SPACT
The Strategic Planning and Adaptive Change Team has completed their work and has offered their final report. If you’ve never heard of this initiative don’t feel bad. The website is a better place to start than the final report and the Frequently Asked Questions page is quite helpful. This is pretty deep insider Christian Reformed Church denominational stuff.
Numbing
When I first looked at it it looked like a jumble. I needed to slow down and do some work to figure out how it speaks before I could figure out what it was and what it was trying to say. As with most documents of this genre it is filled with jargon and buzzwords that are going around in church consulting circles. That’s not a sin, it just locates the document in terms of genre and intended audience. To me this document isn’t intended to communicate much to “folks in the pews”. It reads mostly like a working document for the denominational bureaucracy and the Board of Trustees.
13 Key Ministry Challenges in Four Headings
The heart of the document are the findings of this investigative team to try to summarize key ministry challenges facing the CRCNA.
Right away you have to ask “what is the CRCNA?”
That might sound like a stupid question, but let me tease it out?
- Do you mean the group of men, women and children who are official members of the CRCNA or are attending its churches or involved in its ministries? Which circles? How far do they go?
- Do you include denominational offices, structures, agencies in this group?
I think the document assumes the largest possible imagined group of all the CRCNA entities whether they be membership, attendees, agencies, offices, officers, employees, and people who partner with it in North America and beyond, including those who simply receive services or are ministry targets.
While these challenges impact all levels how they impact each component, how each component can respond is all different.
This lack of teasing out the pieces of the CRCNA I think creates a sense of confusion. How can we get specific when we are talking about such large things?
I think and feel all of the 13 challenges but trying to get a handle on “strategies” and “behaviors” besides “convening” is rough. In chatting with a friend about the report my initial impression was:
“We are CRC: have a problem, have a meeting”
Imagine the CRC as Medieval City
As I began to give myself to the document, to slow down and start to load into my mind’s RAM all of the offices, people, initiatives, programs, etc. that I know in the CRC, the document became more useful, helpful and clear.
I think you need a mental picture to help understand the document.
Imagine the CRC is a walled city, old and not centrally planned. The city has grown organically over decades with old and new construction, streets that used to be paths that were converted. A few boulevards but most of the city has built itself up in a haphazard fashion.
Now imagine that you want to “improve” or “update” or “help” this city. Where do you start?
If you enter into the city by a gate you immediately notice noise, activity, visual clutter.
You immediately see that the “CRC” is full of people, all of them unique, lots of buildings. Your effort to “improve” will touch different people, buildings, streets, relationships in different ways but it will be messy, chaotic, slow.
City Council Wants to figure out What to Do!
Now let’s imagine that the motivation for the report is climate change. Krakatoa has erupted on the other side of the world and the added dust in the atmosphere has cut down the radiant light causing crop yields to plummet which is impacted the city in lots of different ways most of them unwelcome and potentially even catastrophic.
If you know something of the city called “CRC” and you read the report you can see the wheels moving. If you know the various shops, families, houses, streets and you read this report you can see that a lot of real work has gone on with it. If you are a CRC wonk you and you take your time there are a number of fascinating things about this report. The town is alive and the community elders are at work to try to address what the town is suffering from.
This report is mostly a “talking and tinkering” report. How can we help the city by making changes. The report feels like the working assumption is “let’s not be hasty”. There aren’t any broad sweeping things even hinted at, mostly slow, methodical, evolutionary changes. The community elders are talking about moving some things around but nothing too radical or costly, at least not at the present moment.
Reception at the Town Meeting
Let’s imagine the community leaders bring this report to a town meeting. Now the CRC itself is too large for everyone to show up, but let’s imagine a couple of hundred people do. Many people will come to that meeting with a variety of big ideas that they are sure will turn the tide and usher in a new golden age.
- “We should tear down the wall! Newer cities don’t need walls.”
- “We should build the wall higher! With lower crop yields un-desirables will be roving the country side. We need to spend more on defense!”
- “We should join with neighboring city RCA or learn from cities ECO or ECC!” I hear they are thriving more than we are!”
- “We should tear down the old buildings, put in wider streets, new sewers, etc. so the city can function better.”
- “We should dam the river, make a lake and improve irrigation in our fields!”
One thing you note at these public hearing type meetings
- Lots of people have lots of ideas to save the city
- Many of these big ideas would have high costs and be opposed by settled groups in the city that would block such ideas. Those people have their own big ideas that the first group would block.
- There are reasons that things have come to how they are.
The civic leaders know all this so they patiently listen and continue to do the work that they find reasonable and manageable within the confines of the political realities.
Most people feel simultaneously and contradictorily relieved and frustrated
- Massive hoped for change to save the day is not envisioned.
- The things I care about that are currently the status quo haven’t been touched or threatened.
This report reveals the wheels of a community plus institution grinding away at the massive challenge confronting them.
CRC Culture
The report very much expresses CRC culture. We tend to be careful, incremental, communal people who work on our problems together. We major in trying to be faithful and competent. This report reveals all of this.
