Lifelong Learning @ LPTS

Writing Workshop offered at LPTS

2011-07-07T16:25:00.002-04:00

THE WRITING PASTOR

Apply for this tuition-free workshop designed particularly for pastors and church leaders who are committed to the ways writing can be a spiritual practice, an expression of the pastoral imagination, and a service to the church and the world. From articles and reviews to curricula and books, from memoirs and poetry to blogs and children’s novels, the possibilities for the committed writer are wild and wonderful. In a small group setting, participants will have the opportunity to develop their skills, share ideas and drafts of work, explore possibilities for publication, and—most of all—nurture their passion for writing, while residing and working on the 67-acre park-like campus of Louisville Seminary.

The leader is Dr. J. Bradley Wigger who teaches both writing and education at Louisville Seminary. He has written for general, church, and academic audiences alike, including numerous articles and essays, books for scholars as well as for children. He was Consulting Editor for the Jossey-Bass Faith and Families book series and for many years he was the Editor of the journal, Family Ministry. Most recently he has been studying creativity and the imagination in children (as part of a research project for the University of Oxford) and hopes to write his next book on the subject.

Louisville Seminary, in partnership with The Collegeville Institute, offers this workshop tuition free, and will cover room and board at the Seminary. Participants will provide their own travel expenses to and from the workshop. Those who join the workshop will be expected to reside at Laws Lodge on the seminary campus throughout the entire week.

The program is limited to 12 participants | Application deadline is July 31.

FOR MORE INFORMATION GO TO:

http://www.lpts.edu/Academic_Programs/writing_pastor.asp

The Three C's of Minister Support

2011-06-29T11:04:00.000-04:00

Small Peer learning Group in Action
(2010 Emotional Intelligence Seminar)

I keep trying to remember the three "C's" of clergy support needs. This morning I spotted the old book on my shelf and looked it up: Barbara Gilbert, Who Ministers to Ministers? (Alban, 1987). Here's a quote from the pertinent paragraph.

"One study...proposed the 'Three C's' as basics: Comfort, Clarification, Confrontation. We need people whom we can trust with our pain and uncertainty and who will comfort us, often by just being good listeners. We need people who help us clarify by asking the right questions and pointing us to significant resources. We need people who care about us enough to lovingly confront us with that which we don't see or have been avoiding."

As we keep working to find ways to build peer learning groups for ministers throughout their working lives, these keep cropping up for me as helpful in identifying what we need and what works.

Emotional Intelligence Seminar 2011!

2011-06-09T16:52:00.000-04:00

David Harris (front left) facilitating a small group, EQ-HR 2010.

http://www.lpts.edu/Academic_Programs/Emotional_Intelligence_11.asp

Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary is once again offering its very popular course, “Emotional Intelligence and Human Relations,” an intensive and highly experiential week-long opportunity for strengthening leadership skills for congregational life. The course will take place on the campus of Louisville Seminary, August 22-27, 2011, and accommodations can be reserved on the Seminary campus at Laws Lodge.

Participants can expect to:

• Improve awareness of concepts of emotional intelligence and the impact of emotional intelligence on the participant and all with whom he or she interacts.

• Improve ability to identify, articulate, and reflect on various phenomena of group life and group process.

• Improve understanding of how one is impacted by a group and one’s own impact on a group.

• Increase skills in pastoral leadership for lay and clergy.

• Develop heightened awareness of the importance of constructive behavioral information about self and others as leaders.

• Develop heightened awareness of the presence of God’s Spirit in group life and ability to identify and reflect on that presence.

• Recognize the redemptive possibilities within groups.

A majority of time will be shared in small, unstructured groups of 10 to 12 people with two experienced facilitators. As group life unfolds, participants focus on their feelings and behaviors in the here-and-now in order to learn about the impact of their behavior on others through the appropriate use of feedback and experimentation. The work will draw on five areas of emotional intelligence as keys to improving leadership effectiveness for faith based leaders.

In preparation, participants will complete the BarOn survey on emotional intelligence. They will also identify up to 20 people who know them well and who are willing to complete the inventory for them. What results is a 25-page printout of one’s Emotional Intelligence Quotient (EQ). This will be for the participant’s eyes only and will provide the participant with personal items to explore in their small group. The $182.00 cost of the inventory is included in the tuition fee. Past participants have described this workshop as a life-changing event in their lives.

Leadership

Roy M. Oswald

Author, seminar leader, and former senior consultant for the Alban Institute, Oswald is currently Executive Director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence and Human Relations Skills. He has provided leadership for hundreds of conferences and training events in the U.S. and Canada. A variety of denominations have called on Oswald to focus on the pastoral role and the dynamics of parish leadership. He also frequently consults with local congregations and judicatories where his planning model utilizes norms, myths, and meaning statements from a church’s past. Oswald is identified with research into the transitions clergy make when they enter parishes for the first time and for clergy in longer pastorates. More recently, he has headed studies of the candidacy process, leadership needs of small congregations, and new methodology for assessing ministries using clergy/lay teams. His most recent book focuses on the Eight Polarities a Thriving Congregation Manages Well. (2007)

David R. Sawyer

David Sawyer is Professor of Ministry teaching in the areas of church leadership and administration, and directs the Lifelong Learning and Doctor of Ministry programs at Louisville Seminary. He has forty years experience as a pastor, associate pastor, interim pastor, new church development pastor, judicatory executive staff, and in group facilitation, human systems consultation, and workshop leadership. He is author of Work of the Church: Getting the Job Done in Boards and Committees (Judson Press, 1987), and Hope in Conflict: Discovering Wisdom in Congregational Turmoil (Pilgrim Press, 2007).

How Does a 21st Century Leader Respond to Crisis?

2011-03-29T14:41:00.000-04:00

Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony
Picture from AP

The CEO of Sony, Sir Howard Stringer was in a wheelchair heading for a hospital in New York City when the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. Stringer had just arrived in New York City for emergency surgery on a slipped disk in his back, and he postponed the surgery for a day to get on the phone with his senior staff to rescue and protect workers in Japan. The disaster planning was quickly overcome by the extent of the tragedy, but having a creative and capable group of executives in place, he was able to turn it over to them and head for the surgical suite.

That sounded to me like a leader who has nimble and collaborative structures in place to respond to the changes and chances of the 21st century, so I did a little research on him.

When Sir Howard moved from head of Sony’s American subsidiary to CEO of Sony in 2005, he flew to all points of the globe to rally Sony’s scattered enterprises to a turnaround plan.

“As part of that plan he has set out to streamline and reorganize Sony's core electronics business, which accounts for 70 percent of the company's $64 billion in sales. More crucially, he is trying to overhaul Sony's culture to become more internally collaborative and much more software-savvy. And he is tackling these challenges at an enterprise that is so large and diverse that it simultaneously produces some of the coolest gizmos on the planet (like Sony's Location Free TV viewer or its latest CyberShot camera), yet appears lumbering and clueless in other aspects (think of the faded glories of the Walkman or the Sony Connect downloading service).” (Richard Siklos and Martin Fackler, “Sony’s Road Warrior,” New York Times, Business, Published: May 28, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/business/yourmoney/28sony.html, accessed 3-21-11)

That collaborative, horizontal culture came in for its biggest test when the earthquake and Tsunami hit Japan. Stringer was pleased with the resiliency of his Japanese employees. “Engineers at the flooded plant, while waiting for help to arrive, had started to build homemade boats using office furniture and salvaged tsunami debris, using them to bring food to still stranded townspeople” (Brooks Barnes, “A Disaster Spares the Heart of Sony,” New York Times, Monday, March 21, 2011, p. B6).

As I read this article and researched Stringer, I thought about heads of institutions who fall back on their hero-savior roles and attempt to navigate these financial hard times all by themselves. Often they have caring and competent colleagues and workers who could make the decision-making more effective; sometimes they have avoided hiring or keeping mature and helpful team members in place. And I thought about all the times that governing boards fall back on hierarchical approaches that lead to stilted decisions.

The church at local, regional and national levels makes a big mistake when it thinks it is following “good management practices” with hero-savior leaders and hierarchical controls. And that mistake stifles the church’s ability to adapt to the rapidly changing needs and emerging concerns in the contemporary environment. Truly good management practice would install or improve structures that are more complex, horizontal and collaborative in order to navigate the turbulent waters of the early 21st century. President Obama put this very succinctly, (quoted on NPR ‘s Morning Edition, “Obama Agency Review Looks to Snip Red Tape,” March 24, 2011)—“We can’t win the future with a government built for the past.”

Taking up the cross in Lent

2011-03-18T10:57:00.001-04:00

I've always struggled with Jesus' words: "take up your cross and follow me." Hearing my pastor, Jane Larsen Wigger talk about it at the beginning of Lent this year set me on a new perspective (my own, not Jane's necessarily).

What if "the way of the cross" is the way of weakness and vulnerability? What if Catherine Keller is right (On the Mystery) in pointing to the power of God shown in the cross--the ultimate and infinite vulnerability of love. Keller quotes John Caputo: "The perverse core of Christianity lies in being a weak force." (Keller, p. 84).

What if the suffering that is required in taking up one's cross is broader and deeper than simply death, but involves a life of vulnerability?

Daniel Day Williams included in his powerful description of Love (The Spirit and Forms of Love, 1968) the notion of suffering, by which he meant "the capacity to be acted upon, to be changed, moved, transformed by the action of or in relation to another." (p. 117). To love, he said, is to freely put oneself in relation to another free person and allow that commitment to limit and change one's own life and freedom.

Watching the lovely underrated film "Love and Other Drugs" brought this point home to me. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a self-centered jerk who eventually decides to love Anne Hathaway's character in her struggle with Parkinson's disease. "I can't ask you to take this on," she pleads. He responds with something like "You're not asking--I'm offering." In his free choice to stay with her in her obvious progressive disability, he suffers the limitation and transformation of love. In that moment, I think he has taken up his cross!

From Montreat's Blog--update on two conferences!

2011-03-17T13:08:00.000-04:00

Spring Greetings from Montreat!

Important Information to Use and Share

Spring is finally here, and along with thefirst blooms and balmy breezes of the season come special spring programs at Montreat Conference Center that are particularly designed to empower you and the pastors with whom you are in ministry! Please forward this email, share with the pastors in your presbytery, and encourage all who might benefit to take advantage of these timely learning opportunities! The time to register is now!

For more information and registration, go to http://www.montreat.org/current/

Equipping Your Pastors for Ministry

The Solo Pastor to Multi Staff Seminar
May 8-13, 2011
Can you identify pastors in your presbytery who started out serving as solo pastors, but were then called to ministry in large churches? This transition, which is often difficult, leads pastors to ask hard questions: What do I focus on? What should I do differently? Why are there different expectations? Why do I always feel like I'm “stepping on people’s toes?” This seminar will help those pastors discern their gifts and skills and successfully weave them into the ministry of their new position. This seminar is also helpful for those who are considering this migration. Leaders are Harris Schultz and Deborah Fortel. If you know pastors who might gain fresh insight and new tools for ministry by attending this seminar, please urge them to register online today!

The Hope in Conflict Seminar
May 8-13, 2011

Several years ago, when we had some conflicts with staff at Montreat (yes, it happens here, too), one of our senior staff members helped us define the conflict as “a difference of opinion about something that really matters.” What a hopeful thing! No matter which side of the fence you're on, it matters! Believe it or not, the best part of any conflict is the people. They clearly care. They're not apathetic. They are engaged. So, how do our congregations in conflict work through that conflict and find the hope? This is an opportunity for pastors to engage in conversation and learn from David Sawyer, author of the book, Hope In Conflict, available at Montreat Books and Gifts. Reserve your place at this timely event, and please share it with others who might benefit. Online registration is still available.

SPRING BIBLE STUDY AT LPTS

2011-03-01T16:41:00.000-05:00

Rev. Janice Catron

"EXODUS" - - A series of six presentations led by Janice Catron, Pastor, John Knox Presbyterian Church of Louisville

Can you remember one event that helped more than any other to shape who you are today? For the people of Israel, that event was the Exodus--an experience to pivotal that echoes of it run throughout the New Testament as well. The Spring Lay Bible Class will explore this remarkable story and its meaning for Christians today by focusing on its main themes, which include grace, providence, deliverance, and the care of one another.

April 13, 20, 27, May 4, 11, 18.
Wednesdays, 10:30 a.m to Noon
Laws Lodge

The cost for this course is $40. Register online at www.lpts.edu/lifelong-learning. E-mail or call David Sawyer or Laura March at the seminary for answers to your questions about this or any Lifelong Learning events. 800-264-1839.

Embrace Sagehood!

2011-02-11T09:07:00.000-05:00

Caspar Luiken
"The Wise Woman of Tekoa"
Hosts: Pitts Theology Library,
Digital Image Archive
(Candler School of Theology, Emory University

If you’ve been around church much you’ve heard of the major players in the history of the Bible. You’ve heard about the prophets, you’ve heard about the priests and you’ve heard about the kings. But we don’t talk much about the fourth group of major influences in religious history. The sages. A sage, of course, is a wise person, an elder in the community, one who brings deep knowledge and experience to bear on the problems of today. Even though the sages wrote a major part of the Old Testament and even some of the New Testament, we’ve forgotten them.

Who are these sages? The most famous one was Solomon, of course, who was also a king. Many of the wisdom books are attributed to him because he asked only for wisdom when he became king.

The sages were advisers or counselors, not just to rulers but also to families and whole communities. They were the teachers of the young, and much of the wisdom literature is the lessons they taught and wrote down. And we know they were both women and men (like the wise woman of Tekoa, 1 Samuel 24:13). Sages drew from the order and demands of God’s creation (systems, process) recognized the enigmas and dailiness of life (an ironic worldview), and knew God through deep mystical experiences, often beyond and beneath the law and the temple. We also know that their wisdom was not just based on the commandments and the Torah, but also drew from the wisdom of the cultures around them, such as Egyptian and Babylonian cultures who also had sages.

But it seems to me in our own time and culture, with all the emphasis on youth and celebrity and the goofy shallowness of reality TV, it would be good to acknowledge the importance of wisdom and to encourage us to embrace our own inner “sage.”

A contemporary sage is a great southern writer who just died last week, Reynolds Price. He is famous for his novels and his poems, and for his teaching other writers at Duke University for a long time. His stories are drawn from the depth of human nature and help make sense of the world around us. But his real sage-hood was shown in how he approached a major catastrophe of his life. In his mid-fifties he was stricken with a tumor that wrapped itself around his spinal cord. The surgeries that successfully removed the tumor also left him paralyzed from the waist down and in constant, unbearable, fiery pain. The way he worked through that catastrophe is what makes him a sage in my mind. He tells the story of that journey in his little book A Whole New Life (Scribner, 1993). Before his illness he had written 12 novels in 30 years of work. In the ten years after his ordeal he wrote 13 books. The wisdom that allowed him to rework and reframe his life has about three things in common with the sages of the Bible. First, he had a deep and abiding sense of the presence of a loving God. He had experienced down through the years moments of mystical clarity that convinced him of God’s positive regard for himself and all creatures, and that carried him through a lot. Second, he had studied the world and human nature enough to know the practical wisdom of how things work and how to adapt what he already knew of himself and others to his life in a wheelchair. And third, he accepted the reality of community, the combined wisdom of good physicians, wonderful friends, helpful colleagues and invaluable care-givers. Overall he counted himself blessed and his fans have called him wise. Describing his experience, he wrote:

"If I were called on to value honestly my present life beside my past—the years from 1933 till ’84 against eh years after—I’d have to say that, despite an enjoyable fifty-year start, these recent years since full catastrophe have gone still better. They’ve brought more in and sent more out—more live and care, more knowledge and patience, more work in less time. (p. 179)"

So I would challenge everyone here to aim to be a sage in your own unique way. Gather your years of experience, your storehouse of faith, your knowledge of how the world works, your own sense of yourself as a worthy child of God, and work out this present chapter of your life. A sage, a wise woman, a wise man, an elder of the community, can apply her or his knowledge and experience to your own life and make it a life of blessing. Be blessed yourself with your own confidence in your wisdom and goodness. Bless others with your wise and calm perspective to see what is not but what could come into being with enough practical faith and hope to make it so.

Biblical Warrent (with interpretation) for Collaborative Leadership

2011-02-02T11:09:00.000-05:00

Captain Chelsey Sullenberger
(from Wikepedia)

Growing up in a Presbyterian church in a little town in southern Illinois, I was shaped by experiences of shared leadership. Since one or another of my extended family served on the governing board constantly, I overhead lots of stories of the excitements and difficulties among the leaders and the pastors. It was just assumed in that Presbyterian culture ministers had to work with the elders and that elders were important in the life of the congregation. Later on as a young pastor wanting to be up-to-date, I fell into the fads of leadership of the 1970’s and 1980’s which cast pastors in roles of management and executive leadership. Those fads fit nicely my graduate work in management and organization development. When the 1990’s rolled around, the fashion for leadership shifted to the term “visionary” by which the leader was imagined to be the head of the organization, where the eyes are placed up on the head so that the leader could “see.” It worked well as far as it went, but I can see now, the mistakes I did make arose from failing to make full partnership with the elders and members of the congregation. For someone like me who fancies himself a student of “leadership,” all of this shifting and changing makes for a story with shifts and tensions and deep ironies.

As you probably know the Bible is not necessarily a source of absolute and eternal answers, but offers us insights and inspiration to fit our current circumstances. So it is on the topic of leadership. There are lots of stories of leaders in the Bible, some good examples and some really bad examples. The only place I’ve seen the actual word “leadership” is in one of the lists of “gifts of the Spirit” needed for the church in the middle of the first century of the Common Era. For inclusion in the list, the Apostle Paul chose a nautical term which has been variously translated as leaders, administrators, government. There’s a lot to make of the word, which in the original Greek language is kubernesis. The literal meaning of the word is a nautical term for pilot or “steersman,” or “helmsman,” the one who handles the tiller, who provides the direction for all. It implies the kind of wise and experienced direction or governance needed for safe travel to get the ship where it needs to go. The gift of governance is given among the many gifts needed, including proclaiming the Word which was the sole domain of the original Apostles. Nonetheless, every human organization needs some order and direction in order to carry out its purpose to expand awareness of God’s grace and love as known through Jesus. And the overarching reason for the gifts of the Spirit is given in the introduction to this essay “To each person is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.”

