How to start a movement (possibly)

Not so long ago a friend said to me ‘what you’ve done Paul, is start a movement’. Which I thought was hilarious. Because it kind of implied I know what I am doing, or that what may (or may not) have emerged from anything I have ‘done’ has had some kind of pre-determined plan or strategy. The thing is that all the plans and strategies I have cooked up in my head and tried to put into practice have not worked (at least in the way I thought they ought to have done). Anything that others think I have done that has ‘worked’ has only made sense in retrospect, and in that sense its success cannot really be attributed to me.

I don’t think I started a movement. I got swept up into one. Indeed if mission is anything it is the movement from God toward the fulfilment of all things, which Jesus called the Kingdom. And we get to participate in it. This Sunday I was asked to preach on Ephesians 3. Turns out it pretty much describes Paul telling the Ephesians how he was one small part of this movement of God through Jesus to the apostles to the Gentiles, the rest of humanity and then all creation. (v 7-11) And he says ‘Although I am the less than the least of all God’s people, this grace (i.e. to preach to the Gentiles) was given to me’ (v8). Playing the part in God’s movement that Paul was called to play seems to Paul like a ridiculous, illogical surprise – a work of utter grace.

And this is the thing with the movement of God’s mission. If we are sitting appropriately human-sized within them we feel constantly humble, inadequate, on the edge of chaos, overwhelmed and disturbed. So as my friend and colleague Jonny Baker once said to me “if you think you’ve got movement sussed you’ve probably just killed it!” Why? Because the movement is always bigger than our attempts to describe them. And they don’t ‘work’ when we think ourselves big enough to control them. When that happens we domesticate them or turn them into institutions.

Nevertheless I think we might be able to understand the dynamic of God’s movement that is mission to suggest some principles it and therefore a posture of leadership within it. My friend who thinks I started a movement asked me to write a side of A4 on how to start a movement. You don’t start a movement – you join in with on – but still here goes…

1. Movements are animated by purpose and values and not by predetermined outcomes.
2. Movements are fuelled by connection – ie by the dynamic created by lots of people oriented toward the same purpose able to talk to one another, encourage one another and learn from one another.
3. Movements are enabled by key people who enable connections to happen – e.g. by facilitating online connections spaces, in person gatherings, by developing relationship with other key people in the network.
4. Leadership of movements is not leadership in the sense we often mean it – think ‘gardener’ rather than ‘manager’ – it’s all about tending to the environment and trying to ensure its healthy and protected from the kind of things that might hinder growth of the movement.
5. Leaders within movements are good storytellers – stories are another thing that fuel movements i.e. good examples of how the purpose and values of the movement are being expressed in one particular context.
6. Leaders within movements are ‘sensemakers’ – they are able to make sense of what is happening and describe it well to others. This is both so those in the movement get a sense of the whole movement and where its going, and also so those outside the movement get a clear picture of what is happening.
7. Leaders within movements advocate for the movement with ‘the powers that be’. I.e. there is always a wider context to any movement that will be a mixture of support and resistance. Movement leaders engage with both, drawing supporters in and engaging with those who resist a movement by advocating for the space for those in the movement to do what they do. (I’ve always gone with the maxim of St Francis that ‘the best critique of the bad is the demonstration of the good’ (or something like that!) ie don’t’ waste too much time trying to convince people, let them see the obvious good of what is being proposed.)
8. The chief agent in any movement of God is the Holy Spirit. So the question is often – ‘how can we ensure we participate with what God is doing?’ and ‘How can we try and ensure we not hindering or domesticating what God is doing?’

Alan Bates – An Unlikely Leader

Like many, even most of us, I watched the ITV docu-drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Its been incredible witnessing the impact that drama has made on public opinion, policy and ultimately )one hopes) the lives of those affected. It’s a testimony to the power of good storytelling to change things.

