September 2013 – The Flipchart

Five-fold Puzzle

Over the weekend I heard yet another sermon on the five-fold ministries of Ephesians 4.

Apostle. Prophet. Evangelist. Pastor. Teacher.

That’s four, five times this year?

It seems to be common currency in the church at the moment, like the theme of ‘discipleship’. And like the theme of discipleship, preachers and teachers aren’t going deeper and either asking difficult questions or explaining in detail what they mean.

For example, here’s something I’ve never heard preachers discuss.

How are these five gifts to be distributed within the church?

There’s plenty of talk about what these gifts are for, or how they work, but no sense of whether everyone should expect to use one or more of these gifts in the church.

For example, while it’s possible that everyone may be gifted in one or more of these five-fold ministries, it’s by no means obvious from scripture that that is the case. But if these gifts aren’t for everyone – why not?

So what is the premise of the sermon? Is it really a sermon about about church organisation?

Again, that is an angle I’ve never heard expounded in detail. Why isn’t the church isn’t organised to allow these gifts to be used appropriately? In fact, some churches are organised specifically to exclude some people from certain gifts because of their gender. Some are excluded by their age. Some by their education. Some by common sense (how many Apostles can one church take!)

Anyway, while this puzzles me every time I hear the sermon it troubles hardly any of the churches in my chosen denomination. As long we have a warden, a treasurer, a secretary and hopefully at least a part of a vicar, we’ll be OK.

Although that’s getting harder too.

Plenty of Persons – Few Personalities

It’s never happened before, but this week I stopped to read the words of the Czech President Milos Zeman.

He said:

“In European politics there are plenty of ‘persons’ but few ‘personalities’ “

In other words, interpreted the commentator, there are functionaries, but not leaders.

It turns out that President Zeman backed up his reflection by appointing as prime minister a close ally with uncomfortable credentials in the Czech secret intelligence service who was not representative of the caretaker government in power. Zeman went for a potentially radical leader rather than one that more closely represented the balance of parliament.

Not being in any way acquainted with Czech politics didn’t stop me wondering about an interesting parallel.

In an interregnum in a parish church of the Church of England (the irony of comparing a parish church in the Church of England with the government of one of the most unchurched nations in Europe is not lost on me) the diocese often helps establish a measured, balanced transitional leadership team made up of members of the congregation. This team usually represents the current (and more problematically the historical) position of the particular church.

Does this then result in: a) the appointment of a middle of the road, balanced, competent, ‘person’; and b) the exclusion of the more radical, alternative, creative ‘personalities’ the church needs to grow?

Or in the words used by the Czech president, does this approach put functionaries but not leaders in charge of churches?

Model Sports Leadership

An article on management in the FT last week recalled the comment of Howard Wilkinson (former manager of Leeds United) on management:\r\n\r\n“No offence to captains of industry, but even a FTSE100 chairman can postpone a board meeting. A football manager can’t postpone a football match and every match is a shareholder meeting, [sometimes] in front of 80,000 people”.\r\n\r\nSounds good, but Andrew Hill, the FT correspondent on management, made a compelling counter argument. Yes, football managers rarely have second chances and are often granted a short tenure, but he points out that “there is a purity and focus to the football manager’s role that is rarely found in business”.\r\n\r\nSo while it’s perfectly reasonable for Harvard Business School to carry out a study on Alex Ferguson (who by the way has access to the boardroom that is atypical in football), we should not be seduced into thinking that the axioms of sports leadership can be readily transferred to other organisations, where leaders often have a far more nuanced task in front of them involving more complex data and more significant unknowns.\r\n\r\nSo before adopting someone else’s leadership idea the shrewd leader should think deeply about this:\r\n

‘What stream feeds the well you are drawing from?’

\r\nThat said … ‘Fergusons Formula’ is still worth a read on the Harvard Business Review site here.

Clarke on the Wall

Working on the mock-up of a photographic collection of ‘Extraction and Refining of Oil’ …\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n

The Mindfulness of Meditation

What do the Singapore Government, the IMF, Bridgewater (the world’s biggest hedge fund), and Pimco (global investment advisers) have in common?

They all have senior executives who meditate every day.

In an article in the FT this week a number of senior executives described how they are committed to meditation.

Mr Peter Ng, the Chief Investment Officer of the Government of Singapore, meditates for twenty minutes two times a day. Mr Ng is in charge of tens of billions of dollars of investments. He says,

“quieting the mind can help managers conserve energy in daily work life …. and bring greater clarity … and greater clarity makes you more orderly”.

Sean Hagen of the IMF says that mediation …

“… helps you focus, which is a good skill, and encourages a ‘one-thing-at-a-time’ approach, which helps slow things down”

The other benefits listed are achieving equanimity, gaining perspective, increasing decision making skills, and removing ‘confirmation bias’ – the tendency to seek out information that supports your own point of view to the exclusion of data that might be right but contradictory.

