In her latest post at http://robinmsf.blogspot.com/2012/02/vision.html, +Robin Mohr asks for “stories of Quaker leaders and committees/organizations that have functioned well together.”
It was in college that I first heard Max Weber’s idea that bureaucracies grow to eventually see their own maintenance as their prime objective (Wikipedia has a section on Weberian bureaucracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy#Weberian_bureaucracy). At the time I assumed we were talking about governments but it didn’t take long in the nonprofit world to see the phenomenon alive there as well. Resources go to the programs that can attract the biggest donor attention. Committee discernment gets short-circuited. Internal benchmarks become the measure even if the are disconnected from actual effect or mission. If a need arises from outside of the boundaries of the internal structures, it is ignores: there’s little incentive to address it.
The only real solution is to keep remembering why we’re doing what we’re doing. It’s the practice of self-reflection, it’s the exercise of asking what we might be called to. Perhaps this is a leader’s real job description.
I’ve been thinking again lately of the way the Society of Friends responded to the Tom Fox kidnapping, a story I recounted in “Why Would a Quaker Do a Crazy Thing Like That”(https://www.quakerranter.org/2006/06/why_would_a_quaker_do_a_crazy/). I think the underwhelming response was mostly a failure of imagination. Too many of the organizations in question had settled themselves into narrowly-defined mission silos of their own making. They didn’t know what to make of the situation. I’d like to hope that a Rufus Jones or Howard Brinton would have cut through the slack, and I am encouraged at some recent conversations I’ve had with some emerging leaders, but as a student of history I know these are eternal problems that are always ready to return.
My theory of media and social change is that 90% of the time we’re talking amongst ourselves, inviting people in to the conversation and building an infrastructure of community. It’s one-on-one work, slow, people intensive (but then that’s what makes it enjoyable, right?). The fruits of this labor become visible with unexpected opportunities – those times when we’re called on by a larger public to explain ourselves or describe the world as we see it. If we’ve been doing our background work – planting the seeds that is the people of our community – then we will be ready to step up to the challenge. If we’re not, opportunity slips away.
The history of Friends – maybe the history of the church universal – is one of missed opportunities; the miracle of faith is that sometimes we connect with one another in the love that is God and lay some more bricks and mortar for God’s kingdom on Earth.
Embedded Link
What Canst Thou Say?: Vision
Without vision, the people perish. Mostly because they get eaten by tigers they didn’t see coming. Isn’t that a joke from Calvin & Hobbes? I’ve been thinking a lot about vision lately.…
Hi Martin! I like the new design.
I still can’t tell if you liked my post, were ambivalent or worse about it.
I think you’re right that we have to keep asking what are we here for. We, as individuals or organizations, can’t get caught up in all the 1,000 things that people think we ought to do. Heck, I can think of 20 things I’d like FWCC to be involved in right now all by myself, but I also know we can only do about three at a time. How do we choose? How do we balance honoring the commitments that the organization has made and responding to the call of the Holy Spirit in the moment, even if we may be mistaken in our discernment in either direction?
I’ve been writing about this quandary for years : In 2011 http://robinmsf.blogspot.com/2011/08/making-choices.html
In 2006: http://robinmsf.blogspot.com/2006/09/my-candle-burns-at-both-ends.html
Maybe it’s just me that is not given to singleness of eye, of focus. The good side of that is breadth of vision. The shadow/sin is frittering away time and other resources.
How can we help each other in the discernment process?
Hi Robin: of course I like your post :). I’m quite confident you’ll be one to remember the reason you’re doing this work. The sort of move into the more tautological bureaucratic thinking (“we serve ourselves so we can serve ourselves”) seems to happen at a larger staff/budget threshold than FWCC’s current status.
This really speaks to me. I like your media and social change model. I think that is how I understand church works — 90% of the time we are practicing, we make attempts to live God’s way, we soak ourselves in God’s grace and eventually build up some pathways in our brains. So then when we meet an opportunity, once in a while we recognize it and respond from our practiced understanding of opening into God’s grace. We might intend to do that most of the time, but we can’t do it without practicing.
“Why are we doing this?” is a great core conversation for church social time, and for me it points straight to the well of good water, God’s grace. I think it’s hard to make good decisions in committee meetings if we haven’t practiced asking “Why … ?” together outside that context. If we have been drinking deeply together at the well of living water that Jesus shows us — I think that’s what allows us to find the heavenly dimension of God’s possibilities emerging amongst us. Knowing one another in the things which are eternal (from Britain YM’s Advices & Queries #18). Perhaps we can only make decisions as deep as our collective immersion in God’s presence.
Yesterday, I clerked a small quarterly meeting working group — I’m co-clerk, since it isn’t my quarter… and the other co-clerk is, which works well. We keep asking the questions and seeing the potentials … but when it comes down to being faithful (a term I use instead of “accountable”) that needs consistent testing. It is important to center in worship, no matter what we are doing.
I had the experience of being chair of a group of biologists, and found that, even then, I conducted business in the same way… one of seeking guidance from other members of the group — even though the group of which we were a small part used Robert’s rules of order. I felt our group was too small to make that approach workable… Occasionally, I forgot I wasn’t among Friends until another member of the group (a United Church graduate of Swarthmore College) reminded me… Church of the Brethren folks just grinned and allowed as how they preferred the approach; we were, after all, both friends and biologists. For most of us, the work had both a scientific and a spiritual basis.