Ship of Fools - Synchroblog Updated!

So this is a real conversation that really happened... for reals. Only the names have been changed to protect those involved because I have not asked permission from them to use their names. Except "Pomo" who is me.

The room upstairs is dark and the smell of coffee fills the air. Already sitting on the scene are three church leaders; Deck, Art, and Mode. They proceed with small talk but also appear a bit nervous because of the conversation that is about to take place.

Enter Pomo, who is shocked at seeing all three of them sitting there. He usually only met with Deck.

Pomo: Um, hi guys. What's up?

Deck: Hi, how are you?

(Now 3 or 4 minutes of small talk ensue which not need be elaborated here. Then some specifics were brought up regarding vision and direction and trust; which is too laborious to get into on a blog. But now, for the exciting conclusion!)

Deck: I was trying to think of an analogy and this is the best one I could think of: Your on a bus and those with you are also on that bus. And your driving this bus but you really don't know where you are going. You're just going off in some direction but you don't have a map.

Art: See, when you drive a bus you need a specific address. We feel like you maybe have a city, but a city is pretty big and you need an address.

Deck: So, we'd like to ask you to step down from leadership, just for now. Until you know what your address is. If you find out that address is the same destination as ours then you can come back, but for now, we feel it's best that we take over the ministry.

Art: Then you can ride our bus until you get a map and go in the same direction we are going.

Mode: But we need you. We need you to stay on the bus so we don't loose all the people who got on the bus with you.

Deck: Yes we need you to ride our bus and follow our map. We can't do this without you. But you have to let us drive the bus for a while. You need to give us the wheel until you figure out exactly where you are going.

The conversation pretty much ended there but if I thought of it at the time, this is what I would have said:

"But you see, we aren't a bus. We don't know the destination. We are like explorers on the open sea. We just know we need to go West because land is East. There may be dragons and their most assuredly are storms, but we will let the wind guide us and whether we succeed or fail, we will venture into unknown territory, see amazing sites, meet amazing people, and live each breath by the grace of an amazing God.

"Call us a "Ship of Fools" if you like, but God uses the foolish to confound the wise. I think following Jesus should be more like a sea faring explorer with a compass and the stars and the wind, than a bus driver with a map and a paved road and a gas station every 50 miles."

We are still a ship of fools. I deeply respect those who feel otherwise but we wouldn't change it for the world.

*for the record, I did say that we would step down from leadership in the best possible way, but we would never ever ever come back. It ended very amicably on a Sunday morning a few days later.

Synchrobloggers now here!

The Foolishness of God and the Foolishness of Christians by K.W. Leslie

Fools Rush In by Sonja Andrews

The Power of Paradox by Julie Clawson

That Darn Ego by Jonathan Brink

Won't Get Fooled Again by Alan Knox

Strength on the Margins by Igneous Quill

Foolish Heart by Erin Word

A Fool's Choice by Cindy Harvey

Quiet Now, God's Calling by Jenelle D'Alessandro

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right... By Mike Bursell

Hut Burning for God by Father Gregory

God Used This Fool by Cobus van Wyngaard

Fool if you think its over by Paul Walker

Blessed are the foolish -- foolish are the blessed by Steve Hayes

What A Fool I've Been by Reba Baskett

What a Fool Believes by Sue at Discombobula

ants, brain cells, falling in love, and the abandonment of leadership as we know it

Sir Francis Galton, one of the founders of eugenics discovered something quite to the contrary of the idea of bettering the human condition through having only the elite educated make the rules. The story is well written here (author notes aside) but I'll copy it:

1822 Sir Francis Galton (d. 1911), English explorer, statistician, anthropologist, advocate of eugenics (i.e. the discredited notion of improving the physical and mental makeup of the human species by selected parenthood; he coined the term), and investigator of the human mind.

He was born into the remarkable Darwin - Wedgwood family and was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin and Charles Darwin’s half first cousin. It was Galton who gave statistics the concept of regression toward the mean.

Galton was an elitist, a believer in the power of a better class of people, noting “the stupidity and wrong-headedness of many men and women being so great as to be scarcely credible.”

Some of his research interprets as the superiority of group-think over experts. At one of England’s many fairs, he noticed a wagering competition in which people had to guess on the weight of an ox. Eight hundred people wrote their guesses on slips of paper; some were butchers and farmers, while others were casual guessers.

Averaging the estimates, Galton expected the result to be nowhere near the mark, because so few of the guessers were professionals in the meat business. To his surprise, however, the crowd had come within one pound of the ox’s weight. The group as a whole had guessed that the ox would weigh 1,197 pounds, and the ox’s actual weight was 1,198 pounds.

This study has since been done thousands of times across college classrooms with a jar of jelly beans and the outcome is alway they same: No one particular person guesses the correct amount of jelly's in a jar, but the collective group average is always remarkably close.

Google works the same way. No one person or elite group of people determine site rankings. It's all done in a matrix ranking the collective group of hits to, and links from websites. In a sense everyone... and no one, determines how Google ranks.

Ants, bees, and even brain cells don't have a leader. There is a collective thought that determines how ants find your picnic lunch, how bees build a hive, or how we fall in love.

Paul even had a grasp of this when he talks of Christ followers being a body. Christ is the head - the exception of the 'no leader' like insects and cells - but other than that, no one member of the 'body' is more important than another member.

The Israelite people demanded a King - a leader - and although God relented, he made it very clear that His original intention is that they were to have no leader but Himself.

Do you get my drift? Do you see a pattern that maybe should be done differently in the church? Is Sir Francis Galton right where the church should be built on the educated and experts? Or is it the bees where the church should be created in the forms of mysterious collective thought?

Does this dismiss leadership all together or does it just force us to think differently about what a leader looks like?

Here's a book I'm interested in: From Steven Johnson and his website is here. I heard him on a WNYC podcast called "Emergence" but you'll have to do the legwork yourself in I-Tunes because the weblink didn't work. But heck, I ain't your leader, although, maybe we can collectively emerge with the right answer. ;-)