The best practical suggestion I ever heard for church mergers may apply to transitions as well, since both require paradigm shifts. Here's what one merger did, when a older-population/declining church invited in a younger-population/church plant. For several months, members of the host (older) church put a time-line by decades on the wall of the largest meeting room. Anyone who had memories or photos of people and events and God's activities among the congregation from those decades posted them. They devoted some public time to recounting that history, from the host-church people who were there as eye-witnesses, while those of the church plant listened in and celebrate with them. Later, the church plant recounted their shorter history with a similar timeline and public sharing. And the church-plant timeline on the wall merged with that of the host church on the date of "relaunch."

It really did seem to work, because the stories and people were valued, the time spent was intentional and not seen as wasteful, and it visually signified the death of BOTH parties in the merger, and the BIRTH of something new that had never been before. Both "sides" lost everything, and gained everything, in this process …

Now, that's the healthiest example I've ever heard. Wish others would follow it, especially seeing that it simply cannot be one side doing all the change and the other side simply leading the change. (And it isn't always the younger church in a merger controlling the change process, as I have unfortunately seen.)

I still want to get down there and visit Life on the Vine with you guys sometime and experience this thing first hand.

Having been through the process of planting now I've come to discover that planting doesn't usually get you of the hook for this transition, because you're still often transitioning people who join your plant – and I've learned there's something else that we missed at that bigger church: the critical role of lament. By trying to avoid critique we miss out on the importance of lamenting and the ensuing newness of life that comes on the other side of lament. I think we in evangelicalism have lost a sense of the importance of critique and lament to the process of renewal and rebirth, and I think we've largely failed to recognize – and therefore affirm – that much of what has come to be known as Emerging was essentially a large scale lament by divers sectors of Christendom.

I’m reminded here of a quote from long-time church consultant Lyle Schaller, when he taught in 1999 at a conference on the church, leadership, and seminaries in the 21st century. In talking about paradigm shifts, he said, “When the sequential [i.e., conventional] church leaders do not accommodate the concurrent [i.e., random, non-linear] thinkers, the concurrent people lose hope.” As best I can recall, he believed many major denominations were going to be in big trouble, as were many seminaries, because of this problem of paradigms. In fact, he expected many such organizations to fail within 25 years.

JR Rozko recommended a book on “appreciative inquiry.” This process can be helpful to figure out what assets a group has, or track what its long-term “redemptive purpose” seems to have been in that cultural/neighborhood setting. However, a note of caution: I saw church leaders at the second church who supposedly wanted to transition. But it appears to me that they ultimately hid behind what they traditionally did well. They let a focus on “being positive” and “unity” obscure the very areas that needed strengthening to truly transition into a paradigm that fit with the emerging cultural framework that had been changing around them for decades. They did not transition because they sought to reformat, not reintegrate. The “new” version looked strikingly like the old, still in the images of the current leaders and the church’s past glories.

From this, I came to see that we may find that what assets or purposes were invaluable in a former paradigm, culture, or church methodological model could actually prove to be a liability in the context of the dominant paradigm or current culture. Transition is about a paradigm SHIFT not simply a purpose-statement or program SHUFFLE.

A final note. I am still working on this concept and how to express it, so for now, I’ll just have to blurt it out and keep refining it. It’s the idea of push and pull, and how they sometimes get reversed in the transition process. Conventional leaders tend to vision cast to “push” people toward what they see the future should/will look like. New-edge leaders tend to vision carry and embody what that future already looks like, so they can “pull” people toward that future. I think transition could work better with this specific combination of push/pull – it keeps people of different paradigms and generations in a mode of collaboration.

It doesn’t work well when the new-edge leaders try to push people toward the future (those who live in that unknown land can easily generate fear in those who don’t) while the conventional leaders try to pull them there (these leaders may only glimpse that “right” future in theory and have gaps in their practice).

Does that make sense? A blog-post and story for another time … and this topic is, in fact, on my schedule to address before I end my futuristguy blog this April (or however things unfold).

Meanwhile, I also posted this comment as an article at the following address. There may end up being comments there, and I'll post follow-up articles if/when I can:

http://futuristguy.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/thoug…