One thing that has not been commented on much though is the leadership of Alan Bates in the whole process. I was so stuck by the incredible way in which this unassuming man doggedly led a campaign that has achieved the impact it has. We still expect our leaders to have status, charisma, power. We still expect them to be magicians – capable of ‘hitting the ground running’, ‘turning things around’, ‘getting results’. There is an irony in this, because all these phrases, and the leadership culture they come from, are part of a corporate managerial culture which has been exposed by this whole scandal. A culture that concentrates power into the hands of a select few people and protects it from the ordinary person by any means.

Alan Bates’ leadership was counter-cultural in that respect. Perhaps prophetic of the kind of leadership we want to see, the kind of leadership we need, in the dehumanised world of hyper-modernity.

So what are the characteristics of the leadership embodies by Alan Bates in this story:

1. Guided by a deep purpose.

There is a moment in the drama when there is decision to be made about a civil action against the Post Office. It becomes clear that the best-case scenario for each individual sub-postmaster is a pay out (if they win) of something in the region of £22k. For most this is nothing compared to what has been lost, materially and personally. There is a murmur of revolt at the thought of another long fight when the rewards may not outweigh the cost. But then Alan Bates speaks and reminds them they not fighting for money, or for compensation – ultimately they are fighting for the truth. Deeper than any material outcome in this case, is the principle of truth and justice, principles of eternal and lasting value.

Too often we lose sight, if we ever had it, of the deeper purpose of what our leadership is about. The fundamental purpose, deeper than say an annual goal, or a particular target, or a strategic aim, deeper than our personal ambition, or our ambition for our organisation or group, gets lost in the detail. What is what we are doing really about? Why are we putting our energies into this? What is the fundamental and eternal purpose which, even if we failed at this juncture, would still motivate us to keep going?

2. Patience

Patience is not a virtue we value in our culture. Some years ago I saw an advert for a new delivery service which simply said ‘Waiting. Boring.’ Our culture values speed as a moral good. To be busy is to be someone. Our culture encourages us to display our identity and worth to others through a performance of busy-ness.

Alan Bates never seemed to be in a hurry. If he had been he would have given up years ago. His wife refers to him as ‘bloody-minded’ which no doubt is true. But I think deeper than determination, or bloody-mindedness, is a resolute patience, an unwillingness to succumb to the timeframes of our culture and to set his watch perhaps by the historical timescales of social and systemic change. As Martin Luther King said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Patience in this respect is not just a virtue but a practice that schools us in the timescales of eternity.

3. Non-anxious presence

At the end of the ITV series, many of those who have been wrongly accused of theft and false accounting have their convictions quashed at the Supreme Court. They celebrate their victory outside as the TV cameras capture the moment. Watching from their home in Wales Alan Bates and his wife. ‘You should have been there’ his wife says. ‘No…its not about me’, Mr Bates replies.

This attitude seems to me entirely in line with his leadership all the way through which exhibits a calmness, an unwillingness to resort to anger, a non-anxious presence which provides a still, yet powerful, presence throughout the campaign. The unspoken message of Alan Bates’ disposition throughout the story is one of calm, determination toward the possibility of justice. Mr Bates doesn’t need to make impassioned speeches to motivate people toward that end – he simple models it authentically in his tireless work on behalf the movement and his personal demeanour throughout.  

4. Curating space for the leadership of others.

Whilst the ITV drama was entitled ‘Alan Bates vs The Post Office’, as though one man took on the might of a monster corporation, it becomes very clear just how good Alan Bates was in bringing other people into the campaign and curating the campaign as a movement rather than a one-person crusade. A key moment exemplifies this leadership. Knowing the identities of only 7 of those affected by the scandal, Mr Bates decides to call an open meeting and invite anyone else affected to come. At random he chooses an obscure village in the midlands to hold a meeting, hires the hall and waits to see who will come. When they do come there is not great rousing speech from Bates, no clever strategy launch –  they just sit in a circle and tell their stories. And so a movement grows based on the solidarity of a shared experience of injustice.

Leadership is so often cast as being about personality. About being the kind of extraordinary person who can do heroic things on behalf of others, drawing people together by the sheer force of their charisma, or the genius of their strategy. What Alan Bates reminds us is that sometimes the most extraordinary things happen when someone sticks a pin in a map, or a stake in the ground, and says ‘lets do this together’. Leadership is about creating (and curating) the space for the participation of others, then standing on the edge and letting it happen.