The problem with this word kubernesis is that it can mean different kinds of leadership and we have to interpret it. In contemporary American organizations we have what I call a “myth of leadership” by which leadership is what is done by a single person at the “top” of an organizational chart, who directs all the operations without relying on the help of subordinates or other members of the organization (Preskill and Brookfield, Learning as a Way of Leadership, 2009, p. 3). The leader in this American myth is all knowing, all powerful, everywhere present, and un-moved by the changes of time or the emotions of people (sounds like a description of God, doesn’t it—except I’m not sure I believe in that kind of God, either). Such a leader has all the charm of Donald Trump and all of the sensitivity of Leona Helmsly. One management expert has noted that the top-down, control and command style of leadership is the “default mode” for the way Americans expect leaders to behave. If it is the default, popular tradition of leadership (Sharon Deloz Parks, Leadership Can be Taught), it’s no wonder that even some “experts” in leadership got caught up in it.

But interpreting kubernesis in that straight-line, top-down, singlular way misses an important re-interpretation of the word taken in the 20th century. As scientists began to make sense of the new insights of the work of Einstein and other physicists, and realized how everything is interconnected, both machines and organizations, they discovered that there are circles or loops of influence at work all around. They took that circular and inter-related understanding of the way the world keeps itself in order and created new science called cybernetics. That term came directly from the Greek word kubernesis. Cybernetics, when applied to human organizations, helps us see that it is not enough to see organizations and organisms operate in simple cause and effect, organizational charts with straight line relationships. When we step back to see how there are also circular, relational dynamics, guided by great feedback loops of information and emotion, we can explain a lot more about how we work together in organizations, even the church. Thanks to cybernetics, it is now clear that a human organization is not a simple machine, but more like a living organism in which every part is connected to every other part and leadership is a shared enterprise. With the rise of cybernetics, the old myth of the lone, all powerful leader at the top no longer makes sense to us.

With those newer understandings of how things work, investigators in the1980’s started looking at crash landings of several major large passenger aircraft. Seeing how the circles of relationship work or don’t work helped them to find that a common factor in many disasters was a lack of communication among the members of the cockpit crew. Many black box recordings from those crashes contained stilted conversations in which the captain would not or could not ask for or hear the information, suggestions and even warnings of other officers on the flight deck. Without all of the resources available these captains made decisions that took the lives of hundreds of people including themselves. That was due to the myth of the “sky god captain” who had absolute power. From that point on, the aviation industry demythologized the sky-god-captains and a new culture of leadership in aviation was born. It is called “crew resource management.” CRM uses all of the loops and feed-back mechanisms of cybernetics to insure that in moments of crisis everyone in the cockpit of an airliner become leaders and every officer has major responsibility for the safety of the aircraft—not just the captain. In case you’re wondering, Captain Chelsey Sullenberger (Sulley) who safely piloted the disabled airplane into the Hudson River two years ago was himself a Crew Resource Management expert. While the media tried to make him a single-handed hero, he acknowledged publicly that it was a full team effort that saved the lives of 155 passengers and perhaps countless on-the-ground individuals as well.

So to interpret Paul’s use of the word kubernesis for the 21st century we begin to see that the pilot can no longer be a lone, objective controller of the workings of a ship or an organization. He or she is an integral part of the ship as a whole, including the ships mechanisms, the ship’s crew, the resources aboard the ship, the information available to the steersman regarding weather and navigational directions. The steersman also has a set of feelings and hopes and dreams that also play into the loops of information about how to steer the ship and where the ship actually goes. In that fashion, the First Century picture of the helmsman is filled out by the 20th and 21st century image of the cybernetic leader. The winds and change and uncharted waters of this present age require more complex ways. Cybernetic leadership is collaborative leadership in contrast to command and control leadership. One source has defined it as “forming and sustaining relationships that lead to results in the common good.” (Preskill and Brookfield, p. 4). Instead of the top-down all powerful leader we have a leader who listens and shares. Instead of the visionary leader who does the seeing for the organization, we see that the leader is one who helps the organization to see where they need to go and what they need to do (Otto Scharmer, Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges (Cambridge, MA: Society for Organizational Learning, 2007), 136).

To check this interpretation with other scriptural information, I would like to note that in the synoptic Gospels Jesus is hardly a loner, or a top down leader. He created a team of disciples, included more and more people in his circle, and was physically absent when his followers turned the world upside down. Paul was himself a collaborator, not a dictator. He found the human resources and invited, trained, nurtured and guided them to build Christian communities around the Mediterranean Sea.

Leaders of the 21st Century: I commend to you this new image of leadership by relationship, leadership that takes all the resources around it into consideration, leadership that brings a whole team to work to achieve the common good. I think this is the leadership that is gifted by the Spirit of God for this time.

Remembering Reyolds Price

2011-01-21T15:37:00.000-05:00

Reynolds Price, Novelist
(picture courtesy of Duke University)

I note with sadness the death of Reynolds Price, one of my favorite novelists. He carried the second half of the 20th century as the essential North Carolina storyteller and thus Southern Writer. His prose was always a delight to the ear and eye, his characters always carefully observed and developed, his description of culture and family and human nature in his particular time and place always universal. For me he articulated a both a deep sense of the irony of life and an abiding conviction that human life is precious to the creator.

He has helped me to articulate my sense of human nature as essentially good but prone to slip into destructiveness. For example he referred to many of his characters as "decent outlaws"--a phrase I have often used to describe several of the characters of the Hebrew Scriptures such as Jacob the Patriarch, and implicitly myself and other members of my tribe.

I was consistently drawn to and warmed by his underlying spirituality, drawn from his own experiences of mystical awareness. In his book Letter to a Man in the Fire (Scribner, 1999, p. 27), he wrote:

"Starting on a warm afternoon in the summer of 1939, when I was wandering alone in the pine woods by our suburban house in piedmont North Carolina, I've experienced moments of sustained calm awareness that subsequent questioning has never discounted. These moments, which recurred at unpredictable and widely spaced intervals till some thirteen years ago, still seem to me undeniable manifestations of the Creator's benign, or patiently watchful, interest in particular stretches of my life, though perhaps not all of it. And each of these moments--never lasting for more than seconds but seeming, in retrospect, hours long--has taken the form of sudden and entirely unsought breakings-in upon my consciousness of a demonstration that all of visible and invisible nature (myself included) is a single reality, a single thought from a central mind."

Because I am one who relishes experiences of the Holy, I have appreciated the consummate word-smithing of Reynolds Price that has helped me make sense of them in light of the Christian tradition.

Not having Reynolds Price alive and writing is a loss!

Thinking Again about Missional Ecclesiology

2011-01-12T11:57:00.000-05:00

Reading the proposed "New Form of Government" of the PC(USA) again in preparation for last weekend's Lay Diploma School in Western Kentucky, the starkness of the missional ecclesiology hit me harder than before. I'll vote for it because I believe we need to streamline the denomination's constitution and this is a fair and balanced approach to that task. I'm sorry we have bought the missional perspective as the primary model, however.

What struck me this time is the heavy emphasis on hierarchical thinking in the missional model. My concern is that missional theology is based firmly on neo-orthodox doctrine, whose notions of revelation are carefully argued from the scriptural witness to Jesus as Christ and who avoided fundamentalist orthodoxy by including the response of the faithful through the witness of the Holy Spirit. Neo-orthodoxy grew in the soil of European rationalism of the 20th century with its assumption of male dominance and hierarchical order. Without question these assumptions and values fit nicely into the traditional Presbyterian ethos as reflected in the constitutional documents already, so it's hard to argue against them. The sense of hierarchy is there in the traditional words: Christ is Lord of All and everything is done in "obedience" to Christ.

I only wish we could have more openness to more relational terms and more breadth in our theological underpinnings. I long for my denomination to recognize that the richness of human experience, particularly the witness of the creation, and the wisdom of science and the humanities play a partnering role in understanding our faith. Other 20th century theologians such as the process, liberation and black and womanist theologians speak more from the heart of the human experience and approach hierarchy with more hard-earned skepticism.

I wish Presbyterians would wake up to the movement of that same Holy Spirit calling us from the margins of the 21st century to really (and I mean really) reform our practices of governing and our theological assumptions. I keep praying!

Chief Chaska and the Multicultural Church

2010-12-14T11:01:00.001-05:00

Chaska and Little Crow

An article in today's New York Times reminded me of how the church interacts with its culture. It told of renewed efforts to have Chief Chaska pardoned. Minnesotans know the story of the Dakota revolt that led to capture and conviction of over 300 Dakota men for the violence. Lincoln Pardoned most of them and 38 of them were hanged in a mass execution in Mankato MN December 26,1862. Chaska (his nickname--and a town near Minneapolis carries that name) had been pardoned but was slipped into the execution group, perhaps because he had been defended by a European-American woman.

The combination of racism and sexism with the overarching narrative of manifest destiny (by which the European Americans assumed their absolute privilege to take over all of North America and eradicate any "dusky" people who got in their way) was much a part of the culture and also the faith of the church on the 19th century frontier.

Yet there is another side of the story in church history. Presbyterians were part of the effort to befriend the Dakota people, many of whom became Christians. The Pond brothers were missionaries from the revival movements on the East Coast who moved to Minnesota out of their concern for the well-being of the Native Americans there. I served for two years as interim pastor of one of the churches they founded, Oak Grove Presbyterian in Bloomington MN. The story of the Mankato executions and echoes of the Presbyterian mission to the Dakota people are still alive there.

The church is usually multi-cultural. It absorbs and lives out many of the values of its context, and it also makes a prophetic stance against many of those values. It cannot be completely completely counter-cultural as some would wish because we are always people of our time and place. But the church's finest hours have always been those moments when it attracted lots of people of many cultures to its message and its practices and still found ways to encourage some critiques of cultures as well--including the dominant cultures and its oppressive ways.

In the story of the last moments of Chaska and 37 others, a hymn now in The Presbyterian Hymnal (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990, # 271) plays an important role. It has been told that on their walk from their cells to the scaffold, the condemned sang "Many and great, O God, Are Thy Things." It is a Dakota tune, titled "Lacquiparle" for the site of the mission where it was written. The words were adapted by missionary Joseph Renville who along with the Pond Brothers developed the alphabet and writing of the Dakota language there in southern Minnesota. On their way to die for the crime of protecting their land and their livelihood, Dakota men expressed their multi-cultural heritage with these words, translated, of course, into English:

"Many and great, O God, are thy things,
Maker of earth and sky;
Thy hands have set the heavens with stars,
Thy fingers spread the mountains and plains.
Lo at Thy word the waters were formed,
Deep seas obeyed Thy voice.

"Grant unto us communion with Thee,
Thou star abiding One;
Come unto us and dwell with us;
With Thee are found the gifts of life.
Bless us with life that has not end,
Eternal life with Thee."

A Plea for Diplomacy and Leadership in Politics

2010-10-29T11:17:00.001-04:00

My "senator of origin" is Everett McKinley Dirksen, Republican of Illinois. He was the Republican Leader of the senate when Republicans were chronically in the minority. I long for his stately manner, shock of white hair, mellifluous voice, poetic rhetoric, and willingness to sit down and talk to anybody about how to get something done for the good of the country, whether or not it was in the Republican Party's best interests. Here's quote from the Senate's obituary when he died in 1969, that catches the spirit I'm remembering:

"There are 100 diverse personalities in the U.S. Senate. Oh Great God. What an amazing and dissonant 100 personalities they are! What an amazing thing it is to harmonize them."

The people running for Senate today seem to me to be lacking in any sense of the "amazing." They're angry, pitifully immature, and reactive. I can't believe I'm longing for a this Republican throwback!

Of course living in Kentucky is especially hard for this kind of sensitivity. I know Illinois may not be that much better than Kentucky in its narrowness and racism, but I have a high view of my home state because of the politicians of my youth like Dirksen, Adlai Stevenson and Paul Simon.

Don't even get me started on another positive icon: Paul Wellstone of Minnesota!

Conflict Workshop in Cincinnati October 30

2010-10-13T13:47:00.001-04:00

Deborah and I are leading a one day workshop on "Hope in Conflict" for the Presbytery of Cincinnati, Saturday, October 30, 9-3:30, at Lakeside Presbyterian Church, 2690 Dixie Highway, Lakeside Park, KY 41017 (in northern Kentucky, suburb of Cincinnati). Church phone 859-341-1963. Directions to Lakeside are on the Presbytery and Church websites.

Registration: $10.00 per person /maximum $25 per church. Registration fee includes lunch. Checks payable to Presbytery of Cincinnati

Register through the Presbytery Office: Speak to Marian at 513-221-4850 OR Register through Lakeside Presbyterian Church: by e-mail to lakeside@lakesidechurch.org.

e-mail me for more information: dsawyer@lpts.edu. See our website at http://www.flourishingchurch.com/

Objectives for the Workshop

1. Establish in the Presbytery an ongoing learning environment about congregational conflict using the book as a learning tool.
2. Encourage a shift in perception that conflict is expected and potentially lifegiving for a congregation.
3. Learn tools of conflict utilization that can be used by any church leader to interpret conflict and learn from it.

Festival of Faiths and The Seminary Luncheon

2010-10-12T16:46:00.000-04:00

Two events directly related to Louisville Seminary are on tap for the 2010 Festival of Faiths with the theme of "Sacred Soil." This is an exciting way for LPTS to connect with the interfaith leaders of the community and commit to our Doors to Dialogue Initiative.

Monday, November 8, 2010, 7:30 am to 3 pm. Kentuckiana Interfaith Community Faith Leader’s Forum ”Why Being an Environmentalist of Faith is so Hard ... and Worth It: A Morning of Prayer, Meditation, Lecture, and Discussion”

Faith leaders are invited to enjoy a complimentary breakfast, interfaith panel discussion, scholarly lecture and open discussion. The morning will be led by Dr. Roger S. Gottlieb, professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a well-known scholar and author on faith and environmental issues. The afternoon will be led by Mitch Hescox, CEO of the Evangelical Environment Network, speaking about “The Creation Care Challenge.” Other visiting scholars participating in the forum will be Dr. Larry Rasmussen, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics, Union Theological Seminary, and Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, author of Green Deen: What Islam Teaches about Protecting the Planet.

7:30 am – Faith Leader Breakfast and Conversation
9:00 am – Dr. Roger Gottlieb: Why Being an Environmentalist of Faith is so Hard: And Worth It
10 am – An Interfaith Panel Discussion on being a Religious Environmentalist
11 am – Group Discussion, Questions and Answers
12:30 – The Annual LPTS Luncheon, “Doors to Dialog”
2 pm – Mitch Hescox: The Creation Care Challeng

You are invited to participate in all or any of the events of the day. The event is free, but reservations are required for breakfast attendance.

Monday, November 8, 2010, 12:30 to 2 pm. Annual Louisville Presbyterian Seminary Luncheon: "Setting the Seeds for Dialogue"

A seminary is a seedbed for cultivating knowledge about ultimate concerns. As LPTS announces a major commitment to interfaith cooperation with its “Doors to Dialogue” initiative, faith leaders will be invited to find common ground in specific ways to become partners in the initiative. Doors to Dialogue (D2D) is a new approach to seminary education at Louisville Seminary to enhance students’ learning to prepare them better to provide religious leadership in contexts of religious difference. At this lunch you will learn more of this initiative and of ways you can partner in it.

Bring your own lunch or order a box lunch from Miss Cs', a deli located in the Henry Clay.

Upcoming Fall Lectures at LPTS

2010-10-05T16:45:00.000-04:00

The Church’s vital ministries of evangelism and justice will be the focus of the 2010 Edwards-Presler Lectures at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, October 21, 2010, as two church scholars and leaders present their ideas at the intersection of faith and the transformation of the world.

This year's lectures will be especially poignant with the recent death of George Riley Edwards, long-time Professor of New Testament at the seminary in whose honor, along with his wife Jean, the lectureship was established 24 years ago. George was a fearless and tireless advocate of peace and racial justice.

On Thursday evenin g, October 21, at 7 p.m. in the seminary chapel, the Edwards Lecture will be given by Dr. Milburn Thompson of Bellarmine University, a self-professed admirer and supporter of Dr. Edwards' activist ministry. Thompson will address the Church’s response to faithful stewardship and care of the earth and creation from a Roman Catholic perspective. Initiated in part by Pope Benedict XVI's 2010 World Day of Peace message on this topic, the Bellarmine University professor will explore the Church’s environmental ethic to be peacemakers with Earth.

The Presler Lecture will be given at 11:30 on Thursday morning, October 21, by a son of the honorees of the lectureship, Canon Titus Presler. In his lecture, Presler will focus on the shadow cast by 9/11 on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Muslim-Christian relations and how competing claims such as secularization and religious extremism affect a theology of mission. He cites the Taliban’s massacre of Christian missionaries in Afghanistan and the debate about the “ground zero mosque” as the most recent “signs of hardening stances amid many calls for respectful dialogue.”

Church as a Creative and Life-Giving Institution

2010-09-21T11:40:00.001-04:00

Image of trash compateer rom: letsgetgreen.files/wordpress.com

I've been reflecting on the lives of several friends who have been part of the church, mostly at the denominational level whose lives have been crushed by the organizational/personnel machine-like culture of their denomination. Many of them (not all, of course) are still un-employed or under-employed and operating at a kind of "post traumatic stress" level as a result of the way they have been "handled" by the church's power structures.

When we treat the human resources of the church like so many machine parts that can be removed and thrown away, the church loses its soul.

Reflecting on my own vocation, my own "quest print" I realized that my life question is How can I help the church be organized in ways that are creative and life-giving.

Join me in committing to making whatever level of the church as an organization you have some influence over more creative and life-giving for its members and staff. Help hold leaders accountable for policies about hiring, recognition, motivation, pay-scales that are equitable, and termination policies that are just and humane.

Fall Bible Study--Lay Institute of Theology

2010-09-17T11:09:00.000-04:00

Rev. John Gulden, Fall Bible Study Leader

Now is the time to sign up for Fall Bible Study which begins next Wednesday.

“The Reign of God”

Much of the Bible pertains to the establishment of nations and governance by rulers. In fact, the one topic that is addressed by Jesus more than any other is the Roman Empire and competing claims for our allegiance. Our objectives will be to explore the story of Israelite kings, the nature of empires and their rulers, and the competing claims presented by "the reign of God", known also by many other names throughout the Bible. We will also dare to wrestle with contemporary issues of Church and State and their spiritual implications, and to grow in faith as we consider once again our citizenship in this mysterious and radical "reign of God".

