Unraveling

Here we go again? No, not exactly, because we have changed.

Compared with my mother and my sister, I’m not much one for handicrafts. I taught myself how to use my sewing machine during the pandemic, but ultimately I got more mileage out of the sewing machine as a metaphor for balanced leadership than I actually produced by way of usable textiles. My mother and sister knit, as do many of my students (during class, no less; I’m over it). I have never caught the knitting bug but do occasionally crochet. Why? Crocheting is easier to unravel.

Knitting is unforgiving. If you make a mistake by dropping a stitch and don’t fix it right away, you end up with a big hole in your project. Crocheting? Just pull it out… and pull and pull and pull… and you can fix an error from rows ago like it never happened. As I crochet my way into a new semester at Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School, unraveling some plans because of the omicron variant of Covid-19’s baldfaced aggressiveness, I realize I’ve learned a lot about unraveling in the past two years. I’ve actually gotten pretty good at it.

In his book Joining God in the Great Unraveling (Cascade Books, 2021), Alan Roxburgh writes about the importance of paying attention to what God is doing in the world, rather than panicking about what’s happening in human-made institutions. Having made a name for himself as the founder of the Missional Network, helping hundreds of religious leaders to reimagine church as outwardly- rather than inwardly-focused, Roxburgh is rethinking some of his own ideas. Covid-19 merely accelerated change in churches that was already well underway, writes Roxburgh, in that it required congregations to radically rethink everything they were doing together, exposing the fact that a lot of what they were doing wasn’t working.

Like others (including myself), Roxburgh writes that the mainline church movement bet on the wrong horse when it aligned itself with modern institutional ways in the 19th and 20th centuries. That alignment, inspired by a desire for relevance, set the church of the West on a path away from God-centered Christian spirituality and toward four wrongheaded priorities:

1. Ecclesiocentricity: churches focus on themselves rather than what God is doing in their communities and the world. When their existences are threatened, churches become self-protective and anxious, even less able to listen for God’s voice.
2. Technical rationality: ecclesiocentric, anxious churches rely on human ways of knowing and protecting themselves. They begin to see reason as the only way of knowing anything, including God, whereas God’s ways are not our ways.
3. Management: that which we seek to control, we no longer see nor hear nor understand. When leading from a place of institution-centered reason, leaders manage anything that moves.
4. Clergy centricity: churches look to their clergy as experts in managing rather than theological interpreters of reality. Clergy adopt that expectation, and then, when they aren’t able to manage, everybody blames them, including themselves.

Here is the good news: God is unraveling all of it. Roxburgh invites us to join God in the unraveling through getting out into our neighborhoods and discerning what God is doing there. He commends disciplines of discernment, place (engaging communities), prayer, and relationship. Nurturing these dimensions of life in a faith community doesn’t even require a radical shift on the outside; it’s an inner reorientation toward what God is doing and away from what human beings thought was somehow better than what God had to offer.

The Friday before the end of exams at Yale University, President Peter Salovey informed the university community that we would make some changes to our schedule so as to get away from campus, hunker down, and let the omicron wave crest and crash without crowding together and giving it to each other. At moments like these, I become the envy of my friends serving congregations. How they wish there were a voice from on high telling them the basics of what to do, giving them only the work of making it so!

Unraveling plans for late December and January, and anticipating further changes for the spring that will not be whatever “normal” once was, of course exasperates me. I work with a great team, as well as a vast network of stakeholder groups, and we don’t take planning lightly. Going back to the drawing board again and again takes a psychological toll. That said…

If God has been trying to tell us to get over our human-made plans, return to Holy Spirit led disciplines, and follow Jesus rather than idols, at least this disciple can say, now, “I get it.” Or at least I’m unraveling the project far enough back to go a different way.