Back To My Crystal Ball in An Imperfect Community: Hamster Wheel, Generative Values, Mother Maps

If you bop around blogs much, you’ll run into that staple of uberbloggers – the blog series.  Like a megachurch preacher, these folks are able to sketch out a narrative in consumable nuggets, spaced in regular increments, almost “pre-chewed” for easy digestion.

That is not this blog.  Most of my ideas are half-baked, I traffic in random oddities, memes that fascinate me and the occasional “deep thought”.

image from Nick Today

I am sorta more the “hamster wheel” blogger, posting just to keep myself (the hamster) amused and to keep the wheel spinning.

So it was a bit out of character this past October when I popped out a series.  I had some time to wonder & wander, which led to this odd post All Your Souls Are Belong to Us: odyssey, fluidity, life worlds.  The more I played with this, the more I hungered to gain a taste of what the future feast might be like – out of that came this series, focussed on where things might be in 100 years:

• Playing With My Crystal Ball: An Interpolated View - Signs of Looming Extinction
• Playing With My Crystal Ball: An Interpolated View - A Species Goes Extinct
• Playing With My Crystal Ball: An Extrapolated View - How Legacy Organizations Will View Ministry, Incorporated
• Playing With My Crystal Ball: An Extrapolated View - Ministry, Incorporated
• Playing With My Crystal Ball: Where I See The Future Starting From - We're backdrifters
• Playing With My Crystal Ball: Extrapolating & Interpolating

If you read through them, you’ll realize that I was unable to summarize them into some tidy model or 8-point plan or even some guideposts for the trail ahead.  But they have stayed in my wondering, with bits and pieces added to them over the last 4 months.

A few things connected over the last few weeks that led me to go back over some of the landscape – so here goes a little trip back to my crystal ball.

Maggie Dawn, who still holds the title for the most interesting person I have ever met in a horse stall, interviewed two faith leaders I respect immensely – Rowan Williams & John Sentamu.  These two sections just fascinated me:

“Human beings, by nature, always need a home,” said Archbishop Sentamu. “Whatever else happens to organised religion, if it’s providing a place of safety and identity, then future is very bright. If not, the future is bleak. The Church should be a home where the stranger finds love, and the lonely a welcome. When it loses those things, then it’s just an institution, and it’s bureaucratically passive. But organised religion is ambiguous. It can be a source of great good, or of evil.”

Archbishop Rowan continued, “If there is a future for organised religion, it’s because it offers a communal religion. The gospel mostly isn’t about individuals, but about living in co-operation. If you have a communal understanding of religion, sooner or later you begin to ask about how to hand on the experience. It’s never just a private spirituality. What the organisation itself looks like has already changed many times, and it will change again, maybe dramatically. But its purpose is this communal function, distilling and handing on.”

The tradition these two leaders are part of – Anglicanism – is where I grew up.  Far too often, it resembles some grand U.N. experiment or, more likely, a debating society.  It seems hell-bent right now on imploding, but it holds a special space among faith traditions as a group brave (or dumb) enough to try to hold tensions in challenging issues like identity, authority and language.  Given that context, their statements just floored me – Sentamu is so right that faith tradition can only hold future hope “if it’s providing a place of safety and identity.”  Williams comments are even more profound – in a stark contrast to the consumerist mindset that seems to have overwhelmed Western churchianity, Williams argues for “cooperation” and a communal expression.

The contrast is stark ideas captured in the recent Pew Religion study The Religious Landscape of the United States.  The study portrayed an American landscape where faith affiliation is in an ongoing churn, where faith is personal consumable and where the coming generations are fed up with way faith communities are so often unsafe.  It struck me that this was the end result of the “church shopping” POV that seems to have been at the center of American churchianity over the span of my lifetime.

The irony here is while faith communities have embraced this marketing/retailing mindset, many businesses are moving away from it.  Kevin Kelley is a thinker, author and pundit who I enjoy reading – his recent post Better Than Free captured some ideas around:

eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values.  I call them "generatives." A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.

He goes on to step through these 8 generative values: Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, Findability .  While Kelley’s context is the web2.0-y world, it strikes me that these values have a lot of meaning w’in faith communities.  Rather than spend so much time & resources focussing on excellence, growth and dated marketing schemes, there seems like there is such an opportunity for new life, for risk-taking and permission.

The gap here seems to be how current leaders in faith communities – leaders who paid to lead, but mainly leaders who are NOT paid ministers – how those leaders can move into places and dreams that are disruptive – even cannabilizing – from their current approach.  This led me to one of my fav thinkers – Chris Corrigan.  His post The mother map is just brimming with approaches and ideas for a new day, a way that communities and institutions can stretch and bend and even break.  At the beginning of his post, he makes an off-hand comments that just grabbed my imagination:

we have been drawing our maps was too linear. This is a map that charts the territory of working in long term, large scale change efforts within complex living systems.

In the time since October when I posted this series, my family & I have gotten very involved in a local faith community Journey Imperfect Faith Community.  It is truly a complex living system - the very essence of disorganized religion, of communal groping for meaning, of messy lives led by imperfect people who are trying our best to follow God in a Jesus way.  Being in this community has reminded me that the first rule of living each day is being awake, rising up, becoming alert:

Today I am so thankful for the friends – online & off, real & imaginary, God geek & tech geek – who are helping each other stay awake.