I read this article on Thursday morning and later that day I met up with a fellow leader who showed me cuttings from four different broadsheet newspapers this week on the same subject – meditation in business.

It seems that meditation is having a good week.

Which led me to puzzle over two things.

First, none of these executives linked meditation to religion. They practised ‘secular’ meditation for its intrinsic benefits. So how does that compare to the practise of meditation by people leading the church, where meditation has a rich tradition in spiritual formation?

I wondered how many church leaders (and that’s not just ordained or licensed people) have the same discipline of regular meditation as these successful businessmen.

It’s worth some research to find out.

Somehow I suspect that the findings would be disappointing, certainly if the gauge of successful meditation includes equanimity, perspective, increased decision making skills, and (especially) removing confirmation bias (look at most church mission strategies).

The second puzzle was this. None of these executives related meditation to religion, and yet the Christian tradition has 2,000 years of expertise in developing high quality, life enhancing, personal meditation skills. How did we loose the high ground on this?

Answering this question runs the risk becoming being an academic exercise, so perhaps time would be better spent reflecting on the more important question of how Christian meditation leading to spiritual formation could open new avenues of engagement with people around us.

After all, meditation in the Christian tradition is not restricted to the elite – either of the world’s financiers or even the church. Rather, Jesus’ guidance given in the Sermon on the Mount, as recorded by an office worker, was for everyone to ‘Find a secluded place …. and be there as simply and honestly as you can manage’*.

*Matthew chapter 6 verse 6: [The Message version]

Parable of the Bowls … or ‘What it’s like going to church for the first time’

My neighbour Bill (it’s appropriate to change his name) was on my case. He wanted me to play bowls at the local club in the park. He’d been once with his wife Jackie (not her real name, of course) and loved it.

Bill would talk to me about joining him at the club, perhaps with our wives to make up a foursome, as we made our way home from the tennis courts, past the bowls club, in the early evenings of the summer. Whenever he raised the prospect I pointed into the club and jeered. Not at any club member in particular. Just jeering in general.

To be honest, the bowls club gave me the heebie-jeebies. From what I’d seen all the members dress the same, white shoes, white trousers, white shirts, white caps, and – important to someone like me fending off the passing of years – white hair. And imagine being trapped in a small enclosure of hedges and railings with people I didn’t know and had nothing in common with.

But the pressure was mounting. The summer was ending.

It was now or never said Bill.

We finally gave in.

The evening came several weeks ago when the four us ambled up to the bowls club, my wife and I and our evangelists by our side. My steps were getting slower as we got closer. My whole body was crying out for an emergency to take place in the children’s play area so I would have to stop and administer comfort and solace to the parents of a poor child as we waited for the ambulance. But God didn’t answer that prayer (I knew it! Never when you need it).

We arrived at the gate. It was not inviting. Because of the eight foot high yew hedge there was no way to see who or what was going on in the club. The gate in the hedge gave a foreboding screech as we entered and there, suddenly, was a startling freeze-frame tableau. About twenty elderly (sorry, sprightly) people immediately turned towards us and froze – some of them in mid-bowling action, one foot forward, bowl ready, but perfectly still. Twenty cap peaks pointing at us as if to accuse us of being … NEW PEOPLE!!

Suddenly it was all action (albeit at a jolly snails pace). One member took the shopping trolley (yep, they’d stolen one from Asda) past the nice little club house to find sixteen bowls in the portakabin (“sorry they don’t quite match; we don’t have many visitors. Make do and mend …”). We were taken to our allotted place, slot, or aisle (not sure what it’s called) and off we went.

I confess, the bowls was fun. It’s not decent to be competitive with neighbours, but that didn’t stop us making up our own scoring system and keeping score. And bowls has an attractive nerdy quality to it.

During a couple of ends a senior member came and gave us encouraging comments. At one point the club secretary came and suggested we might like to look over the membership forms in the club house. There was lots of cheerful banter from the ‘folk’ next to us.

We wrapped it up halfway through the evening because Bill and Jackie wanted to get back home to see “The Great British Bake-off” and we wanted to go to the pub first. I refused to share in pushing the trolley back, but from my bench I could hear the cheerful banter as my three competitors said their goodbyes, and resisted the invitations to drink at the nice little bar in the clubhouse (“…it’s cheaper than The Victoria!”).

Thank goodness that was over.

Although getting there felt like walking to the dentist, at least we were walking through a park in a truly beautiful summers evening. The event itself was pleasant enough, we escaped without commitment, our friends are still friends, and we pasted the experience into the scrap book of things to talk about in the winter when the nights draw in.

But for me, and bowls, I won’t be going back.