The local congregation has been a central feature of American life since the founding of this country.  It is now in precipitous decline.  This author has tried to address this decline by inviting a series of conversations with people who care deeply about the institution.  This is a report of the author’s conclusions including why reforming existing congregations appears to be untenable and what we can anticipate about how locally-situated, in-person, faith-based communities of the future will be different from what local congregations have been.

My Living School Integration Project

It was my great honor to be in the 2015 cohort of the Living School of the Center for Action and Contemplation.  This “school” is comprised of 180 people from multiple countries and diverse religious affiliations who meet on-line and in-person in Albuquerque over a two-year period.  In smaller groups we met with Fr. Richard Rohr, the founder of the Center.  It was at that small group event in the Spring of 2014, that the seed for my “integration project” was planted.

We had been learning about and discussing the concept of developmental hierarchies with particular attention to the integrating work of Ken Wilber and his framework of eight “altitudes.”  The core of the theory is that everything that grows does so through a set of stages which are sequential, invariant, and hierarchical.  That is, there is a set of steps that every organism takes in a particular order that are increasingly able to respond to the inherent complexity of being.  This is true for everything that can be understood to be alive, but it also applies to any complex adaptive system from ant colonies to nation-states.

This application of developmental theory to the organization of organizations had just been accelerated by the publication of a book by Frederic LaLoux entitled Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness.  In the book, LaLoux lays out a description of the stages of the organization of organizations in clear terms with many examples and shares the stories of several organizations with varied purposes which have all evolved to what Wilber refers to as Teal or Second Tier.

[For the purposes of this essay I will not suppose that the reader is familiar with the details of this developmental map.  I will just say that this level [Teal] is the sixth of a proposed eight order sequence.  Most social organizations are organized at Third Order with some more progressive businesses operating at fourth order.  So, what LaLoux is demonstrating here is a huge leap.]

Given our interests in the Living School, some of us wondered about the possibility of local congregations evolving along these lines to also become Teal/Sixth Order communities.  We put the question to Fr. Richard.  He stated that this wasn’t possible for churches.

A small group of us stewed over this during the summer and approached him again at the September gathering.  “Why,” we asked, “was it not possible for churches to undergo this same transformation?”

Fr. Richard relented a bit and allowed that it was theoretically possible, just not practically possible.  Churches in his view just aren’t open to that much change.

Wise as I believe Fr. Rohr to be, there was a part of me that was unwilling to accept the inevitable result of the belief that local congregations are not able to evolve.  I explained this to myself by noting that his context is the Catholic Church, and it is governed by traditions and canons that my denomination, the United Church of Christ, is not constrained by.  Given the autonomy of local congregations and the free church traditions of which we are a part, we can do whatever we feel called to.  I resolved to take on this effort as my integration project for the Living School.

We Should Talk About the Future of the Church

In the decade that followed I have engaged in several extended conversations with as diverse a community as I can gather.  Much of this was by virtual connections on Zoom.  This was largely because of the geographic diversity of the participants and was only reinforced by the pandemic.  Most of the participants were pastors of local congregations but we also had seminary professors and seminary trained folks whose employment was with nonprofits and private businesses.

New and Renewed: Missional Wisdom, Holacracy in Las Vegas, and Sixth Order in Florida

Some of the conversations revolved around things we had read.  The most relevant for me is a book by Elaine A. Heath entitled The Mystic Way of Evangelism: A Contemplative Vision for Christian Outreach.  It was first published in 2008, with a second edition released in 2017.  I highly recommend it.  It sets out an understanding of the church that is rooted in the transformative power of contemplative practice.  One of the more inspiring visions she offers is of a potential future for pastoral ministry in an age of bi-vocationalism.  The communities she has helped to birth are active in Asheville and Dallas as manifestations of the Missional Wisdom Foundation, but they are new manifestations of the church, not rejuvenated existing local congregations.

One of the characteristics of a Sixth Order community is governance that is an expression of distributed decision-making.  This is a system that allows each person in the community to be just as involved as they want to be in a way that is purpose-led rather than preference-led.  The two most prominent forms are called Holacracy and Sociocracy.  I was able to find church in Las Vegas that uses Holacracy as its governance system.  But this was a feature that was built into a new church start by the happy coincidence that members of the founding group were also employees of Zappos, which as a company uses Holacracy. 

