I wanted to respond to the thoughts in a separate post, as as I’ve mulled on things some wider things have come up… which I guess I could summarize as: we are part of Corpus Christi, not ChristCorp™.

Firstly, I would entirely agree that facilitating conversation is not enough as a leader. But it is a big aspect as it carries with it an important sense of leadership style that carries people beyond the fruits of the actual conversations facilitated. The very act of giving space to such action sends a clear message of intent: that as a leader, one is not going to dictate, but resource. But, more importantly, what I have been trying to get across is that there is not going to be just one such leader. The key to this model is that leadership is distributed, and different people will be taking a lead in different situations. This has two big implications:

1. People who are currently ‘do-it-all’ leaders are going to have to initiate some sort of process by which they step down from fronting the majority of things.

2. People who are currently members of congregations or groups are going to have to consider what roles they ought to be taking a lead in, and doing so.

With reference to this second point, I think (and thanks to Jon for flagging this again yesterday, over some excellent tea and cake) that resources such as Belbin ought to be used far more widely than they currently seem to be by churches. For those who don’t know, Belbin’s Team Roles is a tool for working out the role that you most naturally play within a particular group. The emphasis is clear: for a team to run effectively all the roles need to be present and functioning. I know of a case recently where the management of a large Christian organization did Belbin and found that there were loads of ‘plants’ (creative thinkers) but no ‘completer-finishers’ in the group… Which explained fairly well why they were having loads of good ideas, but were getting nowhere fast.

Beyond Belbin I think that as churches in a context of ‘self discovery’ we ought to be helping people to discover ‘who they are’ beyond the often shallow tags of ‘child of God’ etc. By using tools such as Belbin, Myers-Briggs, The Enneagram and such-like, people ought to be being helped to realize their potential as members of a living community… not left to fester in pews doing very little. The great thing about these tools is that they bring with them affirmations of belonging, and help people to realize that even though they are not the charismatic, do-it-all leaders they have seen up-front, they do have a vital part to play in the maturing of the community.

Returning to ‘Emerger’s’ question about ‘what it all means in real life’, I would say, as I have in the book, that we need to be careful not to define models too closely. To do so, I believe, returns us to the problem of ‘hey, let’s do it like Willow Creek/HTB/Vineyard/Solomon’s Porch’ etc, and what we end up with is a beast not suited to its environment. The beauty of an emergent solution is that it is exactly designed for its local situation. So beyond the ‘governing dynamics’ which I’ve tried to outline above, I wouldn’t want to give an ‘out of the box’ example of what things would look like in any given situation. You want to find out? Then risk it and do it. Praxis.

Secondly, while what I’ve read of Carver’s work (and I’m very happy to hear some better expertise than mine on this) seems very good, it does seem overtly focused on the business environment, with its emphasis on purpose, ends, expectations etc. We need to remember that we are part of Corpus Christi, not ChristCorp™. I’m not sure churches should have ‘goals’… As living systems they should ‘be’ and mature and grow (and die)… but they are not in a market economy situation, and not trying to maximize profits for shareholders. They are more like a family which, if anything like mine, does not have board meetings and strategic planning groups… but low-level communication and regular feedback between members, not mediated by anyone else. This is perhaps a difficult idea to swallow, as we seem so caught up in success: are enough people coming, is the presentation slick?

As Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost have written, we should not be about ‘attracting’ people to church. Rather, church ought to be a resourcing place for us to ‘get out there’. And this, finally, is something all leaders ought to keep as a touchstone: that it’s about ‘out there’, not ‘in here’. Too often the lion’s share of church resources, prayer-time etc. are spent on the leaders  on the ‘inside’. They need instead to be constantly pushing away the focus and serving people to help them ‘be’ Christ immersed in the culture/local situation they are in.

I have been reading Griffin’s book ‘The Emergence of Leadership – Linking Self Organisation and Ethics’ and attempting to distill some of the highly academic work in there, and draw some conclusions for our situation.

