AUDIO
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Phillip Jensen speaks on Anger as part of a series on emotions in the Christian life, delivered at the Australia Day Convention 2010
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There is a massive disconnect between many churches and their parish. How do we change that? There are lessons to learn from the military’s counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan (and Iraq). Company commanders are told their first task is to know their turf (or in our context - parish):
1. Know your turf. Know the people, the topography, economy, history, religion, and culture. Know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader, and ancient grievance. Your task is to become the world expert on your district. If you don’t know precisely where you will be operating, study the general area. Read the map like a book: Study it every night before sleep and redraw it from memory every morning until you understand its patterns intuitively. Develop a mental model of your area, a framework in which to fit every new piece of knowledge you acquire. Study handover notes from predecessors; better still, get in touch with the unit in theater and pick their leaders’ brains. In an ideal world, intelligence officers and area experts would brief you; however, this rarely happens, and even if it does, there is no substitute for personal mastery. Understand the broader area of influence, which can be a wide area, particularly when insurgents draw on global grievances. Share out aspects of the operational area among platoon leaders and noncommissioned officers; have each individual develop a personal specialization and brief the others. Neglect this knowledge, and it will kill you. (taken from 28 Articles: Fundamentals of Company Level Counterinsurgency by David Kilcullen)
Putting aside the politics of counterterrorism, we can apply some of these lessons about tactical leadership to the mission field. Newly deployed rectors could aim for the following:
- be the world expert on your parish - what do the people there love and hate? where do they shop? are the local schools growing or contracting? what minority groups are there? Talk to lots of people - how has the area changed? where do people travel to work?
- recognise the local church as the front line of mission. Churches face complex, rapidly changing situations, that need tactical leadership. You need to work out what will work in your mission field - answers will not come from lifting templates from what others have done or by waiting for someone to tell you how to reach the people entrusted to your care.
- don’t hide in your Baghdad-style Green Zone! You need to get out and mix with people. It is easy to build church like a Fortress without any connection to the local area - you can even grow churches like that. But that is not the same as winning the hearts and minds of locals - and that must be your mission. They will not come to you unless you first go to them.
Just to be clear: the analogy of war and ministry is banal if pushed too far - the differences are even more stark. But there are lessons here to learn.
Feature art courtesy of Wolfgang Wildner, Creative Commons licence
* one of the biggest problems the military faces is handover & short tours of duty compared to the length of counterinsurgency. We can have the same problem is rectors keep moving every few years - go early and stay long.
* another point of difference - we need to become local not just connect with locals.
to add, I remember reading stuff from ex-military types who says that churches and coporations are too slow in making decisions. they feel that they need to know all the information before they can act. In the military, most of the time, in an operation they don't have that luxury. A decision is better than no decision (as long as you're willing to change).
the other thought is that a new rector can be like a young officer in command. Don't know much about the field and so need to rely on the expertise and experience of the non-commissioned offciers. I often wonder whether new rectors do this enough.
But I think a bigger problem is the focus on church growth rather than engagement with the parish. Church growth may not represent kingdom growth within the parish at all - yet can take up so much of our time and energy. The analogy here is with the building up of enormous green zones that make people feel safe but serve to exclude locals. The better approach is to know the turf and get out there. And our locals mostly won't shoot at you;-)
They also did research on the town itself - where are the temples? what jobs do people do? where do people hang out? where do they shop? They met with local govt. officials, got a feel for the life of the town. Basically what your quote above suggested. So when the rest of the team came they already had an idea of where to live, how to meet people, where to rent an office, etc.
There is no need to just send in one couple first but it was helpful to have people with permission to just watch and make relationships without the pressure to immediately start something formal and then need to back-track later because they were in the wrong place or using the wrong approaches.
When you spend 18 waking hours a day living in the pockets of three hundred other people for months on end without a day off you develop a keen sense of what’s important and what is a petty, time-wasting distraction. Sharing a unity of purpose (with life and death implications for even the most basic decisions) mitigates self-centredness and pettiness. Why should a church community be any different? Surely we have a unity of purpose, and our message is all about life and death decisions. Yet we let ourselves get swamped by pettiness (too often disguised as championing doctrinal purity) and distracted by materialism and self-centredness. And I’m just as guilty of these things as anyone else
I am rebuked, challenged, and inspired by these insights