The story of the future – exile not exodus, Greta not Boris

The latest round of rhetoric over Brexit saw Boris Johnson making a thinly veiled bid as Messiah-in-waiting by invoking the story of the exodus. What Teresa May should do (says Boris, and, what I would do if I were leader) is march into Brussels and declare freedom with the words of Moses – ‘let my people go’. Cue commentators, theologically versed or not to pick apart his use of the Old Testament. Many ridicule his lack of theological nuance. Though Nick Spenser welcomes the use of a deeper story to offer reflection and insight to these turbulent times. Whether it is done badly (as is often the case) or not, it matters more that politicians reach for “texts of authority” to help remember the ground beneath the shifting sands of economics and politics.

I wonder though whether the exile is a far batter “text of authority” for our times than exodus. Exile tells the story of a people, Israel, who were once a nation with clear boundaries and with institutions that gave a sense of safety and security in a dangerous world. It tells the story of how these institutions were lost through the overwhelming pressure of forces from beyond their borders. And of how a people had to reflect and eventually reimagine how to be a people again in utterly different circumstances. The old ways could not be returned to in the same way again – but new and authentic ways of being the people of God emerged.

The circumstances of the exile map on to those of our political landscape today. Nation states with their national governments are increasingly overpowered by the reality of the globalised economy and the flows of people, information and capital within the liberalised system that these same states created.  When Boris says ‘let my people go’ you have to ask ‘what from’? If Egypt is the EU what does emancipation look like? Can we really return to being a nation state in control of these flows in the context of a globe where this particular genie is out of bottle and running the show? The populism of Johnson, Trump, Viktor Orban etc is a desperate shout in the face of these forces – a attempt to read the story backwards, when the text (and the reality of our experience) say the story is going somewhere rather different.

Where might it be going? In terms of leadership at least we might well remember that Israel in the exile lost their monarchy. The days of anointed kings of authority were over. The king of Israel was taken into exile with his eyes gouged out and his sons killed in front of him. Leadership in Israel shifted from the hereditary to the unlikely and from the prosaic utterances of kings to the poetry of the prophet. Ezekiel, Daniel, Esther – unlikely and unambitious individuals with a moral and spiritual, rather than positional, authority emerge from this time as wise guides, far-sighted visionaries and authentic demonstrators of the possibility of life in the future.

In that sense I find more hope for the future in Greta Thunberg and the movement she has unwittingly started through her simple authentic action. The future must be lived within the reality of the global forces of climate change. It must be a lived alternative to an economy that is crumbling under the weight of its own internal contradiction of endless growth on a finite planet. And it must be lived by example, by people modelling a new way – prophetic action is the theological term – it is practical and prophetic leadership from below. And at present it is more vastly more evident in our young people than our leaders.

Exile shows us that we do not just need a new leader, no matter how much like Moses he or she may be, we need a new way of life. One that pays deep attention to the reality of the forces that have been unleashed. One that does not hark back to some Utopian past that cannot be recovered. One where authentic action, not headline bluster, helps write the story of the future.

Stepping into Grace

So I’m pleased to be able to say my book ‘Stepping into Grace’ is published today by Bible Reading Fellowship. This blog was the training ground for many of ideas that made their way into the book. So it seemed apt to explain a little of what the book’s about and why I wrote it.

Most simply Stepping into Grace is a book about the beautifully formed and mysterious book of Jonah. About Jonah and his journey from Israel to Ninevah. A picaresque journey which is not primarily an external journey but an internal journey where Jonah’s faith, vocation and identity are all transformed.

But it’s the context of Jonah that makes it all the more interesting for our time and our situation as the church. Jonah is written after the exile and is a ‘diaspora advice tale’ – a story written by exiles to grapple with the challenge of exile. Who are we? Where is God? Can he be present amongst these people in this place? How do we continue to be the people of God living in a foreign land within a dominant culture suspicious of our faith and practices?

