Falling out of love with strategy: A fractal theological word crisis

A fractal tree based on Luke 9 & 10

I love a good strategy game, whether it be chess, Risk, Stronghold or StarCraft. But the thing that bothers me about most strategy games is that once you've won, all that you've built and all that you've worked for is of no further use. The winning strategist never gets to live in the world they have conquered. My strategic relationship to the Kingdom of God is different to that in so many ways.

Today, I had the joy of engaging in a challenging conversation with Rev Tom Stuckey (Former president of Methodist Conference) after hearing him talk about his new book ‘Singing the Lord’s song in a strange land’. He suggested that the Methodist Church had too many strategists. Even though I agreed with him on pretty much everything else he said, I have always felt that we have too few strategists. I have for some time considered myself a strategist. After some discussion, Tom suggested that perhaps we had a different idea of what strategy meant - and I think perhaps he was right.

The trouble with the word ‘strategy’ is that it implies that there is a top down plan to put into action. Strategy suggests to many people that someone is in charge; a captain, a general or perhaps a business manager. It is a word with its origins in ancient Greek military talk and has at the core of its meaning the deployment of troops to the battlefield. Whether for military or management speak, it is largely a word that is about taking control of the situation.

In addition to the usual problems with deploying military speak in a theological context, the more specific problem here is that strategy can be heard as something too practical, too linear and too hierarchical. It is too much about the straight line between where we are and where we intend to be. It has the potential to make us sound like we know where we are going – which we certainly do not.

Tom’s suggestion is that we need to stop domesticating God and trying to fit God into a neat box that fits our expectations; that we need to stop trying to be in control of what is, after all, God’s mission. Tom pointed out how the Methodist Church has become weighed down with bureaucracy. I agree to a great extent and I realise now that we need to find a language to speak more specifically and with more discernment than simply talking about 'strategy'. We have more than enough people pushing the metaphorical troops around the map.

Where I differ from Tom is that I think we need to be strategic about how we structure church. The one to one engagement between people is great and to a certain extent that is where the great moments of faith happen. However, when things are going well things will grow and systems will develop as they always have. In order to do the corporate, connexional thing well, we need to be able to engage with and discern how God is calling us to act together. When the systems grow so the imperfections of humanity become immortalised in the structures of our organisation.

I think we need strategy, or something with a different name, that speaks more of the abstract and the aspirational. We need patterns that help us to embody a more Christ-like nature and enact the Gospel narrative within our structures. I still want a strategy, in as much as I want a plan, but I have no intention of setting the destination, or of putting myself or anyone else in charge of getting us there. I want a plan that contains the essence of all we have learned collectively as ‘Church’. I want a plan that gives space for the diversity of humanity within the body of Christ. I want a plan that brings fluidity and life to our structures, and structures that reflect the living Gospel of Jesus Christ. I want a plan that admits we know nothing and frees us to fully submit to the mystery of God. 

This is why I believe we truly need a fractal understanding of God’s creation and of God’s plan for us. We need to be a fluid, organic system, growing in the image of our creator. We need to be bold enough to be more Christ-like in our corporate, collective, connexional way of being – but we need to do that in a way that leaves space for us to turn around when we’ve got it wrong. We need to be able to implement the theological learning we do on a daily basis, simply by being one of God’s creations, in the way that we function together as Church.

The fractal theological way of thinking is to see the patterns of God’s love and justice, echoed in us as individuals and at all scales of what we call Church – at all scales of human community and in our engagement with creation itself. The fractal theological way of thinking is not about a commander setting a destination for the troops, but about setting Christ-like patterns at the heart of who we are as community and as individuals - and allowing those patterns to shape who we become – allowing them to guide us to unknown destinations.

The only word I had to describe this kind of planning was strategy, but I suddenly feel like this word is no longer enough. So, what is the word I am looking for?

(N.B. I’ve not had time to read all of Tom’s book yet but what I’ve read so far looks very good – he describes it as dropping pebbles in the pond of the conversation and watching the ripples, rather than a book that gives the answers.  More about the book here: www.tomstuckey.me.uk/ )

Word Burglars

Much of my work involves trying to inspire people through words. Part of the difficulty of that task is it's not always easy to know if the language you are speaking holds the same meaning in the mind of the hearer, both in the basic meaning and in the subtle nuances. You may think you know what the word simple means, but do I mean easy or unintelligent? Do I mean that distilled simplicity that can only be the result of long experience or the naive simplicity of youth?

It's often good to adjust your language to fit your audience, but you also need to retain your authentic voice, because nothing sounds worse than a forced attempt to mimic the language of your audience. Perhaps the greatest struggle is when the morphing and transforming of language over time makes it impossible to pin down meanings and some ideas become almost impossible to express. Anyone involved in Biblical translation will be familiar with those moments of elusive meaning. But it happens today and it's happening increasingly within the many variations of the language we call English. I have much affection for America and have many good American friends, but the Americanisation of the English language sometimes causes me some frustration.

However, few things in the Americanisation of the English language bug me more than the invention of the word 'burglarize'. A burglar is someone who burgles. The noun burglar is a role derived from the verb 'to burgle', in the same way that beggar is derived from the verb 'to beg'. Of course these days, there are many more examples of this where the ending is 'er' rather than 'ar'; a runner runs, a singer sings and a fighter fights, but the principle is the same. You can't then turn the role back into the verb by adding yet another suffix. A runner cannot runnerize, a preacher cannot preacherize and a beggar cannot beggarize.

The ize ending on burglarize is particularly problematic as it seems to be treating burglar as if it were an adjective like secular, familiar, regular, popular or vulgar. A regular is not someone who regs, to popule is not a thing and secular folk do not go around seculing all over the place.

Some Americanisms are simply nouns being used for different objects in a different world. Language always moves on and the meaning of words will always change, but burglarize signals a potential failureization of language. A demeanification of words and a chaosing of the landscape for the worderizers of our generation. There are many funs you can have with language (depending on how many languas constitute the full measure of your language) but if you're going to mess around with the grammatical construct of the English language then you really need to understand the elements with which you are messing. No one has ever burglarized a house because that would mean turning the house into a burglar.

OK, so I should say that most of my rants about small details come from a place of humour and affection, both for the subject and the people on both sides of the argument. This occasion is no exception, but it holds within it a serious point. We live in a world that is increasingly bound by not one, but many languages of division. Though the truth of the arguments are important, people are rarely that different on one side of an argument from another. Yet it is increasingly difficult to communicate across the divides, because the nuances of language remain untranslated. More than that, the subtleties of the language we hear day in, day out, can begin to reshape the people we are through the ideas that our language equips us to express.

When an American says 'our house has been burglarized', they probably mean something that belongs to them has been taken from them and the safety of their home has been violated. What I hear is that they have been made into burglars; thieves of culture and language, by the very culture and language they have inherited. I am reminded of the irony of people who rightly feel violated by someone invading their house, yet it's a house built on land taken forcibly from the indigenous people who once lived there. I am reminded of how the language carried with their ancestors to this new land can on the one hand be so poorly treated as to invent nonsensical words through misunderstanding, yet on the other hand can often be used as a test and a cultural stick to beat others who would choose to come and live there.

It is easy to pick on the visible inconsistencies of American culture, but every culture is made into thieves by its history; we are all 'burglarized' by our cultural past, we all speak nonsense that feels like it makes sense to us and misappropriate bits of culture we don't understand. But true meaning only comes when we stop and ask ourselves what we really mean by what we say - and where do the words of those who seem to be our enemies, actually mean the same as our own words?