There are growing numbers of organized religious groups whose membership is made up of people with widely differing backgrounds and beliefs. Open, shared leadership and praxis may be desired outcomes for these groups and sometimes, networks of groups, but these are rarely achieved.
Not only are group members often limited by the expectations and bureaucratic requirements of other organizations, but also are deeply affected by bureaucratic ways of relating to one another. People either try command and control and end up with passive (and sometimes active) resistance, or are so sensitive to difference that only the very lowest common denominator praxis occurs. This tends to kill any hope of effective, open, or gutsy shared leadership and praxis.
A different approach is needed. The kind of organization required cannot rely on ‘the rules of engagement’ for working relationships used by hierarchical organization. Instead it must build effective working relationships from the ground up, taking into consideration the often considerable diversity involved. In this article, I suggest four relational qualities - mutuality, liminality, spirituality and trust - that represent a ‘build’ from initial to deep relationships.
1. Mutuality
Mutuality is not the same as egalitarianism. It is not a matter of settting out to consider and relate to other people as equals but rather to allow everybody’s gifts and differences to inform the relationship. In one context, particular gifts and insights - others or our own - will be the ones needed to move the situation forward for everyone’s mutual benefit and growth, and in another context the opposite. Mutuality approaches differences between people without either actual or inverted snobbery or condescension.
It is much easier to talk about mutuality than to practice it. Habits and attitudes ingrain an affinity for people like ourselves and blind us to the possibilities and potential of those who are different. The author and educator Paulo Freire wrestled with this when teaching literacy and justice to impoverished, socially oppressed and illiterate workers.[1] He found that he needed to radically change his attitude to successfully carry out his mission. He could not do it through reliance on his education, teaching skills and social privilege alone. He also had to learn from the workers’ passion, work skills and life experience. He and the workers needed to have a mutual teaching/learning relationship to gain the confidence, words and strategies to change their situation. Mutuality requires the suspension of any concerns about difference for the sake of the work of the group.
Mutuality is commended in the Bible by Paul in his letter to the Philippians.[2] Christians are invited, like Jesus, to cross the line of difference between themselves and others and live on that other side. They achieve this by a process of self-emptying and putting into a radical new context what being at the bottom or the top of the social pyramid might mean. But whether one comes to the relationship from a position ‘up’ the pyramid or ‘down’, In either social direction, the change of attitude required is neither simple or easy. It requires the strength and encouragement of being like Christ and in Christ. Deepening relationships across social and other differences requires deepening spirituality and faith.
Relationships based on mutuality are different from relationships in a bureaucratic organization Mutuality allows each person to interact with others and be enriched by diverse points of view. In hierarchical organizations, people are expected to more or less conform to an ‘official’ point of view, or differences are blurred to try to maintain harmonious relationships. Mutuality emerges as a richer, more challenging and developing relational experience where the struggle is to discover and work at a common mission and go beyond differences. The tendency is to focus on (what can often be really irritating) differences as issues in the group’s life together. Mutuality allows difference to be treated as a ‘given’ in the situation and to use the resulting diversity to achieve richer, deeper and more comprehensive mission outcomes. Each person’s engagement in the mission will affect and moderate who he or she is without any external intervention or pressure to change.
Mutuality can be engendered in a relationship from any common interest or focus, but engagement in a common mission is powerful. The name given to life together based on mutuality is communitas. Alan Hirsch contrasts communitas with community in Chapter 8 of his book, “The Forgotten Ways.”[3] In particular, his writing about the importance of mission as an organizing principle [4] reinforces the sense that the common endeavor of the group fosters communitas and mutuality rather than Hirsch’s belief that communitas grows out of a shared experience of change called liminality. For me, liminality is the next developmental quality to consider for effective, open, and gutsy shared leadership and praxis, dependent on mutuality and communitas being practiced and established.
2. Liminality
The quality of liminality builds on mutuality by bringing the experience of transitioning through change into consideration. How can relationships support, encourage and guide a person through this? Hirsch suggests that groups that are a community, rather than communitas do not provide this kind of relationship, [5] and my own experience confirms this.
