Exploration 1: no problem!

Dear friends,

An expert on the English language complained on the radio recently that nobody says “you’re welcome” anymore when they are thanked. It’s always: “no problem.” That expert deeply dislikes that response for some reason. Most of us have bigger things to worry about.

If someone were to ask the question: “what’s Parkview’s problem” or “what are Parkview’s problems,” I would answer “no problem,” or “there aren’t any problems.” And that would be the right answer.  There are no problems. The church is what it is. Problems only appear in reference to something or someone else. “Then why pray tell,”you may ask, “are we entering a period of exploration?” Because after our hundred year anniversary, it is important not to get comfortable and to go into maintenance mode, but to ask ourselves where we think we are headed.

Now let me be very clear about the problem thing: there is no problem. When I was still teaching at the seminary in San Anselmo not too long ago, we used a book by Kathleen Cahalan entitled “Projects that Matter.” It is a book about planning and evaluation of church projects. Cahalan proposes the term “condition.” Now it is almost instinctual to want to identify a problem and fix it. For example, Almost every mainline church leader will say: “we don’t have enough young people” or “we don’t have enough youth” or “our attendance is too low,” as if there is some magic wand someone could wave. If you then tell those leaders that youth and young people need five significant relationships with adults who have faith to overcome the general perception that church is not “cool,”it comes a little too close to home and a little too much work. Instead Cahalan makes churches ask the question:” what condition do I want to respond to?” By asking about a “condition” we keep it neutral: it could be problem but also opportunity. In our case the condition could be the possibility of losing our parking lot or the condition could be the cultural heritage of the members of the church or it could be the needs of the community around us. By avoiding the word “problem” we operate positively and expectantly. It also allows us to be holistic rather than surgical.

In the coming year we would like all of you to be a part of one group.  That group would be required to have three meetings for each cluster. The clusters will most likely be: Land Park, South Land Park, The Pocket, Elk Grove, the North/East area and Natomas/ Midtown/ West Sacramento. Anyone who visited Parkview in the past years will be welcome to participate. The session will talk about the result and give you the questions to start off with in your group. The first meeting is about procedure. We should be democratic: how do we go about determining what the right procedure for discussing questions is? Also we need to deal with the question: how can we guarantee everyone’s opinion is included, for some people are more vocal than others?

We are coming up on one of our major fundraisers: the spaghetti dinner. So if we are answering the question of why we engage in exploration, we could possibly answer by referring to fundraisers: “At the deepest level what are our fundraisers really for?” Thank you. May God bless our ministry. Aart