Pathways of Hope Reflecting on 9/11, Community, and Congregational Renewal

Phil Amerson [00:00:01]:

Hello everyone. It's Philip Amerson recording today the Be & Do Podcast. We happen to be recording on September 11th. And for those of you who were around or have memories of 9/11 in 2001, you remember the incredible time when the towers in New York City, the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And when the Pentagon, a plane hit there and nearly 3,000 people lost their lives in New York and a couple of hundred at the Pentagon. And then of course, there was also the plane that went down in the field in Pennsylvania. So it's a day when I wondered what What message might we need 25 years after that tragedy? This is Philip Amerson for the Be & Do Podcast, and we're going to talk about hope, especially hope in a time when so much in our world seems dangerous and even tragic. I hope you'll Enjoy just, and more than enjoy, I hope you'll be helped by some reflections on hope.

Phil Amerson [00:01:30]:

This is also a recording where I'm going to talk some about congregational life and parish ministry. And if you're not a believer or a religious person, you might listen anyway, because I think there may be some things here that will help you in looking at other institutions In a more positive way. But let me begin with this. I had a friend who was a Methodist bishop, and probably among the bishops in his time was the most attacked by people who felt like he was too progressive or too liberal. He was a wonderful pastor and a wonderful caring bishop for people, whoever they were, theologically. I said to him once, how do you keep going when you have these caucus groups that are coming after you and saying things that are really untrue about you? How do you keep going? And he smiled. I heard him quote this several times. It's from the Emily Dickinson poem.

Phil Amerson [00:02:37]:

Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul. And sings the tune without the words and never stops at all. Somewhere deep in the spirit, there is this sense of continuing to live in hopeful ways. Boy, that's a challenge, isn't it, today? Well, the gospel of— the gospels are full of stories of hope. Um, I, I think of Peter and John after, uh, Jesus has been crucified and the stories of the resurrection, and it's Pentecost, and they're there on the steps of the temple, and, um, a beggar says, can you give, give me some alms, give me something? And, uh, the 2 disciples say, gold and silver we don't have, but Such as we have, we give to you. And the such as they had was a sense of, we will survive this tragic time, and we have hope because we have experienced something quite remarkable in the resurrection of Jesus. So I want to talk more about hope, and I want to put it in the context we live in today. And for those of you that are people related to parishes or churches, this is especially for you.

Phil Amerson [00:04:12]:

I have recently put together a little, oh, I don't know, acronym worksheet that can maybe help you think through hope. Let's see if it will appear on the screen here. Maybe. I'll go through it. We'll attach it. There we go. Hope, Pathways of Hope. And I want to talk a bit about that.

Phil Amerson [00:04:42]:

But in preparation for that, I want to talk a little bit about the despair and the sense of poverty, impoverishment that I hear from so many, and especially ecumenical Protestant Mainline congregations. Yeah. I recently know of a church that is going to be making some changes in its financial situation, and they're going to actually receive a fairly large sum of money. And it was funny when the public announcement was made about some development work, There wasn't a sense of hope. There was a sense of, oh, we're poor, dying, or that we're getting old. And instead of seeing the resources that were coming as something that should, a story that should be told in positive ways, it was something that felt very sad and fragile. And it was the message that was being sent out across the community. So I'm going to talk about hope.

Phil Amerson [00:06:01]:

Let me tell you one of the reasons I think we have gotten in this sense, in this time of feeling such scarcity. Church attendance is down for almost everyone, by the way, despite what What Ryan Burge, the demographer sociologist over at Washington University wants to tell us, he wants to say that it's the mainlines that are dying and all the rest are, well, the evangelicals are the growth. Yes and no. For those that follow it closely, there are a lot of megachurches that are in decline. I have friends in Florida who jokingly say every time a new megachurch opens, there are 3 that lose members because folks want to go attend the new show. Part of the dilemma is, of course, demographic change. Those of us in mainline churches and in evangelical churches increasingly, have stopped having children. The number of children we had just a few decades ago has dropped dramatically.

Phil Amerson [00:07:21]:

Bill McKinney, a wonderful sociologist and friend, used to jokingly say, the best thing to do to increase your future church attendance and membership is have more babies. Well, of course, we don't keep our children, and that's related to vision and mission, and it's related to what young people want to stay around a church whose message is, we're so weak and we're dying. So hope is part of Paul's message all the way through the epistles. Thessalonians has passages. There are passages, of course, in 1 Corinthians. So we're left with this, Faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love. Let me tell you a little bit about what I think has been happening before I come to the little acronym on hope.

