Working with the good folks of my congregation, I called our leaders to think about the importance of tending to issues of trust in the community of faith. We did this by reflecting first on Galatians 5:13-26, a passage of scripture we have been studying at the church council table for the past couple of months. In it, Paul contrasts life in the Spirit with life in the Flesh. What follows is the reflection on trust I shared with them, a reflection that works with Galatians 5.
With Galatians 5 in mind, I want us to take time to think
about what it means to be leaders in a community that is important to us. I
invite you into this reflection on Galatians 5 by engaging the topic I am
presenting on. At the end of my presentation I will pose four questions for us
to think further on. ‘
As I said, I want us to think about what it means to be
leaders in the church, a community that is important to us. In particular, I
want us to think about what it means to guide this community of faith during
difficult times. Difficult times call us to lead carefully and to remember that
the health of our church is directly related to our ability to provide
stability in the midst of uncertainty. The base of this stability will always
be Christ, in whose death and resurrection the church is grounded.
How we lead in difficult times matters. When leadership is
mixed with wisdom, trust is built. Trust is central to our endeavors at all
times. When we leading in difficult
times, trust is even more essential. Without it, organizations fall into
damaging disarray. Trust is the backbone
of every healthy organization.
Edward Banfield, a Harvard Political Scientist wrote well
about the importance of trust in organizations in 1958. He noted that you can’t get anything so complex as a business of the
ground when you are not reasonably sure of a moral orderliness and sobriety
around you, when you can’t trust others to tell the truth, to keep their
promises, and not rob you when you’ve turned away. (As told by Anthony Esolen
in Trust Busters, When Authorities Smash
Windows. Touchstone. July/August 2008)
My dad owned a small business. We regularly pumped gas into
cars before we asked for payment. If a customer said she wanted us to fill her
car, we trusted that she’d pay for it. And if she asked us to put it on her
account, we generally had faith that she would, indeed, pay her bill at the end
of the month. Trust was behind every action conducted in our business.
It’s the same in the church. We build a community and engage
one another in trust. I give my weekly offering and trust that the money will
be used well. We engage in conversation about issues trusting that we are
openly talking with one another in ways that will build God’s church to be a
faithful place of worship and ministry. Parishioners share their stories and
are open about their lives with us because they trust that we will walk with
them in their times of joy and pain. Trust is a foundational.
So, what happens when
trust is broken in a community?
In 1982, a famous essay titled Broken Windows
explored this question. It was written by James Wilson and George Kelling.
Wilson was a professor of Government at Harvard and Kelling, a researcher at
the John F. Kennedy School of Government, which is also at Harvard. It’s a
great read about the impact of broken trust in the community. Wilson and Kelling examined trust by looking
at the impact of crime on a community.
They began by talking about what many boys know instinctively:
A broken window that remains
unrepaired is an invitation to break more. I learned the truth of this during vacation
bible school, believe it or not. And it wasn’t taught to me through Luther’s
Small Catechism, which, when teaching about the command not to steal calls the
Christian to protect our neighbor’s property and means of making a living. I
learned about it because a window was broken in the abandoned school next to
the church. And that broken window became an invitation for some rocks to be
thrown. Abandoned buildings regularly bear broken windows. It always starts
with one broken window.
A broken window in an abandoned building tends to attract disorderly conduct… At least that’s what social scientists and
police officers have said for years. Stones will be thrown. Not only that, but other lawlessness will
ensue.
To study this phenomenon, a Stanford Psychologist removed
license plates from a two cars, popped the hoods and placed them on two
streets: one in the Bronx, and another in Palo Alto, California. In the Bronx,
vandals set into it within ten minutes – starting with a family who removed the
radiator and battery. Within a few hours
almost everything of value had been removed. Then random destruction began –
windows were smashed, parts torn off, upholstery ripped. Most of the adult
vandals were clean-cut people. The car
in Palo Alto fared differently. It sat without plates with the hood popped
undisturbed for more than a week. Nobody
touched it, until, the researcher, took a sledgehammer and smashed part of
it. Within a few hours, the car had been
turned upside down and utterly destroyed. Again, it appeared to have been done
primarily by so-called respectable folk. (From Broken Windows, Wilson and Kelling, Atlantic Monthly, March 1982.)
There’s something about broken windows that invites bad
behavior by others. It has also been
found that the appearance of broken windows has another effect on people. A
neglected building leads people to perceive the area to be unsafe. Add some graffiti, and people’s
perception of the area suffers. People no longer trust the area to be safe, so
they walk through it quickly and stay behind locked doors. They spend less time
loitering and go to a place where they will not feel threatened. Many simply move away. And all of this
happens whether or not there is a high crime rate in the area. Broken windows
break communal trust.
Broken windows need to be fixed. Broken glass needs to be carefully taken out,
the glazing around it peeled away and a new pane be put in. You can’t just put
a board over it and pretend that it’s not broken, leaving the sore site to erode
the community. It needs to be replaced.
The Catholic Church, through the clergy sex abuse scandal,
has learned that plywood over a problem does not make it go away. For a long time they moved their broken
windows. And in the process, spread the destruction, because they did not tend
to the breaches happening in their leadership. The few who broke the trust of
the community, have poisoned the priestly functions of the many.
The Apostle Paul, speaking to the church in Galatia talked about the
importance of protecting the order of the community. Acknowledging that Christ
sets us free from sin and death, Paul reminds that freedom does not equal a promotion
of a looseness based on individualism. He says, “Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for
self-indulgence…” (Galatians 5:13) There
are standards that need to be maintained. Our attention to what is right and
wrong, is no longer about being right with God, but about protecting the
neighbor and building up the community. For this reason, we are called lead the
people of God in our communal practices of love,
joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness
and self-control. These ways of life maintain the orderliness of the community.
When trust is broken – when the orderliness of the community
is disrupted – trust is hard to regain. Therefore, It needs to be
protected. It calls us to carefully
think about our words and actions. We
need to consider whether we, by word or action are throwing rocks. As leaders,
we are called to carefully tend to the community’s orderliness in good and
faithful ways in order to protect the trust of those we serve. Remember, broken trust spreads –
sometimes quickly, sometimes quietly and slowly. Once trust is broken, people pick up rocks, spend
less time in the community, or move out of the community all together.
The Spirit calls us to order life in the community, to lead
this congregation in such a way that when people look at us, they see God
active in this world. In this sense, we
are windows for the people we serve. And
when people look to us for leadership, they should be able to see in us God’s
hope for the future. People should see
us practicing love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness,
gentleness and self-control.
To maintain the community, we, need to be willing to identify
broken windows among us and to work toward their repair. We mustn’t pretend
that they’ll be fixed on their own. Bad
behavior that breaks trust needs to be addressed in the community of faith as
surely as it does in every other organization.
The health of the church is entrusted in the hands of us as
leaders. We are called to work together to tend to our community. Therefore, we need to be willing to openly
and honestly think together about these things. So, here’s an exercise: Take
some time and turn to one or two people next to you and discuss these questions:
1.
In
what ways are we working toward maintaining an atmosphere of trust within the
congregation?
2.
What
does it take to repair windows of trust?
3.
What
do we need from each other to be sure that we protect our windows?
4.
What
is our responsibility when windows are broken in our church?
