Mike's Sunday Post

April 2, 2023

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·      Welcome to Holy Week.  I brought home palm branches this morning from the worship services.  And Jie is going to let me sing “The Holy City” next Sunday for Easter in her two churches, so I’m getting together to practice in the next few days with a couple piano players who’ve never worked with me before.


·      The gardening has begun.  Indoor broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes, and Brussels sprouts are up and ready to transplant into bigger containers. 


·      And baseball has begun.  The Cubs had a good opening day, and we’ll leave it at that, not mentioning the other games they played against the Brewers. Still, it may be premature to start talking about next year at this point. 


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Bucking the System

People keep asking me these days if I’m still retired.  And when I embarrassingly affirm that I am, the next question is almost scolding, “Well, what are you doing with yourself then?” After all, I'm the guy who keeps retiring, then un-retiring. I mumble something about “Well, I’m busy writing each day.” So they ask how many books I’ve finished, which is zero at the moment.


Now I’m feeling defensive.  Here's the whole truth: I’m still retired.  I’ve turned down invitations to get off the retirement bench and take another church.  I haven’t gotten any of my books finished, even though I’m actively working on three of them.  And I’m not making any money at the moment, just spending my retirement checks. But here is what I AM doing:  I’m bucking the system.


There are so many systems to buck.  Of course, systems will inevitably buck back, so I have to be smart about picking which ones to take on. There’s the legal system, the health care system, the family system, the political system, the solar system…  Being retired means that I don’t have to tilt at all the windmills. I can just take on one; and so I’m focusing on the church-- the United Methodist Church, and its congregations and conferences.  


Don't worry about me though. I’ve been bucking systems all my life, going back to pre-kindergarten days when I connived to get out of the mandatory afternoon nap my mother prescribed for me and my two younger brothers.  I knew her system was screwy when she explained that I needed to nap because I was tired.  Even though I hadn’t learned logic yet, I was still able to figure out that I wasn’t the one who needed to nap, she needed me to nap.  So, I beat the nap system by negotiating with her to let me stay up and watch the Cub baseball games on television, promising to never tell my little brothers what I was doing.


I don’t feel too sorry for my mom, as she herself found ways to beat the system when she was little.  When she was seven and lived in Augusta, Illinois, her best friend in the church was Eunice.  The two girls loved to have sleepovers at each other’s houses.  One evening, Eunice and her parents were dinner guests of my mom’s parents. It was time for Eunice and her family to leave for home.  The girls begged to be allowed a sleepover that night, but the parents denied them.  So, the girls snuck up to my mom’s bedroom, switched outfits,  and kept their heads down.  When it came time for Eunice and her parents to leave, my mom put on Eunice’s coat, pulled her hat over her eyes, and ran out to the car.  According to the plot, once Eunice’s parents discovered they had the wrong girl, they would bring her back, giving the girls a second shot at spending the night together.  My mom managed to remain undiscovered for almost an hour in Eunice’s house before her parents found out. But she recalls to us that on this particular instance, bucking the system backfired. 


When I was in grade school I tried to buck the education system by starting a rogue class newspaper.  When in high school I started bucking the political system by opposing Richard Nixon, which was unheard of in Whiteside County, unless you were one of the town drunks.  In college I relished bucking any institution that kept women and minorities in their place.  


I never went into a single congregation as a pastor but what I didn’t buck the system I found.  And in the conference, bishops and district superintendents were wary of me, as I was always scheming to impose my discontent on others.


Therefore, no one who knows me is surprised when I quietly confess that I’m working on a plan to buck the system.  I’ll be back.  It’s just taking a little longer this time.


Retirement is giving me the leisure to learn more about how systems work, which is helpful to know if you plan to buck one.  Here’s what I’ve got so far:

 

First, systems are composed of interacting parts.  My family system, for example, is composed of spouses, kids, siblings, in-laws, cousins, our houses, our stuff, and our money.  In our family, we all try to keep our money secret from each other, because the way our family system works, you will go broke if anyone else finds out your bank balance is in the black. Which leads me to the second component of every system:


All the “parts” of a system are under the influence of a set of rules, usually unwritten and undiscovered.  One rule in our family was “share.”  That’s why we have to hide our money from each other, or it will all disappear in the hands of our family’s most talented con artists.  (Yes, we have more than one con artist in our family system.) Every system has its rules, and the rules are what keeps the parts of that system functioning somewhat predictably.  


