Community, Hockey, Leadership and YouTube

A New Wineskins interview with Sally Morgenthaler (HT to Len Hjalmarson) started my thoughts running in the eclectic mix suggested by the title of this post.

In our local gathering, we tend to associate the concept of Community with the part of our vision statement that refers to being a place that people can call home — in other words, it's about the sense of belonging. Sally Morgenthaler reminded me of Joseph Myers' book The Search to Belong which I read two years ago in the break between Christmas and New Year's. Myers' major contention is that "belonging" takes different forms in different "spaces", and that people's sense of belonging can be very strong in any of those different spaces. Different people will see their own "belonging" to a particular group — the local church, say — in terms of the particular space that they've chosen to interact with that group in.

Myers distinguishes four distinct spaces: public, social, personal and intimate. Each of these spaces has its own "rules" for appropriate interaction — the sorts of conversations and behaviours that are acceptable in that space. The boundaries between adjacent spaces, however, are a bit fuzzy, a reality that allows for conversations or interactions to start in one space and drift into the adjacent space in a natural manner. Jumps between non-adjacent spaces, however, are experienced by most people as disconcerting.

The spaces also differ in terms of the number of relationships people can typically sustain in each space — most people can only sustain a very small number of intimate relationships, more personal relationships, and on to a rather large number of public relationships. As a result, people will manage relationships over time by shifting them from one space to another. As long as both parties are comfortable with the space in which the relationship operates, the sense of belonging or community can be quite strong in any of the spaces — even though the way that sense is experienced will differ.

One of the great difficulties that churches have, Myers contends, is that they don't tend to respect the choices people make as to which space their church commitment and connectedness will operate in, but rather have a tendency to want to push all people toward a particular space. Related to this tendency is that churches often are not very good in creating environments in each of the spaces in which community can be fostered. Morgenthaler puts it this way:

The reality is, the church only operates marginally well in one area, and that is public. Even at that level, our public events and services are simply a collection of privatized experiences. They are usually not as communal as a football game. There, the jumbo-tron acts as presider and prompts us to high-five each other or yell at each other across the stadium.

This remark got me thinking about the hockey game that I and a number of clients and colleagues attended in Edmonton on Tuesday night. You would have to say that there was an obvious amount of public space community evidenced in the crowd attending that game. People were connected in a number of ways: many wore Oilers' jerseys or sported the Oilers' logo in some prominent manner; the crowd eagerly engaged in the "call & response" liturgies prompted by the various electronic signage equipment; they cheered, oohed, and booed more or less as one throughout the game; they hugged or slapped each other on the back when the Oilers scored, and kissed when the smooch cam focused on them. Indeed, the crowd was rather fanatical in its commitment to public community at this event — I guess that's why they are called fans. Obviously the experience of community and belonging can be very real and satisfying in public space.

When Myers describes social space, I always think of a cocktail reception or the milling about conversational environment of a church foyer. To be honest, this is the space in which I am the least comfortable — I really have to be psyched up and rested to engage well in social space, and even when it goes well the experience almost always leaves me exhausted. This reality creates a bit of a problem for me in the development of new personal space relationships — you simply can't progress directly from public space to personal space without creating a disconcerting discontinuity.

However, there is another space that lies between public space and personal space — a space I call "collegial space". This is the space where people work together in some common purpose. I suppose that in an academic sense one could consider this a subdomain of social space, but for me what I experience in a collegial environment is so much different from what I experience in a social environment that I have to think of them as different beasts. In reality, almost all of the personal space relationships I have had throughout my life have evolved from collegial space relationships, rather than from social space relationships. While my experience is certainly not in the majority, I strongly suspect that those who, like me, are more comfortable in collegial space than in social space actually make up a fairly sizable minority.

When I have truly felt "at home" in a church "community", I have been solidly connected in public space, collegial space, personal space and even intimate space. In that context, I am most able to give myself to being fully present in social space contexts as well.

Ironically for me, whenever the church leadership (of which I was typically a part) would decide that we needed to be more intentional about creating opportunities for building "community" in the church, invariably the means would be to create social space events. It would have never occurred to anyone to look at the degree of connectedness we were fostering in the public space, and certainly not to look at ways of making collegial space more open.

Encouragingly though, the growing popularity of the word "missional" suggests to me that churches ought to be becoming increasingly focused on opening up collegial space — after all isn't missional all about working together on common mission with Christ and with His body? Yet our leadership paradigms and structures really don't deal with this sort of objective very well. We need more than just tinkering or creating another program. Morgenthaler puts it this way:

Leadership in a truly flattened world has no precedents. Never in the history of humankind have individuals and communities had the power to influence so much, so quickly. The rules of engagement have changed, and they have changed in favor of those who leave the addictive world of hierarchy to function relationally, intuitively, systemically, and contextually.

Those who are up to the challenge of the new world will draw on that deep knowledge. And they will look to the marginalized — including women — not as necessary evils in a politically correct world, but as their own leaders, mentors, and guides. The brightest will finally dump the myth of the great man, park their egos, and follow the one Great Man into the relinquishment of power.

This is, of course, similar to what Alan Roxborough argues in his book, The Sky is Falling!?!. The world we are in is undergoing significant discontinuous change at many levels. The old ways of getting from point A to point B are breaking down, along with many of the old standard techniques for leadership. We need a much more open platform, where the old hierarchies are often bypassed to allow the best of novel and creative approaches to emerge.

Which brings me to YouTube — an extraordinarily successful and open venture that has changed much of our world in two short years. Yesterday I listened to a CBC Radio piece on YouTube which identified a few ways in which YouTube has brought a whole new reality into existence, almost entirely due to it's fundamental paradigm of making it easy for anyone to put up a piece of video and thereby bypass the old hierarchies of mainstream media. Halifax city police, for example, found it far more efficient and effective to post some surveillance tape footage to YouTube to seek public assistance in solving a particular crime than the use of mainstream media ever would have been. Even David Letterman finds it effective to promote his mainstream media program on YouTube. But even more fundamental is the expectation that mainstream media will increasingly use YouTube as the place to find fresh faces for its own industry — directors, writers, actors — bypassing its own former hierarchies for its own purposes.

YouTube was created by two guys in a garage, because they wished they had an easy way to post video to the internet and thought maybe others might too. Classical leadership structures had nothing to do with it, and probably would never have come up with anything like it.

Is it too much to expect that in such a period of discontinuous change, the Holy Spirit might not just move in a similar way, calling some other unknown people on the margins to do what hasn't been seen before, and open up whole new spaces for participation in the work of the Kingdom? Oddly enough, the Holy Spirit seems to have had a penchant for doing just that sort of thing before — making us see in the result the likeness of Jesus Christ in a way we'd not seen for a long time — and turning the world upside down in the process.

Oh, but isn't it hard to expect the unexpected, and to actively participate in waiting for we know not what, going to we know not where? Sounds an awful lot like Abraham, doesn't it? Abraham, the man of faith and friend of God, whom Paul delights in using as an exemplar for the new faith community of Christ followers.