I was able to find a church in Florida that shifted to a new way of being when it hired a new pastor.  The new pastor was a fan of Ken Wilber and was able bit by bit adjust the assumptions and policies to form a congregation that was functioning in ways characteristic of LaLoux’s Sixth Order/Teal/ Second Tier.  However, the pastor shared with me that none of the current members were members when he was first hired.  The present congregation was comprised entirely of new members.

Seven Generations

One of the themes in the We Should Talk conversation was about the prospect of transformational programming for existing local congregations.  The idea was that, when exposed to programs that invite critical self-reflection, members would get energized from those activities and want more.  One of the best responses we got was to an adaptation of a workshop created by a prominent dharma teacher, Joanna Macy, about our relationship as humans to our descendants.  In this program we first considered what life might be like for humans seven generations from now.  What is their world like and what do they know about what life was like for humans now?  What might they want to find out about us and what might they want to tell us about them?

We then divided into pairs and one person was themselves now and the other person played the role of a descendant seven generations hence.  The descendant asked a set of scripted questions about what we knew [what we know now] and what we anticipated would be the consequences of our choices on the lives of those who come after us.

The content was what one might expect.  “How could you have known what your choices were creating and how those choices would impact us and still go about your daily life?”  The impact of talking to someone who was a representative of our descendants was chilling.  It made the issues not just theoretical, but emotionally resonant.  Everyone who participated was glad to have done so and most hoped we could do a follow-up that continued the conversation. 

We did not find a way to create a next conversation, and we were unable to “sell” the idea to repeat it in a local congregation because it was not a Christian program.

Complexity and the Santa Fe Institute

Complexity is a property of a system in which there are multiple inter-dependent variables.  While systems have always been complex, the study of them was difficult until the invention of the modern computer.  This science has thus blossomed in the last seventy-five years.  It impacts nearly every field of study.  The Santa Fe Institute is one of the few institutions that gathers scientists and teachers from multiple fields to study and share insights about such systems.

Because the evolution of social systems like local congregations is a process of moving to an awareness of greater and greater complexity, and because the concerns of the Santa Fe Institute include applications of the science for businesses, it occurred to me that there might be a researcher who was doing work with churches.  I tracked down a fellow from the Institute who was knowledgeable about the scope of the work done by her partners to see if she knew of someone who was working with churches.

The question baffled her.  Not only did she believe that no one associated with the Institute was studying local congregations, she had no idea why anyone would want to.  And I don’t think this was because she thought there wouldn’t be any funding.  It was more that such a study wouldn’t have a purpose.  Businesses are very keen to improve their way of functioning.  She didn’t think churches wanted to do that.

New Beginnings Redux

As an authorized minister in the United Church of Christ I have had a complex relationship with my own local congregation.  Several years ago, it was offered a chance to participate in a process called New Beginnings which was created by a group affiliated with the Disciples of Christ.  I was included in the early parts of that process but then was away for the completion of it as I filled in at a sister church whose pastor was on sabbatical.

Quite unfortunately, the New Beginnings process was hampered by the fact that it was happening during an interim in which the Interim Pastor was not supportive.  Before the process could be completed, the Interim was fired by the Council.  Some lay members stepped up to wrap things up, but the larger goals of the New Beginnings process were not completed.

The church was on its third pastor for this interim when I drifted back to it nearly two years later.  That pastor recognized the need for a clear vision for the future and helped set up a retreat in consultation with a team from a local seminary.  The results of that retreat helped inform the call of the next pastor who was specifically charged with generating a plan to move the congregation into a new way of being.

A year and a half later, the minister who was called to that Three-Year Designated Term Pastorate began to look for a new setting.  He left with no plan in place.  The congregation was faced with another search process and no clarity about what it was building towards. 

The New Beginnings process had been designed to lead to a bold decision that could range from discovering a new sense of purpose to deciding to disband the congregation.  The Congregation was to decide if it was just going to ride this out as long as it could, or was it going to do a new thing?  The church had been trying for several years to discern its own future and kept entering process after process that failed to deliver what it needed.

So, as the Congregation was beginning to look for another pastor, I in my role as a member of the church and as the Executive Director of the Center for Creative Conflict Resolution, went to the Council of the church and suggested that we use this time to assess where we are going.  I dubbed this process New Beginnings Redux.

