The Fisher's Net

Learning Leadership for Communities in Mission
The Western Mission Cluster and Luther Seminary's Mission

Carefree, Arizona: December 4-6, 1998

David L. Tiede, President of Luther Seminary

Introduction:

Let me begin with thanks from Luther Seminary and PUS to you who organized this conference. This is another crucial stage in an extended process. Five years ago, the ELCA set things in motion by adopting the Study on Theological Education along with the I I mission imperatives. That same year, Luther Seminary and PUS adopted a statement of "Principles and Strategies toward Clustering." In 1994, our two executive committees met with the bishops and continuing education leaders in the Pacific Northwest and authorized a planning process for the Western Mission Cluster. The 1997 Philadelphia statement on Life Long Learning authorized the work we are doing now.

John Schiller has been engaged since those early days. His paper captures the comprehensive view of learning systems we seek and the differentiation needed among varied providers, learners, and partners. We are in this enterprise together, or it will fail. Arland Jacobson has also caught the importance of life long learning and the need to support laity and clergy in their learning. "What we are really talking about," says Arland, is the renewal of the church and specifically the renewal of congregations." All who visit the web page for the Fisher's Net may see how well these proposals fit with the vision of the Western Mission Cluster. We have work to do together!

My goal in this paper is to show how all our work together fits the design of the Western Mission Cluster and the Fisher's Net. We come together under ELCA mandates to collaborate toward developing a life long learning system within this confessional church and beyond it. Our goal is learning that will renew the church, tracked by the I I mission imperatives. Our method is education, training, and resources for leadership for Christian communities in mission. Our focus is on the 3,345 ELCA congregations throughout the three western regions of the ELCA because they are called, gathered, enlightened, and sent by the Holy Spirit along with the whole Christian church. We will reach beyond this geography and into ecumenical relationships to help many Christian communities move beyond maintenance to mission: social service agencies, health care providers, publishers, teaching congregations, businesses, colleges, and universities.

We are especially concerned to equip the 1,731,982 baptized Christian members of those western ELCA congregations. They have vocations in the world God loves. If our learning system did a good job with our own congregations and members in our own regions, that would be no small blessing. This learning system is itself a leadership effort because we are taking the responsibility to construct something. It is also a mission enterprise to help our confessional church move into mission, not merely sustain itself. We expect to welcome many others into discipleship and relate beyond this geography.

I would like to propose three things for this leadership learning system:

1. a key verse, expressing the faith of this venture in God;

2. a curriculum design to be adapted in differing locations; and

3. a map of the varied providers, partners, and learners in the system.

The key verse is Matthew 9.13. The Pharisees know about raising up disciples and making a hedge for the Torah. They are criticizing Jesus for eating with tax collectors and sinners. Jesus replies, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick." Then he adds our verse including a quotation from Hosea 6.6. "Go and learn what this means," he declares, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice."

A disciple is literally a learner. The words have the same stem: "mathetes," "disciple," and "matheteuein .. .. learn." Jesus' lesson is first of the gospel, not of the law, in mercy not observance. Jesus is like the Pharisees in making disciples and calling them to follow him. But his great commission will differ sharply from theirs. He will criticize them for crossing "sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves" (23.15). Instead he will authorize his disciples to "go make disciples/learners of all nations," literally all the gentiles. Jesus will break down the walls around the torah. His lesson, his mission is that of divine mercy. This is no simplistic mission. This is what Luke Johnson calls "Learning Jesus." This is

to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings.

Some wonder if the focus on learning leadership for mission will be something other than or less than theological education. It could be mere skill training, but that would miss the profound lesson of God's mercy Jesus is teaching his disciples.

Think about this lesson for this confessional tradition moving into mission in North America. How will the life of faith be lived? What does mercy have to do with justice? Is this what Arland Jacobson calls the move from competence to character?

"The true treasure of the church," wrote Martin Luther in the 62 nd of his 95 theses, "is the Holy Gospel of the glory and the grace of God." In our performance based culture, we Lutheran Christian believe and confess the one lesson worth a lifetime of learning: "Go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice."' The I who speaks is God. Jesus is the teacher. We are the learners. Make no mistake. This is theological education.