When we are living through the complexities of a crisis, we tell stories. Stories are good in a crisis. They are open forms to help us wrestle with the issues without closing them down. They are participative forms that draw us in and engage with the story in ways which enable us to engage with the challenge we face.  And it seems to me that Jonah is an exceptionally good story to help us reflect on the challenges and anxieties we face as the people of God today.

Before Jonah is called by God to preach to the Ninevites at the beginning of the book he is fully involved in a plan of restoration under the king of the northern Kingdom of Israel. Under this king (Jeroboam II) Israel experienced a small reversal of fortunes against the Assyrians and re-established its borders to a previous point of security. Of course, from the point of view of the later experience of exile this now looked ridiculous. Everyone knows it didn’t last. And when the inevitable came and the Assyrians exiled the Jews of the northern kingdom it was brutal.  It’s like that footage of Neville Chamberlaine coming down the steps of his airplane in 1938 waving that scrap of paper and declaring ‘peace in our time’. Hopeful at the time, but ultimately futile.

Jonah is stripped of this illusion of safety and security however when he is called to preach to the Ninevites – the very people who are Israel’s greatest enemy. He is forced in the story to confront what the exiles were already confronting – life as the people of God exiled from the land and face to face with the enemy.

And what transpires is a journey that maps out the journey of soul searching, lament, anguish and reformation that Israel went through as they dwelt in exile.

As I’ve written about on the blog before – I think exile is a pretty helpful and apposite metaphor for our experience as the Christian church in post-Christian Britain today. In many ways we are offered the same choice as Jonah – continue to attempt a programme of nostalgic restoration based on our own will and our own resources, or venture out into the call of God to participate with him in a movement of reform which is happening by the initiative of his Spirit.

And the thing is that if we, like Jonah, willingly or reluctantly, take on that call to venture beyond safety and security, face up to the challenge of mission to people who are not like us, we will find that it will change us, and stretch us and deepen our understanding and faith in this unboxable God of grace. Our vocation is not simply to do what God has called us to do, but to allow ourselves to be shaped into the people God would have us be, and that takes courage.

That has been my, sometimes painful, experience as a pioneer minister in Poole, Dorset. Given the role of creating something new that would connect with unchurched people I found myself travelling a very similar journey to Jonah, a journey that took me from confidence and ambition, through something of a dark night of the soul, to a renewed understanding of God’s grace.

Which is why the book is called ‘Stepping into Grace’. Because grace is not primarily a status, a kind of kite mark of authenticity. Grace is a flow of God’s life that he invites us to enter into, step into, be embraced by and led by. Grace aims to encapsulate and transform all that we are, our doing and our being throughout the course of our journey with God. And one of grace’s key modes of transformation is invitation – invitation to venture beyond ourselves and take on challenges that seem impossible and impractical, invitation to be vulnerable, stupid, in danger, without a plan or a strategy, so that the work of grace can get to those places where we cling on to the ridiculous illusion that we know what we are doing.

In exile God’s people discovered grace anew. They thought they knew all about grace, what it was and how to get it. Exile blew that all apart. That is where we are. Challenged to wrestle again with how to be people faithful to a God of grace without shrink-wrapping grace into presentable and manageable forms for the consumption of others. The challenge is enormous and it will take leaders of humility, vulnerability, obedience and courage to help us find our way. If in some small way this book helps people navigate this challenge, then I will be glad to have written it.

 

The church of 2030 starts here

I recently received an email to say that the course I had booked on had to be cancelled due to lack of interest. The course was entitled ‘Preparing for 2030: Mission, Megatrends and the Future of the Church Conference’. And I guess I thought it was perhaps revealing that a course looking at the kind of world we will be ministering in in 15 years’ time did not garner enough support. Some will argue that the course was fishing in a pretty limited pool given that a large proportion of current church leaders in the Diocese where I work will be retired in 15 years’ time. There is also the perennial issue of encouraging busy clergy away from their context to engage in the important-but-not-urgent stuff of ongoing learning.

