This is the first Senate in just about forever that Dr. G. Daniel Jones has not been with us in one capacity or another. When I first showed up at Senate in 1981, G Daniel was here or had just been or soon would be again. We pay homage to him for his tenure and service, as the one with the most years ever as a Ministers Council Senator, and we miss him.
But I have been around this organization for a day or two, myself, since the late darkness of a hot summer night in 1981 when I arrived at Green Lake for my very first Senate meeting to ascend the hill seeking out Leider Haus where meetings were held in the olden days. Over the years I have been here as Senator from Rhode Island, member of the Executive Committee, editor of Minister, representative to the National Commission on the Ministry, and now as Executive Director for this my twelfth Senate in that capacity. Doesn’t time just fly when you are having fun? I want to take the opportunity this report presents to reflect back to you some observations about who we have been together, who we are, and who in the grace of God we might yet be.
The Executive Committee began our meeting in April focused on something called the Organizational and Team Culture Indicator. The OTCI assesses the core storyline currently taking place in an organization, rather like a Meyers-Briggs for groups. We wanted to look at the Ministers Council’s primary “archetype” in order to focus on who we are as a whole entity, with existence, interests and goals that are independent of the individual members’. The purpose of doing that work was to stimulate awareness about the connections between the unconscious dimensions of who we are and the center of consciousness. Perhaps we might end up working to realign our energies to operate at a higher level of our predominant archetype, or perhaps in a different, less dominant archetypal field altogether.
In advance of the meeting everyone completed an online instrument and Jeff Woods, our facilitator for the task, scored where we came out. Who we are of the twelve organizational archetypes should come as no surprise to anyone observing our logo: we are Everyperson. The Everyperson organization places a strong value on the importance of each individual and does not single out some as more equal than others. The downside can be that while we treat everyone the same that may mean we treat nobody particularly well. Just so you will know a fuller picture, our other archetypes discerned are Explorer, who goes out to find a better world; Sage, who seeks wisdom; and Jester, who fosters a spirit of fun and play that brings both levity and vulnerability to a group’s interactions; all vital pieces but not the core, at least according to our responses.
So we are Everyperson. How does that strike you? The Executive Committee tossed it around, decided that it fit but probably does not function very well as a means to invite new members – after all, who wants to belong to a group where everybody is just folks?, maybe we should explore the other archetypes surfaced, but most of all, we had better understand and clarify our values about who we are for the sake of the organization’s future in a new day.
Lo and behold, last May at the very next constituent Council meeting I attended, a new vice president there described what his heart yearns for in a clergy group: a place where everyone comes just as one person seeking the companionship and support of colleagues, and not as someone with a special role and responsibility to keep us elevated and distant from the true companionship so essential for the journey. For better or worse, this is who we are – and there is enormous value in being the best possible Everyperson organization for the sake of serving our membership for the challenges they face every day.
The interactions that occurred in the late 1990s around development of the current logo are illustrative of the depth of Everyperson in our identity. That Senate struggled mightily to make their way to a logo that would exemplify our commonality through the image of a circle where all are equal, yet which would highlight particularities of all the Everypersons included in that circle. They amplified the original proposal with the addition of skirts on some figures so they would clearly be women, legs on some that would be men (or perhaps women in pants), and long robes on the rest as male or female in liturgical mode. You thought last summer’s session was heated; I’m here to tell you that the great logo debate of 1997 became rather incendiary as Senators wrestled their way to the most complete visual representation of who the Ministers Council is. And then of course they added to the original model a cross at center top to symbolize Jesus Christ, who makes such a circle possible in the first place.
Let me describe who you as Ministers Council are in that Everyperson circle centered on Christ, through my observation of the Ministers Council from numerous vantage points over the past twenty-five years.
Once upon a time, long, long ago I described to Aidsand Wright-Riggins my sense of the Ministers Council as an adolescent organization. Bless his heart, he disagreed, in the conviction that this was a body that comported itself in a mature fashion. Here is what I meant: way back in the early 1980s, a popular self-description of the Ministers Council was as a labor union, and the stance was aggressively demanding toward authority figures that were perceived as having some control over our ministry and livelihood, in other words, congregations and denominational entities. There was even talk of going on strike for better wages. Now if you have or have had a teenager resident in your household, as I did at the time when I had that shock of recognition about the Ministers Council, or perhaps can even remember when you were one, all this sounds extremely familiar. That dynamic did create a generally united body, sort of like a gang of kids hanging out at the local mall and reinforcing one another about strategies over against the grown ups. Those of you who were here way back then may not remember it exactly the same way, but this is my report and that is how I remember us.
