Earlier this week, I spoke to a close friend of mine, Heather, who serves in jurisdictional youth ministry. She’s leading a youth mission trip this week. Since it’s a jurisdictional trip, the teenagers on the trip are from a diverse swath of congregations and backgrounds. She’s also not a musician and doesn’t have one on the trip with her. This combination has meant that she’s had to be extremely creative with how to make evening worship and morning prayer meaningful, accessible, and engaging without the shared language and songs that so many of us rely on. She’s an extraordinarily talented leader, and she’s pulled out all the stops to make it remarkable and impactful. 

Her bishop joined her for the first half of the week, and as she was getting ready to leave, she  told the students on the trip to take the practices and creative engagements Heather had led back to their churches. The bishop told the young people, “If your priest says ‘Well that’s nice, but at this church we have always done it such and such a way,’ you tell them the bishop said it was ok. You tell them to call me.” 

We reflected on her extraordinary leadership and support for youth ministry and noticed that, at the very highest levels of organizations, particularly in denominational and adjudicatory work, there actually tends to be a lot of energy around innovation and change. Anyone who is in executive leadership over an area or denomination has worked enough different churches to know that there’s a lot of ways to do good ministry. Many of them even seem to be shaped by their experiences to be keenly aware of how much that they don’t know. We reflected how young people (and new people of all ages) tend to bring in a huge amount of innovative energy and creative thinking that is actually received well at the top of the system…if it ever gets there. 

Where innovation gets choked isn’t most often at the top, it’s in the middle. It’s in trustee boards and long-time staffers, and operational directors, and all of the layers of people between youth, young adults, and innovative new people, and denominational leaders. 

I think of my daughter, who has taken on a self-designated role of third parent in our house. My children are twins, so she’s not even the eldest child, she’s younger by 3 minutes. Any time we correct her brother, she not only repeats it, but with a level of strictness and intensity we didn’t use. She’s three years old, she’s just trying to understand the world and her place in it, but I see the pattern all the time. The general suggestion of a leader becomes ironclad law, enforced by the middle of the system long after the leader may have changed their mind. Insecurity, not as a personal failing but as a structural reality, will make you start to exert control wherever you can.  

When people or institutions know who they are and where they stand, they can innovate, but when they don’t feel secure in their core identity, they make everything (from service times to order of worship) their identity, and nothing can change without feeling like an existential threat. 

What is the response here? Complaining about middle managers? How novel. No, I suggest we spend time trying to understand what threatens the security of the middles around us (we inevitably have one somewhere above us, and likely below us, in every system in our lives). I suggest we spend time trying to understand what stories, hopes, fears that middle managers feel responsible for protecting against, and see if we can give them permission to hold more loosely. On the less comfortable side of the same coin, I suggest we spend time identifying which systems we are in the middle of (because we are inevitably in the middle of at least one), where we have felt the self-appointed responsibility for holding it all together. What would it look like to consider it wasn’t yours to hold? 

The grip in the middle of the toothpaste tube is stopping us from getting the best out of it. It leaves those at the top feeling cut off from the rest of the system (the tube) and it leaves those in the bottom, filled with good ideas (toothpaste) cut off from the people who are hungry for what they have to offer. Let’s do our best to evaluate what is causing us to grip the middle so hard, and see if we can hold our work a bit more loosely, and let all the good stuff move where it belongs.