Adapting or Recreating Resources

As I have worked with this more, I have moved closer to thinking that the key thing is to do a much better job of adapting resources, or even recreating them for their own circumstance.

This comes in part from my work at the Alban Institute directing a project in evaluation. When I phone people across the country about how well this resource or that has worked for them, I have noticed an interesting division. Some people tend to say "yes, but" while others say "yes, and." This is true in a way that is surpringingly independent of the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the resources being evaluated. The world seems divided between "yes but" and "yes and" people when it comes to resources.

Some people, when you ask them about how a resource worked will say "yes it is good in a way but it is not Methodist, or not for a small church, or not for a black church, not for a Canadian church, not from an urban church, or not from a large church." In contrast to this, some people say "yes this was good and we found a creative way to rewrite the exercises to work with a smaller group, or we realized that the group exercises were better done through Methodist small group methods." People even say "yes this was good in its way and the biggest thing it did for us was to show us that to be faithful to where God is leading us in this place we needed to create our own resource."

Seeing this pattern was for me freeing. It makes it clear that—in the end—the request for resources specific to certain kinds of churches is a dead end. Maybe the Southern Baptist Mission Board can still provide a fair range of resources specific to the Southern Baptists. But what about small southern Baptist churches? Small rural Southern Baptist churches? Small rural Southern Baptist churches in Canada? At some point, a resource center director will need to turn from finding a specific resource to helping a leader to adapt the resource.

In the early days of creating our Congregational Resource Guide, our team faced the question of how to handle this. Some argued that we should set up our Web site to make different resource suggestions at least for different sizes of congregations. At the time, we resisted this suggestion because it felt like it would enlarge what was already a daunting task of coming up with resource recommendations concerning dozens of different congregational issues and challenges. Trying to make resource recommendations for each size of congregation on each subject would multiply the work beyond our capacity. Keeping up with resource recommendations in more than 100 categories is enough of a task without saying that we will come up with separate sets of resource recommendations for small, medium, and large congregations in each of 100 areas (100 x 3), for seven or eight religious traditions (100 x 3 x 8), for African-American, Asian, Hispanic and Caucasian congregations (100 x 3 x 8 x4), for conservative and liberal congregations (100 x 3 x 8 x 4 x 2). If we had tried to go down this road, I don't know which part of our team would have given up first—the resource people or the technology people—but clearly a gasket would have blown somewhere.

If this is true for our Congregational Resource Guide (CRG), it is even more true for the ecumenical resource center director. The CRG is primarily a virtual project so we don’t need to buy and store all the resources the way most ecumenical resource center directors must.

Faced with the impossibility of making individual resource recommendations for each type and subtype of congregation, we realized that our main challenge must be on how to help groups adapt, use, and even recreate resources. There is an important place for specific resources. Canadian churches long for Christian education resources where their experience is visible. African-American churches long for and need resources that recognize the specificity of their experience. Large congregations rightly say that most church resources presume uncritically the situation of the mid-sized congregation.

Yet congregations are amazingly creative. Done well, resourcing can support this creativity by conveying an attitude of possibility and by helping congregational leaders view "something that does not fit" as an invitation to look beyond the ready-made solution and ask what God is calling their congregation to do in this moment. In the heyday of denominationalism (from World War II until the 1980’s), buying resources ready-made in specific denominational colors and patterns was seen as an act of faith. Yet the art of adaptation and recreation has lived on. It has lived on among religious educators. It has lived on among leaders of smaller congregations or African-American or Asian congregations who assumed that resources were not made for them and had to be critically appropriated. In the future work of those who help congregations with resources, far more can and should be done to encourage this capacity for adapting and recreating resources for specific situations and faith traditions.

In broader scope, this fits with our recognition from other sources that the skill of using resources is at least as important as the initial selection of the best ones. It also fits with the recognition—crystallized in the new census—that identity is not only hyphenated but multiply hyphenated.