When the going gets tough

a thought about curiosity and governance

I had a great conversation the other day with a colleague about the work I’ve been doing with a couple of congregations. I said that I’d been learning a lot about the practical application of policy governance and how it’s helping me continue to shape thoughts about agility and the future of religious organizations.

My colleague paused, and then said, “you don’t have to answer right now, but how do we develop that kind of curiosity in our congregations? How is it that you developed that skill?”

I hardly paused because I knew the answer. “I learned it from my father,” I replied. I continued to tell my colleague about how our living room doubled as a library, with bookshelves lining the walls, filled with reference books, encyclopedias, and myriad texts from the humanities, sciences, poetry, and prose. And any time a question came up, Dad would say “look it up.” And off I’d trot to the living room, often lost for hours as one fact led to another question, which led to more research. I learned in those moments how to connect a question about the American Revolution to the ancient Greeks to the development of mathematics to musical notation. I saw the ways in which everything references something else, and how we can look at a tree and see the human mind.

But I digress.

My point is this: working with a congregation that seems to be doing a really good job of keeping relational while doing policy governance has sparked my curiosity, especially when it comes to thinking about systems and congregational polity and the church of the immediate future. And that’s because instead of looking at these systems that exist and getting frustrated with the roadblocks, and instead of changing them just suffering with them (or leaving, or blaming others)… What if we turned to a sense of wonder and curiosity?

Quaker author Parker Palmer talks about this in terms of small group ministries and circles of trust: “When the going gets tough, turn to wonder” he writes in A Hidden Wholeness. Parker asks us to turn to our inner teachers when something makes us angry or uncomfortable or defensive, wondering ‘why this is spark something in me’ and ‘what is it about’ instead of shutting down or lashing out.

And I think we need to do the same thing on the institutional scale. This thing isn’t working - why does this spark controversy or struggle? What is it about? And then, what can we do about it? Do we complain and invite misery, or do we get curious about what the history is, what purpose it serves, and what we might do differently right now?

When we allow our curiosity to flourish, we look for new ideas, we get radical in our research, we see how the things we hold on to “because we’ve always done it this way” are holding us back from being agile.

Look. We know that the religious landscape is changing, and our congregations need different things. The people who need us the most don’t need our pre-pandemic selves, they need places that are answering today’s needs, today’s financial, political, demographic landscapes. They need us to be able let go of the systems that keep us in place, keep us from taking a chance, keep us from being who we want to be.

If you’re not curious about whether we can do better, whether what we have now is still working, then get curious. See where your curiosity will take you. Not every idea you encounter will be a good one, but you’ll begin seeing connections and possibilities.

(Also, you may find yourself learning about obscure language groups which will then connect to a makeup brand, but that’s what happens sometimes.)