DATES: Wednesday Mornings September 22, & 29, October 6, 13, 20, Nov 3;

TIME: 10:30 to 12:00 a.m.

FACULTY: John Gulden

Pastor-scholar John Gulden served as Pastor of Briargate Presbyterian Church and is currently serving as at “at home father” for his two children in Old Louisville. A member at large of Mid-Kentucky Presbytery, he also is a member of the Presbyterian Church (U. S. A.) General Assembly Committee on Representation. Other interests include baseball reading on the front porch, grilling out, attending farmers markets, and eating Graeter’s ice cream.

PLACE: Laws Lodge

COST: $40 Register online or at first class

Dates for Next Year's EQ-HR Seminar at LPTS

2010-09-10T11:42:00.000-04:00

2010 Emotional Intelligence and Human Relations Lab (LPTS Photo)

SAVE THE DATE FOR NEXT YEAR!
Louisville Seminary's Emotional Intelligence and Human Relations Seminar
August 23-27.

Among this year's participants pictured above were ten master's level students, four Doctor of Ministry Students and ten ministers/church leaders taking the seminar as a Lifelong Learning experience. Many of them told us what a transforming experience it was. Rev. Steve Huston from New York said: "I'm thankful that I was able to spend a week with you at the EQ-HR workshop in Louisville."

We've heard from others who could not make it this year but are looking forward to next year. Thus we're announcing the date far in advance.

Tuition is not finalized for next year. This year it was $775 for Lifelong Learning participants.

Go to the website for the EQ-HR Center for more information: eqhrcenter.org/

Call me for more information: 800-264-1839, ext 372.

We'll open registration next April.

David

Thriving in the Pastorate

2010-09-07T16:18:00.002-04:00

I just opened the invitation from the Oates Institute for the fall Gathering and was reminded of the new "Pastors Workshop" being offered this year. Richard L. Hester (pictured here, and J. Michael Hester, pastoral counselors from North Carolina, will be leading the workshop on "From Surviving to Thriving in the Pastorate." The date is September 23, 8:30 a.m. -1:30 p.m., at Deer Park Baptist Church, 1733 Bardstown Road, In Louisville. Dick Hester is also an author in the Alban Institute book Know Your Story and Lead with It: The Power of Narrative in Clergy Leadership. I'll be reviewing that book for the Oates Journal soon. But this is a worthwhile workshop for pastors. To register call 502-459-2370, or go to www.oates.org. Cost is $40 (includes lunch). Tell them I sent you!

If it weren't for the honor of it..Beck's Rally

2010-08-30T11:25:00.003-04:00

Glen Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally was a fascinating exercise in how we deal with change in this country. We either look forward and declare our intention to "be the change we want to see' (Gandhi), or we look in the rear view mirror and declare our loyalty to what used to be. The rally was carefully managed to "avoid" political commentary, but they forgot that the language one uses conveys a great deal about one's power and privilege. The extensive use of the word "God," along with consistent identification of that word as a masculine being revealed what Sam Keen calls "the gravitational pull of the political ideologies implicit in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam" (In the Absence of God: Dwelling in the Presence of the Sacred, Harmony Books, 2010). The implied loyalty to the privilege and power of European-Americans, and their lock on the values of the past was evident. I believe we must always be cautious when someone uses the word "God" with the assumption that "everybody knows what we mean when we say that word." The mystery of God can never be fully held in a word. Even the word "honor" has ambiguities. It can refer to moral integrity, but it also can refer to power and privilege. Power and privilege that are not held accountable are not honorable. As the fellow said about his experience of being ridden out of town on a rail: "If it weren't for the honor of it, I'd just as soon have walked."

Six Places Still Open for Emotional Intelligence Lab

2010-08-04T10:46:00.006-04:00

Roy Oswald and I invite you to register now for this summer's best leadership development opportunity anywhere. The EQ-HR workshop is an experiential laboratory for improving your emotional intelligence in a safe and supportive small group environment.

The cost is $775, which includes access to the BarOn 360 degree survey on emotional intelligence which you will use confidentially to set your own learning goals around the four areas of emotional intelligence as described by Daniel Goleman.

Most of the time of the workshop is spent in small unstructured groups of about ten with two experienced and wise group facilitators in each group.

See the Louisville Seminary Website, click on the button at the bottom of the Home Page that looks like the banner above, for more information and a link to register online:

http://www.lpts.edu/.

Call me if you want more information. 502-992-9372.

David

There is no such thing as reverse racism

2010-07-23T10:06:00.005-04:00

Cries of "racism" against Shirley Sherrod, later proven to be based on doctored tapes, are the hateful and deceitful reactions of privileged white folks who are out to protect their cultural advantages. As a privileged and advantaged aging, straight, European-American, I want to remind us all that we have been and still are in the power position in America, and trying to blame or shame others for their attitudes, even if those attitudes are prejudicial or short-sighted, is a cover-up for our own benefit. Yes, there's plenty of fear and prejudice to go around, and bigotry comes in all colors, but "racism" is a term that only belongs to the actions of those in the cultural advantaged position to keep others from gaining any toe-hold on our privilege.

photo from elgadfly.com

Gas Stations as Signs of the Future

2010-07-22T16:00:00.004-04:00

This past week I've passed three different gas stations that have taken down their national/international brand signs and put up family names on their stations. With all the bad publicity British Petroleum is getting it makes sense. Do I really want my customers to associate me with oil spills and irresponsible drilling?

I wonder if that's not the wave of the future of churches as well. Some folks are getting disgusted at the big-corporation model of church denominations and are not pleased with the image, either too liberal on the one hand or not liberal enough on the other. I know a lot of pastors who just "keep their heads down" and do local ministry and pay little attention to denominational realities.

Denominations that are not able to serve the needs of local "outlets" will not survive. Congregations that know how to thrive will.

Gatekeeping Presbyterian Ministers--Standard Exams

2010-04-20T08:53:00.002-04:00

Presbyterians (PCUSA) have a way of "gatekeeping" entry into ministry called "Standard Ordination Exams." It was introduced back in the turbulent 1960's when local ecclesial bodies called presbyteries might have discriminated against some seminarians' more progressive liberal stances or against women or minorities. Over the years, the procedure has not kept up with the times and the trends. Instead it has become more restrictive and less predictable. Many, including most seminaries, have declared the process crippled if not broken.

This week the denomination's Office of Vocation announced news of changes in the system. Unfortunately the changes are minimal and problematic. Most difficult is their decision to raise the cost of the tests so that a student has to pay $500 to take all five of the tests, and $100 each time a retake is necessary. The other two changes are only minor improvements in the process, regarding the grading scale and eliminating the use of handwritten tests and handwritten grading responses. Obviously the Committee (The Presbyteries’ Cooperative Committee on Examinations for Candidates) has chosen not to address the larger issues of their processes and practices.

The fact is that these tests are not "standardized." The questions are created by committees and not tested in any scientifically defensible way. The graders are given general guidelines but have large discretion in passing or failing the exams. All of the anecdotal evidence I have from my own students' experiences suggests that the grading is random, idiosyncratic, and subjective.

My own view, that I have stated publicly before, is that the exams have outlived their usefulness. The conditions under which they were created have changed radically. Seminaries are now more responsive to the church in curriculum and standards. Presbyteries are bigger and better equipped to fairly and accurately judge the readiness of seminary graduates for ministry.

I call on the General Assembly to either abolish the exams entirely or insure that they are reformed to make them fair and effective standardized tests.

Peace Unity and Purity

2010-02-09T10:44:00.004-05:00

Peter Smith of the Louisville Courier Journal reported on his blog, http://www.courier-journal.com/blogs/faith/2010/ about the latest report from Presbyterian Research Services:
Peace or purity?

Nearly half of Presbyterians put equal importance on "peace, unity and purity" in a church. But among those who give them different weight, conservatives are far more likely to pick "purity," while liberals prefer "peace." Those results are among a raft of newly released data from the Research Services of the Louisville-based Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)The results date from 2006, when the church was about to vote on recommendations from a task force whose formal name included the words in question: the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity. The task force's recommendations served as part of the ongoing debate over role of gays in ministry -- a complicated story in its own right. But the name alone prompted the question of whether a church could really have all three of those qualities together.
Among the results:
•Some 29 percent of liberals chose peace, compared with 10 percent of conservatives.
•Only 6 percent of liberals chose purity, compared with 38 percent of conservatives.
Among both categories, however, the largest group put equal weight on the three values -- a majority of liberals and a plurality of conservatives.
Smaller percentages of each group chose unity.
Among moderates, exactly 50 percent put equal weight on the three values, with those preferring one of the three fairly evenly divided among the rest.
Large majorities believe there's a place for everyone in the denomination regardless of views on controversial issues.
That sounds like a vote for unity.

At the same time, large majorities believe that "a church that is not clear about what it believes is not worth belonging to."

My response to this, a long held conviction, that the constitutional ordination question in which one promises to uphold the "Peace Unity and Purity of the Church" is actually harmful to the church's ability to adapt to the 21st century.

"Peace" is actually a hold-over from old empire values--the Pax Romana—a peace enforce by hierarchical control. Instead of peace, we should encourage creative complexity and ability to create new structures to adapt to new times. Whenever a system moves through change from chaos, it always takes a more complex form, and with creativity, truth and goodness is increased.

"Unity" is also a hierarchically imposed focus on sameness, everybody has to agree on what to think. Heresy used to mean thinking new thoughts, now it means thinking thoughts that don't conform to the unity norm. Instead of unity we should vow to promote a respectful diversity.

"Purity" is a holdover from the post exilic emphasis in the Hebrew Scriptures when the community tended to think more about following the strict laws of the Torah instead of following the spirit of Torah which included major concern for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger in our midst. Instead of purity we need to promote a generous inclusivity, in which the circle of faith grows ever larger, drawing people in instead of circling them out.

I hope the Presbyterians will be able to move to adapt to the 21st century but I fear we're going to continue to push for the top-down values of peace, unity and purity.

New Leadership Book Welcomed

2009-12-11T10:32:00.003-05:00

I welcome to the literature on leadership this new book by my friend and colleague Ken McFayden, Dean and Professor of Ministry and Leadership Development at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, VA. Strategic Leadership brings together Ken's deep study of attachment theory and loss with his thorough experience of church leadership through his consultations and his teaching. Three important ideas are put forth here that are not found elsewhere:

Our response to loss is related to our levels of attachment, and our ability to overcome it depends on our good grieving and re-attachment.
Since all change involves loss, churches seek growth without change (and wonder why it does not happen).
Churches yearn for leadership and resist leadership at the same time.

The book provides ample lists of helpful suggestions for church leaders facing changes, losses, and the challenges of the future.

As I read the excellent analyses, I wished his editors had encouraged him to include his engaging and delightful case studies to help the reader see how leadership works in changing circumstances.

Bibliographic info:

Kenneth J. McFayden

Strategic Leadership for a Change: Facing our Losses, Finding our Future.

Alban Institute, 2009. Paper. 101 pages. $17.00. ISBN 978-1-56699-392-0

Sacred Geometry Report

2009-11-06T10:38:00.005-05:00

Amazing how a simple triangle with right angles and right proportions can help make a circle. That was the genius of Robert Ferre, "geometrician of the sacred," who led the "Seeking the Symmetry of the Soul" conference at Louisville Seminary last week. Forty people learned how to do the geometry and the lay out classical and Chartres style labyrinths in the classroom. About 15 people stayed for the second part of the experience--building a brick lined, 11-circuit, Chartres-style labyrinth on the grounds of Historic Farmington in Louisville. The picture above is the early work of laying bricks in place to create the circles that are the basis of the labyrinth. That group included folks from Ontario Canada and Maryland and North Carolina and Florida who were here to learn to put a labyrinth together in their places of worship.

Building the labyrinth was a joint venture of Louisville Seminary and its Biennial Labyrinth Conference, and Farmington, the historical foundation preserving the home of the Speed family in Louisville on Bardstown Road, and Sullivan University, right next to Farmington.

The Chaplain/Wellness Director at Sullivan, Dr. Renee Rust-Yarmuth, a trained labyrinth facilitator herself, has been wanting a labyrinth to use in her work with students so she was a strong force in pulling this three-way collaboration together. She was able to call into action the inspiring ethos of inter-departmental collaboration within Sullivan University to make this a reality. I was moved by the willingness of administrators and facilities workers to lend their resources to make the event so successful.

The cooperation of Farmington, with its director Andrea and the properties committee chair Herb Shulhafer was also gratifying. Herb found enthusiastic donors of the bricks needed for the project (about 4000 altogether) in the Russells of Lee Brick and Block Company.

Stop by Farmington at 3033 Bardstown Road and see the labyrinth created at the back of the property. It's a "liberty labyrinth" in tribute to the slaves who worked those fields. A truly redemptive project.

2009 Labyrinth Conference

2009-09-28T10:56:00.002-04:00

Devotees and th0se curious about the labyrinth will gather on the campus of LPTS for a fascinating approach to the labyrinth. Robert Ferre, a prolific maker of labyrinths, will lead us through the basics of sacred geometry, the design principles of the classical labyrinths, basic spiritual practices connected with the labyrinth and networking to discuss the whole process. The conference comes in two parts:

Monday through Wednesday, October 26-28 is the teaching portion of the event on the seminary campus, with sessions from 9-5 each day.

Thursday and Friday, October 29-30, participants will actually build a brick labyrinth on the grounds of the historic Farmington, adjacent to Sullivan University in Louisville.

See the Seminary website for more information and online registration.

www.lpts.edu/academic_programs/labyrinth_2009.asp

Call me at 800-264-1839, ext 372, or Laura March at extension 382 for more information.

Visiting Whitewater Valley Presbytery in Indiana

2009-09-06T13:26:00.003-04:00

I invite friends of Louisville Seminary and anyone looking for encouragement in church conflict to meet me at the Presbytery meeting of Whitewater Valley at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Marion Indiana. My presentation: "The Plot Thickens: Narratives of Change and Hope in your Congregation" will take place at 10:30 a.m. See the Presbytery website, http://www.whitewatervalley.org/ for more information. My powerpoint presentation is posted on http://www.slideshare.net/ . I'll also be doing a small group discussion after the presentation, and I will be available around the edges of the meeting for anyone wanting a conversation about Louisville Seminary or my presentation

News of the death of racism is highly exaggerated

2009-07-27T10:45:00.003-04:00

Anyone who was ready with the obituary of racism in American will have to wait. The news of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s arrest in his own home and the exaggerated reactions to it around the country highlights the real and dangerous presence of the old prejudices. Focusing on Gates' behavior after being confronted in his own home only highlights the pervasiveness of racism. Reminders from some that black men should always go docile when confronted with police make the truth even harder to hide.

Those of us who are privileged European Americans should step up to say helpful things and promote the strength and health of the black community and the black churches.

In that light, I'm proud to point to the new initiative at my seminary, the LPTS "Black Church Studies Program" announced this spring and ready to begin this fall. See the link at http://www.lpts.edu/News-Events/article.asp?intID=321.

My colleagues on the faculty and staff, and particularly Lewis Brogdon, are to be commended for their courage and strength to persist and pursue this program for the sake of the black community and the black church!

Do as I say not as I do: Brochure Review

2009-07-01T14:18:00.007-04:00

Out this spring from the Presbyterian Board of Pensions brochure series "Conversations on the Church," is a good piece of work by two leaders of contemporary Presbyterianism. "Presbyterian Leadership: Reflections on Leadership Renewal in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)" available online, see link below, by Linda Valentine, Executive Director of the General Assembly Council, and Clifton Kirkpatrick, recently retired Stated Clerk and currently President of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and Visiting Professor here at Louisville Seminary, is a 21 page summary of current and helpful thinking about what the authors call a deep hunger for renewal of leadership in the church.

Drawing principles from the Reformed and Presbyterian tradition such as servanthood and the last shall be first, and weakness-trumps-power, and following excellent contemporary managerial theorists from Burns to Heifetz and Linsky, the authors propose five characteristics of Presbyterian leadership that are visionary and hopeful. As an inspirational and motivational piece, this is excellent work.

At the same time, the work is significant by what it reveals about the actual practice of Presbyterian leadership. Shining a light often casts a shadow. In this case, the words of the brochure are in stark contrast to the top-down, command and control practices of the General Assembly Council, the thoroughly inequitable treatment of personnel, and the lack of a strong, courageous vision in the face of antagonistic factions in our national governance.

We should do what our leaders say, not what they do, when it comes to organizational leadership!

http://http//web.pensions.org/Publications/pensions/Home/Forms%20%26%20Publications/Booklets%20%26%20Brochures/pub-505.pdf

The Subordinant's Lament

2009-06-25T15:49:00.003-04:00

For several years in different positions I have reflected, only around the edges, about what one does when the boss does not appear to be as effective as the organization needs.

In the last years of the 20th century, for example, I sensed that one organization was going to have trouble when the new leader was drawing inspiration from the writings of leaders of the organization from the 1890's. In another situation, I watched the collective leadership of an organization I loved behaving in such unhelpful ways that I imagined myself in "Gorillas in the Mist," saying "they look like us, they have so many of the same characteristics, but THEY'RE DIFFERENT!"

Now I ready to offer some more constructive suggestions for those in subordinant positions who have higher hopes for their organization than those in the dominant positions. (Note: I'm following Carol Pierce and her colleagues from New Dynamics Partnerships and their work on multicultural, gender and ethnic relationships in using "subordinant" and "dominant" to avoid the cliched organizational terms here.)

Nurture your own spirit. When tempted to spend time moaning or griping, exchange that time for quiet reflection on yourself, your place in the universe--a broader perspective than just your organization or church, and your calling and your principles. Keep track of your own integrity and don't let it get lost in your discouragement and cynicism.
Keep your own creativity going. The organization needs creativity, adaptability, and connection with fresh ideas even more when the folks at the top are less in touch. The musician and coach Harry Pickens reminded me several years ago that a person could have more influence on an organization from the margins than from the center. You can keep tabs on creativity by asking if you are increasing your sense of knowledge and truth, if you are growing in respect for differences, if you are building community, and if positive work can still be done (a distillation of the thought of the philosopher of the creative spirit, Henry Nelson Wieman).
Find partners or allies for the journey through this time in your organization. There is strength also in collaboration and alliance. You are better with others than alone. A caution about this, however, is to avoid a secretive and oppositional coalition. As I define it, a coalition is two or more members of a system, often at different levels of authority (a member and a staff member, or a member and a member of a governing board), who join together expressly to oppose or exclude another person or group. A coalition usually involves secretiveness, and it is likely to be denied if someone asks about it. By contrast an alliance is defined as two or more members of a system who agree to work together on an issue of common interest, without intentionally excluding or opposing others. An alliance is not usually secretive. Open and transparent relationships formed for the benefit of the organization and for its members are usually welcome.
Look for ways to adapt to the new realities of the organization, for ways to act out transformational leadership in your area of work, to help the organization keep learning and growing. Assuming that an organization is a holistic organism, any part that can be healthy and creative can leaven the whole.