Over time we have grown into what seems to me a generally more adult organization, taking responsibility for ourselves and often for the denomination by resourcing pastoral leaders – ourselves -- through services not otherwise provided, not waiting for somebody else to take care of us. We might describe the dialectic in which we have recently been seeking to live as the tension between partnership and self-sufficiency, rather like what happened when we as individuals successfully accomplished the adolescent task of rebellion, stopped holding responsible our parents and other authorities for how life was turning out, self-differentiated, and learned how to take care of ourselves while at the same time cooperating with others for the betterment of all.
You know the wisdom about friendship dividing sorrows and multiplying joys? Something like that has happened through our various partnerships: the Ministers Council has geometrically expanded capacities far beyond what our own modest resources would allow. Listen to some of the projects we never could have done on our own and others could not have done without us:
Simultaneously, we have served by staffing countless denominational bodies, programs, projects and reports, and provided input into suggested ordination standards, the ongoing endorsement of chaplains and pastoral counselors, and the occasional national staff gathering. Much good for us as leaders and for the whole ABC body has resulted from our adult capacity to be in partnership with others.
Now part of what adults sometimes do when confronted by divisive issues is to turn against one another, which of course minimizes our capacity to be of any earthly good to anyone. When a mess occurs if we cannot reasonably demand that an authority figure somewhere else fix matters in the system to our own liking, then we have to deal with one another as equals, a task we have engaged well in the Jerusalem Council project and last summer’s Senate Bylaws vote and resolution and we did that work not just for the Ministers Council but on behalf of the entire denomination. The originators of the Organizational and Team Culture Indicator describe just such an ideal outcome when a mature Everyperson body “can identify the polarities inherent in a problem or situation, give them both their due, hold the tension between them, and watch for the emerging solution that yields a glimpse of organizational wholeness” (John G. Corlett and Carol S. Pearson. Mapping the Organizational Psyche: A Jungian Theory of Organizational Dynamics and Change. Gainesville, FL: Center for Applications of Theological Type, Inc., 2003, p. 111).
What felt like an intrusion or an aberration in the events that led up to and through last summer’s Senate was in fact simply the movement through time of the Ministers Council’s core story line. You will note that some former partners are no longer at the table, in the absence of Senators representing the Regions of the Pacific Southwest, the West and the Northwest. We regret their decision and miss them as well, but on the other hand, within those geographical areas we now have new constituent Councils in the Greater Bay Area and Evergreen, and an invitation to individual colleagues from PSW to belong with the promise communicated that as soon as the dust settles pastoral leaders related to those congregations that remain affiliated with the ABC may also form their own Council. We anticipate creating new partnerships through niche networks of pastoral leader groups among various racial-ethnic members, as well as clergy couples and bivocationals. The Everyperson is a story line of weaving webs that work among all who will come.
Our brothers and sisters in the British Baptist Union have had their own recent struggles with disagreement among covenant partners (theirs have been over charismatic phenomena in worship). In their struggles they have engaged in profound theological reflection on what it means to be the people of Christ whose invitation is extended to “whosoever will come.”
"Whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16).
"Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." (John 11:26).
"Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved" (Romans 10:13).
"Whosoever believeth in Him shall receive remission of sins" (Acts 10:43).
"Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God" (I John 4:15).
What do the “whosoever assurances” of the Gospel mean for the humans with whom God covenants? I particularly appreciate the insights of British theologian Paul Fiddes in his 2003 book Track and Traces: Baptist Identity in Church and Theology: "Covenant is about relationship and trust, about ‘walking together’ which is in some mysterious way part of the very journey of salvation,” he says. “…the inner dynamic of covenant is precisely in the direction of openness, towards the goal expressed in the biblical account of the 'everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth'” (Gen. 8:16). In our age, the making of covenant can accord with a culture which lays stress upon the virtues of openness to others and to the future. At the same time, covenant expresses a necessary closure, in commitment to God and in faithfulness to God's purposes" (Bletchley, UK: Paternoster, pp. 46-47).