Bishop Arthur Rimmereid once said to me, "I don't like your mission statement at Luther Seminary, David."

I was stunned. "Why not?"

He smiled, "You commit Luther Seminary to educate leaders for the callings and commissions of Christian communities. That's good. But what do you make of the fact that Jesus did not call leaders, but disciples, learners, followers?"

Pretty good, Arthur. This is not merely another mission in a leadership of command and control. These are not only lessons in the seven habits of highly effective people. A Mormon wrote that book. It is a good book. It expresses a quintessential American confidence in mastery through technique, of progress toward perfection. These are real life skills, valuable and valid for leadership, but another Spirit is at work here.

I agree with what Diane Jacobson of our faculty says about the Franklin Planner System, also produced by the Mormons, "I use it but I don't inhale!" Effectiveness is an important discipline, but the song of our souls is of a profound love, God's divine passion for mercy. God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not counting our sins against us. We did not invent this message of divine kindness, but we are called to make learners from all cultures of this truth about God, humanity, and the world.

Jesus calls us to be disciples, learners of mercy not practitioners of perfection. Then he sends us as apostles to serve God's Gospel of mercy and to lead the church's mission in the world. Learning leadership in such a distinctive mission begins with following Jesus as God's way of mercy in the world, for the world.

This Gospel is the distinctive lesson for all nations of the world to learn.

Nothing else is worthy of the Biblical witness or our confessional tradition. Nothing is so simple, so profound, and so transforming as the discovery, the disclosure this is the desire of God, the will and purpose, the determination that produced the passion of Christ and was vindicated in his resurrection. If the goal of our life long learning system is leadership for communities in mission, let this conviction about God's mission in Christ be the singular lesson this tradition teaches and confesses.

Then what curriculum will yield such learning?

Mercy will be learned by learning Jesus, but it is hard to teach. Procedures, knowledge, and practices may be taught, should be taught. Leadership in God's mission of mercy has a peculiar character or quality. The Holy Spirit opens the heart and the mind to this learning. It is counter-intuitive for those who want to perform, to accomplish things, to succeed, to triumph. Of course we all want the Lutheran church to prosper in North America. I would be the last to equate ineffectiveness with fidelity. Jesus also called his disciples to obedience, even the observance of all that he commanded.

Let us do our work well, even our educational work!

But the lesson that will save us, our neighbors, and our nation is not more grit and technique. God bless America! In this mission, another Spirit approaches the door of the heart, a Spirit of healing and renewal, not mastery, a mission of God's generosity and reconciliation, not control, So how will we learn such a counter-intuitive, such a counter cultural message as this, "I (that is God) desire(s) mercy not sacrifice"?

I am a fan of Peter Senge, the M.I.T. professor who has written an excellent book on management called, The Fifth Discipline . As it turns out, "the fifth discipline" is that of leadership in creating learning organizations. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the church became such a "learning organization" gathered around its one distinctive lesson! Senge constantly pays attention to "systems." He argues that the leader of a ship is neither the captain, nor the officer at the helm, but the architect who designed the ship! He also steals a page from our tradition in suggesting that in order to become a teaming system, any organization must go through a profound transformation, an alteration of the mind, or a paradigm shift, which he calls metanoia. In the New Testament, metanoia means "repentance" or "conversion." All leadership begins with metanoia.!

What is the first step in becoming an organization where we learn what it means that God desires mercy not sacrifice? Repentance and faith! Without this reorientation to the source of our life and hope, we might be only a second rate community education program. Maybe our marriage care course would be better, maybe. But the one lesson we have to learn and teach, the one treasure which has been entrusted to us in earthen vessels is God's, not ours. This is the metanoia of discipleship.

We are designing a learning system for leadership for Christian communities in mission. Our curriculum proposal at Luther Seminary was forged in the white heat of faculty debate. We sense we have moved from the "Abby" of the denominational seminary, to the "Academy" of the good theological school, and now to the "Apostolate" of learning leadership for mission. Each of these phases has its own virtue to be carried forward, but each is also at home in particular cultural contexts and eras of the church.