It took a couple of months to negotiate the process, but we ended up extending a wide-open invitation to those who care about the church in the Congregation and the surrounding community to enter a three-month intensive process of discernment.  The result was a Discernment Team of twelve people, three who were not members (but seminary trained and concerned about the future of local congregations), three who were on the staff of the church, three who were on the Council, and three who were members of the Congregation but not in current leadership positions.  The team was equally black and white and represented the youngest and among the oldest of the membership.

The team met every two weeks (but only once in person as this was toward the end of the pandemic).  The result was a set of recommendations to the Council for actions to revitalize the church.  These included concerns about…

Purpose: that the Congregation develop a statement of purpose that everyone understands, distinguishes the church from other local congregations, and gives clarity about what we do and do not do.

Communication: that we have clear policies about what we communicate to the Congregation and the surrounding community that is as transparent as possible.

Resources: that we acknowledge the resources of the property and grounds, the members and staff, and the financial investments, and have clarity about how we will be good stewards of these resources.

Governance: that we revise or replace the by-laws that we no longer follow, and which were written for a congregation many times the size of the one we now have, and consider adopting a form of dynamic governance like the version of sociocracy that the Discernment Team used to form these recommendations.

These recommendations were presented to the Congregation by a series of Zoom meetings and in a couple of cases were refined by subsequent small groups.  The final report was given to the Council and then to the Congregation at its Annual Meeting a year after the process began and just two weeks before the next called pastor was elected.

That new pastor left when the Congregation determined that it could not afford someone full-time.  The new part-time pastor is someone who was on the Discernment Team but has indicated to the Council that the recommendations of the Team are no longer relevant and will not come before the Council.  At this point now three years after the Discernment Team completed its work, none of the recommendations have been considered by the Council.

Fr. Rohr was right.  Even in the context of a congregation that has known for some time that it is in decline, and with the support of a process that has helped it clarify just what issues it would need to address, the choice to change was simply too high a hurdle.  While it is true that there are no structural barriers to change, the cultural barriers are insurmountable.

What we can discern about the future of the church

I confess that even after all this there is a part of me that won’t give up on the local congregation.  It has been so important to me in my own development that it feels disloyal to abandon it.  I can feel a new thing arising and can see it in the new churches that are and have been arising for many years now.  They are not yet the durable institutions that local congregations have been in the past, but they have spirit, and they point the way to what is surely to come.

That the past and even the present would be so discontinuous from the future should not be a surprise to me.  Jesus warned us not to try to put new wine into old wine skins.  I am now an old man, and I will not live to enter the promised land.  But I can broadly discern it from here.  There are some things that the new church will have to be which the old church can no longer be.

The old church has been telling the old story.  It loves to tell the old, old story.  But there is a new story that will build upon the religion of old while embracing the world of the new science with an integrating philosophy.

The old church has been for the preservation of ethics and the morality of the way we have always been.  I was not only confirmed into that way of being but taught to conform to it.  But there is a new ethic of mutual accountability that requires not just tolerance of diversity… not just acceptance… but a celebration of the rich creativeness of our differences.

The old church has been a bastion of the structures by which we act in concert with each other for the creation of the common good.  It informed the reflections that brought forth from Major Henry Robert his Rules of Order by which the minority is not allowed to overwhelm the majority.  But there is a new dynamic of governance that allows all voices to be heard and heeded while creating not just what we prefer, but that which truly is most beneficial for all.

Telling the Story

A dear woman who was devoutly committed to her local congregation once told me that, “you can believe in God or your can believe in evolution, but you cannot believe in both.”  The God of her understanding was so tied to the worldview of two millennia ago that she cannot conceive of a god that creates through evolution. 

A few hundred years ago near the birth of science as we know it, Copernicus and then Galileo challenged the fathers of the Church to adopt a new perspective of the cosmos.  They rejected the idea that we are not the center of the universe.  While most people can now accept the insights of science, the split between science and religion remains. 

Within the last hundred years there have been numerous thinkers and writers who have envisioned and described a cosmology that marries theology and the new science.  They amply demonstrate that we can have God and quantum physics at the same time.  I personally find the vision they describe as thrilling.  It is so much more mysterious and inspiring than the old white man on the throne whom we are to please or suffer for eternity.

