva.org, a microfinance site that lets anyone with computer access invest small loan sums in a targeted way, mainly in the developing world. The clever bit is marshalling all the agents into a slick process that connects loaner and entrepreneur as directly as possible, making it easy for anyone with a credit/debit card or paypal to get involved at the click of a mouse.

This is not an entirely rose-tinted process — some have criticised Kiva’s recent inlusion of US small businesses in its portfolio, as well as some interest rates the other end (not astronomic by UK small finance standards, but high and largely dictated by the partners who make it happen, in a way that’s almost inevitable with microfinance). Potential collywobbles some feel about child sponsorship might apply; Microfinance investing from home may not be for everyone. That said, Kiva does boldly go to places conventional banks don’t and makes the connections. Kiva would be the first to say microfinance is not the magic bullet to end poverty — but some involvement in microfinance certainly seems as defensible as sitting around on your spotty behind, beefing up the bottom line of conventional banks to the tune of £3,000 a taxpayer, which is what we’re all compulsorily doing anyway.

In terms of Leadership learning, kiva.org shows how someone in their twenties can impact world development to the tune of 86 Million dollars in four years with a good idea, creative use of technology, and the guts and stickability to pursue her vision out of Sunday School, through Business School, and out onto the streets.

Church and MegaChurch Stress Test

I go to the Willow Creek Leadership Summit, not as a signed up US MegaChurch fan, which I’m not, but because what you see is what you get — an opportunity to reflect on and learn about leadership with colleagues, in the context of a consistently world class training event put together from a wide range of sources by Evangelical Christians from outside my own expression of the faith. It’s also a personal check back for me to core discipleship values, and I really value the opportunity to take that journey systematically, rigorously and regularly.

But here’s a housekeeping question. How does a Megachurch like Willow Creek weather a recession? Those of us getting muddy and wet, if not shot, in the trenches sometimes wonder how the war’s feeling on the Battleship Invincible. It was interesting to find out.

In his opening address, Bill Hybels talked of the rough seas through which the enterprise was sailing. It included, amongst other challenges, $300K annual donors exploding in the water. There’s some comfort in knowing the seas look rough from a supertanker as well as from our little English dinghies. Of course my Anglo tendency is to be sarcastic about the differences, but it’s a fact that a place like that, as well as yea many more dollars resourced (the thing people always notice first) is also yea many more dollars committed and exposed.

Hybels acknowledged that the conditions we have all assumed to be normal may never come again, and simply hunkering down and awaiting the return of financial glory days is not an option for faith. This is a challenge to the Church to be the Church in the face of circumstances over whch we have no control. Acts 2:38 has to become a more a practical proposition, less a romanticised ideal. This means some formerly large donors downsizing radically, and accepting the humbler place of recipients, whilst those who still doing well step up their generosity.

Jack Welch, formerly of GE says “In a Crisis Cash is King.” Present conditions are an opportunity to own another kingship, and so prove what people in poor areas of the world often know better than rich Christians in the West — that there is nothing like the local Church when the local Church is being itself, rather than the means of getting a light dose of God at the weekend.

This strikes me as a significant philosophical principle for living in testing times, which I think it would be as interesting to try in the smallest housegroup as the largest megaChurches.

Taking refuge in Denial

is not what they used to do in ancient Egypt, but characteristic behaviour of organisations confronted with unpalatable feedback about themselves arising from changed conditions over which they have no control. So said Gary Hamel, business guru, at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit today. It’s the same for businesses confused by what others would take for a clear mandate for change they can’t quite bring themslves to handle.

What often happens in Civvy Street is lurching from crisis to crisis, occasionally decapitating the old team — exactly the way nasty autocracies work, with infrequent, total and convulsive decapitations marking catacymic transitions between one unchanging junta and the next, induced by a change of Generalissimo. Surely we can do better than that? Yes we can, he says. For a start we can recognise four phases of denial:

1. Dismiss the problem — “It can’t be”
   
   
2. Rationalise the problem, projecting it on someone else — “you have the issues, not us...”
   
   
3. Mitigate the problem — try prozac
   
   
4. Confront the problem — hopefully not the other person, but confront myself honestly, recognising that until I change nothing else will.

