The Way Forward: Engaging Adaptive Questions

Last week I summarized the Presbytery’s current fiscal dilemma ($180,000 budget deficit in 2015) and suggested the way forward together will require us to move beyond merely discussing things in terms of technical fixes but rather engaging the adaptive challenges associated with our life together (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfLLDvn0pI8).

Today I would like to suggest some questions that help organizations such as a presbytery (or your congregation) engage the adaptive challenges presented by our ever-evolving world of complexity:

o   Questions to ask that are already being discussed

o   Questions to ask that no one seems to be talking about

o   Issues we see that need to be addressed, at least from our point of view

o   Opportunities before us that are either (a) a bit outside the box kind of thinking, (b) really outside the box, (c) wild hair ideas, or (d) whatever is beyond a WHI

o   People who need to be around the table of conversation (beyond us)

o   Sacred cows that no one seems to want to talk about (remembering sacred cows make gourmet burgers)

o   Elephants in the room (a more extreme example of the above)

What would it look like for your Session to have the kind of conversation in which these questions are engaged? Such a conversation requires implicit trust, radical humility, deep sensitivity, uncommon honesty and a willingness to listen, listen, listen. Only communities of care are able to engage in such conversations.

My wife, a licensed therapist, likes to tell couples that she is “on the side of the relationship,” which is to say that a healthy relationship means all parties listen and all parties are heard; yet each party also takes personal responsibility to serve the relationship with both courage and respect. Only communities of care are able to engage in such conversations.

What will it look like for our presbytery to have the kind of conversation in which the above questions are engaged? We are about to find out. I am bringing these questions to the Resources Committee, to the Leadership Team and, in April, to the Presbytery meeting in plenary. And I invite you, through whatever cohort or sub-group in which you participate (e.g. CNAM, Hispanic Fellowship, one of the theological cohorts), to begin to engage these questions. Together we will be a community of care able to engage in such a conversation.

We are all on Team Jesus,

Brad Munroe