So do not lament, faithful subordinants. Free yourselves to be the best you can be in the circumstances and it will pay off.

Change, Learning and the Lifelong Learning Professional

2009-05-11T14:50:00.004-04:00

OK, it's time for confession. Three weeks ago, the Lifelong Learning office at Louisville Seminary received the news that it was being cut in half. My job as Director of Lifelong Learning and Advanced Degrees was intact, but my colleague, the Programs Manager, was to be laid off in a reduction in force.

My first reaction was just that--a reaction. I was hurt and angry. I felt totally helpless to assist my colleague and hopeless about how I would continue these programs for which I have so much passion without a full time colleague. I felt my "position" was diminished by this move. I stayed angry and hurt for a couple of weeks, including a week of vacation--well timed for rest and reflection.

The turnaround did not come for me until last week with my prayer and support partners. We do a day long retreat together nine or ten times a year and last week was perfect timing. They worked me over pretty good and as they helped me get clear and straight about the situation, here's what I realized. I have to practice what I preach.

I'm the one who proposes that those engaged in lifelong learning need to ask themselves four questions:

What has changed or what needs to change in ministry?
What do I need to learn to meet the changing situation?
How can I promote my own health and growth in a changing situation?
Where can I find help or partners to get what I need?

Don't you hate it when your own words come back to haunt you!

Of course things change! Unfortunately they do not always change in directions we hoped. Certainly I'm not in charge of the changes in my life and work!

So instead of a reaction to the new situation --"I'm hurt and angry," I've moved with my friends' help to a response--"I'm learning." A learning mode is helping me be less helpless and more creative.

leadership style and the future

2009-04-22T13:54:00.002-04:00

In difficult financial times, organizations tend to fall back on default leadership styles, drawing on old, autocratic and authoritarian methods to make hard decisions. We may wonder "what's wrong with that?"

My colleague Scott Williamson has discovered a fine new book by a couple of educators that helps make sense of this dilemma.

Stephen Preskill and Stephen Brookfield in Learning as a Way of Leading: Lessons from the Struggle for Social Justice (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009) have gathered stories from leaders of social justice movements and teased out the kinds of leadership that have been effective.

I found most helpful their image of conventional leadership from the work of Joseph Raelin ("Leaderful Organizations"). The value of directive, commanding styles of leadership assumes leadership to be "serial (exercised by one person at a time...), individual (only ever exercised by a single individual), controlling (fiercely pursuing the leader's vision of how others should live and how a community or organization should function), and dispassionate (viewing as necessary 'collateral damage,' the wrecked lives of those individuals, cultures or communities that are uprooted, excluded, or disenfranchised in the pursuit of desired goals)." [Preskill and Brookfield, p.3.]

It's so evident to me that this kind of leadership is well designed to defend and protect the status-quo. It works in a stable environment with a homogeneous constituency. The problem with this style is that we no longer have either a stable environment nor a homogeneous constituency! Change is rapid and comprehensive. Diversity is becoming the norm rather than the ideal. Organizations, and this includes churches and theological seminaries, that hope to survive the first quarter of the 21st century need to take change and diversity into account, and ignore the emerging of the future to their immediate peril.

Preskill and Brookfield suggest that learners make the best leaders when the future is at stake. Learning is about changing the learner as well as the context of learning. Learning is an investment in the future, not the past. Learning is translating the faith and traditions of the past into the parlance of the presence so we can move together into the future.

Comment on Comment

2009-03-24T09:05:00.003-04:00

Dave's comments posted here in response to my "heaven can wait" posting serve to show the vast gulf between world views here. In their presentations here at Louisville Seminary, McLaren and Borg both made strong Biblical cases for a service-oriented "God's will be done on earth" perspective, based on a faith-relationship with God in Jesus Christ. Dave makes his case from a propositional-doctrinal position, quite possibly based on the modernist apology for faith found in a set of doctrines known as fundamentalism. I appreciate Dave's comment because it makes me work hard, and not yet very satisfactorily, to find common ground between our divergent perspectives. I assume Dave is a faithful person with a different take on Christian life than mine. I hope Dave would be able to grant that my take is also worthy of respect.

Making Heaven Wait

2009-03-23T12:07:00.005-04:00

This year's Festival of Theology at Louisville Seminary, featuring Diana Butler Bass, Brian McLaren and Marcus Borg, stirred up lots of good thoughts and feelings, and prompted many fine reflections.

One reflection came in the intersection of one of Brian McClaren's concepts and a newspaper article printed in the New York Times last week.

Brian was critiquing the American cultural religious notion that the main point of Christian faith is to get each person to heaven. In two power point slides, he made his point graphically (see www.slideshare.net/brianmclaren/christian-faith-as-a-way-of-life). In the first, slide # 13, faith is imagined as "self enhancement in this life and the next" with a tiny circle representing the world, a middle side circle representing the church, and a huge circle representing the self on its way to heaven. His preferred image is showed in slide 14, with concentric circles. An arrow from heaven shows God's investment in the self and the church, with the smallest circle being the self, the next size the church, both of which moving into and serving and transforming the world, making God's "kingdom come, on earth as in heaven."

The article in the Times (I've lost the date and citation) reported a study that showed that the "very religious" are the most likely to request extraordinary procedures in hospitals and emergency rooms, postponing death even at the cost of comfort and dignity. When I saw the headline, I said to myself, "That's just crazy!" After I thought about it awhile, I realized the connection. The devoted Christians come from that "self oriented" perspective which wants what "I" want, not what heaven wants, so I can selfishly hold on to life, even with the promise of "heaven" waiting for me.

The contrast between the self-oriented faith and the service-to-the-world oriented faith could not be more stark. I'd rather be putting God's will to work here and now, not making heaven wait for justice and equity and peace, than making heaven wait while I get everything that's coming to me!

Cones of Hope

2008-11-20T11:21:00.004-05:00

Watching the weather news about a recent hurricane, I heard the term "the cone of uncertainty" to describe the possible but unpredictable trajectory of a storm. I was reminded of it with a quote in my prayer book on the hope that all things will be brought to God in the end. That is an older world-view that projects a "cone of certainty" in which everything will work out according to God's "goal"--a teleology of seeing how everything comes together in the end.

A perspective more understandable to the contemporary mind might be to refer to the "cone of indeterminacy" -- it may sound better than "uncertainty" and it rings true with quantum physics. Rather than seeing all things coming to a pre-determined end, even God's end, we see trajectories of freedom and choice with lives evolving and changing as they go along. The picture of fractals, lovely and complex patterns of developing reality, but not predictable in their outcomes. This is a "process theology" approach, it seems to me.

We can found our hope, as Christians, not in certainty but in the sense that God is luring us all, including the whole cosmos, into newer and more whole ways of being.

I Love it when I was right!

2008-10-09T14:13:00.003-04:00

Two items in the news in the last couple of days confirm my earlier opinions expressed in this blog.
1. The new book about Warren Buffett, The Snowball: Warren Buffett on the Business of Life, is being advertised with the heading "What would Warren Buffet do?" That reminded me of my blog of November 16, 2007, when I recommended a dream ticket for president (sadly my recommendation has been ignored until now) of two Buffetts--Warren for president and Jimmy for vice president. Think of the Alan Jackson country song "It's Five O'clock Somewhere" which includes the line, "What would Jimmy Buffett do?" The song is about skipping responsibility, but I maintain that even Jimmy Buffett would do a better job at governing than the yahoos who've been in power the past eight years. But we really should have been listening to Warren.
2. Watching the presidential debate and realizing that both candidates have gone back on their vows to avoid mudslinging in this campaign, I thought about my blog post from March 11, 2008, on the concept of "teleopathy"--which means "goal sickness." Obviously the goal of winning has overcome the deeper values of integrity and honesty in the presidential campaign, and the American people are the worse for it because it diminishes our respect and trust in whoever wins the election!

Follow up on Harvey Cox

2008-10-07T13:26:00.003-04:00

The man hasn't lost a step, theologically or intellectually. As he walked into the room he was wearing his Red Sox cap, very appropriate. About 45 people gathered, about half the seminary faculty, a few folks from the Presbyterian headquarters, a number of retired pastors from the area, and a few students (most of the other students had no idea who Harvey Cox is!) He talked about his Harvard undergrad class on Jesus and moral ethics, noting that most students, including the most secular and including those of other faith traditions, have no problem talking about Jesus.

He also talked about how there is a resurgence of religion in our time, often in the form of "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual." I was fascinated by the ensuing conversation about what Jim Lewis labeled the intersection of the appeal of high liturgical worship, such as Eastern Orthodox, the endurance of Pentecostalism, and the "spiritual but not religious."

It put me in mind of David Roozen's sociological study of denominations (Church, Identity, And Change: Theology And Denominational Structures In Unsettled Times, Eerdmans, 2005) in which he notes that those American denominations based on "affective" religion--such as the Episcopalians and the Pentecostals--are having a better time at adapting to the 21st century than are those denominations based on "the word" or what Cox called the "assentive" faiths based on propositional adherence. Of course its clear that the Presbyterians are in that latter group and are not faring well in adapting to the 21st century.

That may be partly why I'm attracted to teaching "emotional intelligence" to old-line protestant ministers, and also why Diana Butler Bass is able to promote re-traditioning--since she's episcopalian.

When Harvey Cox Came to Louisville

2008-09-11T10:28:00.002-04:00

An Evening of Conversation
With HARVEY COX
“A Theologian Reflects on
Religion, Morality and Politics
in the 21st Century”

For Students, Faculty, Staff, Friends of the Seminary
Free, no registration required!
MONDAY, OCTOBER 6
7-9 P.M.
HUNDLEY HALL—GARDEN COURT
Moderated by Dr. Christopher Elwood

Cornell West has called Harvey Cox “one of the most significant religious thinkers of the late twentieth Century.” Cox is Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, where he has been teaching since 1965. An American Baptist minister, his research and teaching interests focus on the interaction of religion, culture, and politics. Among the issues he explores are urbanization, theological developments in world Christianity, and interfaith relations. He is a prolific author, including:
· When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Decisions Today, describing his immensely popular undergraduate course, “Jesus and the Moral Life,” which attracted hundreds of students each year.
· The Secular City, published in 1965, became an international bestseller and was selected by the University of Marburg as one of the most influential books of Protestant theology in the twentieth century.
· Common Prayers: Faith, Family, and a Christian's Journey Through the Jewish Year, based on his experience with his wife, Professor Tina Tumarkin, of raising their son in her Jewish faith.
· The Feast of Fools;
· The Seduction of the Spirit;
· The Silencing of Leonardo Boff: Liberation Theology and the Future of World Christianity;
· Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality.

Participants in this evening of conversation will be inspired by the range of Dr. Cox’s spiritual history as we engage him with our questions and comments.

Seeing into the Future

2008-08-25T12:51:00.005-04:00

www.anonymouspace.com

Driving around Louisville yesterday I remembered the fun of finding my way back to places I'd been years before. In the 1960's I was a student here and had a fondness for places like Crescent Hill Presbyterian Church. When I came back to live here six years ago, I enjoyed driving around to find my way back, relying on the way coded deeply into my memories to guide my driving. It's fun. That's one way of finding our way around this world--following our memories.

A second way of finding our way is by using the encoded memories of others who have charted out the path ahead of us. We call them "maps"--printed on paper for those of us who remember them before the age of Google maps and GPS. Being able to read a map and orient oneself to them is a useful skill in negotiating a way around the world as it is known.

But I'm more fascinated by a third way of finding our way around. That is learning to move into an unknown future where our memories and our maps are not as helpful. If we truly believe that the cosmos is on a trajectory of transformation, then the future "ain't what it used to be." Simply downloading our memories and the guide-maps of the past and the present will only keep us stuck in the past or the present.

I like to pull from the insights of the behavioral and managerial sciences to inform my understanding of human nature, and for this question I look to the work of Gary Klein on intuition (Klein, Gary. The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work. New York, Currency/Doubleday, 2003.) When new situations present themselves, our intuition pulls in our previous experiences and helps us transform them by imagination into possible scenarios for the new situation as it might unfold. Those quick choices of scenarios can inform quick action in a crisis situation.

If there's time for a more leisurely movement into the future, the spiritual concept of discernment comes to mind in which one quiets other voices and tunes into the deeper seated voice of God. A current source for understanding discernment in an organizational setting is Otto Scharmer's Theory U (Boston: Society for Organizational Learning, 2006). It's a discernment and systems thinking model that takes change into account for what he calls "leading from the future." I also go back to Jane Kise and David Stark's work in Life Directions (Bethany House, 1999) in which they help us identify our gifts, our passions and our values as part of the holy design for our lives that are part of of the guidance system. It is through these realities of our personal or corporate identity that we can build scenarios for the future that are true to ourselves and open to the future.

Finally, I like to invoke the notion of desire. If we can place in abeyance our own smaller agendas and fears and put our own desires in the context of what we understand of the Divine, we pray that our desires and the desires of the Holy One can be one. It's a future desiring, not for our own comfort and convenience, not to revisit the old familiar places, or even to impose the maps of others on the future, but to hope for something new that suits a new humanity in a new world.

How do you move into the future?.

New Lay Academy in Mid-Kentucky Presbytery

2008-08-05T15:55:00.004-04:00

Called to Lead is a new program of theological education for congregational leaders offered in partnership by Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and Mid-Kentucky Presbytery. Focused primarily toward Elders, but open to all, this two-year program will engage leaders in Bible study and theological reflection, as well as equipping them to serve their congregations with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love.[1] A third component of small group coaching and mentoring is available to Elders who wish to further their study in preparation for becoming a Commission Lay Pastor under the care and authority of the Committee on Ministry (or Committee for Preparation for Ministry?) of Mid-Kentucky Presbytery.

Participants will meet one Saturday each month (except summer & December), for 8 hours. The fee of $30.00 includes lunch, handouts and instruction. In addition, participants will be responsible for purchasing required textbooks. Although participants are encouraged to commit to all classes, one may register on a monthly basis. However, those intending to complete the Commissioned Lay Pastor program must successfully complete all classes and any additional requirements for the CLP diploma. Costs for CLP component will be determined by the number of participants and will include other expenses for additional program requirements. *

Persons interested in participating in Called to Lead should complete the attached application, and send it, along with payment, to Mid-Kentucky Presbytery, 425 South 2nd Street, Suite 301, Louisville, Kentucky 40202. The application is also available on-line at http://www.midkentuckypresbytery.org/. Questions concerning the program should be directed to Rev. Peggy Owens, 502-561-8300 or owens987@bellsouth.net.

*Candidates for Commissioned Lay Pastors will attend additional small group coaching sessions and work closely with a pastor- mentor. Extra reading and written assignments will be required, along with psychological/vocational assessment and a final examination. The CLP component will be administered by the COM (or CPM?), which will have the responsibility of determining the fitness for commissioning. Participation in the program does not guarantee one a call to commissioned ministry.
For more information on CLP’s see Book of Order reference G-14.0800 or call the Presbytery office.

The Error of Church Unity

2008-08-04T14:46:00.005-04:00

At the end of the 2008 Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion, Archbishop of Canterbury was quoted in the New York Times (August 4, 2008) as saying he was hopeful the expected covenant would help avoid schism. If he is quoted correctly, he said that everyone would be moving along "in step" and the church would be acting more like a church.

That hit me right in the old ecclesiology! That might have worked in the earlier generations, but the church in the 21st century cannot flourish in a a lock-step unity. It's the same error being promoted in my denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Church leaders continue to hold out for unity as a primary value. The Presbyterians require a vow that church leaders will "further the peace, unity and purity of the church." I believe all three of those are off the mark as primary values. This post will deal with "unity."

I take my cues in this matter from an article by Arthur Dewey of Xavier University, "Ecclesial Techtonics" presented to the Westar Institute's National Jesus Seminar in 2004. In Section 11.7, Dewey writes:

The sense of eccelesial unity ("one" [in the formula "one holy, catholic and apostolic church"]) can no longer be understood as a monolithic adherence to a propositional confession, nor reduced to a litmus test. The reality of human experience brings us to the recognition that unity is discovered in diversity, brought about by genuine human relations. Dialogue not dictate characterizes such unity in diversity. The hierarchical, pyramid of power collapses as a structural principle for church. This sense of inclusive unity agrees with the vision of the historical Jesus who trusted in a God that benefited good and evil, just and unjust. Paul also intimates this unity in the diversity through his understanding of the gifts of the Spirit to the community.

If we can have unity that promotes diversity (as illustrated in the table fellowship of Jesus), that celebrates difference, that allows freedom of choice in belief and practice, then I'm for unity. If unity is created through power, domination, coercion or force, or even through financial obligations, then I'm against it. If we have to sacrifice diversity for the sake of unity, unity has become an error. The church in the 21st century needs to focus on diversity and freedom over unity and purity.

And of course I value your opinion ESPECIALLY if you disagree with me--diversity, you know.

Adult Learning and Experiential Learning

2008-08-01T14:06:00.005-04:00

Wedding something old, from way back in the middle of the 20th Century to something new--current brain research informing leadership theory and practice , Roy Oswald, following his 30 year luminous career at the Alban Institute, has created a Center for EQ-HR Skills. He brought his new creation to Louisville Seminary last week in a high energy, intensive week-long laboratory http://www.lpts.edu/Academic_Programs/Emotional_Intelligence_08.asp. Thirty two judicatory executives, ministers and students participated in a ground-breaking event, new to virtually all of them.

The "T-Group" ('T" for training) was created in the 1940's and flourished through the 1960's as a premier way of enhancing the interpersonal and group effectiveness of leaders in many fields. Kurt Lewin, shown here from NNBD.org, was the pioneer who discovered the power of open and unstructured interaction in small groups as a learning technique. We call it experiential eduction, by which we learn by doing first, then reflecting on the experience and then practicing what we've learned in the group. it is designed for adult learners who assume full responsibility for their actions and their learning in the group setting. The National Training Laboratories in Bethel Maine was established to promote this method (www.ntl.org). Due to a variety of historical factors, the T-group method faded away in the latter third of the 20th century, but it has been receiving new energy among a group of former leaders in the movement, crystallizing around Oswald's new venture.