I know many of the people on the SPACT team. If I were on the team the report probably wouldn’t have looked much different.
If someone is looking for big, dramatic change a synodical committee report is usually not the place where you’re going to find it. I think the team should be thanked for their hard work and I’m sure the report will be helpful to the city that is CRC in the nooks and crannies where real people do real work mostly in quiet, competent ways.
I think big change comes to the CRC usually in two ways:
First, when forces larger than the CRC force it to react. There are lots of these forces at play now, many of them named in this report. The CRC fusses at them, resists them, etc usually until “it can’t take it anymore” and then something large happens, one way or another.
Second: When usually in response to large outside forces a leader or a group of leaders emerge to start a new thing, usually outside the walls but next to the city. The city watches the effort and initiative for a while and then if it feels good to them they extend the wall.
The CRC Will Remain Anxious
Probably nobody was imagining the SPACT report would be like a bolt from the blue, although general CRC anxiety probably made a number of us wish it would be so. It isn’t. The “adaptive change” meme continues to haunt us. We keep hearing that “adaptive change” is required but most of the initiatives or behaviors look technical and instrumental. If we keep hitting the “adaptive change” language but without proposals that look “adaptive” anxiety and cynicism may continue to grow. I hope that doesn’t happen.
Concluding Thoughts
1. I think we need to keep thinking about what the different pieces are that we are, how they relate and how they do and should work together.
This summer I wrote about the exoskeleton. (I wrote a lot this summer, not much about the CRC since.)
The CRC is a highly complex, multi-layered community with lots of different pieces. Critical for each piece to work they must know where they are in the ecosystem and how they need to function for the welfare of that ecosystem. I don’t think we’ve really figured much of this out yet still. The report doesn’t have a sense of who is talking to whom about what. It’s all just very large.
- What can and should Synods do?
- What can and should synodical agencies and offices do? (To read this report one might imagine the answer is “everything”)
- What is the role of classis?
- What is the role of the local church? (elevated still in this report, yet is this different from Jerry Dykstra’s “healthy church” emphasis? If so how?)
2. I appreciate this work of this committee and the heart behind it.
Something is better than nothing. Anything we try will be hard with no guarantee of success. I see a lot in the details of this report that look good. Incremental isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We say “high risk, high reward” but we know that “high risk” means “high chance of failure and potential setback.”
Although it may not feel satisfying to know that in the CRC we live by “have a problem, have a meeting”, meeting together is usually not a bad thing. We are a community and we need to talk and work and pray. I know that we want big dramatic things to relieve our anxiety and rescue us from whatever it is we feel beset by but most of the time life is about slow, incremental faithfulness.
3. Are we serious about the adaptive language?
I’m not sure we are. Sometimes we use big change terms to avoid big change. I hope this isn’t what we’re doing.
So these are my initial thoughts. I’d love to hear what you think.
Leadingchurch.com 
Damn the river.
And adaptive change does sound like homeostasis.
Thanks for your thoughts Paul. Insightful as always. One of my first questions reading the doc was also, just who/what are they referring to when referencing CRCNA? I agree the report probably intends to address the CRCNA defined as broadly as possible, which is really too bad. The denom complains bitterly about being monocultural and then puts out a monstrously long, agonizingly bureaucratic sounding blueprint for changing the direction of this monoculture as if an enormous oil tanker, and to keep it a monoculture.
I was sorely disappointed that although a great deal of input received from the pew suggested decentralization was in order (which would tend to create multi-culture instead of mono), the report suggests, read fairly, to go the opposite direction. Far too many proposals are that the bureaucrats discuss with the BOT how to solve the purported problems of local congregations and classes because they are purportedly too much in the dark and can’t figure anything out for themselves.
Not only does this report assume the CRCNA is (and should stay) a massive monoculture, it assumes that local churches all exist in the same culture, as if the US and Canada are mono cultures. Wrong. Just wrong. And if I’m right about that, a hierarchical approach to “fixing” the problem can’t possibly work.
I think there is a striking similarity between the perspective of this report (and impetus for it in the first place) and the perspective of economic collectivism, which view badly underestimates how much the millions and billions of “little decisions” in any massive economic system can only be competently made by the millions of local people who are locally touched by the need to make those decisions for their local lives — otherwise known as the market. Those in the pews who want decentralization, that is, market thinking, that is, letting Salem more figure out their local problems, not less, as well as Hull, Sacramento, Ontario, Lyndon. Sumas, etc etc.
I don’t think the writers of this report really have a feel for what decentralization is. They want to save the whole CRC culture, not to merely address issues in an institutional church. No wonder they think the church order just doesn’t work anymore. They don’t want to work merely within an institutional church but rather as a hierarchical force in an all-spheres mashed together monoculture. I assume they don’t appreciate anyone ever mentioning the words “sphere sovereignty” (as did Overture 3 to Synod 2012) because that thinking breaks down monocultural, hierarchical control.