Phil Amerson [00:08:31]:

What's been happening is for years and years and years, we've been being shaped by a sense of impoverishment and a sense that the only way to get out of it is some kind of technique, some kind of top-down program. I want to talk about that and this acronym of HOPE. Dorothy and W.I. Thomas were sociologists back in the 1920s and '30s. As a matter of fact, Dorothy Thomas was the first woman to be the president of the American and Sociological Association, they came up with something called the Thomas Theorem. And the Thomas Theorem is simply this: what a person perceives to be real becomes real in its consequences. What they meant by that was if we think we're dying, if we think there's no hope, if we think there's no future, Then probably the consequences of that may be that we won't be able to see where there are opportunities. We won't have imagination to perceive in new ways.

Phil Amerson [00:09:55]:

Now, some people have thought the Thomas theorem, what we perceive to be real becomes real in its consequences, is the same as the self-fulfilling prophecy. And it's not. They're cousins. Another sociologist, Robert Merton, in the '40s and '50s wrote about self-fulfilling prophecy. Whereas the Thomas theorem is looking more broadly at the ways we perceive the world around us and all its dimensions, Thomas Merton, when he talks about self-fulfilling prophecy, is generally talking about one thing, that we get wrong. And then out of that wrong understanding or wrong belief, poor decisions are made and we end up structuring what's going to happen in a way that it's self-fulfilling. So if we just start with a wrong premise or a wrong assumption about one thing, This is Thomas Merton. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Phil Amerson [00:11:08]:

The Thomas theorem is a much larger one. And the Thomas theorem was picked up by yet another sociologist. He didn't speak of it in the same language, but Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in the 1970s and '80s talked about the social construction of reality. And what Berger said is, once you have this perception of the world, it's all you can see. And he called it habituation. You're in the habit of always seeing the world in a certain way. And so there's a difficulty seeing new opportunities or seeing new options. You're actually constructing A social reality.

Phil Amerson [00:11:57]:

What's happened in the mainline church is a construction of social reality that's resulted in several things, and that's where I'm going to go now to the Pathways of Hope document, and we'll attach this. The first thing in the Pathways of Hope document that I've put together recently is hearing. And what's important there is Listening is not the same as hearing. You know, I get tickled at all the town hall meetings that people want the politicians to have. But just because a politician is there and says they are listening, that doesn't mean they're hearing. And just because The mayor or a faith leader or a business person or someone in philanthropy says, I'm going to go on a listening tour, doesn't mean they're hearing. You see, part of what's going on when you say, I'm going to listen, Involves who's in control. So are the people you're going to be with the subjects or the objects? Now there's theology around all of this, and I won't talk a lot about it.

Phil Amerson [00:13:31]:

Minjung theology in Asia, Latin American theologies talk about the importance of the base community of Going to a place where you don't just listen, but you hear. What are the people really saying? And I've watched as local congregations may believe that they are listening, but they haven't gotten close enough to the subjects. They've turned them into objects. They're the objects that we're going to go fix or we're going to go recruit, but they're not seen as anyone that God is already working with that already have gifts. We've turned them into objects at the beginning that we're going to go somehow fix. I had a wonderful seminary professor, a Free Methodist. He grew up in evangelical world. but he was head of evangelism for the Free Methodist denomination, at least urban evangelism.

Phil Amerson [00:14:41]:

He said, the problem is our evangelism is never radical enough. We're not really hearing what the people who God has created in communities maybe of poverty or suffering or communities that haven't heard, We're still thinking we're the ones that are going to fix them rather than understanding what God may already be doing. And when denominations or philanthropies or government says, we're listening, but they're not hearing, they do real harm. And it's harm that then becomes habituated. It's, this is what the people expect. They don't really hear us. We ask for something and we either don't get a response or we're pretty much shown and learned that our concerns, our world isn't seen. It's easy to fall into that place.

Phil Amerson [00:15:58]:

I struggled with it all through my ministry as a pastor and then as an educational leader. I struggled with, am I really hearing? And often I didn't. And so that's the first thing, hearing. Listening is not the same as hearing, or we sometimes— the parallel would be in terms of vision. You know, looking is not the same as seeing. You can, it's amazing. I've walked the streets in my community with people and it's amazing what we both see, but what is missed by both of us if I'm walking with one person. So seeing is a broader than my two eyes.