What will replace the menu of courses and departments most "good theological schools" inherited from Friederich Schleiermacher and the University of Berlin? You know the list: Old Testament, New Testament, church history, theology, and the arts of ministry. In the middle of a faculty retreat, Gerhard Forde declared with some frustration in his voice, "Look, it is not so hard. To lead in mission our graduates need to know the Christian story. They need to be able to confess the Gospel, and they need to be able to lead Christian communities in the mission God has given to them!"

In fact, this is an alternative to the curriculum centered in academic disciplines. All those fields are still valuable, as is their scholarship, but the telos, the purpose, the goal toward which they move alters both what is taught and what is learned. This scheme, variously stated, has become our curricular outline, not merely as a catalog of required courses plus electives. The curriculum is an educational strategy to do more than convey what we know to students. The curriculum is accountable to its promised outcomes:

• Do they know the Christian story?

• Do they understand, interpret, confess, and communicate the Gospel message in the real contexts where people live?

• Are they able to lead Christian communities in the callings and commissions God has given them?

How else will congregations become the learning centers, the synagogues of a new apostolic age?

We have been working at these questions for over a decade at Luther Seminary. We will continue to learn and deliberate these questions with our sister faculty at PLTS and with all our colleagues in the learning system of the cluster and the Fisher's Net. Our curriculum design is a rhetorical strategy to overcome what Arland Jacobson calls "the old dichotomy of theory and practice." We bring an understanding of learning to the discussion, perhaps even an epistemology. With thanks to Aristotle, Luther, and the University of Chicago, we regard leadership for mission as a persuasive enterprise. The witness, the message, and the community of hearers in their context all require attention. Mercy is learned in relationships, not in asserted dogmas or empirically verified truths. Rituals and practices are communication as is speech, and the verba define reality. The word, in articulated in preaching and palpable in sacrament, bears Christ. Communities of witness and service, Christian synagogues seek to learn mercy and convey it to the world.

Each of the moves in this curricular strategy has its own kind of learning. The world of understanding opens with these faithful inquiries. Forget about the seminaries and higher education for a moment. Think about these moves in the context of the congregation as a learning community. Or consider the colleges and universities of our system as "vocational schools," to use Pres. Mark Edwards theological term.

Knowledge of the Christian story is essential for a community in mission. How else will they grasp that when Jesus says, I desire mercy not sacrifice," he is quoting God's word spoken through the prophet Hosea. Jesus relied on a level of knowledge of the scriptures among his learners. The single most consistent factor in congregational renewal is Bible study, and our tradition has produced some great ones, closely linked with teaching faculties by the way: Bethel, Word and Witness, Search, Crossways. We know that the people of God must know the Christian story for the mission to be alive and faithful to God's desire for mercy for all the world.

But knowledge does not stand alone. Our tradition relies upon and moves beyond Biblekunde to another kind of learning, understanding. Understanding how to interpret, confess, and interpret the story begins with the catechetical question, "What does this mean?" Our confessional heritage is a hermeneutic, an interpretation of the word of God as it addresses us and the world with command and promise. Our witness will have the distinctive character of communicating both God's justification and justice, not confusing commands with promises. The wealth of each ecumenical heritage may be measured in part by how they handle this second move in our learning system. Roman Catholics and American Evangelicals will bring differing interpretations to the Christian story and the world. We will also learn with them.

All of you who have read Niebuhr's Christ and Culture know something of the theological character of Roman Catholic spirituality or American Evangelical politics or Methodist progress. These distinctions are often minimized by cultural relativism in North America. "Whatever!" Then they are often carelessly practiced in the public lives of communities. Wouldn't it be wonderful if every ELCA congregation could grasp the way our tradition understands and treasures the Gospel?