To summarize the previous 3 posts on this leadership issue:

• By locating ethical responsibility in a few ‘leader’ individuals, and in ‘the system’, we are adopting a view of leadership in which it is individual leaders who are blamed and punished when things go wrong, and treated as heros when they go right. We too often take on passive roles (the gathered congregation) as victims of ‘the system’ and of manipulative leaders, and simultaneously locate our salvation in the actions of heroic leaders. Result: we go some place. Get fed up. Bemoan the system. See some other leader we can worship. Go to their church. Repeat.
• We need instead to realise that we are part of a body. We all have corporate responsibility. We are in it together. As equal before God.
• It’s my theological contention that this ‘corporate’ view of the Church, this ‘organ-ization’ that we are a part of, leads us down the road of self-organization. A bottom-up, emergent, complex, living system is what Christ incarnated. And what we have as a model.

So what is the place of leaders in such organizations. Is there one? As I’ve argued in the last 3 posts, I think there is.

• Leadership is distributed. Different people ought to be exercising leadership in different situations. Not one man does all. This is about interdependence.
• Leaders are servers. They facilitate communication. They do not act as communiques between people. They simply make sure it happens.
• Leaders have huge power-potential. But as they are constantly devolving it, and keeping communication open, they avoid power abuse.

I want to add something further to that, mostly based on a re-reading of Capra’s ‘The Hidden Connections‘.

Firstly, if we accept that the groups we are part of are living systems, then we need to appreciate that they cannot be changed in the same way a machine can. You can’t take them apart, re-grind the pistons, connect rods up a different way. Living systems change by being disturbed. Their equilibrium is removed, they are forced to respond, interact with their environment, and evolve to meet the new challenge. I love the recent Guinness ad, which takes 3 drinkers back in time right to them being tiny sea-creatures on a beach not liking the water… It’s only through that disequilibrium – that dissatisfaction – that things change.

The problem is, you can’t always tell how a living system will respond to that. But that’s the beauty of true freedom. Capra uses a lovely example: If you kick a lamp post, you can pretty much predict exactly what’s going to happen. You’re going to get a sore foot. But if you kick a dog… well that’s not easy to predict. Two living systems are now interacting, disturbing one another and having to work out how to face the emerging challenge.

This of course links in with the ‘dirt’ aspects of the book. I argue that we need to re-imagine our relationship with dirt in a church ‘purified to the point of sterility’. In a sterile church where everything is clean and spotless, nothing can live. Everything is dead in an operating theatre. Christ deliberately challenged the dirt boundaries of those he interacted with. Why? To disturb their equilibrium. To challenge them to think again. To force them to interact with their environment: to not ignore the lepers, the women, the tax collectors, the poor, the trafficked, the infected, the asylum seeking, the struggling…

So an aspect of leadership I want to add here is this: leadership is disturbing. This is perhaps in contrast to the ‘peace, peace’ style. Some in the church need to be affirmed in this leadership role (remembering that leadership is plural and distributed) of disturbing the peace. For there is no peace. This is leader as Trickster, if you will. A role Christ played so well.

Of course… there have to be limits. Complexity theory states that for a system to ‘self organize’ it needs to be held ‘at the edge of chaos’. Disturb it too far, you destroy it. Don’t disturb it enough, it dies. Life exists in the strange place very close to chaos. And it is a leadership task to keep us there.

•    Griffin proposes that we need to think differently about ethics, and this will mean we will think differently about leadership. I have taken this, in our situation, to mean that we must avoid projecting heroes or villains – which is still happening too often in ECs.

• It’s my theological contention that the Church needs to become a ‘self organizing’ system if it is to properly model the holy freedom God has given us post-Incarnation. Griffin would want to call this ‘participative self-organization’ – which clearly emphasizes the participative element of each person.

•    In such an organization, people are recognized as equal, and all as ‘becoming’.

•    As interconnected equals on a journey together to newness – rather than back into tradition – we will need to be interdependent. This will call for distributed leadership in which different people take a lead as their gifting requires. “The eye cannot say to the hand, I don’t need you.”

