Things I Didn't Learn in Seminary (But am Glad to be Learning Now!)

The whole "things they didn't teach in seminary" trope often comes up when clergy lament the difficulty of fixing a particularly cranky toilet or navigating a certain aspect of church finances. (I don't think it's bad for clergy to know these things, but there are probably cheaper places to learn them.) Of course, the comment is commonly tongue-in-cheek and can refer to particulars of a local context that either could not have predicted or, even if they had been predicted, would have only been relevant to one or two in the class. Even so, I think the question has lasting merit and is worth engaging from time to time: "What would have constituted adequate preparation for this?"

The list that follows is my realtime answer today. Probably different from my answer tomorrow, definitely different from yesterday's. The list doesn't replace or take for granted the things I did learn - Scripture, theology, CPE - and I should add that just because I didn't learn it at div school doesn't mean someone wasn't teaching it (or that that someone wasn't one of my professors, which is just to say I'm sure I missed significant pieces of the knowledge dropped on me along the way). In any case, this is my list and, if nothing else, you'll find links to six interesting books! Without further ado...

Community Organizing around the Presence of God

To be fair, I probably did learn a fair bit about this. But it was good friends made after seminary, with backgrounds in community organizing, who showed me that whatever I had learned was only a start. Community organizers showed me that the church's default question, "How many people showed up to X, Y, or Z?" didn't have to be a measure, and implicit endorsement, of the attractional model of being church ("If you build it, they will come"). For years, such a model led well-meaning Christians  to take turn-outs as a kind of referendum of a gathering's resonance, relevance, and/or content. So a poorly organized Bible study effort leaves church members bemoaning the "fact" that people in a given community "just don't take Scripture seriously." At the same time, Willow Creek famously acknowledges (a while back) that large numbers have, for years, obscured the reality that the church isn't realizing its goal of transformational discipleship.

Instead of taking turnout as a referendum on relevance, effectiveness, or something else, community organizers have taught me how to build toward a gathering from the baseline of relationships, and in ways that allow us to shape the thing we're building toward together. And that you can do this in measurable ways. Turn out is still important, and it's actually relatively predictable when you are organizing communities, because you're talking with, learning from, and listening to the people with whom you'll gather.

Additionally, it was in reading David Fitch's Faithful Presence that I discovered a marriage of sacramental practice and (the best of) evangelical sensibilities that grew my imagination for Christian community organizing that is intelligible to itself beyond a vague sense of being usefully disposed toward others. Fitch writes

This is the challenge of being a Christian today. We have forgotten how to live together in Christ's kingdom and invite the world along. Our collective imagination has lost the new possibilities for the world in the life, death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus Christ. Instead, with the comforts of Christendom, we set up churches as organizations for maintaining Christians. When people...think of church, they think of large buildings where people gather to hear well-dressed men (mostly men) talk for an hour, usually from behind a pulpit. As a result, many of our sons and daughters cannot stomach the thought of becoming a pastor in these churches. 

Nonetheless, this is the task the church faces: political organizing for the kingdom. To be clear, this has nothing to do with national politics. It is the work of gathering people into God's presence, living together under the one reign of God in Christ. This way of life doesn't stay within the walls of a church building but bursts out into the world through all the circles of our lives. The task of church leadership today is to gather people into Christ's presence in all the circles of our lives. This is what faithful presence looks like. This is church. (emphasis mine)

As a seminary class, I imagine a blend of community organizing principles, sacramental theology, and Fitch, a CMA evangelical who goes around quoting cultural critic and philosopher Slavoj Žižek and Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann in equal measure. 2017 is an amazing time to be alive.

Accountability Conversations

Call this the Matthew 18 class. Or don't and just skip to reading this book: Crucial Accountability: Tools for Resolving Violated Expectations, Broken Commitments, and Bad Behavior. I'm not wild about the sub-title, but it works so long as "resolving" doesn't get read as "fixing the bad behavior of others." The book is not about that. The book is about conversing "about violated expectations in a way that eventually solves the problem and improves on the relationship." It sounds simple, but the authors observe that many times "we don't say a word because we don't know how to handle the conversation, or we fear that we don't know how. We're not bad people. We're just frightened." I won't rehash the whole book here, but I will say it's not about picking our battles and winning them. It's about meeting one another in the space of shared values, clarifying intentions in ways that allow the other to feel safe, and standing up for what one believes is important while being open to learning something new and being open to change. It's about being focused and flexible. In the words of the author, "How about you? Are you ready not to rumble?"

Leading through Questions

Jesus did a lot of it. I'm not as good at it as I'd like to be. It's definitely harder than having all the answers. And it's not the same as only saying, "How do you feel about it?" or "I've got nothing to add for you." Good questions are rare and incredibly substantial gifts for formation, discernment, and both personal and corporate development. Further, where answers tend to fill space, good questions open space, which is a special priority for me in light of Fitch's book (above).

Full disclosure: I haven't read (yet) any of the books that follow, but I asked a good friend what he'd recommend as resources for developing the ability to ask worthy questions, and this is the list he came up with.

• That's the Question! How Managers and Facilitators Ask the Best Question at the Best Time 
• What's Your Question? Inspiring Possibilities through the Power of Questions 
• The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever
• Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change

That's my list. What's yours? What would you add?