Even so, that a course, oriented so clearly towards the future mission of the church, could not attract enough participants to run suggests to me that we have a problem. We are not sufficiently concerned about the future of the church to study what the future might look like. We are not sufficiently concerned about the future of the church to seriously consider what changes need to made now to plan for it. Perhaps, even worse, we are not sufficiently aware of the rapidly changing world we are in to see that unless we study the future we are forever living and ministering in the past.

In periods of rapid change any organisation needs to be extremely adaptable in order to remain effective. But to be able to adapt we need to be willing to adapt. And to be willing to adapt there needs to be a commitment to it. Gaining that kind of commitment requires some work, the telling of truth about the present as well as any casting of vision for the future. To some extent we all hold onto the present as the last remaining vestiges of a warmly held past and we do not let go easily. Adapting, changing and orienting ourselves for the future requires three things: reality, relinquishment and renewal. All too often to we clamour for renewal without first doing the work of enabling one another to face reality and relinquish the past.

As part of my ministry recently I have been meeting with a small group who represent a new worshipping community within a local parish setting. The new community was deliberately set up in the hope of engaging new people. Many of the group are committed to the future of the church but have also been a part of this parish for many years. They remember the past with great fondness. I have spent the past 6 months exploring mission for their context with this group. However, it has been hard for our discussions not to be drawn back into concerns for the church, that is the church building, a beautiful old building, devoid of heating, in completely the wrong place for its community. The last time we met however there seemed to me to be a turning point. I presented them with some harsh realities about the place and identity of the church in modern society and culture. I presented them with the concept of a church in exile; on the edge, no longer at the centre, no longer asked for its opinion, or respected for its views, no longer (physically or otherwise) at the heart of community life and able to reside there and see people come to it. As this picture developed and we discussed its merits, the mood in the room grew gloomy, then resistant and then finally resigned. It was a hard truth, but it was nevertheless the truth. The church of Christendom, able to command such an influential and prominent place in society and culture, has gone. We are in exile. And the sooner we face up to the reality of that and relinquish whatever false and nostalgic identities we have for our church the better.

Much as the exilic prophets did for Israel, telling them the truth of the disastrous nature of the situation they were in, church leaders must do for their worshipping communities. Unless we embrace the reality of our identity as people in exile we are never going to orient ourselves to be the sort of Christian communities we need to be now, or in the future. We need a conversion. We need to relinquish one paradigm and positively accept the reality of another, one where we must learn again what it means to be faithful witness to Christ in a culture that is not oriented by his message or ethics in any substantial way.

Recently Archbishop Justin Welby, speaking at the recent New Wine leaders gathering said this:

“I want to say to you today that I believe from the bottom of my heart that the long years of winter in the church, especially in the Church of England, are changing. The ice is thawing, the spring is coming. There is a new spring in the church.”

Encouraging words. But I am not sure many are truly aware of the reality of the winter we are emerging from. Or if they are, they look nostalgically to a balmy summer of yesteryear to inspire any hope for a new season. Some will not be able to spot a coming spring because, as I believe, it will look very different from the new season that might hope for. Renewal is not a return to some recycled past. Renewal, by its very nature, is the unexpected wonderful new reality of God’s inbreaking into his world and his people.

The concept of exile is powerful truth for us. Like Israel of the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem we must face up the reality that the old dispensation has gone. We must learn to live in a new land and embrace being strangers and aliens instead of lords and leaders. To do this we must face the reality of our identity and relinquish hopes and visions inspired by warm feelings for the past. Only then might we begin to embrace renewal, the new thing that God is doing in his church to which he invites us to participate. 2030 may seem a long way away, but it starts now, with a conversion to a new way of seeing, a new paradigm of church identity and mission where we embrace the truth of our identity as exiles in a foreign land.

Middle voice ministry

There has been a lot of debate with the CofE over the past few months that orbits around the agenda of church growth. The Green Report which was made public earlier in the year, though not primarily about church growth but about preparing people for senior leadership and responsibility, drew a huge amount of criticism for what was thought to be an unhealthy emphasis on the language and techniques of enterprise and business.

