By The Rev. Steve Godfrey, St. Martin’s, Perry
The Rev. Steve Godfrey
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This spring, the Board of Directors of the Diocese of Iowa
invited people attending Chapter meetings to have Indaba conversation around
the question, “How
would we characterize our current diocesan budget in terms of gathering and
sending, and where does our reach need to be extended or increased?” The
feedback from these conversations has been fascinating and offers a case study
to illustrate Dwight Zscheile’s chapter on organizing for innovation. What we
are hearing from all corners and the center of the state is that we want
conversation, but this question is very confusing. It feels bureaucratic and
distant. We wonder whether the diocesan leaders are really interested in the
people in local churches. Honestly, although I did not create the question, I
initially really liked it, loved the idea of inviting conversation feeding into
the budgeting process, and felt disappointed and a little hurt by the response,
as one who strives to invite conversation and involvement from everyone. But as
I have reflected on the question and responses, I have begun to understand the
failure of this effort, and its ultimate success!
In chapter six of The
Agile Church, Zscheile challenges the current structure of the church and
suggests some new ways of seeing it. In congregations and at the diocesan level
we are currently structured for managing an establishment, or at least that is
our assumption. While there is need for management—liturgical, pastoral, and
administrative—in congregations and dioceses, and that is perhaps the primary
work of executives and officers, ultimately leaders need to be agents of
connection, encouraging and supporting innovation by ordinary people at the grass
roots, and harvesting learning from it.
The Chapters’ frustration with the budget question stems, I
think, from the establishment management assumptions behind it. Chapters are
thought to be official districts of the diocese that elect representatives to
the board and thus participate in the leadership of the diocese. The “gathering
and sending” language came right out of a very exciting speech at the last
diocesan convention. And we emailed everyone we could with the invitation and question, the speech and the whole budget! Fortunately people have responded to
the invitations to attend the meetings and have been able to articulate that
mass emails and questions about the budget are not very helpful. But gatherings
for conversations are very helpful.
There has been a growing interest in conversations in the
Diocese of Iowa. Indaba Conversations at Convention and the Epiphany
Conversations have all yielded a deep yearning for more connection and
conversation. We seem to get that we need each other and that the solutions to
our challenges will not come from on high but from within gatherings of
ordinary people throughout our congregations. This is very exciting and this
represents the ultimate success of the Chapter strategy.
We still need the bishop and the board to be concerned about
the budget, and to somehow get input about it from around the diocese. We need
them to manage the environment that holds both the tradition and the
innovation, and to care for those who are struggling with the loss of the establishment
and the effects of the simplification and pruning that is needed to make room
for innovation. But ultimately the bishop; the board; the budget; the diocesan
staff; the discernment and formation processes; convention and other structures
need to be critically interested in what is happening in local communities, how
God is moving there, how congregations are struggling and responding, what
knowledge is being created, and what can be learned and shared with others
facing similar struggles. The structures need to support innovation and
connection. The leaders need to be “architects of communal spaces of conversation,
practice & experimentation” (p. 126). I hope that Chapter gatherings might
soon evolve into a platform for exactly this kind of conversation, practice and
experimentation, and I invite anyone interested in helping to facilitate this
development to sign up for “Conversations that Matter,” Track 3 of the Summer Ministry School and Retreat this June!
What has been so gratifying about reading The Agile Church, is the extent to which it validates some of the most exciting, hard work we have been doing in Iowa, with the bishop's leadership, convening intentional conversations that bring different kinds of people together to share yearning and learning with an eye toward innovation, toward discerning and building the church that serves God’s mission in the places where we live and work today. I am excited to see how our collaborative leadership develops in the years to come.
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