Back in my former life as a university professor, the area in which I worked--the intersection between mass media and the creation of culture--was populated by individuals who liked to use the word hegemony. Hegemony refers to the ability of cultural institutions like the mass media to define "normal." There are assumptions, values, ideologies, etc. that are so profoundly accepted they not only are unquestioned, they are simply accepted as, collectively, constituting normalcy. Like fish unaware of the water in which they swim, we live in a particular cultural milieu where, at a very basic level, we accept that the way things are is the way they must be.
As I have begun in earnest a conversation with the congregation I serve about what it will mean for us to embrace a missional/incarnational understanding of church, I've become aware in new ways of the hegemonic power of the institutional church, of what those in the missional church movement like to call "Christendom." I've told the congregation that in any move to missional, half the battle is mental, simply getting our heads around a different way of understanding what Christ calls his church to be.
This mental battle is more than just resistence to change. We could remain a traditional, attractional church, merely implementing a new strategy for church growth, and encounter resistence to change. And change to the stasis of any system will be resisted to one degree or another.
No, this is a battle of an altogether different order. A move to missional is not just a change in our understanding of church (in itself a significant hurdle) but a change in our understanding of normal. It requires stepping outside one paradigm of being church with a level of awareness sufficient to make it clear that the ways we've done church in the past are only "normal" because that's the way we've always done them. To that extent, many of the ways we've done church are not divinely ordained so much as they are inherited. Encouraging the congregation to recognize that it is within our power to redefine normal while remaining faithful to Christ's calling, and that even though the ground beneath our feet will move as the redefining progresses the center--Christ--will still hold, is the challenge.
And then there's this: to the extent we can be a missional/incarnational church only insofar as we're living missional/incarnational lives, the "normal" that is being challenged is not just about church but about the intricacies of our daily existence.
High thinking, perhaps, that comes to ground in something as comparatively mundane as suggesting that a particular committee is not really necessary. People can acknowledge that the committee doesn't work very efficiently, that folks are not lining-up to be part of the committee, even that the work the committee does doesn't require a committee to be accomplished...yet they struggle to imagine the church without the committee.
One of the things I've discovered about remaking normal is that some people can make the leap instinctively and immediately: they can envision the new normal and the benefits it provides...they get it. Others grasp the new normal incrementally, arriving at an understanding over time, a piece at a time. And still others will never get there at all. Some leaders advocate defining the new normal and forging ahead, taking with you those who can make the leap and leaving all the others to forge for themselves. I'm not sure you can do that in a church...something, perhaps, about us all being members of the body of Christ. This is part of my learning curve--figuring out how to lead through a process of redefining normal. It is one thing to research and speculate upon the power of hegemony, safe on the sidelines of academia; it's another to be in the thick of it, groping about to find your way.
How do you redefine "normal" in your context? What challenges do you face?
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