For some, liminality is the consequence of a traumatic event, like a natural disaster, economic recession, illness or bereavement. But, as Alan Roxburgh, in his discussion of liminality, observes,
“ Ours is a period in history of such massive change that the whole of modernity can be described as being in a liminal situation. What Turner describes is far more than a predictable passage within society. Rather, the entire culture is in an unpredictable transition. It is not just a particular group within the society that has lost its former, established social locale. In a period of large-scale historical change liminality becomes the pervasive social experience. [6]
This means every person and group in these times experiences liminality. Different life circumstances are being dealt with constantly because of rapid social change. Whatever the cause of it, open groups need to see liminality as a positive growth experience through which they explore new relational opportunities.
The organizational consultant and researcher, Margaret Wheatley affirms this approach as being the way that all organic systems evolve. Writing with colleague, Myron Rogers,she says:
“These complex networks of relationships offer very different possibilities for thinking about self and other. The very idea of boundaries changes profoundly. Rather than being a self-protective wall, boundaries become the place of meeting and exchange. We usually define these edges as the means to define separateness. Defining what’s inside and what’s outside. But in living systems, boundaries are something quite different. They are the place where new relationships take form, an important place of exchange and growth as an individual chooses to respond to another. As connections proliferate and the system weaves itself into existence, it becomes difficult to interpret boundaries as defenses or even as markers of where one individual ends.”[7]
Wheatley describes liminality as a kind of ‘edge of chaos’ phenomenon, where the relationship has moved from being known and prescribed, but has not become anarchic and chaotic. It is in an intermediate, disturbed state that is rich with possibility.
The emphasis changes in the move from mutuality to liminality. Mutuality focuses on a common mission as a basis for relationships and disregards difference. Liminality focuses on difference to find alternative ways to be and act from relationships. However, people approach boundaries, limits, new encounters and strange experiences feeling a fair degree of trepidation. The strength and encouragement of mutuality is needed to embark on the exploration of liminality which is needed, in turn, to experience the fullness of group relationships.
The metaphor of journey or pilgrimage is helpful for understanding liminality in relationships. Other group members are fellow-travelers, a pilgrim band, experiencing similar changes but each in a different way. Fellow pilgrims demonstrate their relationship in three ways. They commiserate, celebrate and consecrate, not ‘from above’ but sharing as someone mutuality immersed in a similar experience.
Commiserate
The shared status of pilgrim means that commiseration is different from sympathy or empathy. Commiserating is recognizing and accepting that transitioning can evoke painful emotional responses. Rather than attempting to mollify these feelings, they are allowed to ‘be’. The shared story, keeps the relationships in a liminal and edge of chaos situation. Experiencing this provides a context from which helpful ways forward will emerge. Commiseration is a kind of Rogerian, active listening.
Celebrate
Liminal relationships help the recognition and celebration of two aspects of the transitioning experience - significant achievement in mission and a self-appreciated benchmark in pilgrimage or spiritual growth. Biblically, Jesus’ set of three parables about the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son [8] are stories about liminal experiences that reached a benchmark with celebration. The celebrations also mark an exceptional accomplishment in each character’s mission - in their shepherding, housekeeping or parenting.
The lost son story has an additional reflection. Those celebrating liminality may experience judgement, resentment and hostility from brothers and sisters who have a vested interest in bureaucratic organization, like that of the stay-at-home brother in the ‘lost son’ parable, they tend to see liminality as something to be avoided rather than celebrated. In contrast, people who are companions ‘on the road’ can share the joy of reaching significant points on the journey or significant achievements in mission because they ‘get it’. The best way to handle any negative response to difference is to build mutuality around mission.
Consecrate
The institutional church does recognize and celebrate some liminal experiences, but they tend to be once-in-a-lifetime events. Conversion and baptism or confirmation are examples. Call and commissioning or ordination, often separated by a liminal period of seminary training, are others. But even in these instances consecration is added as an additional element. Consecration is a way of acknowledging that the liminality of the experience is holy and necessary for the fulfillment of God’s purpose. Consecration is both losing oneself to God’s purpose and finding oneself as a different being because of what God has accomplished during the liminal experience. Most anthropological studies of liminality tend to stress this element.
Pilgrimage is consecrated liminal experience. In pilgrimage, everyday routine and purpose is surrendered to God’s purpose as a ritualized journey. Facing each day’s physical, emotional or spiritual difficulty requires a re-examination and re-affirmation of the mission to which one has been called by God and a consciousness and openness to the personal changes God requires. Group members, as fellow pilgrims, consecrate the journey beyond each celebrated achievement by prayerful encouragement to face the next challenge. By affirming the call and opening hearts to the Holy Spirit they foster a change of attitude. What might have been a resented burden becomes an act of loving service to God.
