How do we adapt adrienne maree brown‘s emergent strategy book in a church or non-profit context? To explore this, I’ll be walking through nine principles of emergent strategy. (2/9)
I’ve been teaching about culture change for well over twenty-five years and I’ve noticed a distinct shift in the past few. My conversations have gone from trying to convince people that life has changed to a more tired but proactive posture that both acknowledges change and responds.
Change truly is constant. There is no place to go back to, no place of comfort to which we can return. If change is constant, then we must shift our relationship to change. We are not trying to find the “next thing” to do, the next program that will help people engage, the next study to help people connect with God, the next way to organize. Rather, we must start to respond to what we see in the “here and now” and put systems in place that will regularly reflect on the change. Instead of static systems that create hierarchies and clear returns, we must create a culture that sees the culture as change and operates like water – moving with the changes that emerge on a regular basis.
The Christian scriptures are full of anecdotes of Jesus telling stories with metaphors from the land. While they might not use water, as brown’s quote does, Jesus’s stories of sowing seeds, cultivating conditions, tending what emerges, and allowing the cycles of life and death to flow calls followers to expect change. We look for conditions, we examine the weather and soil, we discern what needs to be done next, and we reflect on what happens. In it, the miracle of life emerges, and has always emerged, in both seasons of plenty and seasons of want, even in the church throughout the years.
“change is constant. be like water.” reminds us to live expectantly, to notice change, to respond to it, to “be like water.” Even in the church.
holly rankin zaher 