For organisations wanting to save themselves time on this cycle, he suggested four helpful organisational habits to protect against unreality:

1. Unflinching honesty.
   
   
2. All our practices are hypotheses open to revision, not absolutes. It’s fine to decide we do need to maintain them, but they still need justifying in contemporary conditions, again and again.
   
   
3. Listen to renegades and dissidents: resource not infliction
   
   
4. Develop new strategic options in as enriched a way as possible all the time, engaging as many people as possible in a meritocratic way in the discussion.
   

Church: Institution & Organisation

Two thoughts from our bishop’s staff reflection with Professor Martyn Percy, using Philip Selznik’s sociological concepts of Organisation/ Institution:

1. Movements become organisations and then additionally institutions, changing from a kind of second to third gear.
   
   An organisation is a technical machine for mobilizing energies and achieving aims by devising and enforcing rules, dividing up work and co-ordinating results. It needs managing, based on competence. It gets things done, mainly pragmatically, within the constraints of what can be done and the limitations of the human beings involved.
   
   An institution is an uber-organization, responsive, adaptive organism, with a script about surviving and flourishing long term. It needs leadership, based on values. In a mature body you need both, but if the long-term Institutional leadership breaks down, the organisation fails. Take football: the organisational needs are fulfilled by clubs and players. Without them there'd be no game. The institutional needs are fulfilled on a Meta level by the rules, referees and administrators. Effective management is no substitute for good reffing. Nor vice versa.
   
   
2. Many snafus with Church, including focus and identity probems among ordinands come from not understanding this distinction. People become frustrated when they expect the Institution to manage, and mostake the local management for the whole institution; which in a sense it is, but in another it isn’t. Neither strategy works, long-term. People who underestimate the organisational dimension lose practical capacity, and tend to fantasy. People who underestimate the institutional dimension tend to pure pragmatism, and easily lose spiritual and world-transforming focus.

I am fascinated by Willow Creek, as a laboratory of the spirit, which after 30 years is now trying to find its institutional feet as Bill Hybels returns to being senior pastor. Compare Michael Dell returning to Dell, or Steve Jobs returning to Apple. Or don’t?

Catholic reality, locally delivered...

A League of Gentlemen vision from hell:

Tubbs and Edward run the local shop, despite the fact it is far away from the actual centre of the town. However, they believe themselves to be local and will protect their localness by any means...

Have you ever experienced churches like that? Self-obsessed, paranoid, sourly political, dwindling disgracefully. There’s a lot of it about. Here’s to us, who’s like us? And the enemy is Them; everyone else; diocese, deanery, whatever. Visitors sometimes encounter weird attitudes and assumptions in Entirely Local shops — and churches:
Of course the particular local people, congregation, parish, whatever, with whom you do your Christianity is a key part of the delvery system. But it isn’t everything. The National Deaneries Consultation at Swanwick is a biennial opportunity for area deans and lay chairs to raise their sights a bit. I’ve been working there this weekend with Janice Price, missiologist. Area deans and lay chairs from over 20 dioceses have been looking beyond their particular trenches, aided and abetted by resource people and ideas from all over the country.

Ecclesiologically, Christianity is a Universal reality, a new humanity, a global (= “Catholic”) reality, locally delivered. Jesus said his Kngdom was yeast inside, not top down or bottom up. NT Christians necessarily did Church bottom up not top down, mainly because there wasn’t a top, and the whole thing wasn’t institutionalised yet in that way. The Reformation was about recovering this authentic perspectve out of the institutionalism and powergaming of Western Christendom, which Eastern Orthodox Christians had never surrendered to as a total vision anyway. You can see the diocese, not just the congregation, as the local church. Doing so can free up relatonships and attitudes for mission, if only we let it.

So the value of the Deanery is not about structures but relationships; its strength is not geometry, but mission process. We have to work missionally and relationally, refusing to surrender to the boring old Tubbs ’n Edward Blockhouse mentality. Response points from the floor at the final Bible study and reflection Janice and I led together were encouraging:
Unlocking — Building relationships — Running with Change — Sharing faith with confidence — recognising barriers — Investment — keeping Jesus central, who valued his disciples in spite of their failure — Serving — Thinking the unthinkable (Mission Possible) — We are where diksciples were in John 20 (behind locked doors for fear of...?) — Imagination.

