Leadership Lessons from the Minnesota State Fair
So, if you aren’t from my fair state, you need a little background. The Minnesota State Fair is a behemoth- last year, about 1 in 3 state residents attended. It has everything you can imagine- rides, games, music. All the labor unions and politicians set up their booths, all the TV stations are there, the newspapers. It’s a blast. And it drips with sentimentality for a bygone age.
That’s what struck me this year. That basically, there was a time when this was really an important public function. Of course, on one hand, it is- it gives Minnesotans a sense of place, identity, and cohesion. But in a practical sense, it’s 90% just for fun and sentiment. It isn’t really a place where significant public discourse takes place, or where people find out the latest happenings from around the state. But it seems that at one point it actually was.
I just can’t get over the rate of change in our culture. I posted about it a few days ago, and it keeps rolling around in my head. Think about it- 100 years ago there was no TV, few phones, no internet, few cars. Churches that now seem either quaint or outdated were in their heyday- a heyday that would last for a while. The Pentecostal movement was barely germinating, and radio was just getting off the ground. Hot issues in the church might have included card playing, mixed bathing, public dancing, and theater attendance. There was no such thing as a debate over women in ministry, the megachurch movement, or gay marriage. 10 years ago Yahoo was the hottest thing on the internet and 5 years ago taking out sketchy mortgages seemed like a really good idea.
How should the rate of social change influence how we think about ministry and leadership? Gosh darn it if I know. I was at a conference recently and spoke to a long-time mentor of mine who is in her 60s now. Much of the conference had revolved around responding to rapid change. When I asked her what she thought of the conference, she just said two words, “I’m scared.” She didn’t mean it in a bad way, she was just being honest. Sometimes it seems we have to rewrite the game plan of leadership every six months.
I think of three helpful responses, but heck, maybe they’ll change in six months.
First, never hold on to the past. Hold on to truth, hold on to God, hold on to people, but not the past. It can’t help you. It’s already over.
Second, always learn from the past. It’s not there to be preserved, it’s there to be understood. I was a history major, and I still find studying history one of the most helpful practices for understanding the present and the future.
Third, figure out what your knee jerk response to change is. Are you stodgy? Are you an early adopter, or a late adopter? Do you throw yourself into change quickly- maybe too quickly? Understanding our instinctive response can help us make more critical assessment of how to move forward.
What do you think? How do you respond to change?
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With anxiety, potentially frustration, and almost certainly avoidance. What else?
It depends on whether, how, and to what extent the change requires *me* to change, I suppose.
). If you haven’t looked into the “Intercultural Development Inventory,” you should look it up or talk with someone from Bethel Sem (Dan Jass, Steve Sandage, or Mark Harden would be good). They give it to BSem students. They also say that amount or lack of interaction/experience with diversity/the other (i.e., life in the bubble) is the largest factor in where people fall on the continuum, if I recall.
This connects with diversity, which you hit nicely in the sermon yesterday. Engaging the other requires some effort. And it creates some anxiety, whether known or unbenounced to us. We somewhat automatically think “What’s different is dangerous” and “What’s different is dumb,” when, really, the truth is that “What’s different is difficult.” Encountering the other is an exercise in change, and we typically either avoid (“minimization,” e.g., “We don’t think of you as Chinese, Q.”) or try to assimilation/eliminate/conquer (“What’s different is destructible.” Some pastoral alliteration for you here.
Oh, and I can’t help but wonder how much the “digital revolution” amidst this “information age” is contributing to the rate of change these days. There’s a lot of acceleration, I think.
I think you hit it on the head with the anxiety idea. The lense through which I have started to see a lot of issues is underlying anxiety in people and institutions. I had a refreshingly honest conversation with an older pastor recently in which he frankly admitted that he just really liked conservative evangelical culture for it’s own sake, and so he had a stake in maintaining it. I told him I felt like I had basically no stake in that culture surviving. Which, as I think about it, is probably an overstatement, but you catch the drift. Sorry for missing a few other of your thoutful comments, for some reason word press didn’t drop them to my email.
If you haven’t, you might take a serious glance at Peter Steinke’s book “How Your Church Family Works: Understanding Congregations as Emotional Systems” or Edwin Friedman’s “Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue.” They both apply Bowenian family systems theory (which centers around anxiety and its transmission in relationships) to the church family/congregation (a family of families). They apply the theory to both church members and leaders. Bethel’s MFT professors (Sandage et al.) are pretty partial to the theory and ground a decent amount of Bethel’s MFT program/instruction in it. Both books here can be pretty eye-opening, if not mind-blowing. Steinke’s book is much shorter. If you haven’t come across this stuff already anyway…