Part of the issue facing us in the Mountain Sky Conference of the United Methodist Church is "mission creep.” My experience in the military is that clarity of mission is an essential and core ethos. Always important, the goal to seek clarity of mission in clearly definable terms and have buy in up and down the chain of command about that definition, became during my personal time in the military (1971 to 1994) a core value. People were rarely, if ever, criticized for seeking clarity on missional definition.
My view is that the mission of the Mountain Sky Conference should be the mission of the United Methodist Church which I see as drawn by and large from Matthew 28: 18-20 – Go, make, baptize, teach and in infinitive form, obey. Verbs are good: they give us the action. And focusing on those verbs will have a transformative impact, locally and globally. The world is local and global.
How does the Mountain Sky Conference do that? Clarity of purpose, clarity of mission, our “why” in Simon Sinek terms. We believe, or should believe, that a relationship with the risen Christ leads to transformation of the spirit. Paraphrasing the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it is the pursuit of the only goal that really matters. The further we get from the transformative mission, the more an idea needs to be placed on the pile of ideas we will get to later.
The clarity of purpose we need is in defining how does the Mountain Sky Conference bring about that transformation driven by making, baptizing, teaching, through obedience outside of our walls? I posit it is through Leadership Development. Everything we do, for the foreseeable future anyway, should be around developing leaders: lay and clergy. It does not mean, for example, the local church Finance Committee Chair needs to be an evangelist, but it does mean that the Chair needs to understand that the budget of the local church is a means to an end: transformation. Transformation is our purpose, our why, and the resources available to the local church are the means towards that mission.
Leadership development is, in part, the nurturing of skills from within, it is the identification of skills talented developers see but the individual does not see themselves, it is showing new ways to solve old challenges. In many ways, our current challenges are old challenges. Paul in 1 Corinthians is dealing with what we are dealing with now: a flawed focus on what is important, and Paul says, “teach Christ and him crucified.” Bonhoeffer agreed. At the same time, while the context may be ancient, our solutions may be more contemporary. Gil Rendle, and I will paraphrase, says “we don’t know what to do so we do what we know.” New ways to solve old challenges.
Having looked at this for a while, I posit everything we do in the Mountain Sky Conference needs to get back to how we can help leadership be developed in order to accomplish the transformational mission, which the UMC says is best accomplished at the local church.
Kevin Bacon, the actor, has this thing about the “degrees of separation.” If a proposed idea for the Mountain Sky conference cannot be within about three or so degrees of separation from the Mission of the UMC, it is probably not something we need to be doing now. ‘Three or so, “so that’s’” from the proposed idea and the transformational mission need to be a core test. For example, within the Financial Leadership: “We will improve the technical and theological knowledge and competency of Financial Teams at the local church so that the transformative mission of the United Methodist Church defines everything we do.”
This brings us back to why I wrote this post. On February 20th past, I participated in an adventure in improving how we reimagine circuits composed of local churches. Circuits if organized from a top down, “do it this way” will fail. Clarity of mission (i.e., purpose, why) while establishing guard rails to keep the circuits moving forward are good and necessary, but Circuits need to be about expanding, stretching, focusing, developing the people (and the churches they represent) within them. Clarity of mission, purpose, why.
I sought brevity with clarity here: less than a thousand, hopefully, clear words. Sometimes when a person is brief, we criticize with “well, you did not mention, <insert something>” and that becomes evidence of an inherent bias. Please, do not do that. A thousand points I could have made. Absence of a particular focus does not mean it is not potentially relevant to the issue: it probably is!
Respectfully, Selah
Dennis Shaw
Testing
ReplyDelete