The Politics of Ministry: Navigating Power Dynamics and Negotiating Interests

340 Pages·2019·2.742 MB·English

by  Bob Burns, Tasha Chapman, Donald Guthrie

Contents
Foreword by Steven Garber
Introduction
1 Three Ministry Stories
2 The Four Dynamics of Politics
3 Power in Ministry Politics
4 The Branches and Roots of Interests
5 Personal Interests
6 Organizational Interests
7 Societal Interests
8 Negotiation, Power, and Interests
9 Negotiation in Cell Four
10 Ethical Issues in the Politics of Ministry
11 Tom Moves into a Political Struggle: A Final Case Study
Postscript: How People Learn the Politics of Ministry
Acknowledgments
Appendix 1: Emotions Checklist
Appendix 2: Constructing and Exploring a Family Diagram
Notes
Praise for The Politics of Ministry
About the Authors
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Foreword
Steven Garber
Just politics.
A long time ago now, I spent years teaching on Capitol Hill, year by
year drawing very motivated students into the corridors of the glory and
shame that is Washington, DC. We asked a lot of them, pressing them into
an intellectual and moral seriousness, about what they believed and why
they believed it, particularly focused on the nature of public responsibility
in a pluralizing, secularizing, and globalizing world.
The first essay I wrote in my tenure there as a senior member of the
faculty was simply titled “Just Politics.” Playing off of the cynical view that
many have of political life—“That’s just politics!”—thereby distancing
themselves from any relationship with and responsibility for the question at
hand. I reflected on our propensity to see the sorrows and strains of the
Washington, DCs, of history as windows into the corruption that is inherent
in politics. Why care? Of course we shouldn’t, because it is always and only
“just politics” after all.
But that didn’t seem enough for me. During my boyhood summers,
when I traveled the mountain passes of Colorado with my grandfather,
whose lifelong work was cattle buying, he would quiz me, expecting me to
know about our nation and world. In my undergraduate years, the faculty of
my college gave me the award for “the student most committed to political
responsibility.” So, from earliest days, I have believed that somehow,
difficult as it often is, impossible as it sometimes feels, politics matters—
that vocations in the public squares of history are worthy of our hopes and
dreams because the hard work of politics is finally our work together for the
flourishing of all. Even when we know that making peace with proximate
justice must be done if we are to keep on keeping on as citizens. We yearn
for things to be as they ought to be, in our very bones dissatisfied with the
lies and deceptions, the greed and malice that too often marks what we
know as “politics.” Simply said, to believe in and work for just politics is an
ambition that should draw all of us together because our common good
depends on it.
That is as true of public life in the push and shove of politics—local,
national, global—as it is of congregational life in the church. Politics then
becomes something that is ours together, a way of thinking and living that
accounts for the demands of a common life. In this very good book, The
Politics of Ministry, the authors argue that “politics is the art of getting
things done with others.” To see it that way is to return to the older, wiser,
deeper understanding of the polis and what it means for who we are and
how we live. We are in this together, human beings that we are.
In the inimitable words of author and cultural critic Wendell Berry,
offered through the colloquial wisdom of his character Burley Coulter, “The
way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The
difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and
who don’t.” That is as true of our membership in communities like Berry’s
Port William as it is of the cities and states of our lives—and of the
communities and churches that make us, us. We are members of each other.
And yet, so very often we don’t feel like it; perhaps sometimes we don’t
want to be “members of each other.” For most of us the more we know of
the world, the harder it is to love the world; and the more we know of each
other, the harder it is to love each other. We would rather not, for a thousand
different reasons. Psychologically and sociologically, we stumble over our
humanness, longing for intimacy but afraid of intimacy, hoping for
community but afraid of community. In the remarkably prescient words of
Sherry Turkle, professor at MIT whose work focuses on the social ecology
of our technological society, we are “alone together,” connected to everyone
everywhere. But because of the fears implicit in being known by each other
and knowing more of each other, we choose our aloneness instead, feeling
overwhelmed by the responsibility of knowledge.
It is here where the authors offer rare insight, skilled physicians of the
soul of the church that they are, inviting us to learn over their shoulders and
through their hearts from their practiced insights into why we often stumble
over each other—and why that is not inevitable. Complex and
comprehensive, wise and nuanced, together they represent years of
experience in organizations and institutions that are necessarily political,
where “getting things done together” is the name of the game. Rather than
the despair of “that’s just (the politics of) the church!,” their life together
has brought them into a common calling of caring for the health of the
church.
There is nothing romanticized here. They have each spent too long in
the church, too long embedded in more communal and corporate life, to
offer anything other than a holy realecclesiastik for all with ears to hear.
Written into their study are the realities of power, interests, negotiation, and
ethics, four dynamics woven into every family, every church, every
business, every school, every seminary, and every state. But if we are to
find our way to the redemption of the necessarily political character of our
common life, we have to understand them—power, interests, negotiation,
and the ethical implications—and we must steward them for the sake of all.
We destroy ourselves, and each other when we pretend that we are anything
other than “members of each other” with responsibilities for each other.
In Stanley Hauerwas’s essay “The Story-Formed Community,” a
playfully profound study of the novel Watership Down, he theologically
reflects on the ways that stories shape us, especially the ways that they
shape us in and through our communities. After stating his ten theses for the
reform of Christian social ethics, then developing a fascinating study of the
moral complexities of the rabbit communities whose story it is—full of
fractiousness and contention, hope and longing—he concludes hopefully,
“We could form our lives together by trusting in truth and love to banish the
fears that create enmity and discord.” Who are we? How will we live? The
questions and the answers are so basic to a good life and to a good society.
Hauerwas’s long interest in character as central to our identity is
communally embodied in the common life of rabbits, which might seem to
be so different, and yet so it is so similar to ours, human beings that we are.
What is given to us in The Politics of Ministry is a way forward, moving
beyond the worn-down cynicism born of our life together in the church.
With the wisdom of hard-won scholarship about organizational life and
leadership, twined together with pastoral hearts long offered to God and his
people, Bob Burns, Tasha Chapman, and Don Guthrie are teachers to us all,
at least to anyone who has been burdened by the weight of one more
experience of “that’s just politics!”—feeling as if faith and hope and love
are words emptied of any existential meaning, words without flesh. Instead,
they have labored in love together for our sake, for the church’s sake, for
Christ’s sake, believing that the redemption of the politics of ministry is
both possible and plausible. May it be so.