Consider the hospital system and their rule that patients have to wear gowns that leave their butts hanging out.  It is very difficult to buck the system when your rear end is exposed to the authorities.  By the time I find where they put my pants, it’s time to discharge me, and they’ve dodged the rebellion I was planning to lead among my fellow patients.  These ephemeral but pointed rules have a purpose, which brings us to the third thing about systems:


The rules keep a system in equilibrium.  I had a veterinarian tell me three decades ago that the job of a vet is to upset the homeostasis of a sick animal.  He had to explain that to me three times before I got it.  If you haven’t heard the term, here’s your first explanation, (see if you’re smarter than me): homeostasis is the tendency of a system to never, ever change, even if it is dying, because change, even if it means healing, is scarier than continuing with business as usual.  Healers are hindered by the system itself if they don’t find a way to subvert its rules and upset the homeostasis.  Thus, a healer will cut, push, stretch, shock, burn, starve, confine, sedate, juice up…anything to shock the system and throw off the equilibrium in order to save the patient.  It is always the role of the leader to get you out of the system if you try to buck it.  This is because systems have a job to do, and woe is you if you interfere with it.  At this, we come to point number four:


The job of a system is to transform inputs into outputs.  For example, the Chicago Cubs are a system.  They input 26 players, coaches and a manager, jillions of dollars from fans and TV revenue, and historic Wrigley field. All this is the input.  The output?  A World Series win every 110 years.  During the other 109 years, the output consists of $12 hot dogs and $15 beer when you go to the ballpark.  


So, here’s what we know about systems that involve human beings:  1) they are made up of people and other non-people-parts that all interact, 2) everybody and everything in the system is under the influence of rules they usually don’t think about, 3) the purpose of the rules is to keep the system running in its current direction, even if it is headed off a cliff, and 4) the system continually uses up resources and energy in order to produce an output, even if inefficiently, even if no one actually needs the output.     


Systems are not necessarily rational, or efficient, or good for everybody.  Systems arise and survive by developing the impersonal dynamic of inertia, thus preserving their homeostasis, at all costs. Our quality of life depends on gaining the knowledge and skills to buck a system now and then. 


United Methodist congregations and conferences, to which I’ve devoted my entire adult life, are struggling these days.  I might appear to be hibernating in my retirement, getting no books finished, earning no money—but I’m using my freedom to explore the system in ways I’ve never been able to do before.


Everyone who loves the church knows the system has to be changed.  And we’ve tried mightily to change it, for decades now.  Our problems didn’t just begin last week.  We have morale problems, credibility issues, output snags, financial losses, conflicts and fracturing, member loss problems, theological confusion, relationship weariness, church closures and disaffiliations, etc. United Methodist churches and conferences have been wrestling with our future all my adult life.  


So far, what I think I know is this: it appears that there are two ways to buck the system--  the way we’ve been trying is through static changes. That is,  we merge congregations and conferences; add and subtract programs, staff and budget; introduce new technology; start and close churches; restructure; downsize; introduce new programs; improve our mission statements; and redo our policies.  These are static changes because the homeostasis of our system makes us immune to those kinds of changes. The more we change like we have, the more our dynamic remains the same. No one has undergone more changes than United Methodist churches and conferences.  Yet the outlook never changes.  The system always has its way with these kinds of static change and reform.


What I’ve been experimenting with are dynamic changes.  How do we replace the economic models that underlie our churches and conference? How might we radically reform the political process?  What unwritten and undiscovered rules in our system do we need to disobey? What happens if we move the goal posts to a spot outside the “stadium?”  Where would we start if we reframe reality, focusing on people who live in our neighborhoods rather than the condition of the institution whose doors we’re trying to keep open?  If we rewrite the relationship rules to attract team players rather than lone ranger pastors, what will happen to the equilibrium of our system?  


My book writing is on hold for a bit.  I’m enjoying this tinkering and learning about systems too much to stay focused on my books for now. And I’m quietly collecting allies who want to tinker with me—and have a mind to buck the system. But I'm not forgetting, systems will buck back, hard.


J. Michael Smith, 1508 E Marc Trail, Urbana, IL 61801
www: jmichaelsmith.net