Oswald's genius brought him to the conclusion that he could best teach the new brain-discoveries in multiple intelligences, particularly emotional and social intelligence, through the experiential t-group method. I am pleased that Louisville Seminary could be a part of this new movement at Roy's invitation. I myself participated in T-groups in the 60's and 70's, learning to learn and learning to lead such groups with my mentor Burney Overton and others, so Roy invited me to dust off my group skills and become a co-leader for one of the small groups. Four other experienced and skilled and wise facilitators were imported for the event, all veterans of the Mid Atlantic Training Committee, a church based training program from that same era.

I discovered I still could do it. Moreover, I discovered how much of my core educational philosophy is still shaped by the theory behind t-groups. The job of the educator is to provide a safe environment for a group to form and cohere, and offer particular insights and suggestions for ways the group could practice their inter-personal and intra-group skills. I believe that the spark of creativity is in each one of us, and that we long to be transformed by our experiences into the people God longs for us to become. I have seen many times how receiving information from trusted group members about how one is perceived (often called "feedback") can create a learning loop to re-adjusting my self-understanding, and then putting new ways of functioning into practice in the group for further feedback.

I have a diminishing commitment to the "banking method" of education by which a student arrives empty at the "school" and the teacher deposits into the student the knowledge needed or sought, which the student can withdraw later as needed. Yes, some learning needs to be rote memorization and gathering basic knowledge, but the really valuable knowledge, the practical wisdom, is gained by experience, reflection, action and further reflection. We still have a long way to go, however, in preparing ministers for church leadership in the 21st century to provide them with the opportunities to experience and practice the wisdom they'll need.

Recalculating as a Process Theology Metaphor

2008-07-28T09:59:00.005-04:00

After a wonderful week of teaching Emotional Intelligence in an experiential learning mode (more on that in the next post), which included a module on process thought as a theological reflection partner for a relational leadership model, I was moved by the sermon I heard Sunday from my favorite preacher. Full disclosure: she's my wife, Rev. Deborah Fortel (shown at left), Interim Pastor at St. John Presbyterian Church in New Albany. Her sermon follows:

"Recalculating…"
Romans 8:29-28
St. John, July 27, 2008

We have a new companion in our car. It’s a Nuvi, a little computer that connects with a global positioning satellite and gives us directions that get us from one place to another. David’s two kids presented him with the Nuvi for Father’s Day, and having it with us when we were driving around San Francisco and northern California on our vacation was a great stress-saver. It’s like having the most skilled map-reader in the world with you, keeping you from getting lost, even if, like me, you are seriously map-and-direction-challenged. Now since David is a very generous man, and because he doesn’t do a lot of driving around for his work, he has let me use the Nuvi. The other day, when I got in the car, going someplace I knew perfectly well how to find, the Nuvi came on. Out of curiosity, I used the screen to direct the Nuvi to take me home, and then went off in a completely different direction…just to see what would happen. I pulled out of the church parking lot, and the Nuvi told me to turn right, but I turned left. Immediately, the computer voice, (a calm pleasant woman’s voice) said, “Recalculating.” And a few seconds later came the instruction to go 200 feet and turn left. But I turned right. And the computer said, “Recalculating.” And again gave me instructions to get me home. Again I went on my own way and again the computer announced that it was “Recalculating.” And again gave me different directions to follow. And so it went. I haven’t tested it out, but I really think that I could go 3,000 miles in the opposite direction and the Nuvi would keep “recalculating” and giving me a new way to get me home.
Now I always want to be careful about what kinds of metaphors I use for God, so I don’t want to push this very far – after all, God is definitely not a computer – although I might argue that God could choose to speak in a woman’s voice! Still, I think that God’s love for us and guidance to us is something like that GPS device. God has an infinite capacity to be patient with our mistakes, foolishness and outright downright sin – and God is always offering us a way to use our wrong turns and mistaken shortcuts to get us back on the path to the place we really want to go, recalculating over and over again on our behalf and for our good.
That is how I hear Paul’s often-quoted words from Romans, “All things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purposes.” (Romans 8:29) Paul means that God is at work in and through everything that happens to help us bring good from the events of our lives, and to guide us through even the most difficult and challenging times – even the ones we bring on ourselves
.
Because it is sometimes easy to misunderstand Paul, I invite you to notice with me some things that Paul is not saying.

1. Paul does not say that everything that happens is good. And that is a relief to me, and probably to you as well. It would be very hard indeed for me to find any way to name as “good” all the hardships and sufferings in our world. Sometimes, of course, suffering and hardship can lead to learning and growth and we see it quickly. But sometimes as far as I can see they are only pain and hardship that may, in fact, sour and harden a person. Sometimes, tragedy is just awful tragedy in which nothing good can be seen – for a long time, if ever.
2. Paul does not claim that everything that happens is caused by God. The floods in Indiana are not the proof that God is utterly disgusted by our friends less than a hundred miles north of us, nor did God single out the children who died in the schools of China at the time of the earthquake and mark them for death. Natural disasters are the consequence of natural forces at work, sometimes worsened by human efforts to control the environment. Exceptionally heavy rains overflow riverbanks, and tectonic plates shift far beneath the surface of the earth. And bad things happen to good people and bad people alike.
3. Paul is certainly not suggesting that God is responsible for human evil. The long-delayed arrest this week of Radovan Karadzic reminds us of the origin of the terrible term “ethnic cleansing.” Karadzic is the man who planned the massacre of 8,000 men and boys in pursuit of “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnian Muslims. He is a horrifying sample of what humankind at our worst can do. Let us be clear that it was not God’s doing – it was human evil in a particularly dreadful form.

Through suffering and tragedy of every kind, God weeps with those who suffer and yearns over us and our world. God loves us persistently and waits for us to find our way back to healthy, peaceful, faithful patterns of life. When Paul says that “all things work for good for those who love God…” he is describing God’s way with us. God never gives up on anyone. And because of God’s great love for us, God is with us, partnering with us as we learn how to be God’s faithful people. And here is the most radical thing I will ever say: I believe that even Radovan Karadzic, even Adolf Hitler, even Osama bin Laden, could, if they only would, be encompassed by the love and mercy of God. No one is excluded from God’s love and mercy except by their own choice to turn away from the love of God.
Paul affirms God at work with us, in the hearts and souls of those who love God. God is involved with us, choosing to be for us and on our side, but choosing, also, to give us the freedom to keep taking wrong turns. God doesn’t wipe out our troubles or manipulate events. Instead, God stays with us. In the joyful times, in the challenging times, in the worst times we will ever experience, God is with us, and if we are able to listen for the voice of divine love, we will discover how even tragedies can become part of the developing pattern of our lives that moves us toward the good that God intends for us.
Some years ago I saw an exhibit of Chinese technology from the thirteenth century. What I remember most clearly is a special loom that was developed for weaving the very finest silk fabrics from silk threads as fine as a human hair. It is a two-person loom, constructed on two levels. One person stands on the upper level of the loom where the design is clearly visible. That person is responsible for knowing all the possible patterns that can be woven from the silk threads. The person who actually does the weaving is seated in front of the loom at the lower level. From the weaver’s vantage point the design is never seen clearly, for the weaver works on the side of the fabric that will become the inside of the garment. The person on the upper level of the loom sees the emerging pattern of the fabric, including not only variations, but also mistakes made by the weaver. The most important part of the task of the weaver’s partner on the upper level is to help the weaver incorporate any mistakes made into the design of the fabric so that new patterns emerge. And when more mistakes are made, yet more creative ways are discovered by the two working as collaborators in the creation of useful beauty.
And this, too, has become a part of the way I understand how God is with us. We do the best we can – and sometimes we do the worst we can – in weaving the fabric of our lives. We can’t see the pattern of the whole because we are in the midst of living. Often we get things wrong. Sometimes we deliberately muddle the pattern of our lives, but still God is with us, gently guiding us, and steadfastly loving us. There is, I trust, an overarching purpose of God at work in and through human lives and human history as a whole, but God is usually subtle and gentle with us. We can so easily close our ears to what God is saying…but no matter how far wrong we go, there is the divine voice saying gently, “Recalculating…” and offering us another way to create of our lives something good and beautiful, another way to find the place we most want to be. God yearns over us, urges us toward wholeness, and loves us into faithfulness. There is no end to God’s love, no mistake too awful to be incorporated into God’s great design, no way for any of us ever to be so lost that God cannot guide us home again.
“All things work for good for those who love God…”

Time for a new Gardiner Spring Resolution?

2008-07-10T09:01:00.006-04:00

In the wake of the PC(USA) General Assembly Action to propose to the presbyteries that G-6.0106b, a paragraph of the denomination's constitution explicitly blocking faithful, monogamous lesbian and gay members from serving in church office, the next discussion is about what will happen in the presbyteries. More specifically, the discussion is focusing on whether pastors, members and whole congregations, like the New Wineskins group, who have been talking loudly for the past two years about withdrawing from the denomination will take this action as a prompt to go ahead and leave, or whether some in that group will decided to stay and "fight" this latest move toward a more inclusive and open church.

My own passion on this discussion leads me away from my usual pro-union position--I was a strong supporter of the reunion of the southern and northern streams of our tradition in the 1970's and 1980's. Today I'd like to start a thread of this discussion about whether we should craft a new "Gardiner Spring Resolution" for our presbyteries.

This is a real departure for me, because I'm usually critical of the action of the 1861 General Assembly which adopted the resolution of the Rev. Dr. Spring (shown above, from reformedpersepectives.com), pastor of Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City, requiring commissioners to pledge allegiance to the "integrity" of the United States of America. It seemed to me to be an unnecessary hurdle that led to the split of the north and the south.

Practical theology leads one to reflect on current situations and re-think theological views and political strategies. Thus I'm now moving to a position that would prevent anyone who is planning to withdraw from the denomination from voting in a presbytery's deliberation on the proposed constitutional amendment to remove G-6.0106b. In other words, should we create a resolution that requires a statement of allegiance to the PC(USA) in order to vote on that amendment.

My practical theological reflection includes another piece of history, more recent than Gardiner Spring. In the preparation for Presbyterian reunion in the 1970's and early 1980's, a group of conservative southern Presbyterians were appointed to the Reunion Committee in order to assure that their perspectives were considered in the plan for reunion. Rev. Andy Jumper, pastor of a prominent congregation in St. Louis MO, was part of that group. He used his considerable persuasive power to frame and shape the Plan of Reunion and the proposed new constitution in his image. Then shortly after reunion was enacted, he led his congregation out of the denomination. I still feel the anger of betrayal in that set of actions, and that anger and reflection on that bit of history prompts me to raise this question for discussion.

Not that any of us can ever predict our future actions, but we can be more honest and transparent about our current intentions. If I were planning or hoping to withdraw, I would personally recuse myself from voting on that constitutional amendment. Since I'm not planning on withdrawing, I would be happy to pledge my allegiance to this denomination.

Presbyterian Stated Clerk Heritage--Gradye Parsons

2008-07-08T16:27:00.004-04:00

There's a kind of historical joy in seeing a new Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) elected and installed at the recent General Assembly meeting in San Jose. Gradye Parsons has been a very popular member of the staff of the outgoing Stated Clerk, and did a very fine job with the question and answer time on the floor of the assembly.

I'm reflecting on the half-century of memory I bring to this event, starting with the saintly Eugene Carson Blake of the northern stream (shown at bottom). He sort of set the tone for both ecumenical and social justice stances that marked the denomination for the middle part of the 20th century. It was Blake who envisioned the Consultation on Church Union, for example. He was succeeded by William P. Thompson in the northern flank of the family. Jim Andrews (with the white Beard) was clerk of the southern stream at the time of Reunion and Thompson and Andrews jointly oversaw the early years of reunion. Andrews was chosen Stated Clerk afterwards and he retired and was succeeded by Cliff Kirkpatrick. Blake, Thompson and Andrews have all since died.

Although, since reunion, the social justice role has been severely limited, the ecumenical roles have continued. Blake, Thompson and Andrews were all presidents of the National Council of Churches, and Kirkpatrick is president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.

The Stated Clerk is the chief ecclesiastical officer, with oversight of the denomination's constitutional polity, the connectional system of governing bodies, and the national meetings, and serves as primary parliamentarian for the biennial General Assembly. The Clerk is a major public face of the denomination and the kind of personal and spiritual presence that each of these men has represented serves us well.

Welcome to this grand succession of great leaders, Gradye. I offer prayers of intercession for your strength and courage for the days to come!

Welcome to this grand

Gemstones and Lifelong Learners

2008-05-29T11:03:00.005-04:00

Listening to Janice Catron lead the last Spring Bible Study session on the Revelation of John, which she calls a "letter," with reflections on the gemstones in Rev. 21:19-21,I went off on my own little rabbit-trail of my own. Henry Ward Beecher, brilliant and controversial preacher of the 19th Century (shown above with his own "mullet" taken from http://www.chi.gospelcom.net/) was said to have been drawn to beautiful jewels. He apparently talked his wealthy benefactors into loaning him beautiful precious gemstones (shown here in an image from euphoriagems) which he carried around in his pockets, and would take them out and admire them and show them around to others. He said, in reference to the Revelation image, that these stones were a foretaste of the good life God intends for God's people.

Now I am not particularly drawn to jewels, but I believe I understand what he was thinking and feeling. I'm more drawn to the depth of beauty of God's people as they grow and allow themselves to be transformed in lifelong learning. Each learner refracts the light of God's creative energies, and shines in infinite variety of colors with the fire of that energy.

So I encourage us all onward toward a summer of reflection and learning with the words of Philippians 1:14-16: "In everything you do, act without grumbling or arguing; prove yourselves innocent and straightforward, children of God beyond reproach, in the midst of a twisted and depraved generation--among which you shine like stars in the sky, while holding fast to the word of life."

What's God Got to Do with It--control and command management style

2008-05-23T15:39:00.002-04:00

I'm continually confounded by church organizations that are run according to the old command and control management style. You know the style--it's pyramidal, with control starting from the top and moving down, preventing individual freedom and encouraging homogeneity, saying "no" more than "yes," and generally keeping the lid on creativity. Yes, I'm talking about mainline protestant churches and church organizations that shall remain unnamed in this post. How do you go about loosening them up, encouraging more openness, more transparency, more flat organizational accountabilities, more ability of the people who are doing the work having the authority to made decisions, including financial decisions about their areas. Shall we offer more training, more organization development consulting? I'm afraid these initiatives are doomed to failure.

The aha moment I had recently was that the problem is not practical or managerial but theological. We have created organizational structures to match our perception of God. Those who believe in an "omni" God (omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, who is never changing, perfect and beyond passion, those are the ones who are stuck in an organization that mirrors that construction of God: Controlling, Punishing, rewarding, Demanding, Inaccessible--like the angry god in the picture above.

I think it takes a theological reformation to recognize that God might be primarily: Creative, Relational, Loving, Freeing/empowering, Vulnerable, Changing, Discernible, Transforming. Then we might be able to recognize the ability of an organization to organize itself around the gifts and passions of its people and to be a good steward of its capital resources for the sake of its people and of the environment.

It takes a nod to process and liberationist theology to move an organization forward into a future-thinking mode so that something creative can happen to open up a church or church agency to love and relationality.

My reading of Catherin Keller's new book, On the Mystery (Fortress, 2008) helped me to begin thinking about the connection between theology and management styles. What do you think?

Siblings Wrestling Over Homosexuality

2008-04-17T15:05:00.003-04:00

Hearing Margaret Farley, the Grawemeyer Prize winner in religion, talk about sexual ethics, prompted me to ask her what she thinks has made homosexuality the key issue in denominational and cultural battles in the last 30 years. "Why this particular issue at this time?"

She gave her usual calm, clear but well qualified and nuanced response about the loosening of sexual norms in the sixties and early seventies, which led to some people being able to recognize and talk about the fact that they love someone of the same gender. That experience and the co-relative experience of those who have family and friends who are gay and learn to love and except them, led to a deep shaking of the foundations of sexual identity. This shaking, because it is so fundamental, has become extremely threatening to some who "pull the shades" on that topic and insist on holding on to and enforcing the old norms and moralities. This identity crisis makes dialogue about the topic very fraught with difficulties.

I appreciate that Farley's notion of identity crisis is much more generous and graceful than my thinking. I think my thoughts are similar, however, in that I recognize that the acceptance of homosexuality challenges traditional standards of male dominance in which the male is active and the female is passive (also part of Farley's analysis), and the assumption that a man engaged in sexual activity with another male makes one of them "passive," and thus threatening to male identity.

This helps fill out my image for what's happening in the mainline denominations, particularly my own PC(USA). It seems to me that one way of understanding the conflict over homosexuality is that we are having an ongoing fight between siblings, well known in family circles, in which the siblings have engaged in the battle for so long that they cannot imagine either stopping the fight or separating. The background for the two positions could be simplistically put that one side is holding on to traditional moralities due to the threat of gender identity crisis, and the other side is pushing for loosening the traditional moralities due to their experience with persons who are gay or lesbian.

The Biblical story of the sibling rivalry between Jacob and Esau is the model. They struggled within the womb (Gen. 25:22), they were born with Jacob refusing to let go of his brother's heel, and they spent their lives in a wrestling match. It is not accidental that Jacob dreamed of wresting the angel on the night before he met his brother again after many years (Gen 32:22ff).

It's not a pleasant image, and I'd be happy to replace it with a more hopeful story (although the last word on the Esau-Jacob match is that they cooperated in burying their father--Gen. 35:29).

Justice Love and the Grawemeyer Award

2008-04-15T16:47:00.006-04:00

http://www.grawemeyer.org/religion/index.html

20 years ago, the Presbyterian Church (USA) considered a study on sexual ethics in which the criterion for good/bad, right/wrong was the concept of "justice love." The General Assembly, the denomination's highest governing body, turned it down--because it did not conform to conventional moral views of a majority of commissioners. I was mighty sorry that happened.

Thus it is with great pleasure that I let you know that Margaret Farley will be on campus this week to receive the Grawemeyer award in religion for her book on sexual ethics. See the link for more information.