They reminded me of Greg Ferguson’s powerful, inspiring summary of Church history, Fast Forward, and his passionate comment on parochialism and narrow denominationalism:

Don’t be foooled by the joyful sound,
Don’t step over the dividing line;
You stick to your kind: I stick to mine.
Tribes of the global population,
races and denominations,
worshipping separately;
Bowing before the same God,
but would rather die than gather under the same roof.

I want to ask you, my Church,
how have you survived?
What mighty engine keeps your cells alive?
What great heartbeat has sustained you,
When pain contorts you and sin stains you?
Through the trough of human sorrow,
Who has lifted you to tomorrow?

There are and always have been
The invisible ones,
who never made a name,
rejected fame,
the brick and pillars, the crossbeams of the Church,
who stood up for justice,
Stooped down to serve,
Reached out to heal,
Who sheltered the defenceless,
Mothered the motherless,
Lifted the depressed,
and loved the despised.
It matters that they lived,
It matters how they died,
It matters that they answered the call.
Without them
the foundations would groan and crack,
and finally fall...

The wisdom of the old; the passion of the young. Can you imagine what could be done?

Something beautiful for God

In a way that might have been unthinkable to many Evangelicals of a previous generation, Bill Hybels led us the final session of the Leadership Summit to examine the life and leadership of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whom he described as the most influential woman on earth. Her drew heavily on Come, be my Light, a collection of spritual writings and diaries that went paperback in the UK this week.

When first published some secularist reviewers took Mother Teresa’s radically honest, realistic account of faith and doubt as a promising revelation of unbelief. All it actually indicated was their inability to understand “faith” in anything but shallow and obvious terms. In fact, Mother Teresa’s book is becoming a source of inspiration and hope to Christians the world over.

We walked through her early story and serious sense of call — someone who had few obvious attributes to offer, but believed that if God had given all of himself, she could not answer with less than all of herself. From daily exercise of disciplines she called “little practices” emerged a radical calling, relentlessly pursued. So she walked through various obstacles placed in her way by ecclesiastical authorities sometimes, as much as by the magnitude of the task.

Living in a society where feelings and rewards are often pursued as paramount, and people feel aggrieved over minor frustrations, there was inspiration in her faith: “even though I do not feel his presence for long periods of time, I will seek to love him as he has never been loved.”

A voyage round our fathers?

I have never before encountered Chuck Colson. As enforcer for Tricky Dicky, Mr Colson became deeply embroiled in the Watergate scandal and was imprisoned. Remarkably converted, he went on to found Prison Fellowship. Among US Conservative Evangelicals he is something of an Elder statesman. I was looking forward to his talk because I was intrigued by his personal story, and endorse his advocacy for restorative justice.

Actually, his presentation was hard work, not only for me but for all of our group. Many others around us were respectful, but noticeably less plugged into this talk than the others. Mr Colson gave some helpfully provocative sound bites — “we have bought into a lie, and transferred our allegiace from truth to therapy” sticks in the mind as a challenge to consider.
In the main however, his talk was a syllabus of errors, defending a Protestant version of what Roman Catholics used to call integralism — everything about God, propositionally stated, hangs together as an unquestionable whole. Any compromise and the whole trickles away. No duck/rabbits or wave/particles for Mr Colson then. And why his particular whole package, not Pio Nono’s? Don’t suppose I’ll ever know.

This was a curiously unsatisfying talk, with its logical-positivist style — Dawkins stood on his head? Its knockdown arguments took us on a slightly clunky trip around the circle line, whilst most everybody else is up on the surface, strolling in the park these days. Perhaps whipping ideas together to force compliance from the unwilling is what good party enforcers do best. If ever I feel we need that doing, I'll know where to come, I suppose.

John Burke: Gracious open doors?

John Burke is lead pastor of Gateway Community Church in Austin, Texas, and a leading member of the Emergent Leadership Initiative, an Evangelical movement to plant and grow authentic new churches in emergent culture. Winning young people for Christ is not just about packaging, but about authenticity, allowing God to change us hardened burned out religious people into bearers of grace.

From ten years’ rich, fruitful experience of growing an evangelical church among the generation most cagey about Christian commitment, John spoke of creating the right soil for faith to grow, not expecting people to get everything sorted at the check-in. God requires Mercy not Sacrifice, raising a significant question — are we leading like Jesus or like the pharisees? The world does law not grace. Grace says come as you are, and that is the essence of the good news.