Phil Amerson [00:16:47]:

Seeing involves what others also can bring. Secondly, if you're a congregation, first begin with truly hearing. Second, take outcomes seriously. Outcomes can be measured and congregations can make decisions based on outcomes. We've gone through a very painful period for me watching it, Where we did a lot of congregational development, or we had consultants come in and they're going to, you know, in 2 months and 4 easy steps, they're going to fix it. You know, we're going to be okay, but there's never an outcomes measurement. Now, there are people out there who do good research. And if it's taken seriously, can be very helpful.

Phil Amerson [00:17:44]:

I don't know if you know the book Better by Atul Gawande, a surgeon who wrote about how in hospital settings you can actually measure things and get a sense of where improvements are being made. Simple things like, did the doctor and the staff wash their hands? Or more importantly, he speaks about the notion of positive deviance. Look to see where growth is occurring in your congregation or in your neighborhood or in your denomination, and go find out what they're doing differently. What's different? What would be deviant from the norm? And it's generally not the little technique things. The music is different, or we have visitors, guests who welcome visitors at the door and give them a coffee mug. Have you ever had that happen to you? You get to a church and they hand you a coffee mug, and then they think it's so clever to say, you've been mugged. It's okay. It's okay.

Phil Amerson [00:19:04]:

But again, it's the church giving it to you rather than listening to who you are. And maybe you don't drink coffee. I'm not meaning to pick on people, but I'm just trying to help us see that outcomes can be measured. I used to know in a church what I needed to do to keep growing as a congregation, not just in attendance and membership, although those are important, but in mission work, in what we're giving, what part of our budget we're sharing with others, and how we are seeing the world and listening to others. I believe that congregations that are open to welcome outside voices will discover outcomes improve. I remember in one of my congregations, looking back on outcomes, I realized that attendance grew and membership grew, In the months following, are doing a Habitat house build or going on a mission trip to Central America because new people were engaged in that process. It was evangelism, although it wasn't, do you believe in the Four Spiritual Laws, or do you have— have you gone through and said all the right words? It was an evangelism based in outcome, in what are we doing that's in faith. So hearing, taking outcomes seriously, H-O.

Phil Amerson [00:20:56]:

P is focusing on the parish. Now, those of you who are in congregational traditions, please know that I'm not picking on you. What I'm doing is picking on those of us who are in more connectional or Or Episcopal kinds of settings. We in the United Methodist Church in North America have gone through a deep change in the last 50 years toward congregationalism and away from a parish focus. Do you look at the world around the congregation and build ministry based on that? Or do you think we're going to tinker somehow inside, stay inside, talk to ourselves? And in the United Kingdom, in UK, there's a growing emphasis on something I think is quite remarkable and positive. It's called STP and it's entitled Save the Parish. STP. And it really is saying, stop trying to fix all the stuff on the inside of the church.

Phil Amerson [00:22:16]:

Stop sending a benediction that says, go out into the world and, I don't know, give coffee mugs. It's saying, listen for what's going to happen out there, what God is already doing. And then in the parish around you, you'll learn things. There's a book in this tradition in the United Kingdom called Being Interrupted, and basically it says when your ministries are interrupted, maybe that's a clue that there's something more you should learn, or maybe you should let your— liturgy be interrupted? What if, as in some churches, regularly once a month or even every Sunday, there was a 3-minute word given by someone who's not in the congregation about what's going on in the community? Now, I'm not saying that this is for some social service group to come and raise money. No, no, no, no, no. I want to have the principal of the school talk about what's happening at the school. I want to hear the firefighter, the woman on the fire department come and talk about what they're struggling with and the main issues they deal with. I want to hear from the grocer, from the barber.

Phil Amerson [00:23:42]:

What if churches were interrupted? So parish-focused hearing outcomes, Focusing on the parish rather than the congregation. And finally, we need to encourage one another, or I would say, let's have ecologies of hope. When we don't have ecologies of hope, when things are all top-down, it very quickly turns into a self-defeating kind of fear-based ecology. And these are almost always counterproductive and fail. So hearing? Yeah. Outcomes are important. They can be measured and they can help you make changes that are appropriate. Look to the parish around And not to the latest hot technique that you read about in some newsletter.

Phil Amerson [00:24:49]:

Some of those techniques are fine, but they haven't helped us a whole heck of a lot in terms of growth. And 4, develop ecologies of hope. And share with you the wonderful Langston Hughes Poem about hopes. And hopes involve learning to dream. Langston Hughes put it this way, hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life becomes a broken-winged bird that cannot fly. Hold fast. Prepare. Persist.

Phil Amerson [00:25:39]:

Prevail. You know, that's a kind of ecology I wouldn't mind seeing more broadly accepted and practiced. May God bless. This is Philip Amerson for The Belonging Exchange. Bye-bye.