Sunday, June 5th, 2005
Spent five hours yesterday with a group of church leaders coming to terms with a declining membership and the loss of ordained ministry. We used the Jeremiah 29 material throughout the day to work through what it might mean to walk through the transition from denial through to acceptance and adjustment for the future.
As we read through Jeremiah 29 we used two resources:
Four tasks of grief - (based on William Worden’s work in Grief Counselling and Grief Therapy.)
- Face the Loss
- Face the Pain
- Face the Emptiness
- Face the Future
Six Responses to Despair
Walter Brueggemann’s reflections on the exiles’ reality, as in hs book, “Cadences of Home: Preaching Among Exiles“.
1. Grieving for a lost world - the need to develop honest sadness
2. Rootlessness -permission to express hunger for roots
3. Despair � doubting God’s faithfulness & power to save - a resolve to find hope together
4. Profaned Absence - become aware of God’s presence in new environment
5. Moral incongruity - face up to chaos
6. Self-preoccupation - find strategies for shaping the environment
We sang - “Rivers of Babylon” - and we prayed. We mourned. We took another look at the new environment of an increasingly multicultural community. We touched base with the passions for shaping the community that were already there. We considered the exhaustion of singles in their fifties and sixties and considered the options of shared living. Maybe these people could consider engaging with a new form of monastic life that energises people in mission.
At the end of the day a dazed group of despairing church members emerged as a hopeful band of mission agents.
Tags: grief, Jeremiah, Leadership, Spirituality, Theology, Walter Brueggemann, William Worden
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Sunday, May 29th, 2005
I am using Jeremiah’s letter to the Jewish people living in Babylon, found in Jeremiah 29:1-14, to explore the experience of being the church in exile. I have used Jeremiah 29 in worship and study workshops for leaders in a variety of congregational and judicatory settings, along with parallel passages, Psalm 137 and Jeremiah 4:23-26.
I have drawn heavily on insights shared by Walter Brueggemann and Gerald Arbuckle. Both writers link the future of God’s people with the gradual process of moving through stages of grief towards hope and action.
William Bridges material on change and transition reminds leaders that the introduction of any change involves a process of letting go, in-between (neutral) time, and the launching of a new beginning. I have used the framework of grieving tasks, outlined by authors such as William Worden, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and John Westerhoff and echoed by Scott Peck in his study of community formation.
Jeremiah 29 stands alone in the gathered writings and sermons of the Jewish prophet Jeremiah. It is addressed to all those who were deported from Jerusalem to Babylon in 598 BCE. Jehoiachin, son of Josiah, has become the exiled ruler of the Jewish people, while Zedekiah, his brother, remains in Jerusalem. Jeremiah’s role up to this point has been to warn the people about the consequences of their complacent and rigid responses to God’s call for obedience and trust. Jeremiah is now writing to a group who, while experiencing low morale, are likely to be looking for a fresh sense of vision. He has identified this group of exiles as the ones who will take the Jewish faith and culture into future.
Brueggemann has written that visionary leadership is integrally linked with the prophetic phrase, “It could be otherwise”.[1] The prophet Jeremiah believes that no matter how desperate the situation, there is a future. That belief is expressed strongly in his letter to the exiles in Jerusalem. In this letter Jeremiah is able to talk about the past in ways that releases people to live in the present and prepare for the future. If the exiles continue to spend their lives pining for the past, they will either dwindle into an insignificant family-based cult or disappear altogether, subsumed by the Babylonian culture. These people cannot afford to passively wait for the day of their return to the glorious days. The time of mourning is now over - the work of grief has begun. Now is the time to live again, to put roots down in the new context. Jeremiah outlines the practical implications of living as residents of Babylon - and in that context he presents the hope of future generations going home.
[1] Walter Brueggemann, Unmasking the Inevitable, From The Other Side Online, 2001 The Other Side, July-August 2001, Vol. 37, No. 4.
Tags: exile, Gerald Arbuckle, grief, Jeremiah, Reading, Theology, Walter Brueggemann
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Saturday, May 28th, 2005
I’m currently finishing off a paper reflecting on the challenge of motivational communication - the task of building vision amongst congregational leaders. This is in the context of Jeremiah 29 - the call to deal with the past, live in the present, and prepare for the future.
I have been writing this paper for six years! I have worked in three different positions in those three years. I was National Youth Ministry Coordinator for the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, Minister of Youth and Families for Robina Surfers Paradise Uniting Church and am Mission Consultant for the Uniting Church in Australia, Queensland Synod. Throughout this time I have struggled with what it means to be a visionary leader who inspires and equips others to become visionaries themselves.
I’ve discovered that a lot of writing by Christian leaders focuses on the need for the congregational pastor/senior leader to take a visionary lead, inspiring others to get in behind a common vision. In many cases Christian leaders are encouraged to take most of the responsibility for discerning purpose and direction.
Within the circles I’ve moved, this approach to leadership leaves many cold. It is perceived to be an approach rooted in a corporate church culture, espoused by men rather than women, and suitable for hierarchical structures. In many cases this approach in fact disempowers people, expecting lay people to be loyal and enthusiastic followers of charismatic or authoritative parent figures. [1] Peter Senge calls instead for the sharing of vision which involves the skills of unearthing shared pictures of the future that foster genuine commitment and enrolment rather than compliance. [2]
I believe there needs to be, at a congregational level, visionary people, rather than a compliant people lead by a visionary leader. In this paper I will explore a framework for guiding disillusioned congregational leaders [3] through a grief process in order to build the capacity for vision. I will discuss the practice of communicating that motivates people to thoughtfully move into the future with purpose and direction, with both an individual and a common vision.
As part of my preparation for this paper I have worked my way through three sets of reading.
My initial focus was on communication as an art. I was looking for clues on more effective communication of vision in my role as National Youth Ministry Coordinator. I looked at the importance of clarifying the message, knowing the audience, using symbols and stories that could be related to by a variety of stakeholders, while using feedback to develop the message. As I read through this material and talked it through with my colleagues and support group, it became clear that empowering a new generation of visionary leaders was more important than the mere communication of national strategies for youth ministry. This shaped my work significantly.
My second focus became the nature of visionary leadership. This follows on from my previous paper on servant mission leadership. I prepared a summary of writing and resources on leadership and have published this on my work website.
The focus of this current paper has been narrowed down to the process of motivating, inspiring and mobilizing visionary leaders in the Uniting Church in Australia, particularly in situations where levels of morale and innovation are low. As mission consultant I have a key role in the redevelopment of threshold congregations - congregations who are facing either continued decline and death or the reinvention of their models of membership, ministry and mission. The development of vision in these settings requires initial groundwork in grieving processes.
More tomorrow…
[1] Loren Mead, Transforming Congregations for the Future, pp. 97-100. Mead uses the concept of parent tapes to describe unhealthy levels of dependency in the church.
[2] Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline, Random House, Sydney, 1990, pg. 9
[3] I am working with teams of congregational leaders rather than just the ordained leaders of churches.
Tags: grief, Jeremiah, Leadership, Loren Mead, Peter Senge, Spirituality, Theology
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