…or, ‘The Upside of Tension’.

A few weeks ago, I was at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit along with some members of the Dock Dream Team (the people who keep feeding big exciting ideas into The Dock’s onward progress!)  Susan and I were just back from holidays, and many of the team had made big sacrifices in busy schedules to be there, so when we saw that one session was called ‘The Upside of Tension’, we all rolled our eyes and thought “huh, no up side that I can think of…”

As it turned out, that one session contained one of those life-alteringly profound (yet brilliantly simple) insights that just keeps coming back to mind as we try to work out the ‘Shared Medley’.  The speaker, Andy Stanley, described how he noticed some arguments coming up again and again in his church staff meetings, and how some staff members would fall out and become deeply discontented because of these ongoing disputes.  As an example, he described how some of his team would urge that the focus on the church was on building up its existing members, while others were equally convinced that the focus should be on newcomers.  (if you’re involved with a church, I bet you can think of a few more examples – those old battles that keep rearing their heads time and again).

Stanley’s great insight was to spot that these weren’t ‘problems that had to be solved, but tensions that had to be managed’.  He encouraged his staff to see the situation not as win/lose (because if one side “won”, their opponents would be hurt, disenfranchised and discouraged) but as an ongoing conversation in which creativity sprang from managing the tension.  His team were encouraged to argue their case with all their passion, but then at the end of the conversation, to accept the solution with all its potential imperfections.

He noticed that when the team could work in this way, creativity blossomed, as his staff found new and imaginative ways to manage the tension – solutions which would never have occurred if one team member had things all their own way.  And he encouraged his team to be patient, accepting and forgiving with each other when the conversation got heated – and to finish, almost as a liturgy, by saying together: “This isn’t a problem we’re going to solve – it’s a tension we’ll just have to manage…”

To me it all speaks very powerfully to the idea of the Shared Medley – the hope that different Christian denominations will work together as part of one network.  Why do we have so many different church buildings, different denominations, different breakaway groups throughout the province? What is the root of our inability to work together?

Surely there’s something grown-up about the ability to cope when things aren’t exactly as we would like them, when the solution isn’t our own personal Plan A.  And surely the people of God should be modelling that kind of maturity as part of living out our faith.  So I guess the first ‘Boat Rule’ of Dock living could be that simple challenge:

Or (all together now): “I guess that’s not a problem we can solve – it’s a tension we’ll just have to manage”.