Small Wins and Being a Contribution

Institutional Change comes painfully and agonizingly slow. Institutions have a culture that is deeply inscribed in their everyday actions and communications. Sometimes this culture has a beneficial aspect, because culture acts as the binding aspect that holds that institution together and allows it to accomplish its vision and goals. Yet other times this culture has a detrimental affect, that while it benefits a few inside the culture, may bar the institution from continuing to thrive and accomplish what it sets out to do. Sometimes change may be the very thing an institution may need to survive, yet the culture is so deeply engrained that it will not be able to adapt.

Change does not always have to come about in large, immediate success. Many different sources talk about small victories, including Kouzes and Posner. The account of small victories that I found most compelling was Meyerson's example in Rocking the Boat, because of its incorporation of personal integrity against and in conjunction with organizations the most clearly. These small successes allow for momentum to shift from the ingrained culture to the necessary growth needed for survival and flourishing. The small succeses also allows for other people in that institution and part of that institutional culture to come on board; either as seeing small victories as a method of persusasion or through understanding the small victories as indicators that the overall change of culture will be possible.

The way to measure or recognize these small victories shouldn't be dependent upon an outside source for validation. In the very first day of class, Professor Dalton read to us from Zander and Zander's being a contribution. The Zanders suggest that instead of assessing through accomplishment, to instead look to "contribution." This is not an example of "Did I check off goals off of my list" but instead "how did what I do have meaning?" To me, contribution thinking is the first step toward small victories, because it allows for the proper perspective and positivity to recognize when small victories happened. Instead of assuming that the institution (that is resistant to change in the first place) will be the place of validation, it instead allows the person enacting the change to measure their success. While for perfectionists like myself this may seem like a difficult understanding, being a contribution allows the value for works in progress and self-reliance upon measuring and evaluating success.

What I have learned the most from this class is to trust my own self-assessment skills in how I appreciate my own ability to change institutions around me. I recognize when little things ease and this contribution, small victory outlook, allows me to celebrate when that little bit of culture is liberated and continue toward that large, necessary changes that are often needed inside an institution.

Who Then is My Customer?

The Well Known Crisis of a Mainline Protestant Church
The United Methodist Church (like many other mainline denominations) is in the middle of a crisis. Its church membership has halved from 12 million to 6 million people in the past 50 years. There are churches closing their doors and missions programs that are folding. Simply put, the United Methodist Church is not what it once was. If it is to remain a viable spiritual community in the future, then it must change.

Leadership and Change
This is a challenge and clearly a change in the church is required for its future. According to Kouzes and Posner, in The Leadership Challenge, strong leadership is needed for any kind of change to take place. When interviewing leaders who reflected upon what projects they most proud of, they discovered this consistent theme.

“Evident in the tone of almost all the personal-best stories is that leaders are people who seize the initiative with enthusiasm, determination, and a desire to make something happen. They embrace the challenge presented by the shifts in their industries or the new demands of the marketplace and commit themselves to creating exciting new possibilities that make a difference.”

Instead of fearing the challenge, the leaders embraced it as an opportunity to learn how to do new things and make their company more relevant to the world around them. Intriguingly, what appeared as the most reliable source of change was the need for better customer service. It was not the product that these companies created, but instead the way that they related internally and to each other.

The United Methodist Rebrand
I’ve been noticing a lot of rebranding for the United Methodist Church. Re-Think campaigns (which incidentally I first heard about from a Pagan friend who is a person in-the-know about marketing) that are happening online and on television. We’ve been trying to figure out ways that we can make our product of our church more attractive to the people we want in our doors.

The Good Samaritan
This past weekend, I preached off of the Good Samaritan parable, and so I've been sitting with the challenging framework for community that Jesus lays out. The parable is framed by a story about a lawyer trying to figure Jesus out --- and being a well trained lawyer, he is trying to put Jesus into a corner. Vocationally, Jesus is a teacher, and teachers tend not to simply give information when he can invite his student into thinking through a problem. When the lawyer asks, “Who then is my neighbor?” Jesus answers with the story of the Good Samaritan.