More recently there was been a significant debate on the nature of church growth and the role of leadership to bring it about. On my own Twitter feed I was able to witness a sharp disagreement between Ian Paul and Giles Fraser on the relative roles of church, vicar and God in bringing about/or not bringing about growth.

One common response to the Green Report was to criticise its lack of theology. It was in my view unfairly accused of jettisoning theology in favour of the techniques of enterprise simply because the document contained little out and out theology. Defenders of the report replied that it did not set out to be a piece of reflective theology but a contribution to a conversation in which theology was clearly an inportant partner.

Theological reflection on these issues is precisely about dialoguing theologically with experiences learnt in other fields. That is one thing the church does so well, and Justin Welby’s leadership experience in the oil industry, which has been subtly maligned by some in the light of the Green Report, is something we should welcome at a strategically critical time.

But theologies can overreach themselves and become deaf to realities and experience, particularly when these threaten a strongly held position or expose a weakness or a wound. Whilst Giles Fraser’s piece on the theology of failure was a powerful and brilliant re-emphasis of the counterintuitive nature of Jesus’ Kingdom, it is not the whole story. Success and growth in the Kingdom have a gospel trajectory of downward mobility and resurrection. Success is not necessarily an empty church, with the weeds growing through the floor. Success is a church that has experienced failure, perhaps even emptiness, with courage, faith and the gospel of the cross and resurrection. Success is a church on a journey through the cross and the grave and out the other side (perhaps over and over again).

I would want to add another theme to the debate however. As well as good entrepreneurial leadership, and good theology we desperately need good spirituality, good Christian spirituality. This will be a many faceted thing. It will however be something unique, something particular to the nature of church leadership. In light of the current debates there is one aspect of this I would want to try and describe.

The church growth agenda does throw up huge challenges for church leaders. Not least the question – what might I do to enable my church to grow? There are no end of recent books written advising the church leader on what he or she might do. At the same time we are fond of praying in the light of Psalm 127:1 ‘unless the Lord builds the house the labourers labour in vain’. Work hard. Pray hard. Work and pray hard. And what will be the end result? Growth? Perhaps? But at what cost? Exhaustion, burnout, depression, disillusionment? A generation of church leaders who can produce results but no-one wants to imitate?

Much of the current language of growth errs far too much on our natural inclination to do something. To be the architects of our own success. We might give the nod to God for doing it all, but as something of an afterthought. Eugene Peterson explores this same dilemma through an insight from the nature of Greek verbs (well he would wouldn’t he!). Greek has passive and active tenses. But it also has a tense that is lacking in English, the active-passive tense. It is what you might call a ‘middle voice’. The middle voice describes activity where ‘I actively participate in the results of an action that another initiates’

Actively participating in the results of an action initiated by another –  that sounds a lot like ministry!? Ministry earthed in good theology. It is Christ’s Kingdom and Christ’s church which he has founded but which we are graciously invited to actively participate in. We therefore minister with a healthy scepticism toward too much activity rooted in the active tense, where it is ourselves constantly initiating. We are also not inclined to embrace a theology of complete passivity, for God’s grace suggests an invitation to join in. He has something for us to do! We therefore seek to practise an active-passivity, a ‘middle voice ministry’, that encourages us to hold our initiatives lightly, reflectively, humbly and honours the initiative of God highly and reverently.

For me the key to practising this active-passivity is prayer, not so much prayer of the intercessory kind, though that is important too. No, prayer of the contemplative kind. Prayer whereby we are predominantly in listening mode, listening for God’s initiative so that in hearing it we might more confidently participate.

Bishop John V Taylor wrote a generation ago, ‘we have lost our nerve and our sense of direction and have turned divine initiative into a human enterprise’.

There is nothing wrong with human enterprise, but everything wrong with it in terms of Christian leadership when it becomes untethered from or outpaces divine initiative. To guard against this happening we must rediscover our middle voice. We must become contemplative leaders, able to lead in an enterprising fashion, but from a place of deep listening.