What, then, is a leader in such an organization?

In his summary, critiquing some of the literature on complexity and management (such as Leadership and the new Science) Griffin writes that:

Organizations are not things at all, let alone living things, but rather they are processes of communication and joint action. Communication and joint action as such are not alive. It is the human bodies communicating and interacting that are alive… Leaders enhance communications within and between groups.

I think this is a fantastic summary, and an excellent platform from which to look afresh at leadership within the church.

The first observation I would make from this is that leadership is not communication. It is facilitating communication. This perhaps connects back to the post on preaching. Leaders tend to be those that preach. But in Griffin’s model, this is not going to enhance self-organization. Quite the opposite. The leader who continuously takes a soap-box and preaches his or her vision is setting up a passive congregation. As quoted in the first post:

“We locate ethical responsibility [...] in a few individuals. In doing this we adopt a particular view of leadership in which it is individual leaders who are blamed and punished when things go wrong, or praised when they go right. The rest of us are allocated passive roles as victims of the system and of manipulative leaders, and our salvation lies in the actions of heroic leaders.”

If leadership is about facilitating communication, it means the leader acts in the role of, to co-join the language of the church and IT, a server. Hugely important. But nothing but a means for facilitating communication. This is, of course, a metaphor that has limited use. A server can dictate whether any communication can take place if it decides to ‘go down’. Which brings us neatly on to ideas of power, and my second observation:

Leaders have huge power-potential, but, as servants, constantly devolve and distribute it. Because they are communication facilitators, leaders will have the regular opportunity to become invested with information. This information, pooled and centralized, amounts to power-potential. But the emergent leader will always seek to immediately share/open up that information for the public good, or, if sensitive, pass it through to another whose gift it is to minister to that need. This means that the power-potential is quickly minimized and evaporates.

The power question is a huge one. It seems that we’ve existed in a paradigm for too long that says ‘leadership is power’. And, more dangerously, ‘church leadership is power ordained by God.’ We’ve got to ditch that one once and for all. Christ didn’t die on the cross for us to follow after him and assiduously stitch up that rip in the Temple curtain. There is no holy-of-holies. There is no ark. There is no need for another sacrifice. There are no priests. Through Christ, as Paul put it in Eph 2: 18, we all have access to God by one Spirit.

So church leadership carries no power. Enhancing communication within and between groups is a gift. But it is a gift that exists within a gifted and empowered body. One might see the modernist/enlightenment era as being the era of the brain. Rational thought. Je pense, donc je suis. And, to go back to Paul’s writing on the body, it is as if we have bought into that and seen leaders as this powerful brain. Thinking for us. Deciding where we are to go, what we are to do. Being the visionary. In the emergent era we are beginning to see that the brain is not simply the machine that controls the body. Rather, it is the place where senses of all kinds are processed and allowed to interact. The brain is a server.

Leaders in the current model of church have been seen as ‘do it all’ people. Multi-gifted people who can preach, teach, pray, minister, pastor, lead forward, visit sick people, chair meetings, organize services, plan committees, arrange flowers, conduct weddings… And thus have had an easy time arranging an aura of power and authority. Leaders in the new model should be seen as having one gift: the ability to facilitate other people’s gifts… And thus will be dis-interested in power.

Leaders, as Griffin sees it, should not be extolled as something exemplary and set-apart. Rather,

“They are who they are only in the evolving context of local interaction in which they and other participants are continuously recreating their identity as they construct their future in terms of the enabling constraints of the past.”

This may be a hard pill for some leaders to swallow. They will have to step down from pedestals. And we must help them to do that with good grace. But, more than this, we must all take our parts, so that there is not a vacuum into which some hero might step and take responsibility for us. We must begin to participate and take responsibility for our corporate journey together. Unless we are prepared to do this, to become adults in our journey of faith we can have no complaints if we suddenly realize that we are children being taken for a ride.