This parable has been something I have been meditating on for a few weeks. The two solutions that Jesus lists out are two entirely correct religious solutions. The Levite and the Priest must maintain ritual purity (something that cannot be done if they come into contact with blood) and so they sacrifice perhaps their own personal convictions to help someone in immediate need in order to maintain a correct relationship between their community and God. The Good Samaritan crosses ancient historical hatreds to help the bleeding and battered person in need. He risks his life and spends his money to help a stranger. This compassion is also “loving your neighbor as yourself.” We know where Jesus comes down on the issue of which person acted more correctly. I myself cannot sit so comfortably with assuming that I'd take the Good Samaritan's side. Nor am I certain that the church has taken that

Rebranding and the Good Samaritan
As I sit watching this rebranding campaign for the United Methodist Church I wonder who is our customer? Who does our advertising campaign try to reach out to?

The story of the Good Samaritan often seems to me to be one about exploding the circle of who we think is relevant and capable of acting with compassionate morality. I often see it as the Biblical Imperative insisting that we need to Think Outside the Box of the people who are normally inscribed as who is allowed to be inside the box.

Therefore the rebranding is our way of thinking outside the box right? Well. It’s a start. There is a TEDTalk that I often return to when I think about branding and who the product is selling to.

And while the topic of selling condoms may be slightly controversial in comparing it to the decline of the UMC, the general idea I get from it is widely applicable. Is our marketing appeasing the people who are worried about a cause or is it to actually convince people to use the product? Ending AIDS and saving the United Methodist church are two important causes in my book – and I wonder if we are falling into the same trap.

Are we selling ourselves to ourselves or are we selling to our actual customers?

Who then in our Customer?
The UMC needs to market to ourselves. We need to talk about who we have been, who we are, and where we think God is taking the church in the future. This marketing is an important way of starting that conversation for ourselves. We need to see ourselves as part of the good customer service the United Methodist Church offers.

Yet the question that the Good Samaritan asks of us is to stop seeing our religious life in conventional ways and understand that our customers are more than just who is already on the inside of the box. The more I have worked at First UMC of Los Angeles, the more I believe that the future of the United Methodist Church will not be monocultural or presenting one or two styles of worship. I believe it will engage in the complicated questions of justice for the world and call us to work outside of our church walls. Worship will become a place where we God is made real and our souls are restored, not merely a place where we are entertained. I think we need to be ready to start looking at the people who make us uncomfortable, and realize that they are the neighbor that we need to ask to be in relationship to our church. Yet I see this as an exciting opportunity. We get to not just rebrand, but reimagine our whole community. This is a great new opportunity to welcome the great diversity found in the children of God and see that as precisely where the United Methodist Church will begin.

This will take leadership, risk taking, and willingness to think outside the box. This is the great challenge of the United Methodist Church for this day.

This cartoon has been making its rounds on facebook the past week. Part of the reason is because facebook has changed its layout (which always creates a large amount of handwringing and consternation among its users) and because a persistent rumor about facebook charging money had been making its rounds. With candid humor this post explains the reasons why charging and frustration at changes are largely not a concern of facebook.

When I saw this, it really made me think about structures and people's participation in those structures. Many people in facebook see it as a tool in which they can get their message sent out to a broader range of people or a place they can keep up with many friends and relatives in the distance. They see facebook in the ways that they use it, but not in the ways that facebook is using them to make a profit and further its own needs. They see only half of the coin, the portion of facebook that they benefit from and can use; they do not see the ways in which the institution sustains itself.

In a rather cynical reflection, I wonder then why do we do leadership. Do we do this because we see the ways in which we can change an institution and our world? What is the other half of the coin? How then do institutions use us to sustain themselves?