Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

“The way we’re trying to change the world is not going to work,” says Deborah Frieze, “and it’s never going to work.” That’s how she begins her 2015 TEDTalk, “How I became a localist”.

“You can’t fundamentally change big systems,” Frieze claims. “You can’t undo, fix, reverse engineer, redirect or reassign these systems. That’s because they’re not machines: they’re living systems.”

“Somewhere along the way, maybe around the time of Isaac Newton, we got confused about how life works,” she goes on. “We convinced ourselves that the world was causal, linear, and predictable. And so we began to treat our bodies, our communities, and our ecologies as if they were machines. Machines respond really well to top-down, preconceived strategies. They rely on designers and engineers to give them purpose. A machine would never criticize the five-year plan or lose faith in the boss. Thankfully, that’s not how we are. And that’s not how life is. Natural systems, living systems are complex, emergent, and unpredictable. And every system we humans participate in is a living system. Small wonder we keep failing to predict and control the outcomes of our good-faith efforts to repair our schools, hospitals, banks and bureaucracies.”

And, here, let’s add: our churches, or The Episcopal Church.

I don’t understand the institutional church’s love-affair with corporate, managerial thinking. Sure, we talk about ‘adaptive change’ but it’d be better to declare a moratorium on that phrase until we get some first things sorted. Adaptive change and strategic planning are not happy friends. Managerialism’s obsession with five-year plans is one of the biggest problems we face (not the plans, mind you, but our obsession).

There’s a theory – actually an old theory – called Wicked Problems. Living systems, like churches, have a lot of ‘wicked problems’ so the theory goes -- ‘wicked’ as opposed to easily observable, universally diagnosable or ‘tame’ problems. In a 1973 academic journal, Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, both professors of design at UC Berkeley, wrote: “The search for scientific bases for confronting problems …is bound to fail because of the nature of these problems. They are ‘wicked’ problems, whereas science has developed to deal with ‘tame’ problems.”

Rittel and Webber give ten “distinguishing properties” of wicked problems, and I’ll list them below. More than fifty years later, their article still holds up. The ten properties are fairly self-explanatory, and if you’re anything like me they’ll get your mind racing and your excitement for entering the mission field turned up a notch – full on, strategic plan be damned.

Here’s what I take away from the concept: there is no stopping point, no guidebook or map, and you’ll find few collaborators if you keep looking into the institution itself. Also, the very best – actually the only – starting point is right now. The problem(s) will shift and change once you start dealing with something, so start now. Because the only thing you have to lose is precisely what Jesus said: your life. As in, “What will it profit them [insert = The Episcopal Church] if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?” Matthew 16:26

Here’s how wicked problems have been playing out in my 17-year rectorship thus far.

Long ago, I suspected I’d be the last full-time rector whose ministry was solely dedicated to one church. The numbers suggested it. And that was no more than one year into that call! There were disturbing, developing meta-trends (nones, unchurched, aging demographics, distrust in institutions), and the diocese and not a few leaders inside the congregation also thought the same. With diocesan support, we started talking broadly as a region of Episcopal congregations. “Collaboration” was an early buzzword.

Lots of neighbor congregations shared programming. Several ‘yoked’ with each other. One pair (my new parish) merged. Those were temporary balance measures, however – slowing the impact but not the decline.

That’s a Wicked Problem: once you start doing something, new problems, new opportunities emerge. The lens shifts the focus. At the same time, however, don’t do anything and you absolutely know what the outcome will be.

At Resurrection Parish, my new parish, we started asking other questions – Surely our mission isn’t to save the Episcopal ‘brand’ in our community, is it? What’s our gospel purpose? What about vibrant, Spirit-filled worship? What about turning our assets inside-out? What about our neighbors and community? What about raising up the arts? What about justice?

More wicked problems. Those conversations excited many and frightened some. We’ve gained new members and we’re reaching something that feels like greater capacity to actually do gospel mission. We’ve also said goodbye to those who need to hold on to something that felt more stable. There are neighbor congregations who offer those things, too.

Wicked problems open unexpected doors. For instance, our focus on poverty and justice revealed in our community a geographic ‘poverty triangle.’ It extends from one of our parish campuses to a remote community where there’s already an Episcopal church, albeit one that was struggling without clergy leadership and running dangerously low on empowered lay leaders. Conversations around equity development and resource sharing led three congregations – two parishes – into a covenanted relationship with a dedicated clergy and lay leadership team. And thus the problems shifted once again, as did the opportunities and mission field.

That’s my 17-year story, still being written, still ongoing. I joke that I’ve lived in the same house for 17 years, but my ministry has expanded and completely changed, and our collective impact as The Episcopal Church in, now, three communities has grown exponentially.

So what’s your Wicked Problem? What is the one thing that doesn’t seem to have “an objective definition of equity” or “cannot be meaningfully correct or false” but which you, and perhaps only you, are in a position to start dealing with? What’s the one thing that if you could change you’d start changing it today, and nowhere on the list of answers is ‘more people’ or ‘more money’?

Ten Distinguishing Properties of Wicked Problems

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad.
4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a ‘one-shot operation’; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.
6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution.
10. The planner has no right to be wrong.