Farley is a Roman Catholic, religious, Yale Scholar, well known to several of our faculty, and she takes a very carefully developed stance that justice is the basic issue in sexual ethics! Imagine that. And it is this very Presbyterian seminary that's giving her the award.

Here's the basic information for you:
Members of the LPTS community have the opportunity to meet Margaret Farley and hear her speak this Wednesday and Thursday. Margaret is the recipient of the 2008 Grawemeyer Award in Religion, for her book Just Love: A Framework for Sexual Ethics. Other distinguished guests will also be on campus to help celebrate Margaret’s receipt of this prestigious award, including Harold Attridge, Dean of Yale Divinity School, and Frank Oveis, former editor at Continuum (the publisher of Just Love). In addition, our own Kathryn Johnson is returning from Switzerland for the occasion. You should also plan to attend!

Margaret Farley will be lecturing in the chapel at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, preaching in chapel at 10:10 a.m. on Thursday, and speaking in Frances Adeney’s class at 11:00 a.m. on Thursday (in 122 Schlegel—community members welcome).

If you've been hankering for a more complex and progressive perspective on sexual ethics, this is for you!

Patriotism and Discipleship--choices we have

2008-03-26T09:35:00.009-04:00

Further reflection on the Jeremiah Wright flap, from a left-leaning democrat, but not about partisan politics. This is about how we parse our values of patriotism and Christian discipleship as church leaders and how our folks respond to our choices.

Hillary is quoted in the NYTimes this morning as saying: "Given all we have heard and seen, he (Wright) would not have been my pastor." She is further quoted as critiquing Obama: "While we don't have a choice when it comes to our relatives, we do have a choice when it comes to our pastors or our church."

The assumption in that last quote is a common one. Christianity is a voluntary activity. We make choices to join churches or leave churches or not go to church at all based on our private values and prejudices. One of our favorite prejudices leveraged against our churches and our pastors is patriotism. I've been reminded frequently as a pastor, and I'll be you have too, that we are not free to criticize our country or our president because that's mixing church and state.

I've always felt that I owe a higher allegiance to the God of Jesus Christ than I do to my country, and I'm a kind of American heretic because of it, I know. I am frankly shocked that Americans are criticizing Jeremiah Wright for mining the scriptures for God's priorities and using those scriptural insights to criticize the priorities of the government.

Hillary's comment also reminded me that prominent church members and community leaders are not above using their celebrity and their clout (and their contributions to the church) as a threat to domesticate the clergy. "If you say something I don't agree with, I'll leave this church and tell everyone why."

I personally believe Christians are called to a higher standard of behavior. Of course we are free to disagree with our pastors, but we're not free to reject the demands of the gospel to put God first!

Context in Preaching--Jeremiah Wright's critics

2008-03-26T09:35:00.004-04:00

The seminary had a forum last week, organized by students, to talk about the flap caused by those who cherry-picked Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons for so called sensational clips and then tried to tie the Democratic candidate Obama to them. Our homiletics professor, Dr. Debra Mumford, pointed out that they not only took these clips out of context from the whole sermons and from their scriptural basis (Wright is a completely biblical preacher, by the way), but they also took him out of the context of preaching in a black church, out of the context of the black prophetic preaching tradition, and out of the context of black liberation theology. She also suggested that she could find nothing untrue in what was quoted by Wright--an important distinction!

I thought that the mostly white students in the crowd needed to think, as well, about how they approach public issues in their preaching in the context of mainline, European-American, middle-class congregations. Here is what I wrote in response.

In my 35 years of preaching to mostly middle and upper-middle class European American Presbyterians, I engaged in a very different kind of prophetic proclamation. I think Wright and I may use similar hermeneutic principles, but it did not look or sound anything like what he does. With my congregations, I listened carefully with ear and heart and mind to the culture and existential concerns of my congregation (as Wright did at Trinity UCC) and the historical situation in which we lived. Then I shaped the prophetic messages to work into their particular hearts and minds. I did not usually overtly challenge or criticize their compliance and collaboration with the dominant culture that oppressed others. The reason for that is that I had learned that they could not hear hope and gospel for themselves or for others if they closed their ears to the prophetic message. That’s similar to the mental processes we observe in commentators and news anchors and others who wont’ or can’t really hear Jeremiah Wright’s messages.

The other thing that I did in my congregations that is parallel to Wright—I let them know in as many ways as possible that I loved them, and helped them learn to trust me. After a while, they also became more open to my prophetic proclamation because it came in the context of trust and love. Each of us has to measure how long to let that trust build in a particular congregation before turning up the pressure in prophetic preaching.

With reading the context and building trust, over the years I learned to frame the gospel and the prophetic message in ways that would open their hearts and minds to the possibility of inner transformation for themselves and compassion and commitment to others, particularly to those on the margins. This was not always fruitful, but I kept at it. Frequently they thought I was “making them think” which is white folks’ way of struggling with these issues, and that was OK with them. They also knew, because I repeated it often, that they were not required to agree with me. As good Presbyterians they were required, instead, to come to grips with the scripture passages, listen to my proclamation, examine their own conscience, and arrive at their own conclusions. Thus I could do prophetic preaching that fit the time and place, in my own particular way.

It's all about the context!

2008-03-11T14:43:00.002-04:00

Watching Clinton and Obama turning on each other in a kind of pit-bull fight to the end reminded me of Dr. Ken Goodpaster, Professor of Business Ethics at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul MN, with whom I worked doing ethics training for high school students, and who coined the term "teleopathy." The theologically trained might catch the roots of the words--it means "goal sickness." It is described in his new book Conscience and Corporate Culture, just out from Blackwell. (See a review at:

http://http://www.isfp.co.uk/businesspathways/issue32.html)

A leader afflicted with teleopathy gets so fixated on a goal, such as winning a presidential nomination, that ethics and values are lost in the battle. He says this fixation or addiction is accompanied by distancing from one's humanity, and a rationalization that loses touch with reality. What makes this pathology so insidious is that one can easily slip over the cliff from a healthy and effective striving for excellence, with its virtues of courage, determination and perseverance. When the goal becomes more important than the people and the systems with which we are working, we're in danger.

Church leaders need to be inoculated against the disease of teleopathy because we drink the water of divine vocation and work in stained-glass environments. When you're doing God's work, it's easy to get so zealous that being right and achieving our goals are more important than the Holy One whom we are supposed to be serving. The inoculations take different forms, but my favorite is a veil of humility that holds my own limitations in front of me, and a good dose of relativity to cast doubt that I've got the final and best take on the situation.

Holy Spirit, give me courage, determination and perseverance, without pathological fixation.

New Source for Presbyterian and Ecumenical Studies at Louisville Seminary

2008-03-05T15:33:00.005-05:00

President Dean K. Thompson announced yesterday the appointment of The Rev. Dr. Clifton Kirkpatrick as Visiting Professor of Ecumenical Studies and Global Ministries at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

Kirkpatrick, who is currently stated clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), is also the president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. He serves on the governing boards of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., the World Council of Churches, and the Council of Presidents, United States Chapter of the World Conference on Religion and Peace.

The announcement was made during the “Voices of the Church Dinner,” which was held March 4 in conjunction with Louisville Seminary’s annual Festival of Theology and Alum Reunion. Kirkpatrick was the guest speaker.

In September 2007, Kirkpatrick announced that he would not seek a fourth three-year term as stated clerk in the 2.3-million-member denomination. In a published statement addressed to friends and colleagues, he cited a desire for “more quality time with my family, to be able to devote myself more fully to the responsibility I have undertaken since 2004 to serve as president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, and to share in the life of the church, both locally and globally, in new and creative ways.”

Kirkpatrick’s term as stated clerk will conclude at the end of the 218th General Assembly (2008) in San Jose, Calif., in June. He was first elected to the office in 1996 and is only the second General Assembly stated clerk elected since Presbyterian reunion in 1983.

At Louisville Seminary, Kirkpatrick will teach up to two courses per year in areas of his expertise, including the ecumenical church, Presbyterian studies, the global church, Presbyterian polity and governance, congregational leadership and ministry, and practical theology.

“We at Louisville Seminary are deeply grateful for Cliff Kirkpatrick's wise, humble, and unselfish service in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and among ecumenical and Reformed communities throughout the world. We look forward to his new and promising relationship with our dedicated faculty and students,” stated President Thompson.

Kirkpatrick’s appointment will run three years and will also allow him to offer his services in Doctor of Ministry degree seminars and in Lifelong Learning events, which address the ecumenical and global church, middle governing body leadership, and church leadership.
Kirkpatrick said he will welcome the opportunity for interaction and conversation with faculty and students and of becoming an active member of the Louisville Seminary community.

Kirkpatrick will be a great resource for pastors, denominational officers and other church leaders for continuing education, for independent studies, and for general counsel drawing on his extensive experience in mission, governance, and interfaith and ecumenical relations.

I'm looking forward to having him around as a colleague! Welcome, Cliff!

March 5-8 Festival of Theology

2008-02-22T09:50:00.002-05:00

2008 Festival of Theology and Alum Reunion
Young Voices in Homiletics
Worship - Lectures - Master Classes

FEATURING: Anna Carter Florence - Otis Moss III - Cláudio Carvalhaes - Debra Mumford
March 2-5, 2008
ALSO: Clifton Kirkpatrick, Stated Clerk (chief ecclesiastical officer) of the Presbyterian Church (USA), will speak at the "Voices of the Church" dinner, March 4, 6 p.m. Reservations are required by Feb. 20.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Register Online* Schedule About the Speakers Reunion Events Download Brochure
At the 2008 Festival of Theology you will hear four outstanding young homileticians explain their approaches to preaching in daily lectures, witness them putting their theories in to practice in community worship services, and explore ways to incorporate what you learn through small group conversations in master classes and panel discussions.
*All lectures, worship services and master classes are offered free of charge. Reservations and tickets are required for some Festival and Reunion events.
SPEAKERS
Debra Mumford - March 2, 7 p.m. and March 3, 11;15 a.m.Frank H. Caldwell Assistant Professor of Homiletics, Louisville Seminary She is said to teach and preach with authority, creativity, and prophetic imagination as she guides future pastors in moving from text to sermon and from context to sermon in faithful proclamation of the Gospel.
Otis Moss III - March 3, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m.Pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago He is the author of Redemption in a Red Light District (Four-G, 1999), and his essays, articles, and poetry have appeared in Sojourners Magazine, Urban Spectrum, and African American Pulpit, which recently named him one of the “20 to watch” ministers who will shape the future of the African American church. Newsweek has cited Moss as one of “God’s Foot Soldiers committed to transforming the lives of youth.”Anna Carter Florence - March 4, 10 and 11:15 a.m.Professor of Preaching and Worship at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Ga.As a scholar and writer, her research interests are testimony, feminist theology, the role of experience in preaching, and the history of preaching women. She is the author of Preaching as Testimony (Westminster John Knox, 2007) and the editor of Inscribing the Text: Sermons and Prayers by Walter Brueggemann (Fortress, 2004).
Cláudio Carvalhaes - March 4, 2:30 p.m. and March 5, 10 a.m.Assistant Professor of Worship and Preaching, Louisville Seminary As a theologian and artist his focus on reviving worship for the 21st century is deeply informed by an understanding of worship around the world. Carvalhaes began teaching at Louisville Seminary in the Fall of 2007, and as a much sought after speaker, writer, and consultant, he has served with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in its peacemaking and immigrant groups ministries.
CONTACTS
For Festival of Theology Lectures: Carol Webb or David Sawyer
For Alum Reunion: Lisa Kolb or Leah Bradley
800.264.1839 502.895.3411
Register Online.

Michelle E. Melton
Director of Communications
Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
1044 Alta Vista Road
Louisville, KY 40205-1798
800.264.1839
502.992.9358, direct
502.609.5697, cell
mmelton@lpts.edu
www.lpts.edu

2009 Festival of Theology Lecturers Named

2008-02-19T11:50:00.005-05:00

save the date
2009 Festival of Theology & Reunion
March 15–18

New Ways of Being Church
Conversations on renewal and
transformation in mainline congregations

Yes, there are signs of hope for the church in this so-called post-modern and post-Christian era! In 2009, Louisville Seminary welcomes a celebrated trio of church leaders and writers who are spreading the news that the church of the 21st Century can and does re-think, re-tradition, and re-invent itself. By the time of the 2009 Lectures, all three of them will have published new books about Jesus.

Featuring

Diana Butler Bass, historian and author of the popular book Christianity for the Rest of Us, brings with her inspirational presentation solid research showing that mainline congregations are thriving as communities that practice the Christian traditions.
Marcus Borg, a New Testament scholar, speaks for many who seek a fresh and credible progressive understanding of Jesus Christ for this age. His newest book will be simply titled Jesus.
Brian McLaren is the pastor and author (A Generous Orthodoxy and more recently Everything Must Change) who best represents the “Emerging Church” from an evangelical perspective, but his books and his presentations elude simple labels.

Emotional Intelligence Laboratory This Summer!

2008-02-04T17:18:00.000-05:00

Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
UPCOMING LIFELONG LEARNING EVENT

Emotional Intelligence and Human Relations Laboratory
July 21 to 25, 2008

Course Description: This is an intensive and highly experiential one-week course, with the major amount of time being spent in a small groups of 10 to 14 people with two experienced trainers in each group. As group life unfolds, participants are offered feedback on the impact they have on others in the group. Participants will learn both inter-personal and Intra-group communication skills. The content of the course will focus on the four areas of emotional intelligence as keys to improving leadership effectiveness for church leaders.

Faculty: Roy M. Oswald, Center for Emotional Intelligence and Human Relations Skills,
Retired Senior Consultant with Alban Institute
David R. Sawyer, Professor of Ministry and Director of Lifelong Learning, Louisville
Seminary.
Adjunct Trainers to be named

Cost: For Lifelong Learning:
Tuition: $620.00
Food and Lodging: $490.00
The tuition fee include a survey on Emotional Intelligence: $160
This survey involves a 360 degree EQ evaluation of each participant
provided by up to 20 people related to this individual.
For Academic Credit (3 hours)
Tuition: $930
Food and Lodging, $490.00

For more information contact:
Dr. David Sawyer: Director of Lifelong Learning, Louisville Seminary
dsawyer@lpts.edu
800-264-1839 ext 372
Dr. Carol Webb, Lifelong Learning Assistant, Louisville Seminary
cwebb@lpts.edu
800-264-1839 ext 429
Roy M. Oswald, Executive Director Center for EQ-HR
roymoswald@aol.com
301 432 2616

Controversy over the Golden Compass

2008-01-08T11:12:00.000-05:00

I've been fascinated by the opposition to the Golden Compass. That's a movie (out in December to very disappointing numbers) based on a fantasy series His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. The trilogy fits into the genre of fantasy occupied by Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling. It has, however, fallen victim to the culture wars in which zealous christians (the lower case is intentional here) have opposed it, ostensibly because the stories contain characters and plot sequences that are critical of the church.

Now that I've read into the third book (still reading) and seen the film, I want to make my own comments.

First, the "church" described in the books and implied in the movie bears only a glancing resemblance to the institutions of Christianity, perhaps closest to the Roman Catholic hierarchy, but not really. After all, the last "pope" was Calvin who moved the Vatican to Geneva. Pullman describes a religious institution and power system that has managed to squeeze all the spirit out of its life and exists to maintain its power by oppression rather than freedom. I rather enjoyed the straw figure Pullman has created because I don't love any part of the church that destroys freedom and joy and creative growth of the spirit.

Second, the books describe the "afterlife" as a mystical union with the universe. Now that's not too different than what was reported in the Times' report of the latest encyclical from Pope Benedict (in Rome, that is).

Third, Pullman's god is an absentee god of the theists who got the universe started and then went off to contemplate deeper things. It's another straw figure and it's easy to root for the demise of such a god.

Finally, the central character of "The Golden Compass" is a strong, bright, capably gifted, courageous, and fiercely independent little girl. It seems to me to be quite possible that more conservative forces in our church families are deeply, and probably unconsciously, unable to handle any story line that puts a female, particularly a female child, in leadership.

When we saw the film on a weekend evening just after Christmas it was shown in the smallest screening room in a local multiplex with not more than 15 people in attendance. What a shame that this imaginative story about truth-telling and making a world where children can be whole and happy has been so diminished by forces of unenlightenment.

Leadership and Ecological Metaphors

2007-12-11T15:32:00.000-05:00

http://http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/us/11hunting.html?ex=1355029200&en=b20a1f8dac0c03a4&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

I grew up duck hunting with my father on the "Mississippi Flyway" shown to the right --a major migratory path for waterfowl, particularly ducks and geese. We did not know then that our "swamp" was really a wetland, or that there was a biological connection between climate and wetlands and waterfowl. Late in his life, my Dad learned some of those connections and found himself, much to my amusement, an arch-conservative, making common cause with liberal "green" organizations in the name of wildlife conservation.

A story in today's New York Times appears (see link above) about how climate change is impacting duck hunting in Missouri, and how hunters are beginning to see the light about climate change reminded me of that common cause and got me thinking about ecology and leadership.

Today I'm thinking again about how important it is for leaders in any field, but definitely in the church, to see the bigger picture of the ecologies--environmental, social, emotional and spiritual -- and to think like environmentalists about the future. In the article, a member of the UN Panel that shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore is quoted with the idea that we can no longer effectively lead if we only have data from the past.

Often churches are stuck with information and traditions from the past with no sense of where they should go in the future. I believe we can only lead effectively if we can weave together what we know from the past and in the present with a faithfully imagined "trajectory" (to use Gordon Kaufman's term) for the future.

Or to continue the metaphor, in order to have our ducks properly aligned, we have to reformulate our approaches based on what's about to happen, not just what used to happen.

Organizations with Heart

2007-12-03T16:54:00.000-05:00

The title of the book, Profit for Life: How Capitalism Excels (Society for Organizational Learning, 2006) by Joseph Bragdon, is misleading--the subtitle gets me quicker: "Living Asset Stewardship." It's about focusing organizational leadership on the living assets--the organization's people and the environment--and allowing the "non-living assets"--the financial ones--serve the living ones.

Today's post is an excerpt from the book on "How to Recognize a Company with Heart."

an authentic mission, vision, and values that arose spontaneously from within the firm and that strongly appeal to the heart;
a decentralized, networked organization, based on the principle of subsidiarity, in which employees are trusted to self-organize in their areas of competence and are held accountable;
a culture of servant leadership, wherein the role of leaders is to serve the professional growth of employees, and employees are treated as precious assets rather than potential costs and liabilities;
a commitment to continual learning that gives employees permission to experiment and fail in their quest for innovation; and
a history of prudent fiscal management that reflects an intention to serve humanity in sustainable ways for generations to come.

