Where Everybody's Crazy

Tuesdays, I go to meetings: denominational pastors' meetings, area pastors' meetings, block prayer meetings. Today, one block prayer meeting and one area pastors' meeting. They took up all day, and let's be honest, were completely useless.

Well, no, let's be fair. The prayer meeting was worthwhile. Our denomination, the SFDD, divides its churches into four blocks, and there are four churches in our block. We meet together to pray and share news once a month. Churches generally prepare an A4 sheet of prayer requests, and each church's pastor reads the requests off their sheet, and then we pray.

The other meetings are useful, but in a bit of an oblique way. The contents are irrelevant to me on the whole; the importance is in terms of networking, showing willing, and observing how business is done in the Japanese church context. From that point of view, they're invaluable.

One thing I have noticed, like the recitation of the prayer request sheets, is a fantastic attention to detail. I guess I'm being polite in saying that. The other day, at the denominational pastors' meeting, what was supposed to be a high-level discussion about the vision and purpose of the headquarters building very quickly turned into organising the cleaning rota. I asked my pastor (who, incidentally, reads this blog. Hello, Takahashi-sensei!) about this and he said that we had a lot of attention-to-detail people in our denomination.

Well, I would have accepted that until the regional pastors' meeting today. This is an interdenominational meeting, which is a pretty rare thing here in Japan, and it's mainly a fellowship and unity thing, although we are organising a big interdenominational conference together. And an inordinate amount of time in that meeting was taken up with announcements about the conference cafeteria menu, biographies of the musicians taking part, and examples of the artwork on sale in the gallery. I don't need to know all this stuff. In each of these meetings, I have written down on my little notepad, "Is this discussion taking place on the right level?" Am I just living in a country of anal retentives? Do you have to have an ISTJ personality type to be a pastor here?

I'm not sure. I don't think these people are incapable of vision and leadership. I think it just expresses itself in a very relational way. And part of that expression is keeping everyone informed, even in the minutiae of what's going on. We don't like surprises. In my paper on leadership in Japan, I wrote about the concept of "nemawashi" - I didn't realise at the time that it had a very negative connotation, but it's still useful - it means ensuring everybody is on board before a decision is made publicly. This nemawashi is necessary to satisfy a desire for information and total involvement in a decision which is to be taken corporately.

Another factor may be that, where unity is hard to find, agreeing about stuff that doesn't matter gives a useful sense of safety. There was no way on earth we were going to agree on a vision for headquarters. And if we didn't agree, that would be embarrassing. But if we don't agree about the cleaning rota, well, who cares?

One more thought: all this involvement and sharing information doesn't seem to have made a blind bit of difference to church unity. We can, apparently, keep everyone "on board" and still split like good Protestants.

I'm still working out what to make of this. I want to make one more connection. One of the barriers to lay involvement in churches here is the control factor. Pastors like to know what's going on in their churches. Of course there are issues of pastoral responsibility, but I can't help connecting the insatiable desire for detailed information and involvement in our pastoral meetings with the insatiable desire for detailed information and involvement in church activities. Do pastors need to let go? Or is there a way to both work effectively and preserve the benefits of relationship-based leadership?