Writing Workshop offered at LPTS

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



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!



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?



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

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!

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



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!

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



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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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



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

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 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

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!