Chapter
31: Back to the Drawing Board
Why had it all blown up? Why had we not
been able to increase the size of the church and still have it
stable? Why could we convert people to Christianity yet not have them
in church? These and similar questions needed answers.
When I was studying engineering I
quickly learned that studying failures led to advances. For instance
one of the most repeated film clips in documentaries is that of the
failure of the Tacoma Narrows bridge in Seattle. It is a dramatic
example of forced (by wind in this case) vibration. It is great
footage. The suspension bridge writhes snake-like until it finally
shakes itself to pieces. Actually a young engineer had warned soon
after it was built that given a certain wind strength and direction
this would happen. He was dismissed as a nut case. After the failure
of the bridge, his work was re-visited! Wind bracing then became
standard on large bridges. The engineering world had learned
something important from this failure.
This phenomenon of learning important
lessons from studying failures is seen in all branches of engineering
– and probably most spectacularly in air crash investigations
advancing aircraft safety.
In our church we
had run a dynamic revival, something rarely seen in those days in
Anglican country parishes. People with no church connection had come
to faith in Christ. ... But ... Firstly we had not been able to bring
the new converts into the existing church structures. Secondly the
parish had all spectacularly blown up.
We realised that if, like many career
minded ministers we had moved on to a more prestigious parish while
things were going well, we would have looked successful and the
inevitable blow-up would have happened later and been blamed on the
next minister. We could have (and perhaps many clergy have) gone
through many parishes making the same mistakes and sowing the same
seeds for disaster each time. In his mercy God had kept us there to
see the outworking of the mistakes. So we believed it was our duty to
find out why.
So, once we started to recover I set
out to do some research.
Since we had no difficulty converting
people, I decided the problem lay in the area of human rather than
spiritual factors. (Apart from the triple whammy attack by the devil
described earlier. The books and seminars on church growth had not
prepared us for that attack, but we had since then worked out the
lessons). So I set myself to study sociology and especially the
sociology of churches.
I need to do a flash back here to show
why I thought I was the sort of person who could find out anything
valuable, or find any solutions. The answer lay in my past
experiences working as an engineer.
Theologians and other theorists can
indulge themselves in fantastical theories in their ivory towers –
they can hardly ever be proved wrong. They don’t have to stare
reality in the face. Engineers do not survive long if they believe
post-modern rubbish like “truth is relative” or “language has
no objective meaning". ... Reality always wins!
Kids playing at “Superman” and
jumping off the garage roof have universally found that gravity puts
a painful end to their pretence. Engineers likewise deal with the
real world where if you are wrong the laws of physics will tell you
so, sometimes very painfully. I had been trained to think under this
discipline. I also knew I had a track record for getting it right.
It was not pride, it just was. Let me illustrate.
I first worked in a government
department that designed buildings that were more in the “special
projects” line. I was in mechanical building services – air
conditioning, noise control, any anything else “mechanical”. It
soon became apparent that while I still had a vast amount to learn
from the older engineers (and even the draughtsmen!) about the art of
air conditioning, I had this quirky ability to solve baffling
problems and to be able to invent new things where needed. So if
there was something outside the square, I got called in. If I then
left the office (we were right in the city) and spent a few hours
wandering round the botanic gardens sniffing the roses, no one
minded. They I knew I would come back with a problem solved.
Just one anecdote.
We were designing a new printing works
for the Reserve Bank. Yes, printing money! This needed a vault
which would hold about three months worth of Australia’s currency –
at that stage paper money had a short life in circulation before it was
so tatty that banks sent then back to be exchanged for new notes. The bank was understandably concerned about security. A
successful theft of that magnitude could cripple the country.
One day our chief engineer showed me a
proposal for this vault by a world famous safe company. “Look at
this” he said “but don’t worry about the details of the vault
door. Bank-vault doors are just a trap for young players; any smart
thief goes for the wall.”
I read their glowing accounts of the
performance of their patent system of vault wall reinforcement. My
attention was grabbed by the assertion: “One third of an ounce of
pure Nitro-glycerin exploded on the surface had no ill effect”
This made me suspicious. So I studied up on explosives and called up a relative who was in army intelligence and quizzed him (he
was most enlightening). My suspicions were confirmed.