Roxburgh observes,
“The only meaningful way forward lies in understanding and embracing our liminal existence. We must live with its confusion and frustration, as a hopeful people ready to discover the new thing the Spirit will birth.” [9]
Embracing liminal existence, living as a hopeful people and discovering new things the Spirit will birth will need a spirituality that is different to the spirituality experienced in the institutional church. Spirituality will emerge as a new quality of group relationship, building on mutuality and liminality.
3. Spirituality
Spirituality is the quality that includes God and, in the case of Christian spirituality, includes Jesus, as an additional party to group relationships. As has been shown, spirituality is already very helpful in developing qualities of mutuality and liminality. There is a sense in which the word ‘spiritual’ could be ascribed to the quest for depth in relationships - there is a need for taking God into account as they develop. Differences and change highlight the ambiguity of human behavior. The more this becomes apparent, the more uncertainty is felt. The pressure mounts to re-erect boundaries and re-emphasize difference in order to reduce or eliminate uncertainty. This undoes or damages the qualities needed to build open, inclusive and deep relationships. Certainty belongs to God. Uncertainty is dealt with by becoming more comfortable about ‘handing it over’ to God. Developing an assured relationship with God in the midst of our everyday relationships is what spirituality is about.
However, one’s attitude to ‘handing it over’ can be important. A kind of passivity and fatalism could arise. If the expression, “God willing!” is a way of being reminded about living with uncertainty, then it is helpful, but if it is a ‘cop-out clause’, a disengaged relationship with God, Jesus and others may result. A relationship like this co-opts certainty, rather than handing it over. Handing over certainty to God means sharing, even wrestling, with God over uncertainty. Jesus’ prayer in Gesthemane[10] is an example of this. There is nothing passive or fatalistic in “sweat like drops of blood” as Jesus comes to the point in his conversation with God where he hands over his uncertainty about going to the Cross with the words, “not my will but yours be done.”
At the spirituality level of group relationships, religious practices become spiritual disciplines that help the group to identify and respond to its edge concerns. The following disciplines help one’s thoughts and actions converge towards God-given, difference-resolving, boundary-surpassing, spiritually deepening end points.
Traditional spiritual disciplines can be used. They may need ‘de-constructing’, however, because their implied social and institutional cultural differences and boundaries may hinder, rather than serve, the group’s mission. Worship-as-habit, prayer-as-routine and religion-as-last-resort change when God and Jesus play an active part in developing group relationships.
4. Trust
When relationships are able to demonstrate the first three qualities of group relationships - being unfazed by difference, exploring rather than retreating from boundaries and living with uncertainty, a foundation is laid for the final quality - trust. Trust enables a person to risk him or herself in relationships. It emerges when candor is respected, vulnerability is not exploited and confidence is not misplaced. It leads to intimacy.
Candor
Candor is speaking the truth in love. Being candid with another person requires one to take account of, and work with, their being different to ourselves. Words are couched in ways that are relevant to their situation - who and where they are. Any reaction or response they make is listened to and responded to in love especially on the occasions when it might be felt that words have been taken the wrong way. Candor is daring to take a risk with one’s speaking in order to grow mutuality. It must avoid any sense of being ‘an edict from on high’ or imply that one has what the other lacks. Candor puts the speaker at risk of being offended as much as anyone else.
Candor deals with difference at the deepest level. Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well [11] involves some very candid conversation both by Jesus and the woman. The discussion about spiritual outcomes, expectations and differences is important but it is ultimately the very candid exchange about the woman’s personal relationships that touches and changes the woman’s being. When she returns to her village to invite her neighbors to meet Jesus, it is neither Jesus’ unusual stance towards her, nor the spiritual depth of their encounter, but the candor about her relationships that motivates her. She tells the villagers, “Come and meet a man who told me everything I have ever done!” Trust in Jesus, engendered by candor, encourages her to risk her relationship with the villagers so that they can meet Jesus.