But this new vision has not made it into our local congregations in any durable way.  It is voiced from time to time, but the old worldview is not giving up without a fight.  The old paradigms hold sway because they are baked into our liturgical life.  We like the old hymns, and we sing them with the old lyrics which reinforce the old images.  Sure, we have new hymns.  But we would have to abandon the old and our local congregations are not willing to do that.

Connecting to Each Other

Several years ago, I served as the coordinator of the Boundary Awareness Training program for the clergy of the Conference.  One of the innovations of the training while I held that post was to re-frame the notion of “boundary” away from the idea that we are looking to draw sharp lines and make hard and fast rules, and towards the notion of a boundary as the space between us as we form relationships.  We wanted the training to encourage us to be aware of the nature of the relationships we are creating and to make them as healthy as possible.

I knew we were going to get a certain amount of pushback.  The original reason for the training was as a protection against lawsuits that might allege that we should have told our clergy that they weren’t to do the thing that generated the suit.  Sharp boundaries were the point.

But I wasn’t expecting the pushback from the clergy themselves.  The old training was sometimes referred to a “death by PowerPoint.”  The new version invited participants to identify in advance the issues they wanted to address and featured small group conversations about some of the key issues.  This was a far more interactive and clergy-directed format than the old one.

But when we focus on the relationships we form with others, we will necessarily have to look at what we are each doing to create the relationship, and why we do what we do, and what we might do differently.  The process demands a level of critical self-reflection.  We must look at ourselves and we must do this in the presence of our colleagues. One participant complained that the training felt like therapy. 

As a therapist, that this was a complaint seemed odd, but the sentiment that supported the critique came I believe from the conceit that as the authorized ministers we are the ones who do healing.  We are not ourselves in need of healing.  We might want to be careful to not overstep boundaries, but one of those boundaries is the one between the clergy and the laity.

At about the same time but for very different reasons I visited a different congregation almost every Sunday for worship.  The conference wanted to reinforce its relationship with the local churches, and I was an emissary who brought greetings and thanks for the church’s financial support of the larger association. 

As I had this opportunity to witness the worship of various congregations, I noticed that there were certain themes that emerged in most worship, though in very different ways.  One was that most included in some prayer or litany a plea for transformation.  It was clear to me that for most of the local congregations, a part of the mission is to invite transformation.

As someone who is in the business of transformation and is a student of how we encourage such growth, I was curious about how this wish for transformation was included in the program of the congregation.  Often, I would get a chance to ask someone who was familiar with the church what they were doing to encourage transformation. 

Mostly I got back puzzlement.  When someone could name an action of the church, it was to cite a mission on behalf of the neighborhood or an action to press for social justice.  The transformation they were praying for was of the world outside the congregation; not for the church itself or for its members. 

As it regards the purpose of the church, we can trust that we have done what is asked of us if we love Jesus and we know that Jesus loves us.  This condition punches our ticket and gets us a ride on the train that takes us to heavenly glory.  We have assured our own salvation.

But what if the purpose of the church is less to worship Jesus than to follow him.  And what if following leads to a personal transformation in which we come to see the world through the same perspective as the one he shared with his disciples.  What if “putting on the mind of Christ” is not just a vivid metaphor, but the “Holy Grail” of discipleship?

The biggest reason we shy away from going on the quest, I believe, is that we think we are just not made for the grueling spiritual discipline it takes to ascend the heights of transpersonal achievement.  Who has time to pray and fast and study the sacred texts when the kids need a ride to soccer practice.  There is no room in the fast pace of modern life for the discipline that such transformation demands.

And I admit that, while I felt an impulse early in my life for a deeper sense of meaning and purpose, I didn’t have confidence that mastering contemplative practice was going to be sufficient.  I am a strong proponent of meditation, yes, but it is my personal experience that while that practice gives me a capacity to know my own interior, there is another practice that is more accessible and at least as powerful.  That is the practice of forming relationships of deep mutuality and full accountability.  Indeed, it is rare that I know where to look in my own interior to find the work I need to do when such looking is not guided by the wisdom that comes from the tensions in the persistent patterns of conflict that arise in my most significant relationships.

