The Mid Council Commission report is good for the church. It is the right report, with the right recommendations, at the right time. Our denomination would take a step in the right direction if our General Assembly would approve their report and begin to live into the experiments that they are proposing. Why do I say this? There are at least seven reasons:
-
The Mid Council Commission did a good job of the first task of leadership – listening. They did a lot of listening. They listened to a lot of people. They took their time. They didn’t rush it. Some of us thought they were moving too slowly, but they did it right. They probably got more feedback through face-to-face conversations, Facebook, Twitter and blogging than any other group in the church. They have heard what people are saying and experiencing and have developed their recommendations based on that. Their report does not come out of “left field.” It comes out of center field. It comes from where the broad middle of our church is living, and they are responding to what people are saying they want to try. To not approve the recommendations of their report would be to reject what many in our church are asking to be able to do.
-
One of the second tasks of leadership is to create an environment. Some churches lack imagination and innovation because leaders have not encouraged their people to dream. They don’t encourage people to have visions for the future, to think about what could be, and to imagine the new thing that God might be up to. Some churches are risk-averse. They don’t like to try new things. They are motivated more by fear than faith. They punish people for failure and don’t give people the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. The Mid Council Commission report is seeking to create a safe environment where people can experiment for a season to see if new and better ways of doing ministry together might emerge. The report realizes that we cannot think our way into new actions, but that we have to act our way into new ways of thinking. This report would give us the space to do that.
-
The Mid Council Commission report has accurately identified that the biggest challenges in front of us are adaptive challenges and not technical challenges. Technical challenges can be solved by education we already have, or by going to experts, or by doing small tweaks and adjustments. Adaptive challenges require new learning, making paradigm shifts, and learning as we go. We need someone or some group in our denomination that will push us to begin making adaptive challenges. I don’t see many others doing that right now. Yet, that is one of the critical needs that we have. The Mid Council Commission recommendations are good for the church because they will push us to address the adaptive challenges that we have been ignoring.
-
The Mid Council Commission has not only done a good job of leading, they have also done a good job of following. We live in a world that is getting flatter and less hierarchical all the time. Our denomination is beginning to informally function more that way than we used to, but there is still a lot of institutional and structural resistance to that. Many people still want to enforce and coerce a heavy-handed, top-down style of leadership. The Mid Council Commission report recommendations will help us follow where our people are already going – to a flatter, more networked world, which will release more people into ministry, following the Savior into the streets. This is the right thing to do. We are called to release people into ministry. This will help us do more of that and do it better.
-
The Mid Council Commission recommendations don’t require presbyteries to make any changes. They simply give permission for presbyteries to make changes for a season. If your presbytery doesn’t want to make any changes, you don’t have to. If your presbytery wants to run some experiments and begin exploring some new ways of doing ministry, the Mid Council recommendations will remove the obstacles that have prevented those from happening before. They give us the possibility of becoming more imaginative, more innovative, and more creative. Those are things that we need at this time in our history.
-
The Mid Council recommendations accurately recognize and acknowledge that the purpose of mid councils is to serve the health and mission of congregations. Over the years, in some places, this has gotten reversed. In some places, people have had the sense that congregations existed to serve their mid council groups. But, this is backwards. The Mid Council recommendations call us back to what we inherently know to be true: that mid councils exist to serve the health and mission of congregations, not the other way around.
-
The Mid Council recommendations accurately recognize that we live in both a neighborhood world and a networked world. Many of our church members no longer attend the Presbyterian church that is geographically closest to where they live. Many people drive past other churches, including other Presbyterian churches, before arriving at the church they attend. Our members no longer function in a world with strict geographic boundaries. When our congregations are looking for a new pastor, they don’t want to only consider the twenty pastors who live geographically closest to their church building. They want to jump over a lot of physically close pastors and be able to consider pastors who live a great distance away. Many of our people talk as much to people on the other side of the country as they do to people who live on their street. With the advent of Facebook, Skype, Google Plus, Webex and other social media tools, we can see people and have face-to-face conversations with people in other time zones. We know how to develop these kinds of relationships and how to keep them going. The Mid Council recommendations recognize this is the world we live in and they are not afraid of it. They are encouraging us to explore new webs of relationships within our church structures that might stimulate more discipleship and mission. This is a good thing.
The Mid Council Commission recommendations are good for the church. It is the right report, with the right recommendations, at the right time. I believe the Holy Spirit has been at work in their midst as they have wrestled with the issues of the changing church, the changing culture, and the changing world around us. They are probably not perfect, but they are the right steps in the right direction. If our General Assembly will have the courage to move forward down this path, we can learn how to adapt and adjust along the way, following the leading of the Spirit, as we discover where it is God wants us to go.
Clark Cowden is executive presbyter of the Presbytery of San Diego.
