October 2005 archive

Theological Significance of Art

My wife is trained and practiced as an Art Historian. (She gets a small check every year for royalties on one of her writings.) We have a mess of friends who have gallery shows in Chicago, artists who work other jobs to get them by as they create. So it's probably not surprising that the topic of Art and its intersection with Christian faith come up quite a bit.

Protestant Christians have had an uneasy relationship with the arts since the get-go. The first American Protestants, our illustrious "pilgrims" or "puritans" of the northeast, came from an austere culture where churches were whitewashed and many artistic expressions were actively thought of as evil. You're not going to find the stage among these people. Even physical entertainments (sports) were suspicious. They were suspicious of the arts and entertainments but at least they were consistent.

The modern day Evangelical Christians of the U.S. have a different idea of entertainment. Entertainments produced by professing Evangelicals are more than acceptable, regardless of content, from music to movies to television to cooking books. We love entertainment, and its many pleasures.

But they're still suspicious of the arts.

My friend, D, tells the story of her days in undergrad in Iowa. She had initially come to university to later go to the mission field. But she found that painting could not be ignored. She decided to stay in the Arts complex, learning her craft. But she kept the fact that she was an artist quiet when with her Christian friends.

Her pastor's young wife asked her if she would babysit their two-year old one night. "He can do anything," she says, "but don't let him draw. We're trying to discourage him. We don't want him to become an artist."

The arts are OK as long whatever you create can be sold in the local Christian bookstore. You must redeem your creativity because of its inherent sinfulness. Words, whether creatively spoken or written, are okay as long as it's not plays or poetry. Novels seem to get by as long as there are specific places of "saying the prayer".

It doesn't have to be like this. Barnhart, admittedly a Catholic monk, describes the ancient way, a way in which the creativity of the Increate is reflected those who bear his image, like a glove bears the image of the hand.

Doctorow on "Low-Hanging Fruit"

When an MBA said "low-hanging fruit", he meant "easy pickings", something that could and should be snatched with minimal effort. But real low-hanging fruit ripens last, and should be therefore picked as late as possible. Further, picking the low-hanging fruit first meant that you'd have to carry your bushel basket higher and higher as the day wore on, which was plainly stupid. Low-hanging fruit was meant to be picked last.

[from Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, p 11-12]

Another reason why MBAs are morons. "Low-hanging fruit" always bothered me as a phrase because it didn't make much sense. Doctorow explains why it's stupid.

Now if we could get rid of the word "impact" used when they mean "affect". I've seen a large body "impact" the surface of another large body. It's rather destructive.

Southern Baptist Reaction to Rosa Parks

Michael Spencer recently asked, over at The Boar's Head Tavern, what was the actual response of the Southern Baptists to Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights movement. I used to think, like he evidently does, that the Southern Baptists were massively against civil rights for "coloreds". They may now be, and they were certainly against busing, but I think that the convention actually came out in support of civil rights at least within the 1950s and condemned Jim Crow laws. I'm not sure where I read this is the problem, so I will have to dig a bit. That's at the Convention level and not at the local congregation level. Conventions have always been different, of course, so the variance may be great.

I can't imagine that most current Southern Baptists would be all that happy to have Rosa Parks living next door. Or coming to church, except as a token.

Booklist: What's Up

Now on the table:

• Nisbet, Robert A. 1969. Social Change and History: Aspect of the Western Theory of Development. London: Oxford University Press. Yes, yes, the classic. I no longer remember it. Trinity wanted to use this as one of the texts in Social Theory, I think, but it has gone out of print. Thinking he was dead, I didn't go to graduate school.
• Colson, Charles (with Fickett). 2005. The Good Life: Seeking purpose, meaning, and truth in your life. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House. For obvious reasons. And it's quite good. There are some things missing but he always raises great points and I think in ways that even those who disagree with him (I am at times one) have to respect.
• Vanderburg, Willem H. 2005. Living in the Labyrinth of Technology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Dunno if I will finish this but early pass through looks promising. He uses Jaques Ellul's "technique" concept for the final kill.
• Hanson, Victor Davis. 2001. Carnage and Culture: Landmark battles and the rise of western power. New York: Doubleday. As an answer to many of the other books that would argue for more environmental reasons for western hegemony. Although I'm not sure where offensive realism would fall.
• Doctorow, Cory. 2005. Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. New York: Tom Doherty Associates. "A SCI FI ESSENTIAL BOOK" with the "Sci Fi" network logo, no less. Seems good so far.
• Dick, Philip K. 1955. A Handful of Darkness. Great Britain: Rich and Cowan. Nightstand reading.
• Dudik, Evan M. 2000. Strategic Renaissance: New Thinking and Innovative Tools to Create GREAT CORPORATE STRATEGIES using insights from History and Science. New York: AMACOM. Currently the book I must plow through. Finally, a strategy book that is worth reading because it is actually written at a strategic thinking level. Plus he demands testing and a null hypothesis. Which reminds me to read Popper.
• MacCulloch, Dairmaid. 2003. The Reformation: A history. New York: Viking. Surely setting a book on this in Garamond is not entirely appropriate. Time appropriate, maybe, but wasn't he a French Catholic? Hard to say what you could use, though, since the Germans didn't create a lot of typefaces that we still admire, excepting Guttenberg's types, which are unacceptable for modern reading. Maybe a Dutch typeface? I have no idea if I will make it through or if it will fall like the biography of Franklin (still halfway through after three years), but I really need to know more about this period. I'll try to follow it with understanding the Nixon administration.

