The Rocky Mountain Synod of the ELCA is
not the only synod electing a new bishop this year. I've been
lurking a little bit on Facebook timelines, watching what folks in
other synods are saying about their own election process.
After perusing Keith Anderson's
this morning, I started to think about how we talk with one another
about the work of the church, particularly as we anticipate changes
in synodical leadership.
Here's what I came up with:
One issue we run in to is the fact that the Bishop of our synod has been re-elected at least twice, and has been in office for
over eighteen years.
It's much more likely, when a sitting
bishop is available, that she or he will be re-elected. Unless there
are huge problems with current leadership, my experience is that
folks assume things will remain the same. When we believe things
will stay the same, we don't tend to have serious conversations about
what needs to change.
This year, though, we in our synod have
the opportunity to take our changing culture and society seriously.
This year, we have the opportunity to elect a bishop who recognizes
that the world is different than it was 18 years ago.
Business as usual circa 1993 is not
appropriate for the church of 2012.
It's time in our synod to talk about
what needs to change in the synodical leadership … and we probably
need to talk seriously about what needs to change in the (especially
mainline) church at large as well.
But when we have those conversations,
they tend to be reduced to language that sounds good but doesn't
really mean anything. We talk about mission and ministry without
defining those terms. We say we want to develop bold leaders and
courageous congregations without articulating what that means.
We wonder what G-d is up to out in the
world, but we fight about what happens inside the church while we
tend to ignore the world around us.
We talk about transforming the culture
around us, but don't understand the culture well enough to know what
kind of transformation the culture is yearning for. What we need is
a conversation that moves deeper than generalized language that makes
us feel good, but doesn't really mean anything.
What we need is a bishop who is bold
enough to consider the truth that church culture needs its own
transformation.
$0.02
Matthew,
ReplyDeleteI wonder if we can talk about those tangible ideas and throw them out sort of like we did with the initial Bishop's slate and see if we can at least get a few of those church changing culture ideas out there for us to consider. What might then happen is that we could start listening to responses to these cultureal issue (and that's not a typo). At the very least we could start putting a clearer frame work on some of the questions we have, and perhaps even get the dominant current paradigm to become aware of these issues.