From: Richard Kew
Subject: The AT&T Solution?
Dear Friends,
Last Monday we awoke to the news that for a cool $67 billion the
new-look AT&T had taken over our local telephone company, BellSouth.
There seems to be a certain irony in the way that things go full circle,
for now we are back to having a handful of telecoms after two decades of
confusion and an alphabet soup of companies.
However, the telecom world is at a far different place today than it was
when old Ma Bell was split up, with cable companies, wireless,
satellite, and voice-over-internet outfits muscling in on a business
which communicates more data than it does the spoken word, and is
growing exponentially. It will obviously continue mutating, but in the
midst of all this change that familiar name, AT&T, with a slightly
modified logo is there at the front of the pack again.
Yet it isn't the same AT&T that split out the Baby Bells in the 1980s.
This company cut itself into a number of pieces, then those pieces
shuffled themselves and did some merging, then some other smaller
telecoms got in on the act. Meanwhile they were selling bits and pieces
of themselves to each other, until finally what had started out as
SouthwesternBell took over the remnants of AT&T - and the venerable
name. Now, AT&T had already sold its Wireless service to BellSouth, but
as it has taken over BellSouth it has the piece back again.
It sounds confusing, and it is confusing. Hardly had these companies
started to settle down to a new way of doing business than mergers and
acquisitions altered their configuration so that they were forced to
work out new ways of doing business again. However I am not sure than
there are many people who would want to return to the controlled and
truncated service that old Ma Bell used to offer -- or the prices that
had to be paid for the privilege of making use of them.
What has this to do with the Gospel and the Church? Quite a lot if you
think about it. What the telecoms have been doing is adapting and
adjusting themselves to a wholely different world that has come into
being in the last quarter century. Pundits have been noting for a long
time that changing technology changes the culture which changes the way
goods and services are delivered in that culture. This must change those
who do the delivering.
The telephone companies are a fine example of how that process goes
ahead. Nothing is tidy, there are countless loose ends, and then there
are gaps to be filled. For example, BellSouth provide our landline
service and until a couple of years ago our local telephone service.
Meanwhile, ATT was our long distance provider. When a snafu with
BellSouth happened soon after we moved into our present home we switched
our local service to ATT, which means we get ATT service over BellSouth
lines.
It is more complicated than that because we get our cellular mobile
service through Verizon, the other major player in America's telephone
galaxy, although for many years we were with ATT Wireless before that.
We are now waiting for VerizonWireless to inaugurate their broadband
service in this area because we will then get our broadband through that
because living in a rural area there is no DSL provided by BellSouth,
and the local cable provider hasn't seen fit to hook up houses on our
street!
I suspect you are bored out of your minds by the meanderings of the Kews
and their communication needs, but I am getting to the point. The
Episcopal Church of the USA has been the primary franchisee of Anglican
services in the United States, but like old Ma Bell and the lumbering
old auto companies, it doesn't work in the world of today. It runs a
top-heavy bureaucracy in New York, and demands fealty from its regional
clans (dioceses).
On top of that instead of providing services for mission, the
denominational structure gets in the way as it works out the
implications of theologies that were fresh and shiny in the Sixties but
are now as dated as over-sized cars with fins and Beatles haircuts. Like
most tired old bureaucracies the denomination not only keeps on doing
stupid things (or enabling stupid things to be done), but it also seeks
to maintain its fealty over those who are embarrassed to be associated
with it.
Whether it likes it or not, reconfiguration is going on, much as the
birthing of the Baby Bells played a large part in the development of
today's emerging telecom scene. The old structures are trying to force
the old top-heavy structure to stay together, with its tidy diocesan
lines and money coming from the grassroots up the chain of command, and
the grassroots are increasingly deciding that such a dinosauric approach
is for the birds. This is like trying to hold dry sand in your hand on a
windy day.
For a start, in increasing numbers of places the passage of money along
the chain of command is faultering. In other places congregations or
whole blocs of congregations have severed themselves in favor of
something less onorous and compromised, and are networking themselves
into a healthier church in other parts of the world. There is, like in
the day of the Baby Bells, a bewildering array of entities that in one
way or another are seeking to be faithful, and that see the old
structure as beyond retrieval.
Add to this that there are those who remain in the old structure but are
less of it than of the healthier global church with which they identify,
and the additional fact that some of the older splinterings of the Ma
Bell structure are feeling their way back into the mix, like the
Reformed Episcopal Church and the Anglican Province in America, and you
have something that is far from tidy.
We don't know how all this will play out. The old ECUSA is aging and
despite denial to the contrary by those in the boardrooms, the
statistics say it is in increasing trouble. I might want to continue
pretending that it IS Anglicanism in the United States, but that is
about as realistic as General Motors believing itself to be America's
car company. Because the old ECUSA is in a state of decline something
new, streamlined, and healthy could emerge from all these other things
that are going on at the moment, and I suspect that we would see this
outcome in 15-20 years.
What ECUSA forgot, to use the late Peter Drucker's assessment of the
mainline churches, is its core business. It has become absorbed in
itself rather than the task that Jesus set the church of making
disciples. It has been more interested in protecting its monopoly than
seeing ways in which the Good News can be made to work in this
topsy-turvy world of today. Just as General Motors has been telling
Americans that they should like the cars they produce, Episcopalians and
others are shaking their heads and saying, "Nah," and taking their
business elsewhere.
The exciting thing, if we use the AT&T analogy, is that there is life
beyond the present confusion, but that life will look very different
from what things are like now. I suspect that General Convention 2006
will be the last that many of us will take much notice of. The way ahead
looks distinctly unclear, but who when the Baby Bells were spawned
imagined the sort of world that has come to pass? Yet the Lord is
sovereign, he will purge his church, he will help it reshape itself for
mission, and those who cannot get with his program will eventually
wither and die.
In Christ,
Richard Kew
RichardKew@aol.com
http://richardkew.blogspot.com
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