Pistis Christou

Nearly two weeks ago, I expressed my observations about my own journey and struggles with being “moderate” and my ultimate realization that one can not even identify oneself as a “moderate” and faithfully follow Jesus Christ at the same time. There, the critique I offered was rooted in an analogy between Paul’s own struggle with the Roman world and its influence by the wisdom/philosophy, stating that being “moderate” wasn’t any more effective or honest than the “extremes” of progressive and conservatism.

But, I want to offer a praise of virtue that is specific to being in the middle, so that one does not simply treat being “moderate” as the same as being “progressive” and “conservative.” Rather, in identifying the virtue, it can also help us to identify the vice, so that we can identify the mistakes that we make when we try to go the middle route and how going the middle often times simply reinforces the extremes it seeks to avoid.

There are at least four, overlapping motivations behind being a moderate that I can think of. Firstly, it is to keep as wide array of people involved as possibly. Secondly, it is to avoid the damages that people who go off to the extremes can do when they obtain power. Thirdly, it is to recognize the insights and wisdom that various people can provide. Fourthly, it is generally the best route to keep everything together as it is, which is usually in the best, short-term interest of the most people.

Therefore, in order to operate in the middle, one must a) know what a wide range of people are saying and b) trying to combine what everyone is saying in one’s decisions and behaviors so as to find the best-fit for all involved. At the core of being in the middle is a virtue: listening and understanding. One must listen and value the perspectives of various people, even recognizing the value that diversity can have in the process of adaptation and learning and the dignity given to all people. This is a virtue that finds resonances with Biblical notions of love, although we should not reduce the Biblical vision of love to simply attention and dignity or treat those specific features as always essential themselves in order to be operating out of love.

What is the result of listening to diverse sources: ideally, a source of creativity that searches for deeper, transformative principles that can hit at the various concerns from a diverse set of people. When the virtue of concerned listening is performing this function, it is a virtue that may potentially provide exponential benefits to the widest array of people possible.

However, there are many conditions in listening to a wide array of voices does not lead to creative, transformative learning. Let me suggest at least two conditions where this is the case.

Firstly, under conditions of extreme diversity, effective listening becomes nearly impossible. Human resources are limited as there is only so much listening and learning a person can do at a time before their mental resources of exhausted. As a consequence, there becomes a point where ‘listeners’ become more prone to use rigid labels and stereotype due to the lack of motivation and resources to continue in this direction. The result of this is that the ideas that moderates hold in their heads become more a fixed sense of “knowing” what other people think and feel rather than a more fluid, hermeneutical awareness. Moderates express the sides in terms of ideas, but these ideas are not used as much as aids in listening, understanding, and thinking, but as set positions and frameworks. As a consequence, being in the middle can lead people to try to find the middle ground between what ultimately amounts to straw men, stereotypes that bear little resemblance to the reality on the ground. It is here that being in the middle can lead to falsehoods.

One solution to this is to attempt to try to include more and more people into leadership to try to obtain more human resources to listen to a wider array of people. And indeed, this can in certain conditions be a big help when there is a number of voices that are simply becoming noisome. But there are two principles that prevent make this option succumb to the law of diminishing returns. The more people you include in your learning and decision making process, the more time is necessary to spend in order to align the thinking of the various decision makers. Therefore, the more people you include in leading from the middle, the more and more time and resources it can take to make sure the appropriate listening and understanding from within the leadership to come to sufficient decision making capacities. While this cost is relatively minimal the fewer people are in the leadership, just as with larger populations, the more people that are in leadership, the more and more resources it takes to make sure everyone is on the same page. In other words, the very principle of growing populations that can mitigate effective listening and learning is also working against the effectiveness of a growing leadership.

Eventually, the time and resources necessary for keeping the leadership together itself become exhausted, meaning there becomes increasing division within the leadership. At this point, there is very little time, if any, to effectively listen to the rest of the people, but rather more time is spent maintain the interests that have formed within the leadership. Burgeoning hierarchies and leadership almost inevitably devolve into staking out particular interests that make them inflexible to the interests of another. Therefore, the division within the wider population one serves becomes characteristic of the leadership. It is through this process that the leadership increasingly becomes a mirror image of the society the leadership serves: look no further than the 2016 U.S. Presidential race where the two most popular candidates among specific sectors of the population, Bernie Sanders (who was railroaded by the Democratic National Convention) and Donald Trump, were people with rather extreme views. This principle I would suggest reveals the seeds of destruction from the success of the middle when operating in a democratic mode of valuing all people; the more one has succeeded in the past, the harder it is to maintain the necessary institutional cohesiveness that provided the basis for its earlier successes.

