Notes from Leadership Training with Gil Rendle

This article is reprinted from my personal blog:


Last weekend, I had the opportunity to attend a learning/training day with Gil Rendle, part of a training for leaders as United Methodists in most of New York State prepare to become one annual conference instead of four this July. I found Rendle's presentation to be very thought-provoking, churning thoughts not only on what we will do as a new annual conference, but what we do/can do in my local church.

Here are some notes and my comments mixed, hope you can decipher!:

Rendle notes that our UM membership has been declining for 40 years. We've been in the wilderness for 40 years, but in the wilderness, God can bring about change. We can manage incremental change - we can handle that because we can control it. But deep change - we can't control deep change, and deep change is what we need.

He talked about Friedman and family systems and the idea that "we've grossly overrated the power of information to change people with no motivation to change." That's pretty applicable in all areas of life, don't you think? I can't help but think of my favorite line from Tracy Chapman's "Change" - "If everything you think you know makes your life unbearable, would you change?" What is ourmotivation for changing the way we do church?

He points to CEUs as one system that was implemented to 'fix people' - 'If we only had better leaders' - just make them get more education, and the churches will be fixed... He says, "I was not trained to make disciples, I was trained to make members," of his own training for ministry, noting how we're set up to fail at our own mission of disciple-making.

He says that when "things are getting out of control, the natural response is to make more rules." But good leadership is: Not about doing things right, but about doing right things. I think we've particularly been struggling with this in my local church - are we trying to do things right or do right things?

Management satisfies. Leadership (well done appropriately) dissatisfies. That’s how you affect change. Unless we are dissatisfying, church will not change.

North American Hospitality: Fix things up just the way we like them, invite people in, and are happy until they want to change the channel. That's not biblical hospitality, radical hospitality.

Technical work – known solutions to known problems.

Adaptive work – can’t do technical. You don’t move to action. You move to learning. Have to learn to act. Deep work.

He said, "Who are we? What are we supposed to do? We think we already know the answer. But we know who we were, not who we are." In my first congregation, we once did a project as part of our stewardship campaign that asked people to identify the 'visionaries' within the congregation. To name people. And the congregation did - but it named mostly people who had died in the past years. They knew who they were in the past, but not their current identity.

Rendle says we are asked for leadership, but only rewarded for management in our systems. After all, asking the ‘why’ questions translates into a longer meeting! Whenever the system doesn’t know what to do, it does what it knows.

"Pastoral mode is one of our default modes – tries to manage everyone’s feelings, care for everyone." This is a big one for me personally. I have a very hard time not trying to make sure everyone is getting along and feeling ok. It's hard to say: I'm sorry you're not with the change that is taking place," and then just move on. I'm learning! Rendle notes that not all the Israelites made the journey out of the wilderness.

Church metaphor we love/live by (but is obviously bad): We have to learn how to build a new prison, using the bricks from the old prison, without losing any of the prisoners.

How do we prepare leaders for congregations we haven’t yet met, when we still require conformity of leaders?

The system get whatever it measures. How much, how many, how often measures. In absence of measures, get the same as before, or chaos. Have to measure something, but we’re using faulty measures. At the same time, you can't just have no measures. If you don't like the ones in place, alright, then what *do* you want to be measured on?

Our stated desired outcome: Improved relationship with Christ, enabling change in the world.

But: If you can’t measure output, you’ll measure input. (i.e. "I worked x hours." Not bragging. Just trying to show what we put *in* to system since we don’t know what we're getting out. And we feel we've never gotten enough inputs.)

Long established organizations have 2 missions: Public – what you say you do. Private – what you actually work on. The Private is always the satisfaction of the strongest constituent voices. School: Public – educate children. Private – satisfy parents, teachers, administrators. Students don’t make list.

Church: Public – making disciples. Private – satisfy clergy, congregations, interest groups. Disciples don’t make list.

Was: Whether clergy and congregations were happy.

Takes us from output position, buts us into input positions. We’re expendable resources. Can’t be deployed for our satisfaction but for the church’s mission.

When a system doesn’t know what went wrong, it wants to know who went wrong.

If you go at your work at a technical level, you might get all your tasks done, but it won’t matter.

When a paradigm shifts, everything has to go back to zero. Look for the purpose sentence in Discipline, and stop reading.

Connections across miles

Today, February 12, the New ACT team is meeting. As we worship and work, a team member is posting updates to Facebook and Twitter, including themes of worship, overview of work, and invitation to post questions. It's a novel experience, bringing voices from "out there" into the room, and making us conscious in our work of our connection to so many neighbors...

What does it mean to be God's Love?

I've been excited to be working on and with the New ACT team for the past year. There have been lots of ups and downs, lots of questions and few answers along the way. The one thing that keeps me excited about doing this work is that as a team we really are trying to think outside of the box and do something that gets church folks and non church folks alike excited about God.

One of the piece of our vision statements is "To be God's love with our Global neighbors" That statement really excites me. Although I have to stop and think what does that mean?

I have to go to my perspective of faith and Methodist history to understand what that statement means for me. My first thought goes to the idea of 'soul' I'm not sure that my idea of 'soul' would make it through the theological rigors of my friends who really study this kind of thing, but for me soul is that little piece of God that dwells in each of us. In order for us to be engaged in relationship with God we have to engage that piece in our self and in others. In order to understand just how I would do that I turn to the book of James and our founder John Wesley. James' idea of faith and works have been hotly debated, but for me it seems one of the easiest things to understand. If you are going to walk the walk than you better talk the talk.

This statement says to me that we want our churches to do a lot more walking. So what would that look like... Well there is no easy answer. It all depends on your place and where God is calling you to act. However, wouldn't it be great if whole congregations of people were focusing on what was going on outside their buildings? A colleague told me a story of a church group that was trying to get involved within their neighborhood so they brought some pizza over to the local housing project and started talking to the neighbors about what their problems were. The church has expected to hear about crime, or unemployment, child care. etc. They even had some ideas about what they could do about those situations. Instead, what they heard the neighbors complain about most were the rats. So what did the church do they found an exterminator and helped take of their rat problem. It doesn't sound churchy but that is what they needed most at the time.

So I think that is the first step. Churches need to know what their community needs. That involves going out and talking to community members. It means listening and not assuming.

Maybe there is a gang issue in the community. So instead of just doing summer VBS maybe a church holds VBS and an additional hour of working with kids to understand how not to be caught up in gangs.

In a rural community there is an invasion of an non-native plants that are hurting crops. How about the church bring in an expect to talk about ways of preventing the spread or salvaging the crops.

Instead of just having a soup kitchen, have church members sit down with those being served, building relationship and even invited those being served to serve....

Being God's love means a multitude of things. How are you going to engage your soul and how are you going to engage the soul of others?