[In continuation of our High Performance Team discussion, here's an excerpt from Bill Hybel's Axiom]
One of the greatest contributions author and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck made to this world was to shine a spotlight on the differences between participating in genuine community and experiencing what he coined “pesudo community”.
If community involves things such as knowing and being known, serving and being served, loving and being loved, celebrating and being celebrated, then most relationships, Peck asserted, are constantly devolving into pseudo community. It’s the great temptation for small groups of people to slide into a state where they’re not quite telling each other the truth and they’re not quite celebrating each other. Instead, they tolerate each other, they accomodate each other, and they settle for sitting on the unspoken matters that separate them.
Years ago, what captured my imagination about Peck’s concept was the aha that in order to move from pseudo community to genuine community, you have to endure a little chaos. To break the falsehood, someone has to upset the applecart and say out loud, “As far as I can tell, we’re not experiencing real community here. We’re not where I want us to be, anyway. Frankly, I’m holding back. I’m not giving you the final 2 percent of what I’m thinking. And I’m not really hearing what you have to say, either.”
We settle for pseudo instead of demanding the real deal for one simple reason: fear. “What if airing the issue actually makes things worse?” we think. “What if probing the situation only serves to ruin the relationship?”
To these fears and more, there’s only one response: the tunnel. Frightening as it is to enter the tunnel, those who do are the ones most likely to pop up one day into the fresh, light-giving daylight of true community.
I’ve been in hundreds of pseudo-community situations in which the only option was for me to invite the other person down into the tunnel. We’d be sitting across each other in a restaurant, our food would have been served, and there would come that awful and awkward point when there was nothing else to say except the one thing that had to be said: “This is quite likely going to be a difficult conversation,” I’d start, “but I’m committed to working this through no matter what it takes.”
And then the back-and-forth would begin as we both recounted the steps that had led to our relationship demise: “I meant this,” and “You said that,” and “Here’s where I think we lost our way.”
Chaos would actually be a tame way to describe some of the exchanges I’ve experienced in this regard. Sometimes it all feels downright scary. It’s messy. It’s ambiguous. It can be ugly. But it is almost always worth it.
Ministry is a series of battles, and a lot can get said on the front lines that may not be exactly edifying. Every leader must constantly ask direct reports, chief lieutenants, key donors, and the best volunteers, “Are we okay? How can we clean up the messes we’ve made along the way?”
Stay prayed up, rested up, and committed to entering the tunnel of chaos whenever the Spirit prompts. It’s one of the truest tests of character and love.
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