If You Want to Go Far, Go Together

interdependence: element three of Emergent Strategy

Welcome to week four of our exploration of Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, a book about how we make sustainable, transformative change.

Here’s an introduction to the series, and here’s element one: fractals, and element two: intentional adaptation.

Soundtrack for this installment:

Love this song, but especially this live rendition, which ends as a singalong in McDaid’s pub in Dublin.

Element three of emergent strategy is interdependence and decentralization:

Interdependence: mutual dependence between people, organisms, things.

Decentralization: dispersal or distribution of power.

This element is in many ways self-evident for a lot of us, especially members of religious organizations. Community is our jam. And yet in a hierarchical culture, and especially one with yawning inequality of wealth, privilege, and power, it’s deeply countercultural to link arms, to do the hard work of building a shared vision. It’s especially countercultural to believe in the power of the people to transform the world for the better.

But we can also see how these elements start to work together in a way that makes the impossible seem possible, or at least purposeful. Interdependence/ decentralization at large scale feels overwhelming. But if we look at it in a fractal way, focusing on the “seven birds” around us in our murmuration, we can actually take some steps toward the world as we’d like it to be. And putting interdependence together with intentional adaptation means we don’t have to figure things out once and for all—we can risk taking a chance and even being wrong, because the wisdom of the crowd is around to help us find our way: “What I have been studying by being hyper-aware inside my life is how much being interdependent is a series of small repetitive motions.” (Emergent Strategy p. 93)

Here are a few additional nuggets from brown:

In a capitalist society like the United States, every aspect of our survival—from food and water to healthcare, child care, and elder care—is based on our success at being an individual in the world: Do we compete well enough to make good money so we can live a good life?

…Humans are unique because we compete when it isn’t necessary.

We could reason our way to more sustainable processes, but we use our intelligence to outsmart each other… the idea of interdependence is that we can meet each other’s needs in a variety of ways, that we can truly lean on others and they can lean on us. It means we have to decentralize our idea of where solutions and decisions happen, where ideas come from. (Emergent Strategy p. 87)

A couple weeks ago, we at Trinity got word from a member of the church, P, that her husband D who’d been in hospice care had taken a turn, and it looked as if he would be passing away soon, perhaps within hours. My colleague, for whom responsiveness is one of his best superpowers, went over right away to visit and pray with the family. But as sometimes happens in these situations, D has continued to hang on, and as of this writing is still with us.

With the scramble of acute timing behind us, and given my not having had a chance to visit the couple, I thought P and D might like to receive communion, and started to make plans to visit. Now, it’s much more efficient for my colleague and me to go together. We’re the pastors, after all, and we have the flexibility to arrange our schedules to make a visit possible. But with Emergent Strategy on my mind, and especially this principle, I’ve been trying to ask myself questions like:

• Is this actually mine to do?

• Is there someone who’s been waiting to be called into work like this… or someone who has no idea they have the gifts for it until they’re asked?

• Who brings something to this task/situation that I don’t have in my tool box? (A difficult question for people who pride themselves on our competence… and a really difficult question for any of us trying to prove our worth to the world. *cough*)

• Who can I bring along who’d add depth/creativity/FUN?

What brown is suggesting takes more time and effort. Sure enough, the first person I contacted to accompany me didn’t get back to me. At this point I could have abandoned the quest and fallen back on my colleague. Tick tock, time’s a-wasting! And yet as brown reminds us, “there’s always enough time for the right work.” This felt worth devoting some time and patience to. The second person I called, J, an elder and current Bible study leader, was thrilled to come along, and in fact she had a connection to the couple through a previous church. When we arrived, P had pulled out photo albums that included pictures of J’s family.

brown also teaches that there’s an experience [she says conversation] that only the people in this room can have; find it. In our case, J also sings in our choir, and as part of our simple communion ritual, we sang a couple hymns together. D had been unresponsive in his bed before this, but began singing along.

Holy Holy Holy…
…God in three persons, blessed Trinity!

It’s not lost on me that in this experience of interdependence, we ended up singing a song about an interdependent God—three persons in one. The theological term is perichoresis, and of all the concepts we learned in seminary, few of them bring as much delight. The Greek word means something like “to make space around.” Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit dwell in a fluid interrelationship of unity and harmony, an eternal dance of love and togetherness. I remember group study sessions for ordination exams, with classmates doing a little boogie as we drilled the word into our heads. Perichoresis. Dancing around. …Interdependent. Decentralized. At work in ways we can’t predict, flattening hierarchies and making a way where there seems to be no way.

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Your Turn

Think about the bulleted questions above. Is there a place in your life where you can bring those to bear?

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What I’m Up To

• Plains-state Presbyterians! I’ll be the convocation speaker at the Synod of Lakes and Prairies’s Synod School, the registration for which opens on April 1. Hope to see you there. Some amazing workshops on offer!

• Arianne Braithwaite Lehn and I had a really lovely, centering conversation on Monday about the importance of presence for the living of these scattered, chaotic days. This is part of my Art of Onward series for supporting subscribers, which you can access for as little as 50 cents per post for an annual subscription. If you’d like to join us but are unable to pay, please get in touch. Members and friends of Trinity Presbyterian, Herndon are eligible for complimentary gift subscriptions; just ask.

• And here’s my sermon from Trinity last Sunday; audio is below. Figs, late bloomers, and a guy’s vendetta against the KKK:

“As historian Rebecca Solnit puts it in her work about hope, it’s always too soon to give up and go home. And it’s always too soon to calculate the effect.”

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Link Love

This Monday is Trans Day of Visibility, and I have a few wonderful writers to recommend: Ben Greene of Good Queer News, Savannah of Savannah’s Footfalls, and Erin Moore of Erin in the Morning.

Be curious; be kind. 🏳️‍⚧️

And steady on.