By Norman E. Anderson
In the academic year 1996/7, I was part of a discussion group at a theological seminary on a book by Peter M. Senge, called The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (New York, 1994). The book explores the ins and outs of systems theory, which views organizations as complex structures within which cause and effect are seldom simple or linear. In order to have the right effect, one must find the right leverages within a system of multiply interacting causes and effects. One of the most interesting parts of the book is Appendix 2, "Systems Archetypes," which details ten common fallacious approaches in the management of systems. I made my last contribution to the discussion group by e-mail, and that is the "essay" below.
My comments presuppose the group's previous discussion and some of the vocabulary and ideas of the Fifth Discipline, for instance the book's insistence upon distinguishing our mental models or concepts of how the world works from how it will work.
The essay has a number of things to say about managing "Christianly." Recently I encountered a directly parallel concern in the Jewish tradition. A friend of mine is the president of a synagogue in Connecticut, and he has been struggling with how to conduct the business of the synagogue in accord with Jewish tradition. For example, when a young custodian became disabled, the rabbinic teaching was that the custodian was to be cared for, even though he is not a Jew and even though he did not become disabled on the job. So members of the synagogue took responsibility and through individual pledges raised a full pension for him. The word "Christianly," has content and emphasis that is not exactly identical to the ethical thought of other traditions, but which may hold much in common with them.
I have found that some readers of the essay have been misreading it as a direct criticism of this or that institution, so perhaps a couple of corrective comments are in order.
First, over the last fifty years, my extended family has served a total of perhaps two centuries in churches and other Christian organizations. This has given all of us some ability to generalize a bit about how they work. The essay is about Christian organizations in general, not about a particular organization.
Second, both models or archetypes presented have interplay in nearly every Christian organization. The models are merely tools for analysis. If the Christian trappings model hits close to home, remember that the shoe fits only if the shoe fits.
The essay reflects one small piece of my philosophy of management, which I have held consistently, even if followed only imperfectly, for many years.
So here it is.
You have heard me say this before. A huge difference exists between these two models of an institution with a Christian mission: on the one hand, an institution with Christian trappings and, on the other, a Christianized institution. An institution with Christian trappings may have prayer before many of its meetings, and it may have worship services, and it may teach Christian doctrine, and it may have many committed Christians working to make it function; but it is not automatically Christianized thereby. A Christianized institution asks how it can achieve its Christian mission Christianly, even through its very structures and models of thought; and it commits itself to doing so.
The first model, which I will call the Christian trappings model, typically bears several characteristics:
(Another characteristic may be that spiritual leadership is in the hands of those who hold material power, rather than material power being in the service of spiritual community. But this notion entails a whole nexus of ideas that would take a lot of explanation.)
There are two versions of the Christian trappings model. The socially liberal version believes that whatever the system, it is going to have rough edges and flaws which will have to be smoothed over by Christian compassion. The socially conservative version believes that the system is right and that the infusion of Christian beliefs and values will make the system work even more efficiently. Neither of these versions goes to the roots and addresses the system itself; and each of them is, for a Christian institution, a form of Babylonian captivity -- to borrow Martin Luther's term.
The second model, the Christianized model, is characterized by trust in God and genuine community.
Remember the passage in Habakkuk 2:4 about how the just live by faith? What does this mean? It means that those persons who try to live justly according to God's expectations do so not out of self-centeredness, not with the expectation of some material benefit, not with a tit for tat mentality, but because they trust God, are willing to place their lives, their hopes, their failures, their successes, and even their deaths in God's hands. When the Apostle Paul uses Habakkuk in Romans 1:17, rather than setting up a dichotomy between faith and works, he is instead going to the root of biblical righteousness.
What does this mean for an institution with a Christian mission? In the Christian trappings model, the conception typically is that wise management is subservient to spreadsheets and bottom lines. True, spreadsheets and bottom lines are wonderful management tools; but when they override achieving one's Christian mission Christianly, we must ask, where is the faith, the trust in God? The answer: It is absent, for that is faithless management.