Vulnerability
Probing and extending boundaries and limits entails risk. Cultural, community and institutional boundaries exist to limit the risk to those inside them. Security and power are usually at the center. So the further one goes beyond boundaries the more vulnerable one becomes. However, from the point of view of those outside the boundaries, the security and privileges inside can be alienating and threatening. Taking the risk of becoming vulnerable can open the possibility of relationships that would not otherwise be possible. Compared with faith within the institution, faith in the open, inclusive group can seem to be very vulnerable, but in a time of growing public distrust of the institutional church, this seeming weakness may be the strength God needs to engender trust in the Way of Christ.
Confidence
Confidence is an outcome of handing over one’s uncertainty to God. It engenders trust in relationships, especially when facing a particularly anxious and uncertain time. Confidence comes, firstly, from feeling assured of God’s love and mercy, revealed and experienced in Jesus. Regular meditation, contemplation, prayer and worship help embed the revelation and experience of grace that helps to center relationships on the hope and promise of God. Confidence demonstrated in the face of uncertainty witnesses to a spiritual strength and genuineness that others trust.
Confidence is engendered through core beliefs. Core beliefs are a codified understanding of one’s experience in life of God’s love and mercy over time. Core beliefs are an aid to remembering how to hand uncertainty over to God in anxious moments. Confidence founded on core beliefs may engender respect but not trust. To engender trust, core beliefs need to demonstrate broad value and purpose to the public. Jesus raised this point when he invited the crowd to reflect on their involvement with John the Baptist. [12] Did John demonstrate core beliefs or was he like “a reed shaken in the wind”? Were his core beliefs about personal gain, luxury and power? Or were they being expressed in his proclamation that people should change their ways and purify themselves ready for God’s love and mercy to be revealed? The people trusted John and were baptized. The core beliefs he preached and lived resonated with them and so they trusted him and acted upon his message.
Confidence is engendered by decisiveness. When uncertainty is handed over to God, to act is to take a leap of faith. This is different to foolhardiness. Action is carefully considered and undertaken with anticipated outcomes, but there is no guarantee that things will work out in the way expected. Sometimes an outcome can go either way. Sometimes the odds against success are high. Sometimes necessary information is unavailable. Sometimes taking no action is the worst action to take. Prayerfully deciding, acting confidently, then taking responsibility for the outcome can grow trust.
Luke’s first person account of his and Paul’s shipwreck on Malta[13] is a graphic description of how Paul’s confidence built the trust needed to get the boat’s complement of people ashore safely. His confidence and decisiveness in the face of the peril and uncertainty of the situation stand in contrast to the impulse to self-preservation of the sailors and the impulse to duty of the centurion. Through it all, his open faith stance is a clear reference and witness to the basis of his confidence. Meditating on this story can still be a powerful, trust-building help.
Intimacy more than Community
The ultimate goal of group life is intimate relationships. In a more individualistic post-modern society, perhaps people are longing for the experience of intimacy rather than the experience of community. Many writers have suggested that contemporary nuclear families and individuals are lonely and looking for community. If there is a longing for the supportive inter-relationships of earlier generations, it is nostalgic and idealized. In general, people would react against the loss of privacy, controlling attitudes and censorious exclusiveness common to those past communities. Rather than countering individualization and loneliness with community, perhaps the way to deal with these experiences in our time is to deepen relationships towards intimacy.
Paul’s treatise on love in 1 Corinthians 13 and the shepherd psalm, Psalm 23, would be two of the best known and highest regarded biblical passages, even for pagans. Add the fruits of the Spirit passage in Galatians 5:22 - 26 and in all three texts we can see listed the practical content of deep relationships - complementing what we have shared in the pages above.
[1] Paulo Freire ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ Penguin 1972
[2] Philippians 2:2 -11
[3] ‘The forgotten Ways’ Alan Hirsch. Grand Rapids Brazos Press. 2006 Pages 217 ff.
[4] Ibid Page 235.
[5] Ibid Page 237f.
[6] “The Missionary Congregation, Leadership and Liminality” Alan J. Roxburgh. Harrisburg. Trinity Press International, 1997. Page 36.
[7] ‘Finding our Way - Leadership for an Uncertain Time’ Margaret Wheatley. San Francisco Berrett-Koehler 2005. Page 48.
[8] Luke 15:1 - 32
[9] Alan Roxburgh, Op. Cit. Page 47.
[10] Luke 22:41 - 44
[11] John 4:1 - 43
[12] Luke 7:24 - 28
[13] Acts 27:13 - 44