Blog Archive

Here are past posts from the front page of the web site for the Presbytery of San Francisco that may be of interest.

A Call to Deep Change

At the September 2010 meeting of the Presbytery our Transitional Executive Presbyter, Rev. Dr. Cal Chinn, challenged us to engage in a process of deep change. Here is what he said:

It was 1975, when Helen, one of the elders on the session of the United Presbyterian Church, on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation (Presbytery of the Cascades), announced that if the General Assembly did not condemn homosexuality outright, she would leave the church. Helen was at the time the biggest contributor to our struggling Native American congregation. As her pastor, I spent many hours with her. In the beginning, I simply listened to her, letting her know that even though I disagreed with her, that I would honor her opinions and accept her feelings. We then started to read the bible together. Throughout, we prayed together. Helen and I never came to total agreement; yet Helen remained a faithful Presbyterian til the day she died.

I share this experience as a reminder that there are no short-cuts to reconciliation, to change of any kind. Discerning God’s will for us personally, for the church, for the Presbytery takes time, often more time than we have the patience for. It is all about Prayer and Bible Study. I have been serving as your Transitional Presbyter for about 7 weeks, almost 2 months. In my remaining 10 months in this position, I rely not upon any great wisdom or skills that I have; rather, I will continue to rely upon prayer and biblical reflection. I want all of us–from ruling and teaching elder commissioners to Presbytery to the Leadership Council, and all the committees, working groups, administrative commissions, task groups, staff –to take the time for prayer and biblical reflection.

At the recent meeting of the Executive Forum—the gathering of all the Presbytery Executives in our Synod—we read and discussed the book,Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within, by Robert Quinn. Quinn makes the distinction between incremental change AND deep change. When most of us talk about change, we typically mean incremental change. Incremental change is usually the result of a rational analysis and planning process. Incremental change is usually limited in scope and is often reversible. If the change does not work out, we can always return to the old way. Incremental change usually does not disrupt our past patterns—it is an extension of the past. Most important, during incremental change, we feel we are in control.

Deep Change, which is what Quinn is interested in, is change that is major in scope, discontinuous with the past and generally irreversible. The deep change effort distorts existing patterns of action and involves taking risks. Deep change means surrendering control. It is “walking naked into the land of uncertainty”, “building the bridge as you walk on it,” phrases that Quinn uses to describe what is involved in deep change.

I believe deep change is what God is calling us into. I certainly don’t have an outcome in mind. What I do hope and pray for is that we will have the will and the courage and the faith to engage in deep change as the Presbytery of San Francisco. Nicodemus said to Jesus: “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born again?” (John 3:4) The wonderful mystery of the Spirit is that like the wind—it blows where it chooses. We hear the sound of it, but we do not know where it comes from or where it goes. I invite you to breathe in the Spirit and follow its lead, trusting that God, who is already there ahead of us, will take us to where we need to go.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

A word on polarity management from our Transitional Executive Presbyter, Cal Chinn.
Barry Johnson, the author of Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems, poses the question: “What would you do if you had to make a choice between breathing in and breathing out?” You are wondering, “What kind of a question is that? Breathing is not one or the other. Breathing has to be both—in and out!” And yet, there are so many situations in life that we treat as problems to be solved one way or the other. It’s either my way or no way. I’m right and you’re wrong. But often these situations in life, like breathing, are polarities to be managed, NOT problems to be solved. The two sides of a polarity are interdependent; you cannot choose one as a solution and neglect the other. Both are needed, and both are part of the solution.
It is time to look at some examples. A profitable business must be able to reduce costs and improve quality. Managers and employees need training and must do their work. All of us are faced with work commitments and home commitments. Notice in these examples that we have competing demands that are interdependent and connected in such a way that you need to be able to manage both. In polarities there is no such thing as one is good and the other is bad, one is right and other is wrong. Both are good, and both are needed.

Polarity Management is especially important in a church. St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Oakland has 2 worship services. One is called Noisy Worship, and the other is called the Main Service. Menlo Park has an 11:00 am service in the Sanctuary and an 11:05 am service in what is called the Cafe just down the street. These are wonderfully creative ways of managing the worship wars that we are so familiar with. We struggle with whether children should be included in worship. We struggle with whether to sing traditional hymns from the hymnal, accompanied by the organ or to sing praise songs projected on the screen, accompanied by a band. Should the Session be crusaders or tradition-bearers? Should pastors be conservative for stability or revolutionary for change? Should we celebrate baptism for infants or believers? I hope you see where I am going with this. In all of our congregations, we are challenged with many unsolvable problems. They are unsolvable because the solution is not found in one side or the other. Both sides are needed in the solution. There is no one absolute right answer.
Barry J ohnson challenges us to look at our seemingly unsolvable problems as polarities which do not just seem unsolvable but truly are unsolvable. Then instead of looking for a way to solve these problems, we can focus instead on ways to manage them effectively, which is the real solution.
Johnson gives us two questions that are helpful for determining whether a difficult issue is a problem to be solved or a polarity to be managed. “Is the issue ongoing?” If so, that suggests a polarity, not a problem that can end by applying an appropriate solution. No attempted solution can truly end a polarity. It will remain an ongoing issue. “Are the opposing points of view interdependent?” If so, the issue is potentially a polarity. By taking only one perspective on a polarity, it may look like a solvable problem; but it will become clearer that it is actually unsolvable as soon as you start looking at how the primary perspectives depend on each other.
In our Presbytery, we struggle with many ongoing, unsolved issues. How do we balance peace and purity, grace and law? How do we balance the functions of nurturance and regulation as a Presbytery in relation to our congregations and pastors? How do we balance conscience and constitution, local autonomy and connectionalism. These issues are not only ongoing, but in each case, there is also interdependency between the two perspectives. Which leads me to believe that they remain unsolved because they are unsolvable polarities, not solvable problems.
Getting back to the earlier metaphor of breathing as in illustration of the need for polarity management, we breathe in to solve the problem of lack of oxygen. Then when this creates a new problem of too much carbon dioxide, we breathe out, creating the problem of lack of oxygen again. And this goes on and on. The solution is not to breathe in more or breathe out more, but to do both. Too often we get stuck in unresolvable debates, with some taking one point of view and others taking another point of view. We argue as if it were a question of breathing in versus breathing out when the wisdom is in balancing the two perspectives, which are interdependent.
The apostle Paul has the right word for us when we are faced with unsolvable problems. In his first letter to the church in Corinth, Paul writes:
You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ.
By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which Christ has the final say in everything…. I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together….God has put all the different parts into one body on purpose.
The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part…if one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance. You are Christ’s body—that’s who you are! You must never forget this!!
(The Message, Eugene Petersen)
THE WORD OF THE LORD! Thanks be to God!!