mgpcpastor's blog

A month or so ago a small group tried to work out what was structurally wrong with the Presbyterian Church of Australia.
I think I tried to point out that the PCA is structurally functioning just as it was designed to, as a ‘weak’ national body that is subject to the parochial concerns of the state churches. That’s the reason why the ‘Presbyterian Church of Australia’ has no agenda to plant local churches. It was never meant to.
(Many local churches were, and are, being planted by other local churches and by state bodies, by the way.)
It’s not that the PCA’s structure is a problem, it’s that it’s present goals and priorities would need change so that structural and relational change can flow.
How does this happen?
John Armstrong identifies a common observation applied to different circumstances:

I have heard it said over and over, from conservatives and liberals (theological and political): “The system is broken and we must fix it!” Or, “The government is broken so we should fix it.” From pastors and lay leaders I hear: “The church is broken so we surely should fix it.” Or parents and children: “Our family is broken so how do we fix it?”

He provides the following quote as the basis for his analysis of that contention:

There is a myth that drives many change initiatives into the ground: that the organization needs to change because it is broken. The reality is that any social system (including an organization or a country or a family) is the way it is because the people in that system (at least those individuals and factions with the most leverage) want it that way. In that sense, on the whole, on balance, the system is working fine, even though it may appear to be “dysfunctional” in some respects to some members and outside observers, and even though it faces danger just over the horizon. As our colleague Jeff Lawrence poignantly says, “There is no such thing as a dysfunctional organization, because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it currently gets” (The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, Marty Linsky. Harvard Business Press, 2009).

The quote is interesting because it poses the idea of why change is so difficult to bring about organically in a group if the outcome that the change will bring is not owned by all who are part of the group.
Implicit in that is the need to acknowledge what will be lost because of the change and to allow appropriate grief (or even repentance) to take place.
It’s important when addressing church situations (family situations, personal situations) that are a pretty low ebb, that everyone has to acknowledge that they arrived in their present situation precisely by following their present path. That’s hard to do when their present location feels like a place of pain and defeat, but it is helpful because it serves to reinforce the truth that God’s blessing and our own thoughtfulness and sound planning are not alien concepts.
It is also why subversive change will often result in revolution and division and why many change agents will often find themselves working outside existing groupings unless the group has mechanisms to examine its goals and relational processes.
It is best to think about what you want your goal to be and work out a group (or individual) dynamic which you think will move you toward that goal instead of identifying an attractive dynamic and then seeing where that takes you.