Electric Circuit Rider

I’m writing this just before the inauguration and less than a week after Airbus A320 crash-landed safely in the
Hudson River, and I’ve been thinking a lot about competence.

Analysts are saying that the passengers on Airbus 320 benefitted from the fact that their pilot was:

• The best aviator in his Air Force Academy class.
• A certified glider pilot
• An expert on airline safety.
• And he had almost 30 years of experience as an airline pilot.

Furthermore, the flight crew consisted entirely of women in their 50’s who had decades of experience as flight attendants.

One of the ferry boat captains who helped rescue the passengers said she did not have to issue any orders to her crew because they had trained and trained in rescue operations through the years.

As I look at the people President Obama is appointing to his cabinet, I note that he is placing a Nobel Prize winning Physicist in charge of the Department of Energy, which is responsible for America’s nuclear energy, among many other things that are also highly technical.

I spent a few days after Christmas visiting our friends Jim and Cathy in Key West. Jim is a retired pastor and journalist, although you can tell that journalism has always been his real vocation. I am always astonished at how perceptive are the questions that Jim asks when we talk, as we so often do, about the meaning of life.

Although my wife, Jacquie, no longer practices law, is nice to be married to a lawyer, not because she is going to sue people who bug me, but because she has been trained to spot problems and figure out ways to avoid them.

In Exodus 31, God tells Moses to choose Bezalel and Oholiab to oversee the creation of the Tabernacle, because they have both God’s Spirit and the skill required, this is one of the earliest incidents of what we call the “Wisdom” tradition in the Bible that finds its culmination in the Books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job, but many of the other books express an appreciation for those who are not only good-hearted, but also highly skilled.

Every profession and craft develops a certain kind of competence – even a way of thinking – that cannot be acquired without a lot of work and time. It takes longer for someone to move from apprentice plumber to master plumber than it takes someone to move from his or her freshman year in college to earning a master’s degree. That’s because it takes a long time to learn how to think like a plumber or a lawyer or a physician.

Where I come from, men would sometimes finish a job that they knew wasn’t quite up to standard by saying that it was “good enough for government work”.  That attitude certainly has pervaded public service for a good many years. It has always been far more important to appoint political supporters and their nephews to positions of responsibility in government than it has been to appoint people who actually knew what they were doing. The invention of the Civil Service was a reform that was supposed to fix this, but, as we know from the way FEMA handled New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, even a professional organization can’t overcome the handicap of having a polo-playing political appointee at the top.

The church needs to think about how to develop and honor competence in its volunteers as well as its clergy and paid staff. Here are some of the competencies we need to develop:

• The ability to listen to God. This means both developing a spiritual life and being immersed in the Bible. Without this perspective the church is just another organization – and one that doesn’t really have much purpose.
• The ability to listen to people. Those who are leadership positions in the church need to be able to listen to people, to sort out varying viewpoints and to remember that God speaks through others – often through the most unlikely people.
• The ability to organize people. This requires being able to communicate what needs to be done and how to do it. It means being able to mesh the work of different people and different groups of people into a larger project.
• The ability to let go of the past. As important as tradition and roots are to our religious heritage, we need to be able to let go of those things that no longer have any meaning or purpose.
• The ability to face the future without fear. The biggest mistakes churches and church leaders make are always made out of anxiety and fear.