It’s a phrase I’ve heard many times over the years. It’s always mentioned when there is some conflict in a church. When the congregation splits or is in the midst of debating a heated issue. It’s almost always directed towards the session, quite often towards presbytery. It’s almost always worded something like this: “I didn’t realize they (presbytery or session) made that decision. It was done in secret.”
In secret.
That’s the most absurd phrase to use in a Presbyterian context. Absurd because our polity and structure are designed to protect us from secrecy—an open ended democracy, by the presbyters, for the presbyters. And yet I hear the phrase constantly as those very same presbyters call to share seemingly arbitrary decisions made by their session or presbytery.
And I get it: some place along the way we lost the presbyter. To quote an old joke: democracy would work if we could keep the voter out of it. I’m a perfect example of the problem: I’m a pretty good board member, grasp issues fairly well, but a lousy constituent leader. I’m probably the worst church elder ever—I don’t always have the time to call my district, chat with folks, keep up to date with their pastoral needs, share with them session issues. That’s part of my role as an elder; not just to make decisions. Which without communication are seemingly made in secret.
Communication.
Bill Fellows, whom I interviewed for my April story on leadership, worked internationally as a senior manager. In the guidelines he prepared for the leadership forum he talks about communication as a central focus: do it every way you can, in every way you can. Use the newsletter, use the announcement period during worship, use the pulpit if necessary, use the coffee hour. Get on the phone. Talk to people. Do Q&As; publish Q&As. Tell the same story over and over and over and over again.
Or as I often ask: why does McDonald’s need to advertise? Or Coca Cola? And why do they need to come up with new marketing ideas for the same products over and over and over again? Why new gimmicks, new toys, new jingles? Why?
Communication.
McDonald’s and Coke have thingamajigs to sell. We have the Good News to share—and our reticence to do just that was exposed last month in the Natural Church Development survey published in these pages. Presbyterians have lost touch with their evangelical roots. That, by the way, is the Christian word for communication: Evangelism. Sharing your story.
We are called to share our story and it is in periods of trial that our evangelical efficacy is exposed. If we can’t manage to share our story details within a congregation over an important issue then someplace the whole communication system has broken down. I’ve been on both sides of this and I understand: I wasn’t in church that one Sunday when the issue was announced and I missed the newsletter because of some other reason, but nobody called me to tell me about this congregational issue, or they did call and they didn’t leave a message, or they did call and left a message but on my home phone which no working person answers anymore except on weekends, what with our BBerrys and work numbers, and I didn’t get an email on it, which is the best way to reach me because all of my email addys are forwarded to my BBerry and I’ve said so many times and there was nothing on the church’s website or the Facebook page … and so on.
That’s why McDonald’s tries to reach me any way they can. That’s why they keep changing their pitch so their call doesn’t become white noise to me. That’s what evangelism is: telling the same story over and over again, in different ways, at different pitches. Its how we keep ourselves from falling into the dangers of secrecy—Coca Cola can’t afford to keep its thingamajig secret otherwise the whole enterprise falls apart.
And that’s the same danger in churches. I can think of a half dozen stories in which the great schism a congregation caused itself could have been avoided with a little communication. Which is a fancy word for people talking—that’s all it is. Which is all it is—just folks talking to each other. And though we Presbyterians love to chit-chat, we seem to have misplaced our communications gene. And, that’s why a lot of what happens in our church, from sea to sea to sea, seems to happen in secret.
