I had posted this during the last day of the Presbymergent CG meeting and have received very positive feedback thus far. I am opening it up for hopefully further conversation and exploration in order to gain a sense of common purpose in common language as PODS hopefully begin to gather and coordinate activities. This is its edited form. The original can be seen here, but with very little difference.
I have been involved in a discussion surrounding Presbymergent for over a year now. The term is a combination of ”Presbyterian” (as in Presbyterian USA) and ”emergent” as in emergent Christianity. As most nascent organizations of like-minded people, it has begun as something with a lot of energy, a lot of ideas, and ideas of structure, but no real structure until recently. But in a pragmatic way of looking at the world, structure is something that tends to follow clear ideas rather than come prior to it. So my own Presbyterianism, a denomination named after its political structure rather than a founder (Lutheran) or a theology (Baptist) or ecclesiology (Catholic), causes a continual problem. Organizational structure comes prior to clarity of good ideas and that structure assumes that it has already been formed by good ideas; or, it has been formed with good enough ideas to persist.
So what happens if we still have the same political structure, but the ideas that formed it create problems with the culture that now exists? What happens is that new ideas have to fit within the confines of the political structure which is assumed to be at the very least satisfying to those who persist in the denomination. The evaluative question I ask is rather simple: what is working? But this is always rooted in clear ideas. And away the wheel spins once more.
Presbymergent is a group of more or less like-minded Presbyterians who recently gathered in the form of a co-ordinating group asking this essential question: what is working? I did not go to the meeting due to many other concerns with work that kept me home. Nonetheless I continued to listen and read what others were processing during the meeting. My question always came back to another one related to ”what is working?” and that was, ”why this and why now?”
So I pushed people a bit, critiqued a bit (and from someone from the outside looking in this is always problematic and seems a little intrusive), and engaged people who were there with this fundamental question. Thus, in a wonderfully open-source kind of spontaneous dialogue this afternoon with Landon, Chad, and Fritz, I reached a point of clarity not based on my thoughts, but on the thoughts of others. I had posted a twitter post yesterday that read ”finish this sentence: presbymergent is…” After a good hour or so of pretty intense Socratic dialogue, minds met and broke through some pretty palpable cognitive dissonance with this little statement I cooked up to synthesize the discussion:
Presbymergent are followers of Christ who seek continual reform of existing church structures through dynamic, open, and intentionally critical systems.
Let me unpack some of this since the terms are loaded with a lot.
1) ”are followers of Christ” indicates the source and reason for why people would engage in anything to do with the church. When we cease to be faithful to the revelation of Christs redemption, and when we cease to practice due diligence in following his witness through our words and deeds, we simply lose that which makes us distinctly Christian in the world. I am intentional with the word ””are”” as well. This is not a concept or an ideology. This is a group of people who make choices and act on them.
2) ”who seek continual reform of existing church structures” means that there is simply nothing in this world that human beings conceive that is complete and there is nothing that humans say or do that does not change. Change is not a political slogan and never should have been. It is a fundamental and irreducible construct of human being and human sociation. When we resist change, we are not only losing faith in the calling to which Christ demands of us, we are resisting the very core of what it means to be human. The structures which are constitutive and regulative of the Body of Christ are fallible and so, they are mutable. This is inclusive of not only political structures by which law, order, and social norms are established and reinforced, but of class, gender, sexual orientation, race, culture, ability, and linguistic structures that create assumed boundaries for social and theological construction. These norms are always in flux. Thus it can only be demanded that such frail creatures sustained by an undeserved grace from God, who seek to become more like God through the work of the Spirit that calls the people to God together and which founds the church itself, should understand that all human systems of organization are equally frail, incomplete, and change relative to the working of the living Spirit of God.
3) ”through dynamic, open, and intentionally critical systems” is a call for basic principles of organization that are regulated in and through change. While it is simply a necessity that structures of organization exist that are clear and conducive to getting work done, creating immutable systems is restrictive of the principles of the first clauses in this statement. By ”systems” I mean those of communication, team work, collaborative exercises, task forces, activism, etc. These are important organizational principles that should be open and collaborative in order to ensure that the idolatry of faith in an immutable politics is mitigated if not ideally expunged from the process.
I am employing a grounded theory approach to visioning. In itself it is imperfect and requires testing and development, but it is a clear starting point. What I think is important is that Presbymergent have a consensus vision upon which its members fundamentally agree. Once the vision is identified, then specific problems may be addressed that such a vision can pragmatically correct within any social, political, or geographic boundaries identified by willing and able actors. Reporting the outcomes of these ideas through the various means as noted in #3 above are precisely how those items that need to change in #2 above can be identified and influenced.
I welcome continued conversation around these ideas in order to move toward some kind of a consensus vision to which each of our local areas of influence may soon reap the benefit of our sustained flow of energy to follow Christ in this unique calling.
About dtatusko
The best thinking comes from dialogue, and y’all have generated an exceptionally concise way to articulate the Presbymergent ethos. Here I was thinking twitter was just an annoyance…
I believe that the direction Presbymergent seeks is a good one and I’m all on board with that. I just don’t see how this vision differs a lot from semper reformanda and perhaps it shouldn’t. The extant church needs to reform some of its practices to better speak to the 21st century world and so I pray that Presbymergent can be the Martin Luther of this century.