"Abide In Me" Is A Statement, Not A Command

"I am the true vine
and my Father is the vinegrower.
He prunes away
every barren branch,
but the fruitful ones
he trims clean
to increase their yield.

You are clean already,
thanks to the word I have spoken to you.

Live on in me, as I do in you.
No more than a branch can bear fruit of itself
apart from the vine,
can you bear fruit
apart from me.

I am the vine, you are the branches.

He who lives in me and I am him,
will produce abuddantly,
for apart from me you can do nothing.
A man who does not live in me
is like a withered, rejected branch,
picked up to be thrown in the fire and burnt.
If you live in me,
and my words stay part of you,
you may ask what you will —
it will be done foryou.

My Father has been glorified
in your bearing much fruit
and becoming my disciples."

[John 15:1-8, NAB]

I have recently had to reconsider this passage. I have always read it thusly:

I am the vine, you are the branches. If you don't keep abiding in me, you're going to get it. If you abide in me, you're going to bear fruit. If you're not bearing fruit, you must not be abiding in me so you're going to get it.

I'm pretty sure now that this is not what Jesus is saying.

On Pianos and Praise Teams

Those of you who are going to write me and say that traditional worship doesnâ??t do a thing for you need to hear the following sentence: Other than the Gospel, I donâ??t care what you get out of visiting a church. You, and your (or my) preferences and entertainment choices, are not the point. Including you is one thing. Catering to you is another.

Michael Spencer of The Internet Monk — he of the sometimes infuriating, often inspiring and always interesting — has a recent post how the rise of the Praise Team has led to a decline in the ability of small churches to "do church" (my term) and the ability of any church to have intergenerational worship.

Confession: The PowerPoint Church doesn't have a praise team. We have a band. It's basically a garage band. They're actually pretty good. We all have a rocking time singing hymns, sometimes to new tunes, often simply arranged pretty well. Nothing like sitting in front of old-line Dutch CRC belting out the parts to "How Great Thou Art".

But I'm not a major fan of most praise teams. I like our band for the same reason that I like any music: the musicians do a competent job and are willing to take risks incorporating a variety of musical styles, although I still can't get them to do the mountain-style worship that my kinfolk got me used to. But most of them are pretty nasty things.

Of course, most of the old choir-piano operations are nasty things. And that's where I will disagree with Rev. Spencer, if only slightly.

Jaques on Treating Parishioners As Customers

Elliott Jaques does actually address church organization in several points. I refer you to John Morgan's doctoral dissertation ("") and his book, Leadership Horsepower (forthcoming), for more.

[T]here is a tendency to think of the organization of the clergy in bureaucratic manager-subordinate terms. This view fails to take into account that a chruch is an association and that the clergy are members of the church, and not merely its employees. Once the clergy become regarded as employees within a manager-subordinate bureaucracy, the congregation come to be regarded as the customers. The sacred relationship between clergy and laity will be completely lost.

The clergy have a difficult position. In today's Evangelical Christianity, they must be entrepreneurial, creating or growing their congregation in order to stay in work. If they are church planters, they are creating a community that they then, in some way, belong to. This creates a tension: the pastor must be able to create the containter for the community but he must also participate in it; however, because he (or she, in some congregations) must hold the container, it can't be big enough to fully contain him.

Often, Evangelical organizations have solved this problem by having the pastor keep himself outside the community. He would keep his life separate from them, his struggles separate, his successes separate. It has problems.

An edgier and more traditional way is to live in community with some form of showing up emotionally. Not just leading but living.