Remember the famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13 about faith, hope, and love, the greatest of which is love? In the Christian trappings model, conceptions come ahead of people. Here are some examples:
Consequently genuine Christian community throughout the institution, even though it may be present in temporary pockets, becomes impossible. Furthermore, the Christian witness of the institution is overwhelmed by its deeds, for people pay heed less to what an institution says than to what it does. Its witness is not just to the non-Christian world and those the institution aims to serve, but even more strongly to those, namely members of the institutional community, who are now asking, are these truly my people?
In a Christianized institution, love has ascendancy; and people come first. In a Christianized institution, trust in God prevails over bottom line reasoning, and the just treatment of people is beyond compromise. In a Christianized institution the good and faithful servant -- the one who questions and reflects and contributes and pulls his or her own weight and acts with integrity and encourages the institution to act with integrity -- is highly valued. In a Christianized institution, mutual trust is natural. In a Christianized institution, genuine community is the source of that institution's power to achieve its mission, to pursue its vision, and to communicate its proper message.
I do not regard the Christianizing of an institution to be an easy task, particularly if the institution has already fallen into the Christian trappings model. In fact, I think it one of the hardest tasks to which Christians are called; and it is never-ending, since it requires continual effort.
One of the greatest difficulties is to find one's way through the barriers that people erect. No one is immune to the wall-building impulse, including the best-intentioned; although the effect is exacerbated by how much power one holds. People bristle at any suggestion that they are not acting Christianly, for their conception is that they are doing their best, they are acting on their best judgment, they are under authority and obedient, they are righteous. Patronizing attitudes; defensiveness; the perceived need to spin information and to shift blame; the hoarding of power, authority, intelligence, and control; mistrust of one's co-laborers; the willingness to pull the rug out from under the well-laid plans of fellow laborers; the willingness to reduce the effectiveness of one's fellow laborers; the readiness to squelch fellow laborers; pay-back; black-balling -- all of these dynamics of power relations, and more, have an inexorable tendency to creep into Christian institutions with evil, sometimes profoundly evil, result. Walls become impenetrable. Consciences can't be reached. People's minds and spirits, and thus the institution itself, are boxed in by conceptions that faith and love would blow away.
There are also practical difficulties in Christianizing an institution. For example, does Christianizing mean that nobody can be fired for cause? I think not, but now the context for just termination has changed, and a new philosophy of termination must be thought out.
Yet another difficulty has to do with the expenditure of political capital. Do we harness our political capital to expend it on our areas of assigned responsibility, or do we expend it on the general Christianization of the institution? Is there even such a thing as a right balance between the two? In the Christian trappings model, the encouragement to Christianization is read as threatening criticism, and so the bristles go up, and one's areas of assigned responsibility can be badly hurt. This much I have learned about this seemingly no-win balancing act: It is not enough to create a small Christianized haven within an institution.
In my humble opinion, the Christianizing of an institution that is in the Christian trappings mode can be more difficult than the evangelization of a land hostile to Christianity.
To sum up using systems thinking:
As I said at the beginning of our discussions last fall, I am extremely leery of finding Christian justifications for this management theory or that one. Yet I do think that Christian faith has implications for management theory, particularly in a Christian institution. Our study of the Fifth Discipline has shown us a host of management fallacies we can all easily recognize, such as the notion that money will automatically be saved by terminations. To me one of the most intriguing aspects of the Fifth Discipline is that it frees our minds from fallacious management models so that we can think about management more Christianly and know that we are not necessarily thinking unrealistically.
In closing let me say that, to my way of thinking, one of the central issues in the Christianizing of an institution is power relations. The title that has done the most to sensitize me to that fact is one that I have mentioned before, The Iliad: Poem of Might, by Simone Weil. It can be found in the Simone Weil Reader (1977): pp. 153-183; and it has also been separately published as a Pendle Hill pamphlet. I might suggest this little tract as follow-up reading for the discussion group.
Peace and best wishes to you. May the right leverages be yours!
Written February 17, 1997; posted, January 18, 1998; new url, Janaury 28, 2004; last modification, Janaury 28, 2004
Copyright ©1998-2004 by Norman E. Anderson
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