I am a retired Presbyterian minister who has always found the church to be reformed and in need of further reforming. I applaud what I think are the intentions of the Presbymergent group, but when I read the above they are not clear to me. This sounds like lawyer language. Can it not be said, for the consumption of lay minds, in a few very simple and straightforward sentences?
@David Lawrence – You’re right (at least I hope you are) that the vision of Presbymergent doesn’t differ much from semper reformanda — in fact, I think that’s the unique thing that we, as Presbyterians, have to offer to the Emerging Church conversation from our reformed heritage. As far as being the ML of this century, I’d be happy if we could just be the “Presbymergent” of this century
@Bert Johnson – Not surprisingly, we get that a lot. I think the lack of “clarity” that you perceive stems in many ways from us being authentic to the “mergent” side of who we are, and the recognition that language and word choice are important, but limiting things. The moment something is “crystalized” with words, it also tends toward institutionalization and irrelevance.
That said, we’re also “presby” so our unique challenge is to hold these two things in tension. The end result (I hope) will be that yes, Presbymergent will attempt to articulate what our intentions are in “a few very simple and straightforward sentence” but there’s a really good chance that those sentences aren’t going to be as simple and straightforward as some might like.
If we look to Jesus as our example, sometimes he was straightforward, and sometimes after he finished speaking everyone said “huh???” I certainly don’t think that we aspire to be confusing, but neither do we aspire to being placed in a small box, wrapped with a pretty bow, and mass-marketed to the church.
And actually, I think Landon, Chad, Fritz, and Drew did a pretty excellent job of coming up with a short, concise statement of who we are. I hope we come up with lots of them, and keep working at it. Sometimes truth comes through simplicity, but sometimes it also comes through multiplicity.
I agree with Bert Johnson; I think the above mission statement is rather obscure. As a Presbyterian, I value clarity in mission statements and thus I find the Presbymergent mission statement lacking. I agree with the Presbymergents in that I do think that the PCUSA is in need of reform. However, I don’t see how creating another organization is the best solution, especially if said organization is not going to be more clear about its aims.
Naomi — you’re certainly welcome to value clarity in mission statements. But I think it’s also important to acknowledge that there are other points of view that are also valid. I, for one, find that mission statements as a whole are sometimes limiting and confining precisely because of the clarity that they often strive for.
But I do agree with you that “creating another organization” is not going to be the salvation of the denomination. That’s a mantle that unfortunately gets thrust upon Presbymergent quite often, but it was certainly never our own intent for ourselves. I think most of us would just love to be part of the ongoing conversation about the need for reform, and let God use us in whatever way we can be used.
Of course, if we had a concise mission statement, even God might not be able to divert us from it… I wonder if mission statements can become conceptual idols, too?
Hopefully what you’ll see from Presbymergent this year (and something we discussed at length in the cluster/group I was a part of at the CG gathering) is the emergence of a “Conceptual Document” as an alternative to a Mission statement. I’ll try to blog more about that here in the weeks to come.
Daivd, Naomi, & Bert:
First, thanks for the input. My idea is to have as much input from as many interested people as possible in order to achieve something of a consensus vision that we can all hold onto.
Clarity is what I was trying to engage with the statement that is above. It is also why I wanted to post it here for further input. I was going for one sentence, but I think that defining things is helpful. Often what happens is that we are all trying to say the same thing, but with different language. Semantics kills progress and I want to try to avoid that here.
My goal here is to define this particular group of Presbyterians in terms of function in order that we can actually put into practice the idea of “always reforming”, but in a way that we can hopefully move to a discussion of problems that we want to address and ways that we can work together to solve them.
So…
What might help is if I can get a sense of what is unclear and/or what a more clear statement looks like. I was hoping that unpacking this initial stab at a mission statement would go for that purpose. I think as a group what I hear is that it is kind of ambiguous and the hope is for order to emerge naturally out of that ambiguity. What I am trying to do is be a little more intentional about getting order through clarity without killing creativity at the same time.
Thanks!
Old guy, new to this discussion, newbie as to Twitter, but deeply committed to “The church reformed and always being reformed.” (Emphasis on the passive voice!)
Questions: Who is this Christ whom we profess to follow? Is he the Christ of the anti-Arian Council of Nicea? Perhaps even more importantly for our time, is he the Christ of the anti-Pelagian Council of Whidby? How is the living Lord present with us, among us, and how is his life, death, and resurrection efficacious for us and our world today?
If the church is the body of Christ (structure), and is to indeed fulfill his mission (system), it seems to me that we need to discuss these fundamental issues about the nature of Christ and HIS mission in order to address the structures and systems from which they are derived.
Herein is our unique Presbyterian voice in the discussion of the emregent Church, that is even now being reformed: who is Christ for us today, and how best to re-present him?
Form follows function.
You might like reading about OODA loops:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_Loop
In general, any system operating with many contacts to a rapidly changing environment will operate with more stability using feedback loops and constant corrections.