Knowledge involves learning. So does understanding. Equipping the saints with abilities to witness, serve, and help others fulfill their vocations in the world is a third kind of teaming. Here we need not fear the word "training," as in "Stephen's Ministry Training," or "visitor training." This is about practicing the arts of ministry. There is a lot to learn about "how to do" many things well. The mega church conferences for clergy excel in this kind of learning, and lively congregations practice it well for their members. If they are doing their work faithfully and well, they do not forget that the deepest lesson to be learned, even in training, is mercy. They discipline their techniques of "how to" by the "what" of the Christian story and the "why" of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

In turn, all three of these kinds of learning (knowledge, understanding, and practice) will be surrounded by worship (doxology) and service (diakonia). The end of all human learning is the love of God and of the neighbor.

I have been speaking of the primary learning contexts of Christian communities. I will comment later about where the continuing education centers may fit in the picture. But let me speak a bit more about what Luther Seminary is up to along with PLTS.

For starters, we are in communication with our sister seminary, PLTS and with the three clusters throughout the ELCA as we seek to educate, train, and equip leadership for Christian communities in mission. We are also networked with the MN Consortium of Theological Schools, especially in our D.Min. work. Furthermore, we are depending upon our ELCA continuing education network and teaching congregations to come into alignment with the strategic commitments to which our church has called the entire system. With PLTS, Augsburg Fortress, Lutheran Brotherhood, and others in the Western Mission Cluster, we have also developed the distributed learning system called "the Fisher's Net." We have been actively listening for a decade to voices like those gathered this weekend for the calling God is giving our church, and we will continue to do so.

In the meantime, we have committed Luther Seminary to a curriculum strategy, and we intend to hold it accountable for its ability to produce the leadership for mission promised in our publicly declared mission statement. We have begun assessments of the quality of the outcomes of this educational process. With a recent grant from a donor, we inaugurated Luther Productions to offer learning resources in and through "the Fisher's Net," and two weeks ago we presented a CD version of "The Bible Tutor" at the SBL/AAR meeting in Orlando. We plan to help congregations and their members learn the Christian story, understand how to interpret, confess, and communicate the Gospel, and to equip leadership for the mission to which God has called them. Last week we learned the Lilly Endowment awarded us a grant of $1,5 million focused on "Learning Leadership in Congregational Contexts." PLTS also received a significant grant for a position in congregational studies. We are moving. We are mandated by the ELCA to perform, and we are inviting initiatives from partners and collaborators. We believe this consultation is crucial to what the church needs us to do together.

So what is a plausible map of the varied providers, partners, and learners in the system? I use the word "map," for two reasons. Maps are not hierarchical, and they help us see the locations of our distributed learning system in relationship to each other.

One of our accrediting agencies, the North Central Association, recently published a fascinating study entitled, "The Collaborative Imperative." The point was that in the new environment of communication systems and technologies, institutions of higher education will either learn how to collaborate or they will die! This is certainly no less true for seminaries which are profoundly embedded in the churches they serve. The NCA also suggested that the relationships among diverse providers, partners, and learners in such systems no longer function hierarchically, but rather according to an emerging "hyperarchy." What an interesting metaphor from the cyber world. It is also an intriguing image for a church that knows it is not a control system for dispensing God's grace or mercy. We are not going to manage indulgences from a centralized authority system, nor are we going to dispense the learning of mercy from the seminaries.

The metaphor of a map may also help us think clearly about the importance of those locations as places where communities of learning gather. Some believe the cyber world will lead simply to solipsism, the introverted learner at the keyboard. But the lesson of mercy is relational, and leadership for mission is a profoundly social reality. Our learning system must first of all gather learners in Christian communities.

Project a map in your mind. Limit it for the moment to the western third of the United States, recognizing that those boundaries are artificial. This map has thousands of dots for congregations, tens or hundreds of circles where people assemble from their local communities for leadership education. There's Carefree, LENS, the colleges, the camps, the continuing education centers. And behold, two small stars for residential seminaries!

We are practicing a new craft, inventing the future as we design our network or hyperarchy to serve the distributed learning system we imagine. In my judgment, the most confounding and promising issue we face right now is the place on that map of the continuing education centers, gatherings, or intermediating learning centers: that is the social service agencies, health care providers, publishers, teaching congregations, businesses, colleges, and universities. To put it provocatively, "What do we need them for?" To put it proactively, "How are we going to get what we truly need from them?"