For fun I drew a cartoon of how I would
crack this vault if I were a thief (terrorists were not an issue
then). I had it lying on my drawing board when one of the Reserve
Bank chiefs walking past chanced to see it. He was not amused! But I
was given funding to have a model of a safe manufacturer’s device
for ventilating the vault and a model of a device I had invented and have them tested as
part of tests being done by army engineers. After the sappers had
done their work they picked up pieces of the safe manufacturer's
device 200 metres away. Attacking my device they cut into it and
exploded five kilograms of plastic explosive (so much for a third of
an ounce of Nitro-glycerin!) as I intended, it “failed to safety”
leaving only a hairline crack in the vault wall.
My point is that from that and many
other escapades I knew I had proven ability to research new
disciplines and come up with solutions that worked!
So I set out to study and apply
Sociology.
I read the renowned “fathers” of
sociology, Weber and Durkheim. I took my self off to the nearest
university library pouring over books. I took a course at the
university taught by noted sociologist who was also an Anglican
priest. I talked to him and he set me a reading list, even lending me
some of his own books.
It was absolutely fascinating! The top
sociologists were remarkable people. I remember avidly reading one
sociological study of a small town 70 km outside Washington DC made
some 30 years earlier. The team had visited the town over many
months, looked at all the institutions and groups and just looked and
listened until they understood. Then they wrote it up.
As I read a verbatim of a church
council meeting I found I could do more than identify with it, I
could put names of people in my parish council to the ones whose
words were recorded in the book. They were just the same! It was just
what they would say! (and often had said!)
When I read about the town groups and
how it all worked it was just like Koo-wee-rup (which was a town the
same size the same distance from the big city, likewise a farming
area - just in Australia and 30 years later!) It was a revelation.
One thing I will mention – and it is
why I commented that the men in our church “rebellion” had all
been Masons. The study observed that the Masonic Lodge had men in key
positions in every church in town “whose apparent function was to
control the minister” – the sociologists were not making a
religious or value judgement – just a scientific observation. An
observation which was particularly relevant to me!
I went on to read sociology of churches
– works like David Moberg’s classic and some Australian studies
of rural church life. From the latter I found out why I had met
opposition from the stakeholders in the church as it had been. The
sense of “Identity” for people like Jan (and others) was strongly
bound up in their church leadership role. Any
change to the church let alone their role was a threat to their sense
of “identity”. They might not be able to see let alone verbalise
this as the reason. But they would fight to the death to protect
their vital sense of identity.
It was, the books informed me, no surprise I had encountered
hostility and opposition. One book I recall was titled “Conflict
and Decline - Rural Churches in Australia”. According to their
findings, the real surprise was that I had survived! In their
studies, ministers who had tried what I had tried had uniformly
perished in the attempt (generally suffering a breakdown in their
health and/or marriage and leaving the ministry). So now I knew!
From Moberg I found even more
fascinating things. The problems country churches were facing in my
part of Australia were not new. They had happened (probably many
times) before. Here were studies of exactly the problems we were
facing. Here were studies of the various solutions which had been
tried, analysis built up from many case studies that pointed to which
solutions worked and which made things worse. It was a gold mine!
In country Victoria rural churches were
in decline. The situation was universally acknowledged as most
serious. Bishops were lamenting the decline of country parishes and
wringing their hands and running around saying “What will we do in
this new frightening situation”
I don’t know why but the bishops and
church leaders, faced with a new perplexing problem never stopped to
think that someone might have faced this problem before. They held
endless conferences but never wondered if better minds than theirs
might have actually found a solution. They never considered that
someone somewhere might already have invented the wheel!
I tried to tell the head ministers in
our diocese that I had done some research and found that our problem
was neither new nor unique. I told them that up to 50 years ago these
same problems had occurred, had been researched, and that solutions
had been found, tried and proven in the US. I tried to tell them that
the solutions they were putting into practice were precisely the ones
which had been found make the situation worse. As with the young
engineer who tried to tell the experts that the Tacoma Narrows bridge
would fail, I was dismissed as a nut case.
How could I prove that I was right?
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