In Defense of Hard Congregational Meetings

In Defense of Hard Congregational Meetings

Andy Crouch recently wrote an article published by the Gospel Coalition entitled, “Its Time To Reckon With Celebrity Power.” The whole thing is gold. This isn’t the first time Crouch has opened my eyes to some area of blindness. We just had an important congregational meeting at Trinity. I probably spent 40-50 hours of preparation for that meeting in conversations, communication pieces (written and video), preparation meetings, and prayer. We had so many important pieces in that meeting, and I wanted to serve the institution called Trinity Lutheran Church, which is almost 100 years old. I suppose it depends who you talk to, but most left the meeting feeling like there was an open space for conversation, questions, and disagreement. We also decided to be patient with voting. We had met the constitutional requirements to vote on two significant matters but decided patience with one another was more important than passing resolutions and amendments and policy-making. 

In my post-meeting emotion, I decided that if I was ever given the chance to help plant a congregation, the polity would be different than the polity that created that meeting. As I am moving past the post-meeting emotion to post-post-meeting normal, I am realizing that the problem was not the meeting. The problem is me. Allotting 40-50 hours of preparation for an important meeting is no problem. Attaching an expectation that everyone will be happy or “on board” and supportive is a problem. That is an unrealistic expectation. Getting that many people together to talk about what is best for the community requires a commitment to different voices, experiences, values, and wisdom. It is slow work, but is it worth it? My blindness also came from undervaluing institutions. I am a child of an anti-authoritarian generation and a full-fledged member of a celebrity generation. Neither values institutions. Crouch’s article isn’t blind to the sinful capacity of institutions, but also to the enduring value they have provided.

“Those institutions were nowhere near perfect and perpetuated all kinds of injustice. But at their best they preserved and gave expression to a profound and radical idea: that the best things human beings do together are bigger and more lasting than any person who may occupy a temporary position of power.
It is not wrong to be offended at the homogeneity of the faces of past presidents who stare down from portrait after portrait in institutional hallways (white males in some, black males in others, since African Americans so assiduously and proudly developed their own institutions in the years after Emancipation). But it is not wrong, either, to marvel at how anonymous they are to us, and to a great extent were to their own contemporaries; how much they saw themselves as stewards rather than sole proprietors; how much continuity they preserved even as they led necessary change; how peacefully and graciously they handed on leadership from one to the next.”

Institutions (and established congregations) have liabilities, but are we blind to the liabilities of celebrity? 

1. Dangerous Distance: David on the palace roof is so different than Jesus with real people with real problems in the crowd. We value crowds of people, but Jesus valued people in a crowd. 
2. False intimacy: We know what a celebrity eats, but we don’t know them. Please read this part of Crouch’s article.
3. The structure surrounding celebrity doesn’t have the courage to tell the truth about celebrity or to the celebrity. “The sheer gravitational pull of those charismatic figures has nullified the institution’s ability to protect itself, and indeed its leader, from both legitimate and falsified allegations of misconduct.”

Andy Crouch finishes by describing some of the choices he has made to limit his power for the sake of his own health and the health of the movement he is called to serve. Crouch embraces the gift of limits, accountability, community, Sabbath, and emotional wholeness. He writes,

“This is just what I do. The details are less important than the reason behind them. I have all this in place because, still and all, if you knew the full condition of my heart, my fantasies and grievances, my anxieties and my darkest solitary thoughts, you would declare me a danger to myself and others. I cannot be entrusted with power by myself, certainly not with celebrity, and neither can you.But we don’t have to be entrusted with it by ourselves. We can constantly be pouring our power out, handing it over to others, reinvesting whatever power comes our way in a community that will last longer than our short lives, building something that will endure even to our children’s children—a community to which we are genuinely accountable, a community that will rescue us from ourselves and set us free to be the people we wanted to be, the people we knew we could be, when we first began this journey of life, full of heart and hope.”

The community of God’s people — the church — is worth leaders taking their health seriously. It is worth institutional investment in hard congregational meetings. The patient work required often doesn’t show immediate results. I suppose that is why I am tempted to dishonor the Sabbath. Breaking the Sabbath provides results that can show NOW! Honoring the Sabbath provides results that will show for generations. Working in community takes time and conversation and listening and compromising when its possible. Working by myself only takes one vote. But a community that only involves me is no community.