Let me suggest that if we had not invented "The Fisher's Net" through a highly collaborative process in March of 1997, we would need to do so today. This is a way for very diverse communities to be full partners and participants. Forget for a moment that "The Fisher's Net" has a home page and is associated with technology in many people's minds. It is a network of learners, providers, and partners. This is an effort to construct a mission driven, community based, and widely collaborative" leadership learning system. Those very commitments mean that "The Fisher's Net" will be formed, transformed, and reformed as needed by varied learners, providers, and partners.

In fact, teaching congregations, continuing education providers, social service agencies, publishers, and colleges are also very different from each other. By ELCA mandate, Luther Seminary and PUS are "clustered." Part of what that has come to mean is that our seminaries are making every effort to collaborate in their participation in this broader learning network as well as in its design and development. All along, "The Fisher's Net" has been designed to welcome whatever initiatives will contribute to this learning system to educate, train, and resource leadership for mission. This is a "collaborative hyperarchy" if ever there was one.

[By the way, that cyber-metaphor will never replace Paul's image of the church as "the body of Christ," but it might help us imagine the church's neurology in fresh ways.]

By next summer, the Board of Directors of the Fisher's Net, the Advisor Team, the Executive Team, the Production Team, and the Service Teams from all over the west will evaluate the pilot phase. The business plan will be refined again. And most critically, the question of how the whole ELCA and even the LWF may enter into this collaborative learning system will be explored. These relationships, like the technology that supports them, transcend the geographic turf assigned to the three clusters of ELCA seminaries. Congregations in Florida will find access to the GIFTS offerings from North Dakota. The offerings from the Pacific Northwest will be of interest to leaders in Texas. Augsburg Fortress will be supplying resources to all the church, as will the national divisions, whether through the Fisher's Net or hyper-linked to it. That's how hyperarchy works. And the oceans will be no barrier, in time even to interactive video communication. We learned that from the seminary courses PUS and Luther Seminary teach on the net.

Collaboration, however, also requires differentiation. The seminaries will offer accredited courses on their campuses, through the access of communication systems, and in diverse locations as possible. This is already happening, and it will grow. PUS and Luther Seminary are beginning discussions of a cluster wide faculty development plan. Who knows what that will look like in a decade?

In the first apostolic era, the Christian mission followed the network of synagogues, houses of study and of prayer. Cathedral churches were soon gathering places led by missionary, teaching bishops.

Congregations still hold a primacy as synagogues in apostolic contexts. But they will also need gathering places for conferences, enriched learning opportunities for clergy and lay leaders, consultations with other expressions of the church in similar and different settings, and access to resources to know the story, understand how to interpret the message, and training in critical practices of learning mercy. This is how the body of Christ may be equipped for its catholic and apostolic mission in our time.

Let me illustrate with an opinion. Every synod and churchwide assembly should be focused first on equipping the saints and building up the body of Christ with less energy expended in legislation. The public work of the gospel gives life, not so the law.

My goal, however, is not to be critical, but to challenge every ELCA entity, gathered here and not, to join the learning enterprise to which the Lord calls us. This is how I hear Tim Lull's call to press our educational system into service.

What metanoia will be required of every place committed to the learning of mercy? Can the colleges and universities be called upon to bring their immense resources to this public project in the church? It will renew their soul. Can the continuing education centers be transformed to serve such a lively mission enterprise in collaboration with congregations and seminaries? I believe the answer is yes. Will the seminaries be able to sustain their interest and respect for forms of theological education that are less academic but more apostolic? Can "The Fisher's Net" become a metaphor, a map, a hyperarchy, a system that invites all learners, partners, and providers? Can we gather our strength to serve our church's need for learning leadership for mission in a world of many cultures and religions?

It is my hope that we have the wisdom, faith, and courage for the effort.

It is my prayer that the Lord of the Church will bless the world through this work.