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.
   

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.

Leadership — wisdom and warning

Good to be back at Willow Creek for the 2008 leadership Summit, with 18 colleagues. I have said every year that if I did not learn something of real practical value, I would give it up. As it is, there has been valuable learning every year. I’m fascinated by the integration of Evangelical conviction and courageous pragmatism at Willow Creek, and their peoples’ commitment to excellence in all they do.

The summit doesn’t provide a blueprint to impose on everywhere else, as much as a rich resource focussed on becoming more aware of leadership issues and challenges for what they are. Learning in an unapologetically Evangelical learning environment, within which wholehearted commitment is a key value, brings me back to my own roots of faith and discipleship. So much of what we do in England slips away into far less than it could be through cynicism, fear and the habits of mediocrity.

Emerging among other things on Day One was a sense of the primacy of faith, as courage and authenticity, anchored in God. Bill Hybels explored the relationship between full commitment and laying hold of the life that is indeed life. Gary Haugen, former UN genocide investigator in Rwanda and now CEO of the International Justice Mission, walked us through the feeding of the 5,000, and the need to bring what we have to enact God’s justice. Bill George, professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School, analysed the difference between last century’s ideals of Command and Control leadership, which have largely failed us in many fields of endeavour, and the kind of leadership required now that aligns, empowers, serves and collaborates.

Bill suggested we have generally gotten into the habit of valuing charisma more than character, image over integrity, style over substance. Focus group politics can be a fearful distraction in which the task of following a vision realistically is eclipsed by the mandate to make the lowest functioning around us feel good about themselves, regardless of the consequences for anyone else. Leaders need to be secure and authentic within themselves, to the point they can be honest about pragmatic reality, and fully open to others’ contributions.

So, a good start. The clever bit is in the application, though...

Fast Forward

is a 13 minute reprise of Church History that pretty much says it all. It's available from WCA, or on the whole event DVD. I was amazed by it when I saw it at this year's leadership summit. It bursts beyond static conceptions of Church history — it expresses why as well as what, and explodes Dawkins-type ignorance and childishness that pretends Christianity is a religion, not a lived reality.

Kudos to Greg Ferguson and his team — It would be worth broadcasting freely, full stop. It's that good!

Seeking peace and pursuing it

39th president Jimmy Carter reflected on the joys and triumphs of his life, from a boyhood in Colour bar Georgia where most of the significant influences on his life were black people, through Navy and Civil rights years, to the White House. His warmest memory was of the Sadat/Begin peace deal in the middle East — his worst the Iranian hostage crisis.

What came over was a great gentleness, and willingness to admit he was wrong on occasion, with a rather self-deprecating sense of humour ("I told my mummy I was running for president. She said 'president of what?'"). He had showed great courage in the face of racial discrimination, confronting something that at the time seemed an obvious and inevitable part of life to most people in the South.

There is a Plains, Georgia, and it has 600 inhabitants, who enjoy the ministrations of 11 Churches! Carter could have gone off and played golf for the next 25 years. In fact he had given himself to housing and social justice and peace charities, as well as his Sunday School teaching in his local Baptist Church.

Is your leadership learning bandwidth expanding or narrowing?

Challenging question from Bill Hybels.
He was responding to a Church leader who had boycotted the summit as a protest against the inclusion of Jimmy Carter on the faculty.

It reminded Hybels of parents of kids in his youth group thirty years ago, who banned their kids from going to church to punish them for getting an F on their grade card. To grow as Christ followers, he said, we have to learn how to expand our learning bandwidth, or we are impoverishing the teams we lead, and failing in our discipleship.

He recommended the boycotting church leader do this: come to the summit, and gather his team and say "let's try and turn this whole thing into a learning moment. I have deeply negative feelings about this faculty member and what he stands for. By sheer discipline, let's go in, listen, and afterwards try to see if God was saying anything to us, if we had a learning experience." Don't know what the guy did...

This sounds like a fairly grown up strategy for Republican evangelicals who boycott the leadership summit to protest a Democrat former president they blame for the liberalism of the seventies. Could it apply as practical wisdom to any other context? If we are serious as disciples and leaders committed to christ and our own development, are there any such contexts to which it couldn't apply?

Good News for the Real World?

Richard Curtis spoke passionately and eloquently, in film as well as words, about Africa. His job was to acknowledge the vastness of the numbers, but try and give each of the people concerned a name and a face, so that people could recognise a common humanity in them. Bill Hybels summarised the implications: "The local church is the hope of the world, but we've got to engage with it... enough stuff, enough pleasure, enough chasing empty dreams. let's get into the real issues."

As an aside Richard asked an interesting question about films: If you make a film about some crazy guy losing it and doing something violent and disturbed that has only happened once in recorded history, everybody says it's "gritty and searingly realistic." If you try and express something of the experience of delight, joy and hope people find all over the world millions of times a day when they fall in love, you get told it's "unrealistic, cloying and sentimental." Is this inevitable? Why?

Night Fears

John Ortberg explored Leaders' greatest fears — not the obvious and persistent ones, but the danger of a leader's mission being subverted by what he called their "shadow mission" — the persistent but enticing false identity that, e.g., Jesus encountered on the Mount of Temptation.

Relating this to the Book of Esther, he explored how to stay on track and be the person we were called to be — "who knows, but God could have put you in this position for just such a time as this?" (Esther 4:14)

He gave some nightmare Shadow missions for Churches:

• "A Successful Church for Successful people"
• "We may not be growing, but we know how to judge Churches that are"
• "Successfully avoiding conflict since 1893"

What's our/my real mission, and what's the ghastly subverting shadow alternative?