I'll hold that as a manifesto for church leadership as well. Imagine that coming from the Harvard Business School!

"The WHAT-IF Department"--a dream ticket

2007-11-16T11:30:00.000-05:00

I've actually thought this absurd thing before when Warren Buffett was asked for his idea of the "dream ticket" for president, and occasionally get laughs at dinner parties when I mention it.

Yesterday, another great story on Warren Buffett was in the Times reporting that he was advising congress not to eliminate the estate tax, often called the "death tax." He was quoted as saying that to do so would further deteriorate the foundations of democracy and move us further toward plutocracy (not to be confused with the banished planet of the same name) in which the rich are "on a space ship" and the middle class are "on a treadmill."

And I slipped into my "what if" mind (read fantasy) and wished again for a dream ticket to run for president of the USA. What about Warren Buffett for President and Jimmy Buffett for Vice President? A coalition of the economically wise who live for dividends and the "common people" who just live for five o'clock (somewhere). The Wall Street Heads and the Parrot-heads, if you will.

Don't you imagine they could make beautiful music together?

Sheep among wolves

2007-10-26T16:29:00.000-04:00

The scripture reading today was Matthew 10, and Dean David Hester spoke helpfully about this difficulty passage about being sent on a mission trip, expecting hostility and rejection. David noted the menagerie of animal images in the passage--sheep, wolves, doves and serpents.

I went off on my own little excursion (I'm sure I'm not the only one to do that during a sermon) on the symbolism of these creatures. Only the wolves come out with a negative image in this passage. Even the snake gets a better promotion than the wolf.

My quick comment is, "wolves have gotten a bad rap." I say that partly because of a great love of nature and the delightful time we spent in Northern Minnesota where wolves have been reintroduced and have a valued role in the wilderness ecology there, as is true of a few other locations in this country. We still enjoy Jim Brandenberg's books and photography of wolves--their strength, their beauty, their line of continuity to our own very tame wheaten terrier, and remember fondly our visit to the the wolf refuge center near Ely, MN.

With that background, you might appreciate our experience of visiting eastern Kentucky a couple of years ago and going on an "elk watch" in the dusk of a summer evening. Thousands of wild elk have been reintroduced to the desolate landscape of removed mountaintops, which is an interesting wilderness story in itself. When the tour guides mentioned that the elk were multiplying and beginning to become pests, we asked them if there had been talk of reintroducing the wolves as the natural predators to help maintain a healthy balance of the populations of both elk and wolf. We were told with great passion that wolves would never be accepted in Kentucky!

Maybe this bad rap goes back to Jesus' words from Matthew casting wolves in a bad light. Maybe it's "Little Red Riding Hood" and the grandma eating wolf. Maybe, to take a more systemic perspective, we have fallen so in love with controlling nature and dominating the natural world, that we think we can decide better than the Creator what creatures belong and which do not belong in the wild and wonderful world. We do this at our own great risk.

To point to my own earlier work, in my book on church conflict (see July 24, 2007 post), I encourage us to see conflict as a positive gift, pointing to a deeper wisdom in the ecology of a congregation. Maybe, just maybe, Jesus intended us to recognize that there will always be wolves to challenge and balance our congregational and public ministry. They are not big, bad and evil. They are part of the natural wisdom of the way the world works, and like the elk, we do not thrive without natural challenges and dangers!

So let's rehabilitate the image of the wolves. Let's let them back into our vocabulary, if not on our ruined mountaintops, and thank God for the beauty, strength and goodness of predators in our midst.

Meditation on Pastoral Leadership and Joe Torre

2007-10-25T10:21:00.001-04:00

I usually identify with baseball managers. They get paid less than the people they lead, and work in an environment in which they have to answer to not only the clamoring crowd but also to a few irascible patriarchs and matriarchs (yes, "matriarchs"--remember Marge Schott!). The pastor's job is to lead a group of people who think they know better than the leader what they should be doing in their organization, and in fact the church members should be following their own gifts and passions and setting the tone in the sanctuary (like the clubhouse). And sometimes, the call and passion of the pastor diverges in subtle or significant ways from the crowd and those that have greatest influence, and sometimes it's good to know when it's wise walk away from the job.

Joe Torre stayed longer than anybody except maybe Casey and won lots of ball games and filled the stands and was a good partner with the other management folks and the players to make all that happen. But when that wasn't good enough, he was wise enough to not buckle under a change of covenant or changed expectations to "keep the peace." He walked away. My guess is he'll be OK. The Yankees will be OK, too. And baseball will keep on keepin' on.

What are your thoughts about pastoral leadership during this World Series?

Giving Your Best and Lifelong Learning

2007-10-16T10:12:00.001-04:00

Thinking about a presentation on lifelong learning I will make today to a group of religious leaders who engage in the addiction recovery process, I was struck by this reading from Howard Thurman in today's meditation guide (Shawchuck and Job, A Guide to Prayer for All Who Seek God, Nashville: Upper Room Books, 2003, 372):

"It is one of the great insights of religion that only God is worthy of the best in one's treasure house and the best in one's treasure house is not worthy. . . . The urge to share as an offering of the heart that which has deepest meaning is at bottom the hunger for God. It is deep call unto deep. Offerings may be made to other human beings. . . . But such offerings do not satisfy, nor do they bring peace to the spirit. . . . [O]nly when the offering is seen as being made to the Highest, to God, however crude may be the altar upon which it rests, is the deep need in us all satisfied and our spirits come into the great Peace."

For those of us called to some kind of ministry to others, it is easy to fall back into easy contentment with they way we've been doing our work. The way we preach, the way we counsel, the way we administer, even the way we pray. But each new situation, every new sermon or client or organizational dilemma presents a new challenge and we are called, from deep within, to reach down deep and learn something new, try something better, meet the change with innovation.

Ministry in a changing world challenges each of us to bring new reflection on how to interpret our faith tradition and the situation, new insights about what we are called to be here and now, and fresh skills in the performance of our ministry to others. Not to offer it to those others alone, but to offer this moment's efforts to the source of our life and strength, to the highest, to the deepest, to the one in which we live and move and have our being.

As I thought about this the old Sunday School song came back to me from my childhood : "Give of your best to the Master." The words and the theology are truly awful, dripping in violent imagery. Yet it captures the insight that Thurman illuminates: nothing less than our best, however humble, and only God is worthy of such an offering. That's the path of peace.

Fall Lectures October 24-25

2007-10-12T12:34:00.000-04:00

The Second Annual Edwards Presler Lectures on Justice and Mission will happen Wednesday and Thursday, October 24-25.

The PRESLER LECTURE ON MISSION features Dr. Carlos Cardoza-Orlandi (shown on left), Associate Professor of World Christianity at Columbia Seminary. One of the bright young advocates of the global reach of the Christian Faith in the 21st Century, Dr. Cardoza-Orlandi will speak on the topic, "Mission Impossible?: Faith and the Crossroads of People and Religions" at 10 a.m., Wednesday, October 24th in the Seminary Chapel.

THE EDWARDS LECTURE ON JUSTICE will be given by Dr. Charles Marsh, shown on the right, of the University of Virginia where he is Professor of Religious and Theological Studies and Director of the Project on Lived Theology. This former Grawemeyer Award Winner is a popular speaker at LPTS and a clear voice for racial reconciliation in this country. His lecture on "The Beloved Community: American Search, Christian Hope, Human Struggle" will be at 7 p.m. in the seminary chapel.

These lectures are free and open to the public and require no reservations to attend. For more information, call 800-264-1839, ext 429.

Hoagy's Coming To Town

2007-10-04T10:06:00.000-04:00

I was confused when my friend (and the music director at my wife's church) said that Hoagy Carmichael was coming to town in New Albany, Indiana, and would be appearing in her nightclub-restaurant "The Speakeasy" in October. But indeed, he is going to be present there, in a lifesize bronze sculpture something like the picture above, in the music space of that lovely venue starting next weekend. Apparently Hoagy was a Hoosier, and this is his return tour of his home state.

Go to the co-sponsor of the event, the Carnegie Center for Art & History in New Albany, http://www.carnegiecenter.org/ for more information.

The Speakeasy is at 225 State Street in downtown New Albany, not far from the Brent-Spence Bridge.

FRIDAY OCTOBER 19

10 a.m-11 p.m.. Exhibit Open

4:30-6 Welcome Reception

8:30-10:30 Jamey Aebersold Jazz Quartet Free Performance

SATURDAY OCTOBER 20

10 a.m -11 p.m. Exhibit open

1 p.m. Floyd County Historical Society Lecture by the sculptor, Michael Livingston McAuley

8 p.m. Shall We Dance Studio Instructors Demonstrations and Lessons

9-11 p.m. Speakeasy Orchestra Free Performance and Dance

I think of Jazz as a wonderful metaphor for lifelong learning--continuing to adapt and grow and enjoy the ensemble of life! So I celebrate this remembrance of Hoagy!

Lifelong Learning and Marcel Marceau

2007-09-24T14:04:00.001-04:00

Noting that Marcel Marceau died yesterday, I've been letting my imagination run with the intersection between his art and lifelong learning. The New York Times obituary noted that he never said a word on stage or screen except for the time that Mel Brooks put him in a spot in one of his pictures and had him actually say something. The effect was, of course, unexpected and funny. I don't always practice it, but I'm aware that saying too much is often saying too much.

My daughter interviewed Marcel four years ago during his last tour of the United States. I think her article is as good an obituary as the Times but I may be prejudiced in her favor. The link to her article in the Minneapolis weekly entertainment tabloid is:

http://www.citypages.com/databank/24/1164/article11147.asp

To whet your appetite, here's a quote from the article about what makes a person continue to be alive all one's life:

"Certainly, I wouldn't be the first woman to be charmed by the French or sweet-talked by a mime, but it's more likely I fell prey to the infectious vivacity, curiosity, creativity...and oh heck...let's just say it...joie de vivre, that has charmed 55 years' worth of audiences. It's no doubt the same remarkable well-being that recently prompted the United Nations Second World Assembly on Aging to appoint him "goodwill ambassador." Marceau is quite grateful for his health and chalks it up to "a gift I received from the godly," though he seriously adds, "also, I never quit working."

"The reason behind the longevity of Marceau's career may be that he offers audiences something they can't get anywhere else. He offers poetry--literal and figurative--on the stage, and masterfully refined physical-theater skills. Marceau recalls that in the days before his legendary status he found himself thinking, "What could I bring to the stage that America doesn't have?" "Ah," he remembers answering himself, "the art of silence. And, they can see that in silence I carry the invisible." As he shares this there is a pause in which he seems to be re-asking the question--and coming up with the same answer."

What is salvation, really?

2007-09-21T16:14:00.000-04:00

Helping Doctor of Ministry students work through their research projects recently, I encountered a new surprise. Many of these folks wanted to tie their project into a good sound theological base, but they could not say exactly how what they were wanting to do in their projects in ministry related to the redemptive power of God in the lives of their congregations. I realized how hard it is to define salvation in any practical, concrete way.

That sent me back to my theology source, Henry Nelson Wieman, the process theologian/philosopher from the first part of the 20th Century. (I studied with him at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, where he taught after his retirement from the University of Chicago Divinity School in the 1960's.) He was a master at putting things in very concrete, pragmatic terms.

Wieman's burning question for his life work was:

"What operates in human life with such character and power that it will transform us as we cannot transform ourselves, saving us from evil, and guiding us to the best that human life can reach, provided that we meet the required conditions?"

These three elements constitute the essence of salvation--transformation, deliverance from evil, and guidance toward the best. Faith is the "required condition," for this salvation.

So if you want to preach, teach, lead in ways that people can actually get what you're about, you need to be able to say clearly and concretely what the transformation is we're seeking, how it overcomes the inner and outer hold of destruction and evil, and how it helps us continue to lead our lives.

What's your definition of salvation?

Save the date for Crossan next year

2007-09-12T16:41:00.000-04:00

An ecumenical group in Louisville has completed negotiations to bring Biblical Scholar and member of the Jesus Seminar John Dominic Crossan to Louisville for a lecture series. Louisville Seminary will be a co-sponsor of the event.

Dates are Friday evening and Saturday, November 7-8, 2008.

Titles of his lectures from his book God and Empire: The Normalcy of Violence and the Ambiguity of the Bible:

Civilization and Empire
Bible and Power
Jesus and God
Apocalypse and Violence

The place and times are yet to be decided. More information later.

Hope in Conflict Presentations and Seminars this month

2007-09-06T13:51:00.000-04:00

I'll be making three appearances or presentations based on my book, Hope in Conflict this month (see my post in August about the book).

Tuesday, September 11, 11-12 a.m., EDT, I'll be heard on Louisville's NPR News Station, WFPL, on the "State of Affairs" show with Julie Kredens (shown at right), along with Rabbi Stanley Miles and Tom Robbins from the Louisville Archdiocese. The subject of the hour-long call-in program for that day is congregational conflict. You can access the show and listen online at www.wfpl.org/soa.htm. You can also see their blog http://www.soablog.org/.
I'm doing my first "online seminar" with the Wayne Oates Institute this month. Thirteen people are signed up for the seminar (and that's the maximum number) in the "Online Conference Center at http://www.oates.org/.
The student spouses/partners group on campus has asked me to do two sessions on "Church Conflict for Clergy Families" for them which will be Monday evenings, September 17 and 24th 7-8:30 p.m in Fellowship Hall in the lower level of the Seminary Chapel. For more information contact Christi Phelps, christi@felpsfamily.com.

Diana Butler Bass @ LPTS January 19

2007-08-29T15:22:00.000-04:00

I have just confirmed with Peggy Owens and Jay Magnus that, thanks to a partnership between the Presbytery of Mid-Kentucky, the Episcopal Diocese of Kentucky and the Lifelong Learning Office of Louisville Seminary, Diana Butler Bass will present four lectures in Louisville the third weekend in January.

Bass is the author of the Publishers Weekly "Best Book of the Year" Christianity for the Rest of Us, and a major interpreter of the emerging church movement in the United States.

Her presentation at the Episcopal Cathedral on Friday evening, January 18th, will be for clergy. On Saturday, the 19th, she will give three presentations in the Seminary Chapel. Both events will require advance registration and space is limited.

More information on costs and how to register will be available on www.lpts.edu when the links are up and available.

Updates on LPTS Lifelong Learning Events Calendar

2007-08-24T10:24:00.000-04:00

The published calendar for Lifelong Learning is always a changeable feast. Here are some of the changes to watch for and check the online version (www.lpts.edu/lifelonglearning).

The Susanna Heschel event originally planned of September 9 has been moved to the first weekend of December. She's coming sponsored by Interfaith Paths to Peace. Terry Taylor will get us more information soon.
The Presbyterian Pension Board Events were switched on the printed calendar: The January 29-30 event is the pre Retirement seminar "Growing into Tomorrow Today." And "Getting In Shape Fiscally" is offered on May 6th, adjacent to the new "Render Unto Caesar" event on the 7th. Registration for these events is through the Pension Board's website http://www.pensions.org/.
The Seminary Luncheon for Louisville's Festival of Faiths, Monday November 5, will feature Dr. Gene March, A. B. Rhodes Professor Emeritus of Old Testament, and storyteller Mary Ellen Hill, on the topic of "Interpreting and Retelling Creation Stories." Lunch is $15, register online through www.brownpapertickets.com. The overall theme of Festival of Faiths is "Birth and Creation Through the Eyes of Faith."

Church Shopping--Signs of Life

2007-08-20T14:31:00.000-04:00

My 35 year old son was just transferred to Raleigh, North Carolina, for nice promotion in his work for a large mutual fund company. I visited last weekend to see his new digs, see the communities of the "triangle" of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, and gladly give it all my paternal blessing. Since he has had little to do with church since college but continues his interest in things spiritual, I asked if we could hunt up a church to attend on Sunday. He agreed. We immediately rejected the little church on the corner near his apartment which looked pretty "closed up and uptight" and had on its signboard something about pleasing God by following "His" commandments--strikes two and three! Not surprisingly that church has no website. But there are lots of other Presbyterian Churches in Raleigh, so we looked them up. Looking through the eyes of a 30-something, most of them looked pretty "stuffy" with late middle-aged white men in leadership (not that there's anything wrong with that) and what looked to me like "business as usual/the status is quo" church life. Now understand we're both coming from a pretty progressive point of view so some things jumped out as objections pretty quickly.

Only one church showed what I call signs of life on the web site. North Raleigh http://www.nraleighpc.org shows a picture of an appealing woman pastor, an unusually interesting mission statement and goals ("a vibrant spiritual life" for example), and descriptions of programs that went beyond the usual everyday couple and family oriented church programs. It's not in Dan's neighborhood, but we were willing to make the half-hour drive for the level of interest the website generated. We were not disappointed.

The building is fresh, attractive, welcoming, and well-maintained.
The service was relaxed but thoroughly Presbyterian, which Dan liked.
The sermon was clear, interesting and pretty gutsy (she tackled the "women keep silent in church" admonition of Paul),
and the congregation of about 150 that morning included a full range of ages.
They even took in four new members and with some children in tow on that Summer Sunday!
The pastor who is very confident and easy with people promised to contact Dan based on information he gave on the registration pads,
and a few members greeted us after the service.

I think he was impressed--not an easy test!

If you're looking at your own congregation, check to be sure there are "signs of life" all around, especially on the web if you want to attract the young folks.

Reflections on Mormon Territory

2007-08-06T15:51:00.000-04:00

In a week and a half in Utah, including six days in Salt Lake City I could not avoid reflecting on the phenomenon of the Mormons, "The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. Their culture and influence is powerful in that territory. Although I can't find a lot about their current expression to agree with, and think it was a desolate place for them to settle just to get away from critics, I still admire the spirit of Joseph Smith's willingness to critique the Christianity of his time and to take the risk to believe that God could still speak to humanity with some new insights.

The Mormons emerged during the time and spirit of the 19th Century Great Awakenings that also produced the Campbellites, the Shakers, and the Harmonists of New Harmony, Indiana. My wife's family are descendants of another of those spiritual/social experimental groups, the Icarians, who settled in Nauvou, Illinois after the Mormons left.