At its core, this report represents Roman Catholic thinking, not as to theological points but as to the assumption that the institutional church is the central planner for society (OK, just church society sometime but not at all defined as institutional as opposed to organic). Indeed, just as to the RC church, talk of institutional vs organic is jibberish to this report’s perspective, and the possibility of not having central planning for all things the monoculture is involved in is just not a valid option.
Reviewing the SPACT report further, it seems to me that two points (and the ramifications of those two points) may be critical to understanding the intended ultimate destination (for the CRCNA) of those who wrote the SPACT report and those who would favor the report’s perspective and prescriptions.
First, although the words are found in the report only twice, I think those behind the report are intent on turning the entirety of the CRCNA (broadly defined) into a “missional church.” Note that the advisers who were hired to act as consultants to produce the report are “The Missional Network consultants, Alan Roxburgh and Craig Van Gelder.”
OK, so just what is a “missional church”?
I’ve been following this “missional church” concept for some time now and it seems to me that it is really not so different in some respects than the perspective I was taught in NW Iowa some 40ish years ago. That perspective is cryptically summarized by the now well known and oft-quoted phrase of Kuyper, “not one square inch …” — it is so common I don’t have to complete the phrase. I very much appreciate this part of being a “missional church” although I don’t regard this as a new idea at all but rather new labeling of an old (but still good) concept.
On the other hand, having read materials from and listened to interviews of Roxburgh and Van Gelder, it seems to me that while they have adopted the “not one square inch…” perspective as much as I have, they either do not accept or haven’t stopped to understand Kuyper’s “sphere sovereignty” perspective, which is the institutional rainbow if you will through which the various inches of ‘all square inches’ are engaged.
Second, one of the now adopted, so-called “five streams” of the CRCNA is “Mercy & Justice.” The mercy part of that isn’t new at all, but the justice part very much is. Moreover, the justice part of that stream isn’t half a stream but rather a roaring river — in the Pacific NW, we’d say it was the Columbia River (justice) vs Mill Creek (mercy).
Of course, this “justice” is also used interchangeably with the phrase called “social justice” (and the two expressions are used interchangeably in CRCNA denominational agencies). Further, the definition of “social justice” (check OSJ’s pages) is, well, creating utopia, or said in a more churchish way, “shalom.” Of course, shalom pretty much means that everything is right with the world. And so if justice, or social justice, or shalom becomes a new task (“stream”) of the institutional CRCA, there is pretty much nothing that can be definitionally excluded from task of the institutional church, and talk of sphere sovereignty, or the church as institute vs as organism, or asking “what is the task of the institutional church,” or the words of Church Order Article 28, become rather meaningless, or at least vetoed.
The CRCNA’s entry some years ago into the World Council of Reformed Churches (WCRC, which is actually a merger of two prior organizations) confirms this perspective. The WCRC is not, at least as judged after spending a good deal of time with its website, about discussing theology but rather about discussing and taking acting on/about creation care (climate change, and the justice of the wealthy nations giving money to the poor nations for changing their climate), gender rights, opposing market economics (which are declared to be the worship of mammon in the Accra Confession, adopted by WCRC with the CRCNA voting in favor of that adoption), and rights of the youth. We don’t have theology discussions with other members of WCRC; rather, we discuss political positions and political action.
Of course, there may be not significant difference between theology and political postions/actions for some (most? all?) fans of the “missional church” persuasion. But for me and tens of thousands of CRCers across the US (perhaps fewer in Canada but I won’t attempt to speak for Canadians) — I would argue the majority of CRCers in the US –, the CRCNA, an institutional church, should be constrained by its own Church Order Article 28. We’ll do the other “square inches” in other contexts for reasons of both principle and practicality.
Tellingly, there is no reference to the phrase “sphere sovereignty” (or the concept of it) in the SPACT report. It goes without saying that there is no reference to CO Article 28.
Thanks Doug for your follow up.
One thought as I read your second comment. For a committee via a report to talk about “the CRC” as a whole, congregations, people, institutions, etc. as you noted in your first comment is specious. To do so about the committee or the CRC leadership is equally problematic. It is easy to read reports and see a pattern, but in my experience the people who serve on these committees also have a degree of diversity.
“Missional” is about as slippery a term as there is in my experience with individuals. Some see it as “outward focused”, others as “justice ministry”, others as “mercy ministry”, still others in a more Kuiperian way as you described. Usually when something passes or doesn’t pass Synod it is because various factions or thought-demographic groups see an issue in a certain way and that either allows or blocks a vote from going forward.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t groups that hold similar viewpoints which get expressed in official denominational channels, but it usually means that there is a layer of politics, usually among groups with different ideas and out of that struggle things happen or don’t happen.
With a new ED I expect we will begin to see the make-up of that politics continue to shift. The ED won’t be controlling it, an ED usually can’t. The effective influence is usually subtle and expressed over time. The ED will certainly have the task and opportunity to shape things moving forward, but his influence and power will be just one of various forces within the larger political ecosystem.
None of this is to say that you aren’t watching these factors at work and highlighting for us how they impact in the longer theological and cultural narrative of the CRC so please keep sharing your thoughts. Thanks. pvk