Covenant among all who will is the Baptist way but more to the point the way of Jesus Christ. The Everyperson circle is a dance of equal adult partners where some may opt out and others may join in, yet with a continuing story line as a body fully capable of partnership with other bodies and peace within itself:
All of this probably means that we will not be seeking to place blame on someone else for wider systemic inadequacies or the failure of our own ministry to thrive, or blogging such judgments as, “Valley Forge delenda est.” For any who escaped high school Latin, that means “must be destroyed” (quite disparate from the admonition to build up). Likely an Everyperson body that is sufficiently mature to be both independent and in partnership will rather make statements like this one from a Ministers Council member posted on the BaptistLife forum: “I think it is unfair to blame the denominational leadership, good and godly people that I've counted it a privilege to know, for the fact that we are in a time in our history when the entire church in the world is undergoing profound change… While I believe in constructive change, I also believe that there is both constructive and destructive criticism. It is much easier to throw stones than to build up the body of Christ.”
Nor will we participate in the raining down of curses on the Mission Center at Valley Forge, where an inordinate number of leaders are quite ill. We who believe in the power of blessing ought to be aware of – and beware -- the destructive power of cursing through the virtual invectives thrown at a perceived “other.” I used to call some of the exchanges intracontinental ballistic letters designed not to communicate but to kill, but now the web has exponentially magnified that potential to shoot poison.
We have the power to choose this day blessing, not curse. The power of blessing is precious, and God has put it in our hands – blessed to be a blessing, isn’t that how it goes? Probably many of you have read Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, about the elderly Rev. John Ames near the end of his life in 1956, fifty years ago, writing to his young child who will never really get to know his father. Near the beginning of his meditation he writes to the young man his son will be: “I don’t wish to be urging the ministry on you, but there are some advantages to it you might not know to take account of if I did not point them out. Not that you have to be a minister to confer blessing. You are simply much more likely to find yourself in that position. It’s a thing people expect of you…” (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2004, p. 23).
Near the end of his life and his telling of the story, the Rev. Ames has the occasion to bless the n'e'r-do-well son of his closest friend, who afterward sits back and looks as if he were waking out of dream. “‘Thank you, Reverend,’ he said, and his tone made me think that to him it might have seemed I had named everything I thought he no longer was, when that was absolutely the furthest thing from my meaning, the exact opposite my meaning. Well, anyway, I told him it was an honor to bless him. In fact I’d have gone through seminary and ordination and all the years intervening for that one moment” (241-42).
The Everyperson organization builds community, stands for relationships, functions as a team where trust is built. People expect blessing from us and grant us access, and we are so woven and knit together that through us blessing can flow forth unimpeded. Such is the power of blessing, on both the one who blesses and the one who is blessed: in the divine economy of grace, what we pour out returns to us many times over.
Well, this would not be a report from me if we did not somehow get to the implications of quantum physics for covenantal relationships of the people of God: you know, how we can be informed by the way God put together the very stuff of creation to be in relationship, so that subatomic particles engage in what some have called “a conspiracy to cooperate;” so that a butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo may create reverberations through the web of creation that tip weather systems into a storm in Texas. The God who made such a wondrously woven web also made you and me as well as the collectivities in which our lives are joined to live in a conspiracy to cooperate as well.
In a paper entitled Science Takes a Cooperative Turn a professor of physics evaluates the human failure to get what cries forth everywhere from this creation: “The dominant state of human consciousness at this time is still sadly characterized by separation and distrust rather than union… We need to admit that we have little experience of what can be achieved by cooperative, participatory and coherent modes…” (Jargodzki, Christopher, 2006, www.metanexus.net). What might be possible for us when we really get conspiracy to cooperate as God’s way?
Well, novelists and physicists have wisdom to share with us, to be sure, but ultimately we look to Jesus Christ: “If two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matthew 18:19-20).
The quest of this Everyperson organization is toward our deepest nature, as a body conceived in the mind of God and born into time in 1935 to draw pastoral leaders to call the others toward the Everyperson logo that summons all creation, that great eschatological image: a circle centered on Christ, “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Revelation 7:9). That is who we are. May it be so.