SAN ANSELMO, CA – I am privileged to be on a consulting team helping San Francisco Theological Seminary ramp up its new Center for Innovation.
After day one of three days, it’s clear the enterprise has some challenges just within its name. They’re the very challenges that confront local churches in 2015.
To what extent is the Center literally a “center,” a hub, a gathering place? Does it do its work within the walls of a facility? Does its mission express an institutional mission?
No less, what does “innovation” actually mean? It’s a warm and fuzzy word, and everyone is for it – until innovation takes on its literal meaning as “newness,” “change,” “making all things new.” Then, as many church leaders know too well, innovation can become threatening. Powerful constituencies push back, and things that manifestly need to be rethought take on a non-negotiable, do-not-mess aura.
Thus far, in a day devoted mainly to imagining, possibilities seem wide open. As we turn to identifying audiences and get specific about plans, I can already tell that tensions will emerge: old ways vs. new ways, institution vs. world, leaders vs. folks.
Some will want a truly collaborative enterprise that starts out there in the world, listening to people quite unlike everyday Presbyterians, allowing their needs to set the course. Some will want a more traditional route of inspiring and training church leaders, so that local congregations can do better.
These tensions aren’t right vs. wrong, or good vs. evil. They are different ways of understanding the future of Christian witness. Congregations face identical tensions. I encourage leaders to look outward and to see that their future will require them to engage with a world quite different from their own: younger, browner, less educated, less financially secure, largely uninterested in traditional religion.
That is a lot to ask. Longtime members want to look inward, not because they are selfish, but because they believe their charge is to care for members, to provide worship and church-based fellowship, and to equip people in here for their daily lives out there.
I happen to believe that it is this inward focus that has crippled mainline congregations. We just don’t have adequate connections with future constituencies. But I also know that resolution lies in balance, not in tilting all one way or the other. Finding balance, however, requires more trust than we have been showing, more willingness to listen and to imagine the other’s perspectives, and more concern for the needs of others in something deeper, more organic than a noblesse oblige soup-kitchen approach.
Furthermore, the world needs us to be fully functional now, not in some vague tomorrow after we have learned to trust each other. The name “Christian” has been claimed by moralizers and haters, and we need to stand for what Jesus actually said. The place of religion has become both pugilistic and quaint, and we need to claim a dynamic and self-sacrificial way of believing. Haters are loud, and we need to proclaim love. Greed is on the throne, and we need to climb the Mount that Jesus actually used.
That work needs to happen today. Feelings are high, tensions are high, and needs are high. Which will prevail?
This gathering at a Presbyterian seminary north of the Golden Gate Bridge suggests that good-hearted people can disagree and yet remain in community. None of us bears all wisdom, none needs to defend right-opinion, and none needs to win. This enterprise isn’t about us; it’s about God and creation.
Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the publisher of Fresh Day online magazine, author of On a Journey and two national newspaper columns. His website is Church Wellness – Morning Walk Media
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