What hits me now is that old-line protestant groups like my own Presbyterian Church are currently in conflict that may just be a resistance to any new inspiration from God on social and spiritual issues. We are so caught up in that fight that we are missing the opportunity to stretch and grow and be transformed by discernment of God's moving in the world. The United Church of Christ has it right with their motto "God is still speaking."

I'm wishing for more zeal and enthusiasm and risk-taking to move us into new possibilities to become a spiritually awakened and attuned church for the 21st century. If we don't, the zeal and enthusiasm of the Mormons and the evangelicals and the emerging churches will simply move on and leave us in the desert!

vacation time

2007-07-24T14:02:00.000-04:00

I'll be away from the seminary for three and a half weeks starting Wednesday, July 25 returning to the office Monday, August 20. The intervening time includes the COM/CPM Conference for the Presbyterian Church in Salt Lake City, vacation in Snowbird UT, some time at home for house chores, attending Deborah's son's wedding in Chicago, and visiting my son's new home in Durham NC. While I'm gone, keep on learning!
David

Church Conflict

2007-07-24T09:43:00.000-04:00

This may fall under what NPR's Car Guys call the "shameless commerce division." As I get ready to head for the PC(USA) summer conference in Salt Lake City, I'm wanting to be sure my new book continues to have a presence on the Internet.

Hope in Conflict: Discovering Wisdom in Congregational Turmoil (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2007, http://www.thepilgrimpress.org/) offers a new approach to church conflict. Instead of a problem to be solved or managed, i urge leaders to look deeper into conflict and see how conflict calls our attention to changes God desires for the church and ways the congregation either resists the changes or is rocked by them. The book is both practically and theologically grounded with plenty of real case studies (fictionalized to protect the identity of the congregations and their leaders) for clarity. In contrast to many current writers and consultants, I have drawn from the structural and strategic family systems theory to focus on structures, stories and symptoms as ways to look beneath the surface for the inner wisdom of the conflict. The leader and the consultant need to find loving, positive and hopeful frames (hypotheses) for the conflict before trying to challenge the accepted realities of the congregation.

This approach works well for judicatories to "train" conflict teams in helping congregations utilize conflict. Contact me if you'd like me to come to your area and work with your team. I would also like to continue to consult with congregations along with judicatory teams to keep proving and improving this approach.

For two opportunities to study with me using my book see the LPTS website, http://www.lpts.edu/ . The first is an online seminar this September with the Wayne E. Oates Institute (http://www.oates.org/), and the other is a seminary class offered this Spring every other weekend, Friday evening and Saturday morning, Feb. 8-April 26: "Church Conflict Utilization." Register through the Registrar's Office at LPTS.

Critical or Appreciative Approach to Practical Theology

2007-07-20T11:16:00.001-04:00

Reading two very helpful books on practical theology brought to the fore a conversation that needs further exploration. Is practical theology "critical theological reflection on the practices of the church..." as John Swinton and Harriet Mowat of Aberdeen University define it in their fine book, Practical Theology and Qualitative Research (London: SCM Press, 2006), or is it better understood as an appreciative interpretation of the faith tradition and the "signs of the times" taking into account different and often competing interpretations, as Terry Veling of Australian Catholic University of Brisbane suggests in Practical Theology: On Earth as it Is In Heaven (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005).

Most practical theologians draw from the well of earlier proponents of the discipline who used the word "critical" with great emphasis (Don Browning's "mutual critical correlation" for example). Where did Browning and others find this emphasis? If it is a carry-over from the old, enlightenment academic culture of competition and criticism, it needs to be reframed for the post-modern mindset.

I'm drawn to the term "appreciative" from its use by my old process theology teacher Henry Nelson Wieman, who characterized a major part of his creative process as "appreciative understanding" by which persons in relationship take each others' unique perspectives into themselves, from which new perspectives and enhanced community and ability to take mutual action ensue. It is also used in an organizational assessment and change methodology drawn from corporate consultants and used extensively in church circles, "Appreciative Inquiry." In AI, the strengths and assets of an organization are identified through listening to the stories. Instead of looking for problems, new energy can be released by finding the true goodness and deep positive identity of a group or church.

In practical theology, we move to find a deeper and more complex understanding of situations, not by criticism, but by recognition of differences and competing claims of theology and social sciences and sifting through them to find new interpretations that are positive and true and hopeful.

In my writing of the Doctor of Ministry research methods I urge clarity of thinking instead of critical thinking. The emphasis is that clarity only comes with a deep and complex understanding of situations in the context of faith tradition and other human knowledge.

Hospitality as the Way of Teaching and Learning in a Seminary

2007-07-18T13:49:00.000-04:00

“Hospitality” is strange and risky. Periodically, I stop to remember that the linguistic root for “hospitality,” as well as “host,” “hospital,” and “hospice,” was the Indo-European word ghosti. The contemporary words “ghost” and even “hostile” come from the same root because ghosti also referred to “stranger” as well as “guest” and even a “host of enemies” (Helen Luke, “The Stranger Within,” Parabola, Winter, 1990, p. 17). Deep within the word “hospitality” is a hint of fear and danger, slipping back and forth between comfort and risk. The encounter Abraham and Sarah had with the three strangers by the Oaks of Mamre (Genesis 18) describes this slippery and risky phenomenon. Desert rules required that hospitality be extended to strangers who approached the tents of a nomad. Note how the language of the passage shifts: first Abraham and Sarah are the hosts offering comfort and blessings and then almost instantly they become God’s guests and recipients of a challenge, a call to a new realm and a blessing. Henri Nouwen, in his book Here and Now, describes hospitality as creating a space for the guest to explore and develop in her own unique way. In a seminary that means the teachers and administrators start out by playing hosts, providing a safe and welcoming environment conducive to personal and intellectual exploration, and providing stimulating resources such as readings, lectures, discussions, assignments. If the faculty and staff insist that their own familiar agendas for the students take precedence over the students’ own unique and sometimes strange personal, spiritual and intellectual development, they diminish hospitality and miss the blessing. In a truly safe and open space guests and hosts trade places and the learners also teach and guide faculty and staff into new challenges, new realms, and new blessings. The more “strange” the students are, the more the seminary needs to extend risky hospitality and thereby unknowingly entertain angels (Hebrews 12:2).

Letty Russell's Death

2007-07-18T10:23:00.000-04:00

July 16, 2007
Notes about people
by Jerry Van Marter Presbyterian News Service
The Rev. Letty Mandeville Russell, one of the world’s foremost feminist theologians and longtime member of the Yale Divinity School faculty, died July 12 at her home in Guilford, CT. She was 77.
Russell was one of the first women ordained in the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and served the East Harlem Protestant Parish in New York City from 1952-68, including 10 years as pastor of the Presbyterian Church of the Ascension. She joined the faculty of Yale Divinity School in 1974 and served there until her retirement in 2001. In retirement, she continued to teach some courses at Yale Divinity School as a visiting professor.

Next D. Min. Learning Group Filling Up Fast

2007-07-12T11:51:00.000-04:00

In case you were thinking about applying for the Doctor of Ministry Degree at Louisville Seminary, this is a nudge to move your discernment along a little bit. We have already admitted eight excellent ministers to the next Learning Group which will meet January 7-18, 2008, and we have at least that many applications in process. We aim for a Learning Group of 15 to allow time for individual attention from faculty and group colleagues. The published deadline for admission for January 2008 is October 1. I'm thinking that we may be closing admissions for that group by early September this year (for the first time). Go to our website www.lpts.edu, click on Lifelong Learning and go to the D. Min. page for the full description of the program and the application forms. I always welcome e-mails or phone calls for conversations about how the LPTS D. Min. program would meet your needs for structured Lifelong Learning. We have tracks in Interim Ministry, Pastoral Care and Counseling and the Advanced Practice of Ministry. Within that Advanced Practice Track is flexibility to concentrate in any of the key practices of ministry, including, but not limited to, preaching and worship, Christian Education, Leadership and Administration, Evangelism and Church Development, and Governing Body Executive Leadership.
Let's talk: 800-264-1839, ext. 372; dsawyer@lpts.edu.

No Pigeon-holing Theology?

2007-07-10T10:25:00.000-04:00

An e-mail conversation with a D. Min. student this morning set me to wondering about pigeon-holing theology. With all of the dividing into camps of conservative and progressive in the old-line churches, should a pastor or judicatory leader make a particular theological stance a public matter? The student in question was studying a feminist theologian but worrying about using that perspective in an open way while others are urging more traditional theologians as models.

This is the question I'd like to have conversation with the Lifelong Learning community about: I'm wondering if a leader might do well to take something from theologians such as Barth or Niebuhr or Calvin as well as study liberationist or process or feminist theologians, and distill it all into one's own theological perspective for presentation. When folks ask whether this is Barthian, or Calvinist, or Thomist, or feminist, can we tell them it's "my own" reading of the best of traditional theology based not so much on the big-name theologians as it is on the Bible (sola scriptura). Can we also tell them we're also being very careful to listen to and not exclude any voices in the community of faith, including that of the Holy Spirit? Can we ask them to critique and reflect on our theology rather than pigeonholing it?

What's in my mind here is a remembered comment from my theological hero Al Winn (who taught theology at LPTS in the 60s and was president of the seminary through some of that turbulent time, then a pastor in Richmond and in Atlanta before he retired. He is shown in the picture here from a 2004 General Assembly of the PC(USA) flexing his theological muscles). When Al was asked if his theology was orthodox or neo-orthodox, he replied that he's "paleo-orthodox"--going all the way back to the Biblical authority for what is Christian and Reformed.

It's easy to put someone into a theological box and discount the insights. It's harder to reflect carefully on the perspective of that person, and enter into a conversation about how that perspective compares or contrasts with one's own.

I don't know if I'm right on this. Tell me what you think!

2007-2008 Lifelong Learning Calendar

2007-07-03T15:17:00.000-04:00

I'm happy to announce here that the Lifelong Learning events Calendar is complete and ready to be mailed out to the LPTS constituency. For a quicker look and the absolute latest in Lifelong Learning click on the link for Lifelong Learning to the right of this post below my bio. All of the program are listed on the right column.

New this year are two online events, one offered through the Wayne Oates Institute (http://www.oates.org/) on my book, and the other is a repeat of the "Care and Maintenance of Flourishing Congregations" in May. A new spring seminar added this year is "Transformational Leadership in Missional Perspective, April 21-23, with Roland Kuhl of the Center for Parish Development.

Be sure to note our free lecture events--The Fall Edwards-Presler Lectures, October 24-25, and the Spring Festival of Theology, March 2-5. I'm especially excited about the Spring Lectures with the topic "Young Voices in Homiletics" with Anna Carter Florence from Columbia and Otis Moss III from Trinity UCC in Chicago. Those two lecturers will be in dialogue with LPTS's exciting new professors Debra Mumford and Claudio Carvalhaes! Each will present a sermon, a lecture, and a master class in preaching!

You can not only see information on the Lifelong Learning events online, but you can also register online for the events!

With Eyes and Heart

2007-07-03T09:51:00.000-04:00

So a conversation with my soul-mate suggests that my usual "either-or" mode may have overstated the heart versus vision division in leadership in Friday's post. For me, leading from the top of my head alone tends to miss some of the heart stuff of the rest of the system (and maybe some of my own heart stuff), so adding heart is a corrective. But the leader still has to use eyes and rational frontal brain functions to identify and reflect on what's happening in the system. Sometimes just keeping the wheels on the wagon requires careful reasoning--finances, program trends, staffing designs. I'll continue to have my own hopes and dreams for the organization, but I'll be adding them to the mix, asking questions, holding up a mirror to the rest of the organization to see what they want, what they need, and where their "best selves" can go. that's the heart stuff.

What's Wrong with the "Vision" Thing?

2007-06-29T09:49:00.001-04:00

For many years I followed the advice of many of my mentors, notably Ed Friedman, who recommended that a mature leader was to stay in good relationship with members of the system while taking clearly defined positions (Generation to Generation, p. 229). He taught that the eyes are located in the head for a very good evolutionary purpose--so that the head could lead the rest of the body with clear vision. So visionary leadership became one of my guiding principles. After several hard knocks in leadership, I now see a flaw in that logic. Friedman, a man of the mid 20th century, took a patriarchal, individualistic perspective on congregational leadership. Almost with an "of course," it was assumed that the rational, intellectual (socialized male) approach was the correct one.

Now there's new mind research that indicates vision is not so much individual as communal. Writers like Daniel Goleman (Primal Leadership, Harvard Business School Press, 2002), and Joseph Bragdon (Profit for Life: How Capitalism Excels, Society for Organizational Learning, 2006) note that we see not only with our eyes and our higher brain, but also we pick up key information on the emotions and insights of others through deeper brain paths. The true locus of leadership, they argue, is not the eyes but the heart.

That suggests to me that leadership is a communal activity, best carried out in concert with as many members of the congregation as possible. It's not my vision, but our vision that counts. In a flat world, with open sourcing as an important variable, leadership in the Wikepedia model is more likely to succeed in the 21st century than leadership on the model of the elite academy.

Maybe the task of the leader, as Harrison Owen suggested years ago (Riding the Tiger, Abbot, 1991), is to "keep the sytem open" for full and rich and complex participation of all the resources at hand.

What do you think leadership is?

Associate Executives Focus on Transformational Leadership

2007-06-22T10:59:00.000-04:00

Twenty seven professional staff members of presbyteries (regional governing bodies) of the PC(USA) participated in a national gathering this week at Louisville Seminary. The first such gathering in recent history attracted about one-third of that population. Coming from nearly every region of the country, and serving in a wide variety of job titles and responsibilities, the group found an instant kinship based on the experience of leading "from the second chair." I provided two presentations for their continuing education: "Transformational Leadership" (based on my interpretation of the discernment process in Peter Senge, et al, Presence, SOL/Currency, 2005) and "Hope in Structures." (based on my book Hope in Conflict, Pilgrim, 2007). The transformation of congregations, presbyteries and denominations seemed to be uppermost in the minds of participants. Many important networking connections were established in the two day event, and the group also set plans in place to meet again at the 2008 General Assembly in San Jose and in 2009 for continuing education and support. Contact Felipe Martinez [fmartinez@whitewatervalley.org] for more information about upcoming meetings.

Transformational Leadership http://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/trstrv/v13y2006i3p607-623.html

2007-06-15T16:33:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Doctor of Ministry student Neil Salvaterra, I have been introduced to an article by Alexander Scheiffer of the Center of Excellence for Leadership and Learning in Munich, someone obviously connected to the Senge school of learning organizations. This article (see link) brings together systems theory, cybernetics, constructivist and communication theory to suggest what he calls "co-creative leadership." His argument is: if an organization is a system, held together by its own self-organizing logic and communication, all parts or members of the organization are needed to carry the organization forward. Suitable actions to adapt to the current situation in its environment can be found through collaborative, dialogical interaction. Difference in perspective among members are accepted and taken into account in development of a common position from which collective action can follow. A top-down, unilateral, linear, controlling leadership prevents application of all of the resources of an organization to a suitable action. Co-creative leadership is defined by Schieffer as "the continuous formation of creative and communicative contexts that facilitate a cooperative process for developing solutions for the organization as a whole" (p. 11). This article has given me new encouragement for and an expanded vocabulary for talking about and living out transformational leadership.

The Connection Between Ministry, Learning, and Research

2007-06-11T14:39:00.000-04:00

As I worked with the D. Min. group this week on learning to do praxis research for the Doctor of Ministry Project, I was struck at the deep connection between doing ministry, learning from and reflecting on life and ministry and doing research. Except for those who insist on continuing to do ministry the way they've always done it (those who tend to have one year experience in ministry 10 times instead of 10 years of experience), we're lifelong learners who learn and grow in ministry. When we see a service or a program that needs to be done, we figure out what we need to know and who we need to work with, and we equip ourselves and our community of faith to do that ministry. We define the problem or question, reflect on it theologically and biblically, set a goal, select strategies and actions to meet the goal, get to work and do the ministry, and then we evaluate it. Research for ministry, as done in a praxis oriented, practical theology Doctor of Ministry program, follows the same process. The difference is that research tends to be more intentional, pays more attention to the steps, and expect a more specific outcome or result from the action. Because research is usually "written up" and shared with others who might face a similar question or problem, it is also subject to review and critique by others in ministry. Nevertheless in ministry, learning and research: something is addressed, something is done, something is learned, and implications for future action are drawn. These three are connected to joining God in the process of transformation!

A Helpful Quote

2007-05-25T09:42:00.000-04:00

Here’s a quote from author and theologian Anthony Padovano that has helped me through personal and professional turbulence. It’s copied here from a poster I saw.

“There is a great deal of difference between loss, change, and transformation.

A loss is a step backward; a change is an opportunity; a transformation is a step forward.

The common denominator of these three realities is the fact that one must give up something.

It is possible for both loss and change to lead to transformation, but it is not possible for transformation to occur unless something is lost and something is changed."

Stories of Doctor of Ministry Graduates

2007-05-22T15:14:00.000-04:00

As I watched the commencement exercises this past Sunday, I was remembering the stories of some of the Doctor of Ministry graduates. The first few posts will be stories of hope and inspiration from recent graduates, for those who might consider a doctor of ministry program.

Rollin Tarter "Equipping a Middle Governing Body to Minister to Impaired Pastors and their Congregations."
The first graduate in LPTS’s Interim Ministry Track introduced in 2003, Rollin Tarter enhanced his theological reflection and practice in his unique ministry context. His presbytery was in a transition time between executive presbyters, and the presbytery committee on ministry was ready to examine its roles. Rollin happened to serve on two key transitional committees at that very time, and he was able to help develop a theologically rich process of care and nurturance for pastors and congregations, particularly following experience of clergy disability.

Bonnie MacDonald "Responding to Clergy Sexual Misconduct: Facilitating Congregational Healing and Restoration"
Although progress in her D. Min. program was interrupted by unexpected personal and professional challenges, Bonnie persevered. Every few months we would meet for lunch and work through her plans for next steps: an independent study in Wesleyan theology (she’s United Methodist), an independent study in a systemic perspective on congregations following clergy misconduct, and her plans for her learning project. When her project was about three quarters done, it became impractical to complete her project as originally planned due to personnel shifts in her judicatory, so at lunch we worked out an adaptation that was equally valid. She had prepared a handbook for a judicatory process for helping congregations through the trauma and healing after misconduct. Instead of being able to install it in her conference at this point, she shifted to an evaluation of the handbook by national experts in the field. The result is a very fine and carefully crafted learning project and report.