Chapter Seven: "Let’s Get (Less) Organized!" Guest Blogger Judith Crossett

Changing the Conversation, 

by Anthony Robinson 

Chapter Seven – "Let’s Get (Less) Organized!"

By Judith Crossett

Every summer, our parish sends a number of youth choir members (and a few adults) to a Royal School of Church Music summer course—a choir camp.  Driving into the grounds, the Lord’s Prayer is on road-side signs, phrase by phrase; the youth I drive always read them in chorus as we pass each.  But as you leave, the last sign before the state highway says “Entering the Mission Field”(which they ignore).  That’s what we are looking for: a church organization which, like that road, first brings us into retreat and worship, then thrusts us out to the mission field.  Robinson sets us some questions; as others have said, he makes the reader uncomfortable frequently.  But he also leaves me convinced that we need to set about the work he suggests to make a church which equips us for ministry and sends us out doing it.

His topic is organization—he starts by describing why our “Christendom/modernity” models aren’t working well for us, and then doesn’t tell us what to do instead.  He gives us some ways to think about structure (“systems”, with organic rather than mechanistic analogies), but leaves us with a lot of thinking to do.  He talks about starting with a mission statement, but gives very little to help us craft our own mission statements, except that all our actions (in the general triad of welcoming, teaching, sending) should be driven by the mission statement.  It sounds like hard work, re-forming the parishes; it’s reassuring that he says it will take a few years.  Maybe we should form a committee to work out a timetable for that, next month, after we’re done with Easter.  Does the hospitality committee have enough people to prepare for the extra attendance?  

It’s pretty clear in this chapter that Robinson thinks most of our parishes have too many committees—and rely on them too much as how we think we’re to be involved in church. Newcomers? Get them on a committee, so they’ll meet people and feel involved and stay with us. Election to Vestry? Do some committee work so people will know you.  And bylaws—though our parish doesn’t actually have bylaws, we do have policies, lots of them. 

There is something comfortable about being on a committee and organizing things.  Many of us love to do it—on a committee, you feel valued, recognized, kind of important.  You know how committees work—all those group projects in school (all the way through graduate school, in my experience), they’re preparation for working in a committee, the adult form of “plays well with others”.  So I’m very comfortable with committees, but . . .  best department chairman I ever worked with NEVER appointed committees. He had the minimum number of committees the administration required of academic departments.  

Robinson talks about “well-oiled machines” of church organizations—and that makes me wince.  A committee I once led was so described, once.  That machine is now in the shop for overhaul—we’re beginning to recognize that the “machine” that served us pretty well through the 90s doesn’t work now.  Now that “machine” feels more like a community organization, a social service agency, or (when we had more budget to devote to it) a small-grant-awarding foundation, not the body “Christ-led and Spirit-empowered.” 

Those committees have us talking to each other (not a bad thing, in itself), but do they help us go out into the world to meet and show—by words, or works, or both, but by building relationships with others—and show the Gospel?  I’ve heard sermons about “encountering the Other”, holy places, “thin places”—you’ve probably heard them to.  What about encountering the others, the world that is not on our committees?  Robinson is most convincing when he’s talking about having members of the church doing ministry—showing God’s grace to the world.  That is difficult; it’s more comfortable to sit in a committee meeting.  But time in committee meetings does not, ultimately, engage and energize most people—most of us, once we get out of our chairs, find that active ministry is the most exciting thing of all.  With God’s help, and our hard work, we’ll find the structure that will free us to get there.

The Rev. Judith Crossett is a deacon at Trinity Episcopal Church in Iowa City.