John reports that the two big stumbling blocks people have every time are about other religions and homosexuality. So the question for would-be prevailing Evangelical Churches is one a young neighbour asked him of Gateway, “Does your Church teach people to love others? because I could never attend a Church that teaches people to hate gay people.”

It was fascinating, gievn the all-too-open discussions of this subject among Anglicans, how very coy non-Anglicans are, with much coded communication. Having brought it up, John simply referred people to a chapter of his book, as does the follow up Website. Nobody was willing to discuss it in real time. Even in code, however, John brought exact corroboration, hot off the streets, of the Barna Group research last year indicating we have a major missional issue here. Pretending that this is a subject about which we are either in the 1950’s or can return to the 1950’s is just idiotic. Making it a lead issue seems to be missional suicide.

John’s book takes a commendable pragmatic line — keeping Christ at the forefront, not homosexuality, whilst being wide open personally to accept gay people just as they are. He believes people’s lives turn around in the light of Christian faith in ways they never could if cultural stumbling blocks were erected in the way of their coming to that commitment in the first place. So say all of us, no doubt, but I suspect it will be a good while before many US Evangelicals feel comfortable about discussing openly the follow on — is this, some gay people may feel, in the end a kindly but ultimaterly inadequate, even patronising, response to this personal, moral and cultural issue?

Gary Haugen — Micah 6 Man

The person I am most glad to have encountered at this Leadership Summit has been Gary Haugen — lawyer, genocide investigator in Rwanda, founder and CEO of International Justice Mission. Quite simply, Gary is one of the most impressive and inspiring people I’ve ever met in my life, lawyer or not... his great priorities are Micah 6 — to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.

Martin Luther King used to say that the first claim of love is justice. We can only exert leadership that matters if we apply ourselves wholehartedly to issues that matter to God. Pharisees were well-briefed Biblicists. They failed because they tried to lead people into priorities which mattered more to them than to God.

Why should the man shot artbitrarily by police on the streets of Kenya, or the child prostitute in India, believe that God is good and loves the world? What is God’s plan to make his word believable? Incredibly, we are! IJM deploys skilled local people to contest slavery, trafficking, exploitation and violence around the world. It’s dangerous work, but infinitely rewarding. It’s grounded in prayer, and requires undertaking major risks daily.

Mr Haugen talked of a childhood trip up a mountain — a climb he missed, because he chickened out and stayed in the visitor centre, then tried to kid everyone else it was as good as the real thing. Is our Christian commitment about endeavouring the harder climb, or just looking at pictures down in the visitor centre?

If we want to grow in authentic faith, we need to exercise it about the things that matter, not trivial pursuits and in-house niceties.

Women Leaders stand up and out

Willow Creek has long sought to recognise leaders regardless of gender. If God has plainly gifted someone for leadership, why pretend he hasn’t on grounds of mere gender? In practice, however, the vast majority of faculty members at previous summits have been men.
This year’s event has included in its lineup two particularly inspiring women, Wendy Kopp of Teach for America and Catherine Rohr of the Prison Entrepreneurship Program.

Both, shortly after leaving College, resolved to change the world, by taking wasteful injustices head on . TfA uses a Peace Corps model, with its strengths and weaknesses, to deploy good young graduates in inner city schools with a transformative brief. PEP, based in Texas, seeks to turn around prisoners’ lives in the largest state penal system in the world, by giving them self-awareness and self-respect, growing character, and developing the will to use skills which have been misapplied in constructive ways.

Both Catherine and Wendy came over as sharp, perceptive, high capacity, and practical. These qualities came with low tolerance of being assumed to be their own PA’s, or otherwise patronised. How many times in the past 30 years, asked Catherine, with laserbeam piquancy, had Bill Hybels been asked what it felt like to be a male leader?

The Church of England has some honest, passionate, realistic and focussed leadership like this at senior levels, but desperately needs more. I think back to the stifling, idiotic boys club culture of deanery chapters I belonged to in the 1980’s, and rejoice to think it has largely been subverted. As this process marches on, even towards the House of Bishops, it’s good to know the talent is out there, if only we find the grace and wisdom to acknowledge and deploy it.