Being able to form deeply intimate and mutual relationships and having the courage to be fully accountable within those relationships, even and sometimes especially when those relationships are deeply conflicted, creates the context in which we can discover who we are at our depths and to bring who we are to the surface and into the light.  This work accelerates the transformation we pray for even as we fear it.  But the path is far less scary when we do it together… when we walk the pilgrimage with others,

Acting as One Body

There is a curious tension regarding new members joining an existing organization.  On the one hand, people want to be able to have a say in the programs they participate in.  On the other hand, they don’t want to participate in lengthy meetings which get bogged down in personal expressions of longing for “the way we used to do it.” 

Add to this the bias most people have in favor of dominance hierarchies.  We think the system will work better if we have someone strong and knowledgeable in control.  This remains a powerful force even in the face of numerous times in the history of the church in which a new governance structure arose to counter the abuses of the hierarchy.  Indeed, we need only look to the teaching of Jesus who railed against the formal structures of the temple and the kingdom and the empire, as well as a culture that put great stock in where one sat at the table.  He actively preached that we must become like children and that the first will be last.  Nevertheless, the first thing his disciples did after his death was to solidify the place of “the twelve” as the governance body for the movement. 

The problems that have befallen the church from its attachment to dominance hierarchies cannot be overstated.  But concerns about how to be the Body of Christ without a visible and present head have continued to styme us.  There is now, however, a new form of governance that is far more consistent with the teachings of Jesus and which allows for immediate and meaningful participation by anyone who wants to in a manner that allows for very efficient and effective meetings.  This is called dynamic governance.

There are a couple of different flavors of this system, but they have some common features.  Structurally the framework is of a set of interlocking circles. Each circle has a well-defined aim, a domain of concern, and clear accountability to other parts of the system. Circles have a shared leadership model in which each member takes as role as the facilitator or the scribe.  With only a few exceptions, everything the circle does is recorded in a shared register so that anyone in the system can know what is happening in any other part of the system.  Procedurally the meetings of the circle have a common agenda which is the consideration of proposals that further the specific aims of each circle.  Each member of the circle is invited to consider the proposal, ask questions, and raise concerns, but in the end can either object to or consent to the proposal.  The consent is based on the belief that acting on the proposal will further the aim.  Thus, decisions are not about preferences.  What we prefer is not at issue.  The question is, will this proposal be something that moves us toward the aim without undue collateral concern.

Once a community has a chance to experience this form of decision-making, it becomes easy to see how it can work.  But it is so different from what we are used to that the transition can be hard.  The Discernment Team for the New Beginnings Redux process used this governance system and found that it worked well.  Nevertheless, they couldn’t take that experience back to the rest of the Congregation. 

Equipping the Chrysalis

I remember as a kid learning how a caterpillar would form a cocoon or chrysalis and then, having undergone a transformation called a metamorphosis, would emerge as a butterfly.  I imagined the parts of the caterpillar forming the parts of the butterfly as it hid from view.

Then, much more recently, I learned that the process is even stranger.  The organs don’t separately transform.  The caterpillar dissolves into a kind of protein-rich goo from which the butterfly is then formed.

This revelation came to me at the point that it was becoming clear to me that my efforts to support the transformation of the institution of the local congregation into the church that is to come was not going to work.  The caterpillar must dissolve into goo before the butterfly can appear.  And within this metaphor, it is unlikely that I will witness the emergence of the butterfly.  Rather, I will content myself with helping to build the chrysalis.

But even more recently I have learned that not all of the caterpillar becomes goo.  There are remnants of the caterpillar that form the basis for the emergence of the adult insect.  These are called imaginal discs.   These have genetic material and the function of forming the structure of the butterfly or the moth.

So, to continue the metaphor, let me just add here what the imaginal discs might be for the future of faith-based in-person communities. 

The emerging story of the origin and purpose of humanity is to align with evolution for the growth of consciousness on the planet. This consciousness is one that grows into a fuller awareness of the fundamental nature of being which, when we relate to the creative power, the mindful awareness, and the loving spirit reveals to us that we are an intrinsic part of God.

The emerging ethic is one that shows us a path for our fullest personal development by being most closely connected to each other in relationships that are characterized by mutual accountability.

The emerging form of governance is one that celebrates diversity and allows all to be as active as they choose to be in the creation of the well-being of all of humanity and of the planet.