Instead, the leadership begins to devolve from this principle, and insofar as the leadership has the respect of portions of the population, it only further stokes the division among the people they served. Therefore, the people become more extreme in their views and expectations.

This leads me to the second principle that is both a condition for failure of the middle and a condition that works against effectiveness of growing leadership: the rise of “tribalization,” where portions of the population grows more insular from outsider perspectives leader to extremization. When parties within the leadership no longer effectively influences their preferred constituencies in a direction that effectively keeps the cohesion together, whether this happens consciously or without awareness, the people begin to cluster together into smaller, sub-groups that begin to take on an increasingly greater significance. These various groups begin to demand more and more, as the degree of their satisfaction with and allegiance to the institution is becoming increasingly diminished by the correspondingly increasing value of the specific sub-group one operates within. AT this point, the sub-groups do not identify themselves within the larger organization or nation, but rather with their subgroup, and instead they begin to see the institution and their processes as mechanisms to manipulate to accomplish their own goals. What ceases here is the spirit of the original agreements and processes and an appreciation of the processes as they stand, but increasing demands to get things to operate according to the interests of the subgroup.

In other words, as people begin to connect more to various smaller tribal, group identities, they demand more from the institution. As the institution can not provide the increasing demands, they become increasingly disaffected by the institutions. Rather than feeling connected to the institutional itself as an expression of something greater, they instrumentalize the institution for their purposes. As they become more extreme, they become more fixed in their views and values, as nothing is more effective to radicalization than repeatedly telling narratives that express grievances. Meanwhile, as the various smaller tribes with more stridently fixed values and expectations clash with each other and as they instrumentalize the institution for their own purposes, they begin to increasingly stereotype the opposing tribes rather than flexibly adjusting to them, force fitting them into their narratives of grievances. Consequently, amidst all of this, the various sub-groups continue to impress higher and higher demands upon the institution, making more radical expectations with lesser willingness to comrpomise.

At this point, those who remain in the middle and have avoided moving towards extremes via the processes of radicalization and tribalization are put under increasing pressure in the way they listen to the various sides. What they hear about in their listening is less and less the actual experience of a wide-array of people, but rather discourse that is increasingly forms to the habitualized narratives of grievances and stereotypes of the oppositions conjoined with increasing demands. At this point, the middle is operating with more of a fixed “knowing” about others rather than a more fluid “understanding.” Listening diminishes in this instance. Secondly, the various tribal narratives and stereotypes will affect the various people in the leadership differently; each individual in leadership will be more emotionally affected by one tribe’s expression than the other. Thus, despite their attempts to be joined to the middle, the emotional impacts of listening pushes them more and more towards one side or the other. This then diverts even more resources necessary for retaining a united front and common mind to make decisions, which only accelerates the process of devolution of the institution.

AT the end of the day of a formerly successful institution, you are left with a middle that is itself being torn to the extremes and is hearing more fixed ideas. At this point, mental and personal resources are cut thin to the point that in order to maintain things as they are, the only options the leadership can think of and prefer is to split the difference down the middle in some manner. Rather than providing transformative leadership that takes the various principles and come up creative solutions, the leadership from the middle is actively hindered from such.

In this case, the future of the institution is spiraling towards its eventually full decay and death. But, this is neither an inevitable future for the institution, or even if the institution fails, the people are not inevitably left with no hope for anything to replace what has failed. There are people who seek to learn and listen from the “middle”, but somehow, whether it be the grace of God, the convergence of circumstances, or both, manage to insulate themselves and/or overcome from the worst of the effects of being in the middle. Those people, and I emphasize people and not necessarily an individual person, may potentially provide a source of renewal for the central mission of the institution. But for those people to be properly identified by the institituonal and successful let them have the work they need to do will entail a few things.