• It’s my theological contention that the Church needs to become a ‘self organizing’ system if it is to properly model the holy freedom God has given us post-Incarnation.
• In Griffin’s ‘The Emergence of Leadership – Linking Self-Organization and Ethics’ – he posits that there is an apparent paradox in much of our thinking about groups: while they are actually made up of individuals, we attribute them status ‘as if’ they were single entities.
• The attempt to resolve this paradox usually leads to us neglecting the ‘as if’ and seeing groups or organizations as single entities responsible ethically, led by a few key individuals. These leaders are then projected as heroes or villains.
• Griffin proposes that we need to think differently about ethics, and this will mean we will think differently about leadership. I have taken this, in our situation, to mean that we must avoid projecting heroes or villains – which is still happening too often in ECs.

I want to think a little further about what leadership in a self-organizing context might mean.

Firstly, some thoughts on self-organizing systems. Griffin is keen to argue a position of ‘participative self organization’. What he means by this is a breaking down of the barriers between observers (leaders) and participants (followers), subjects and objects. A participative self-organizing system ’causes itself in moving toward the purpose which is intrinsic to the process’ – phrase I would interpret as an immersed-incarnational approach. This is in contrast to what he terms ‘systemic self organization’, which posits both an autonomous individual as external observer and a self-organizing system of which the subject is a part… and is viewed as ‘moving toward purpose which has originated externally by a leader’ – a phrase I would interpret as the ‘programme-driven’ approach.

In other words, Griffin sees that to model this emerging leadership in a self-organizing, self-renewing group, we need to actually fully take on board the significance of what Paul is saying in 1 Cor 12:14-27, that we are all part of the body of Christ. No one is external observer. Everyone is tied in to everyone else. We are connected. There are no subject/object divisions. This thinking can be developed to bring an understanding of ourselves as ‘human becomings’. Griffin argues that we need an understanding of selves as emergent persons in social interaction. In other words, we become self-aware not through introspection, but through interaction.

It is less ‘cogito ergo sum’ than ‘ (excuse my rather poor latin) ‘concero ergo sum’: I am, because I am connected.

Leaders then, cannot be seen as people external to the system. They are an integral part of it, and must participate fully in it. And, as is perhaps more of the problem in churches, they must invite others to be fully participative too.

So, secondly, what we can also take from Paul in his subsequent writing on gifts is that, as different gifts are exercised, different people take leadership; Griffin concurs with this. More interestingly though, he identifies the dangers that come with the multitude of leadership opportunities that are presented to us:

We, as groups of persons, in the on-going sustaining of our identity, together create a great variety of leadership roles [...] at the same time. A great number of leadership themes of identity are available to us in all situations we find ourselves in. Because of the anxiety of the unknown and the uncertain, we often choose themes that protect us and provide escape from the anxiety.

What this amounts to in everyday life is a defaulting to the leader who seems to provide us comfort. Who cries ‘peace, peace’. When there is no peace. As Aldous Huxley proclaimed: “So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.” This seems to connect with the series of posts I did on Rollo May’s book ‘The Courage to Create’:

“those we call saints rebelled against an outmoded and inadequate form of God on the basis of their new insights into divinity. The teachings that led to their deaths raised the ethical and spiritual levels of their societies.”

The opposite of those pioneering saints are those leaders who claim to be drawing us out of our anxiety, but are really emasculating us from our universal potentiality to lead in the situation where we are gifted.

To summarize then:

• We need to be heading for participative self-organization
• In such an organization, people are recognized as equal, and all as ‘becoming’.
• As interconnected equals on a journey together to newness – rather than back into tradition – we will need to be interdependent. This will call for distributed leadership in which different people take a lead as their gifting requires. “The eye cannot say to the hand, I don’t need you.”

The issues of leadership, in particular whether people ought to work full time for the church has provoked some wide debate on this blog before. [ see posts and comments here and here ] It’s something that I’ve been thinking over for a while now. I seriously believe that the issue of leadership – and the style of it that people are intentionally going to make decisions about – is perhaps the most crucial one that the Emerging Church has to face. If we get the leadership issue wrong, then I believe that the movement will not mature into the radically new model that it currently promises; I have to admit to some concerns already.

