Part Six: “Exceed Thou Authority”
My little brother died of a broken heart.
The fatal diagnosis was an overdose. But the underlying condition was loneliness. It claimed McKinley’s life at 34-years-old.
I clenched his hand, stroking the tear drops tattooed under his eyes, weeping as he took his last breaths. Just an hour earlier I had signed the papers to take him off life support, one of the hardest decisions of my life.
Life leading up to that moment was not easy for him. Our mother had been in a lifelong battle with addiction. McKinley’s biological father was an alcoholic and ultimately died to that disease. My biological father was unknown. As kids we ran the streets, broke the law, and struggled to survive. The struggle was paused periodically by trips to the juvenile detention center and later jail.
Yes, technically he overdosed. The people he was shooting up with left him to die. He lay there, brain dead, until someone found him. By then it was too late. For five days machines kept him alive until I finally made that agonizing decision.
That day he became an unfortunate statistic. Around 100,000 people die each year from overdose. It is the largest overdose epidemic in the history of the United States. These are not just numbers in a report, but real people, with real names, and real families who love them. That equates to millions of people who are left to grieve in the wake of the senseless deaths of their loved ones.
But the overdose epidemic is only one feature of a larger phenomenon which includes an increase in mental illness, gun violence, and suicide.
In 2019 I wrote Deep Roots, Wild Branches (DRWB) which has been utilized as a key text within the Fresh Expressions movement. The central metaphor of the book was that followers of Jesus have experienced a change of ecosystems. The church as we know it was formed in jungle conditions, but now we find ourselves in a desert. A desert is an ecosystem, but a very different one. Some of us will need to learn how to get water from a cactus, and we will get splinters in our hands as we do so. There is no technical problem/technical solution manual for where we are.
As I suggested in DRWB, the greatest soul wound of our time is isolation. This statement is truer now than it was when I wrote it five years ago. People are connected in blazing 5G speed all the time, and yet isolated, longing for authentic connection. Human beings of all races, ages, and socio-economic status experience the soreness of isolation to some extent.
“Within this scenario, the church can offer the world the greatest gift of all, in fact the only gift we can offer that no other organization can—communal life with Jesus. The life that heals our isolation.”
I was writing before the amplification of loneliness in the pandemic, but the virus of isolation was already spreading across the flows, nodes, and hubs of our network society.
In 2023 Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released an advisory titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” summarizing the data pointing to the marked decline of religious affiliation since the 1970’s and noting its role in increased isolation and loneliness. The advisory suggests that religious or faith-based groups can be a source of regular social contact, serve as a community of support, provide meaning and purpose, create a sense of belonging around shared values and beliefs, and are associated with reduced risk-taking behaviors (Murthy, 2023). Robert Putnam suggests there is a correlation between religious decline, the loss of social capital, neighborly good, and a decrease in compassion (Putnam, 2020).
When faced with an epidemic that kills people every day, the menu of choices changes.
In The United Methodist Church, when a clergy person is ordained, the bishop places their hands on our head and says, “Take thou authority.” This is the charge to those of us ordained to a ministry of word, sacrament, order, and service. We are empowered and authorized to take responsibility to nurture communities of love and forgiveness that do good and do no harm.
Amid an adaptive challenge the mandate is not to take thou authority, but rather to exceed though authority.
In our forthcoming book, Gardens in the Desert, Bishop Ken Carter and I dedicate an entire chapter to this idea calling for the church to embrace an adaptive ecclesiology.
Adaptive, refers to a trait that improves an organism’s fitness for survival and flourishing. Ecclesiology refers simply to the study of the church, but this can focus on the origins of Christianity, its relationship to Jesus, its role in salvation, its polity, its discipline, its eschatology, its nature, and its leadership.
In describing adaptive leadership as the “practice of mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges and thrive” Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky draw from evolutionary biology. They propose that successful adaptation has three characteristics:
1. It preserves the DNA essential for the species’ continued survival;
2. It discards (reregulates or rearranges) the DNA that no longer serves the species’ current needs;
3. It creates DNA arrangements that give the species’ the ability to flourish in new ways and in more challenging environments.[1]
Adaptive Leadership concerns an innate ability to adapt to diverse, chaotic, and complex environments, thereby assisting organizations and individuals in dealing with consequential changes in uncertain times, when no clear answers are forthcoming.[2] It involves a community of people traveling together through a state of disorientation into new possibilities.
Mark Lau Branson reminds us, that when a group faces an adaptive challenge, leadership must provide three things: (1) reality testing; (2) a reconsideration of values and priorities with clarity about trade-offs; and (3) an environment in which an increasing number of participants are mobilized for shaping new social arrangements.[3] Adaptive leaders must journey alongside a community, facilitating this process.
A large role of adaptive leadership is forming a fresh social imaginary that can remix meaning and practices while releasing the community to improvise, experiment, innovate, and cultivate new modes of thinking and being. This is not the top-down leadership model of the managerial era. This is not about controlling, owning, and fixing. This is the work of the people. It’s about learning, encouraging, supporting, and releasing.
Amid an epidemic of loneliness, where people like my little brother jam a needle in their arm to escape the aching isolation, the church needs to awaken from our apostolic amnesia, heal from our compassion fatigue, and exceed our authority.
Movements like Fresh Expressions are not waiting for institutional councils to make decisions that trickle down to the local church. We are actively cultivating little pockets of communal life in Jesus in the everyday rhythms and spaces of life.
Those communities are fragile, like the little colorful umbrellas depicted in the series poster above. But every day, we see people find hope and healing in these little communities, and we believe slowly they will transfigure our society in good ways. They fill the compassion gap with love.
Perhaps what seems like a crisis of erosion and decline is a hopeful transformation. Those of us inhabiting denominational systems have an opportunity to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, exceeding our authority amid the flawed structures to forge eternal friendships (Luke 16:9).
The Methodist tradition provides, historically speaking, a more recent example of “exceeding authority” in the liminality of an adaptive challenge. I want to explore practical insights we can utilize from the adaptive leadership of early Methodists in my next post. Stay tuned!
[1] Heifetz, Ronald A., Alexander Grashow, and Martin Linsky. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World (Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Press, 2009), 14.
[2] Branson, Mark Lau. "Interpretive leadership during social dislocation: Jeremiah and social imaginary." Journal Of Religious Leadership 8, no. 1: 27-48 (2009): 29.
[3] Branson, 29.
Excellent.