Firstly, a willingness to recognize the failure of the present leadership. This isn’t necessarily a hit to the leadership as people or as individuals, but it is simply a recognition that for whatever reason, whether it be personal capacities or life circumstances, one does not have the resources necessary to lead transformatively. Collectively, the leadership must say “we cannot!” Without this recognition, the next steps can not occur.

Secondly, they must have a trust and hope that there are people who can, even if one can not immediately identify them. Without this faith and hope, the recognition of inability will simply lead to a spiraling of despair.

Thirdly, they must seek to learn to identify and discern what these will people will look like. Now, this is going to be hard off hand because we will inclined to think effective leadership will somehow resemble the values we have had that have blinded us. Instead, people must learn to deattach themselves from all that they think they know, allowing the space in their hearts and minds to receive new insights, and resisting every attempt of their own value and knowledge to force itself upon the shape of their new learning.

Fourthly, in seeking to find leadership, one must avoid the anointing of any one figure as the solution as looming crises tempt us to think. Transformational leadership is rarely perfect; in fact I would suggest there is has been and will only be one person in all of human history, Jesus Christ, who has ever been perfectly suited for the circumstances of entire transformation. Everyone else will have their flaws and their blind spots, so avoid anointing them. Even these leaders will need the help of others along the way to avoid the flaws they have from being a problem.

Fifthly, don’t overly fix on one person as is commonly the cases in periods of looming crises. In cases of overwhelming diversity, you will need a diverse array of leaders, but much, much, much less numerous than those who have lead (otherwise, you simply recapitulate the problems that created the institutional decay in the first place). If these people share a common heart and mind, they can work together.

Sixth, as those who can help are identified, the present leadership will have to let go of the short-term stability. Almost inevitably, this new, transformative form of learning will be deeply unfamiliar and in many ways evoke the rejection of the various tribes and their values and interests, along with the values and interests of the leadership. Moving with these insights will cause a period of destabilization, leaving the institution going through a process of vacillating periods of emerging, yet hopefully temporary, chaos and rigidification.

Seventh, amidst the vacillation of chaos and rigidification, one can still listen and hear in the midst of that, allowing the expression of concerns and thoughts that were either previously muted or were not considered important early on. In other words, you may find important insights in midst of the period of destabilizaiton that the stresses of a specific direction bring to the surface.

Finally, the leadership must accept the risk that what is being done may fail, that the institution is just going to decay and die. Sometimes, this happens. Apart from God’s unilateral Word and powerful Spirit to make it so, there are no real guarantees in life. But without accepting this possibility may come to pass, the leadership will circumvent the struggles that are experienced, thereby hindering transformation in the name of protection from risk.

Of course, institutions may find the resistance to such a pattern too much to overcome, that the vested interests are too strong to allow the necessary humility, repentance, faith, and steadfastness. There is a reason that institutions, more often that not, are replaced rather than renewed from within when the decay has gotten deep: the hearts and minds have been too influenced by the fears to trek towards the new direction they need. But, that doesn’t mean the people who have resisted the worst effects of being in the middle can not help. More often than not, new movements arise that compensate for the failures of what is present, and experience a marked advantage in terms of directing their time, resources, and knowledge that allow it to address the people and bring them together in a way that the older institution can not. These people, if the combination of personal drive and opportunities converge, may find a way to make things come to fruition.

So I will leave this with one comment that is more specific to my present circumstances in the United States and the United Methodist Church. Many are looking towards us Millenials as the future, as we have been told time and time again growing up that we were the future and have been given dreams to change the world. Let me state something really hard to say: most of us are not primed to take on that role. We have been formed with increasingly greater and greater expectations for our future that has made us more extreme in our thinking as the gap between expectations and reality is markedly high: mots of us have not adjusted our actual dreams, but have rather vacillated between narcissism and despair, between outright dread and excessive optimism. Many millenials are really more in need of formative leadership because we have been simultaneosuly protected from smaller, more formative challenges while left to ourselves when left to deal with the great divergences between dreams and reality. Nevertheless, don’t discount all of us millennials. There are some who may have resisted or overcome these effects, but that is not descriptive of my whole generation. Secondly, recognize that if we as millennials are given something we truly believe in and support, we can be a powerful force in change; however, the true goodness of the direction of that change is not determined, because not all change is truly good change even if it feels like it in the moment, but those who lead will determine the true value of the change we seek to create.