To set out my stall again:

I believe that if churches are going to be effective organ(isation)s – incarnating the gospel in the places they are, speaking in the forms that the culture they are immersed in understand, – then they are going to have to learn to be ‘self-organizing.’ Self-organizing systems are ones that can grow and adapt organically to changes in their environment. With their boundaries being porous, they can sense the environment around them, and adapt themselves to it quickly.

I also believe that this model of organization is one that is initiated by Jesus in the establishment of the early church. The ‘viral network of the Spirit’ and the emphasis on everyone being part of the body (not machine) of Christ suggest to me that self-organization is not only sociologically, but theologically a better model of church than the top-down, hierarchical, client-server model of the Temple that Jesus critiqued so heavily.

The question then comes: how does leadership operate in a self-organizing, bottom-up system? Is there such a thing as leadership in these systems, or is it an anarchy?

The first part of my answer would be, yes, there is such a thing as leadership in such systems. But the model and style of leadership is so radically different to that which a) ‘leaders’ are used to using and b) ‘followers’ are used to experiencing that it is enormously tempting to quickly revert to old models of leadership where ‘leaders’ feel in control and the ‘followers’ can abdicate responsibility for their spiritual journey to them and just jump on the bandwagon.

Hence, there needs to be a real decision on both sides to make the new model work: leaders need to stop organizing everything and followers need to start taking more responsibility. (As an aside, it’s because of this need that I feel that full-time paid leadership is a massive hinderance to the establishment of self-organizing systems.)

In order to get into some of the detail of this, I’m going to be posting some thoughts around Douglas Griffin’s book The Emergence of Leadership – Linking Self-Organization and Ethics, which is part of the Routledge series on Complexity and Emergence in Organizations. [Hence the new category of Leadership.] Thanks to Jon for generously putting me on to it.

Some initial thoughts then from the introduction:

Griffin initially invites us to consider the semantics of organ-izations, corp-orations etc and see that they refer to ‘bodies’. There is a paradox here. In corporate scandals we refer to corporations ‘as if’ they were entities in themselves, when in fact they are really groups of individual people:

“This designation of a ‘body’ to a group of people is purely hypothetical, ‘as if’. Forgetting this ‘as if’ and attributing direct agency to these groups has become a habit of thought leading us to think and talk about groups as objects, as things…

Griffin reflects that it is the confusion of the ‘as if’ that is causing us problems: we forget that they are only like single entities in certain situations, but are actually groups of individuals. What we have done to overcome the paradox is to forget the ‘as if’ with the result that:

“we locate ethical responsibility in both the ‘system’, simply taking it for granted that a ‘system’ can be ethically responsible, and in a few individuals. In doing this we adopt a particular view of leadership in which it is individual leaders who are blamed and punished when things go wrong, or praised when they go right. The rest of us are allocated to passive roles as victims of the system and of manipulative leaders, and our salvation lies in the actions of heroic leaders. In thinking in this way, we are obscuring how we are all together involved…”

I think we can immediately recognize a lot of parallels with the church as organ-ization. Firstly, we hear people complaining about ‘the church’, as if it were a monolithic entity, arguing that they have been abused by ‘the church’. And in some senses, we are one. But, rather than locating ethical responsibility in ‘the church’,  we also need to see that we are very much a group of individuals, and the ethics of the whole lies with the ethics of each individual. Secondly, we allow ourselves to take passive roles, and give over our salvation to the actions of heroic leaders.

Griffin concludes this section with a key point: “As soon as we think differently about ethics, we must think differently about leadership.” Allow me to paraphrase this for our situation: as soon as we think differently about church as an emerging, self-organizing spirituality, we must think differently about leadership.

I’m not sure that we have done so yet. Still too many ‘heroes’. Still too much passivity. Still too easy to see the EC ‘as if’…