Traditional church organizations, with their "hierarchies", mitigate this to some degree. Jaques points out the churh's history:

Jaques on Why You Gave Up Looking For Work

Okay, so I'm getting my notes in order today. Here's another interesting point from Elliott Jaques's A General Theory of Bureaucracy (Halsted Press, 1976), this time on underemployment.

Jaques described underemployment as working in a role that requires less than your fullest work capability at its most demanding point. All work roles have some form of boredom in them, some tedious tasks that you must get done. However, some overall goal or largest goal should stretch you to your fullest extent or close to it.

Also, we should differentiate between your current work capacity and your current work capability. Capacity is the size of your container. Capability how much you actually fill your capacity. People who are either normal in growth trajectory (Mode-3 or less) or slightly more (Modes-4 and -5) often have capability that closely matches their capability. The higher-potentials (Mode-6 and above) have a problem: their capacity grows faster than they can fill it. Even later in life, they will never have their capability match their capacity. See one of my previous Jaques quotations for more on this.

Of course, it is statistically improbable that there are very many Modes-6 through -8 in the United States. Except that I have several in my network. But that's statistically impossible, of course, because they don't exist.

So let's return to Jaques and his points on underemployment.

"The first and outstanding feature of under-employment is boredom", he writes (183). If you have ever had to work a job that was too small for you, you understand this point. If you haven't, chances are that you will think that Jaques doesn't know what he is talking about. Normal Mode individuals often take this line, as their worklives have rarely been marked by boredom and monotony to the extent that a higher-potential individual's has.

Jaques continues:

Jaques on Why You Want Your Church To Grow

It is the so-called 'young and dynamic group' which will seek ways of extending the activities of the association, and will be growth-minded. Their philosophy will be that growth is good, that growth is essential for survival, that an enterprise either grows or it decays. What they will be unaware of is how much their rough and ready economic theory of the enterprise is but a reflection of their own growing capacities and a seeking to express that growth.

[General Theory, 1976, pp. 167]

Jaques was writing about corporate organizations at this point, not religious ones. However, the desire for more responsibility and requirements for bigger accomplishments to excite you comes in churches the same way.

The younger set doesn't always want to grow. But it is often them because they are still growing. The more innovative the youngsters are (proxying for Mode), the more they will want the church to grow.

Jaques showed that many persons stop growing during their life: they naturally plateau at a certain age, depending upon their Mode. (Mode equals the trajectory path of their mental growth as measured by work capacity.) Higher trajectory (higher potential or higher "Mode") persons will want the organization to grow so that they aren't bored.

Jaques on "Leaking" Your Future Potential

From Elliott Jaques, A General Theory of Bureaucracy, Haltsted Press (New York: 1976), pp. 166.

But what can be said about the nature of the potential Str-5 capacity when the person is still working at, say, Str-3? The potential is there. But the full capacity has not emerged. If his performance is compared with that of another manager, B, much older but at the same current level of work, the following will be noted: the older man will produce a more rounded and reliable performance and will be more experienced in coping with a wide range of eventualities; the younger man will be less to be relied upon in various emergencies and will require more frequent direct supervision — but he will also be inclined to think up new ideas, to be innovative, to push for new developments and to welcome new methods, although some of his ideas may still be a bit wild and his proposals lacking in control.

The younger but higher potential person will not perform at the same consistency as the older person who is at the same worklevel. This is why the older person is more respected and dislikes the younger one. The younger one is more capable of creating new ideas and working with new ways.

This is on the Mode-5 currently with capacity and role of Str-3. Now imagine how this gets even worse or more pronounced with a Mode-8 at Str-3 role and Str-5 capacity. Or a Mode-7 working a Str-2 job with Str-4 capacity. And remember that current capacity and capability don't always match, especially for higher-mode individuals.

Jaques touches on this in the same page:

Implementing Strategy at the Right Level: Sustained Double-Digit Growth At Specialty Chemicals Co.

This is an article that I'm writing for someone else. But I figured that I would publish it here, too. Enjoy.

And he really did get double-digit growth from a company with a seven year average of 0.2%. He's also a swell guy.

[ Continue reading "Implementing Strategy at the Right Level: Sustained Double-Digit Growth At Specialty Chemicals Co." ]

Strategy, Structure, People, Milieu and Markets: The Dangerous Interplay

I have been writing up case studies for one of the organizational development areas that I am interested in. One of the fascinating things was that each emphasized the need to get your strategy working correctly first. I began to write this (and even got a good way into it) with that assumption: you start with Strategy which leads to what your Structure you need, which in turn determines who you need where. "Social Milieu" takes the place of what I normally call "culture", but I wanted it to be clear that I meant the culture in which you live, not the subculture of your corporation or site.

Except that it doesn't really work that way. Markets, strategy, structure, social milieu and people work in linear ways, but it depends upon your current situation. To be frank, the interact on each other not consequently but concurrently, creating a chaotic churn. You have to balance all of them at once. You don't have the luxury of concentrating on only one, although you may focus the majority of your energy on one.

And I'm using "milieu" rather than "culture" to make clear that I refer to the culture of the greater society, not simply one's work subculture.

I should say that I'm using "strategy" to mean the first treatment of "how to" of the overall business objectives for the corporation. I acknowledge that often "strategy" and "tactics" are relative: your boss's tactics should be your strategy, if you see. "Markets" include customers, customer behaviours, the various elements that make up the marketplace for your products, competitors and the rules of competition. It does not include The Markets, as in "TheMarkets.com". "Structure" is includes not only who reports to whom, but which silos are important. And even what groups are considered silos and how professional services at the corporate level are organized. For RO folks, it includes more than simply getting the reporting relationships right, although that makes a big part of it. "People" includes the actual persons employed by the corporation and their specific knowledge and skills. For example, you may have a researcher who leads your industry. It would also include your People practices, such as training and development. Advancement opportunities would be treated under "structure".

So let's start with Strategy.

PowerPoint Church Heads For Church Death

I'm not sure that I've published this before, but it looks like the PowerPoint Church will go belly-up by year's end. Merry Christmas to us.

A lot of it probably comes down to mistakes and mismanagement. It's easy to see them in hindsight, of course. One of our biggest mistakes was in not attracting people who have decent jobs. Hard as it is to believe, L and I are actually not at the bottom of the church. The battered women have it worse than we do, easy. As do the mentally ill. And of course college students and small children aren't people you can can count on to help you pay the bills.

But it sucks to lose yet another thing. Time to move to India, I suppose.

IBM's Perna on the Importance of People

eWeek interviewd IBM's Janet Perna as she retires this month ("Interview: IBM's Perna Predicts Changes in What 'Data' Means"). She's been with the company for 31 years, and in that time became one of the leading forces behind databases. Her closing comments about what she is really proud of is interesting and worth hearing.

Despair or Destruction: "Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly"

More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. — from "My Speech To The Graduates" in Woody Allen, Side Effects, 1980.

Again at the South Bend Chocolate Factory cafe here in the beautiful North End. We've been having some rotten growth, making our town more apartments than anything else. Because of some probably shady dealing, our town has a high a percentage of renters as Gary does. That can't be good news.

But here by the courthouse, it's hard to see.

Some of the kids live down here, over across the tracks. We have three tracks that cut through our town: the joy of being so close to Lake Michigan. If the politicos have their way — and God grant that they will — we'll have another coming in somewhere for the new train station and another set of tracks. At least I think that's what they want to do. There's a rail right of way that's been Rails To Trails-ed, so they may use that. I wonder if homeowners on those understand that the railway can reconvert for use when needed.

Anyway, the places between the two southern tracks are part of the "other side of town" here. A good bit of the kids I work with live over there. They are old houses, fairly well used. I'm sure that there's more than a bit of soot in them from the days when all trains went through Chicago. I find it a bit lonely over there. Not many houses. Mostly industrial nowadays. Not that we have that much industry either. You know the type of places with heaps of old wood, or gravel or slag or stuff.

Drinking to Forget

Michael Bates (of BatesLine fame) has reminded me of a passage from Proverbs that I've been meaning to hunt down:

Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more. [31:6-7, KJV]

It's one of those weird bible statements that is something most evangelical Christians would not want said in church and true. Bates calls it a "grace [of forgetfulness] in liquid form".

New LLJC Logos for the PowerPoint Church students!

The kids gave the youth group a name: LLJC. (It means whatever they tell you it means, but you can start with "Loving Life in Jesus Christ" but that wasn't how we got it.) Lolo came up with that, with a small addition from Dori. Excellent work, I think.

So now we call it LLJC and not youth group. For whatever reason. I suggested "Petey" but it didn't fly.

I put together a few test logos for them. We ended up having two, one for girls and one for boys. Although we may also have one for "coaches". I prefer "Sensei" but it didn't fly either.

So here they are:

Congrats to Elise H.!

My young pal, Elise H., was elected Senior Class President over at St John's International School in Brussels. (I think that the school may actually be in Waterloo, that hell-hole of euros and yanks, but why bother?)

Congratulations, Elise!

She is the first young woman to be elected Senior Class President (and thereby school president, also) in over a decade. Her speech impressed her normally jealous younger sister so that she apparently SMSed her immediately afterwards with a "Wow!"