Small is good, small is all (The large is a reflection of the small)
A church-y series on adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy
Over the next few weeks, I plan to post a series of essays on nine points from adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy. That book, and her work more generally, now sits at the top of the stack of “books that have changed me.” It doesn’t hurt that she also happens to be an Octavia Butler scholar, co-hosting Octavia’s Parables, a podcast reading and discussing her work.
The best content, the life-changing stuff, invites us to return continually to it and evaluate again. I’ve especially been thinking this list is relevant a) “post-”pandemic, and b) during the rise of the fascism.
The epigraph at the top of brown’s blog:
'The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.' – camus
So first, here’s the list:
Small is good, small is all (The large is a reflection of the small)
Change is constant (Be like water)
There is always enough time for the right work. There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it.
Never a failure, always a lesson
Trust the People (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy)
Move at the speed of trust
Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build the resilience by building the relationships
Less prep, more presence
What you pay attention to grows
Let’s discuss #1.
Small is good, small is all (the large is a reflection of the small). In another book I’ve been reading lately, Timothy Murphy’s Counter-Imperial Churching for a Planetary Gospel, he highlights the importance of understanding the relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm, and names a temptation.
The post-modern temptation is to retreat from the larger institutional struggles and focus instead on the local. I know that is my temptation of late. I’m far more interested in impacting justice in my city, my county, perhaps my region, and organizing with those focused as I am on the local. I’ve (temporarily?) lost all interest in struggles in my denomination, for example, and although I have from time to time been to DC to advocate with our elected officials in Congress, have increasing doubts about the effectiveness of it. Much more interesting is my local congregation and neighbors and area non-profits and interfaith friends.
For a pastor like me, there is indeed a lot of consolation in this first thesis of brown: small is good, small is all. The large really is a reflection of the small. As much as our attention is drawn through news and other media toward national or global events, our responses to those large events are most effective when instituted in the small, and in a way hyper-focus on the larger events prevents us from investing time in the small where real change can happen.
The joy we can experience pouring ourselves into the small is remarkable. We can’t change the Supreme Court make-up this week, but we can help a young mother in the neighborhood. It’s unlikely we’ll unseat a Republican senator in a red state this season but we can flip a quorum court seat with just a few extra votes.
So too in the church, we often forget that the small is really all. Just a small shift of practice by a church choir, a praise band, a small study group, the church council, a preaching team, can do everything in terms of shifting the church toward living the faithfulness of Jesus.
The greatest call here is simple: instead of focusing our emotional energy on what the larger group is or isn’t doing, focus instead on what the small group can do, this little group, right here, whatever scrappy team finds itself together, because small is all.
Catherine Keller, a favorite process theologian, writes, “We who repent the spectacular failure of Christendom to do justice, practice kindness or walk humbly with our God, are ready for new and stranger coalitions.” Rather than perceive small church-y communities as weakened or lacking, the invitation is to re-frame perceptions. These smaller, new and stranger coalitions are perhaps exactly the repentant groups needed.
Such humble small Christian community may also have opportunity, in ways unlike the church of Christendom, to offer theological insight and find solidarity with other small groups (the stranger coalitions): ecologists, queer community, liberationists, and so on. Returning to Timothy Murphy, “‘the Church’ needs to end and accept its own process as subject-super subject: to die to itself and become a living movement as an interrelated value-network of solidarity and resistance” (182).
This brings us back to why Murphy names the retreat to the local as a temptation. The reality is that repentant communities that steward their own history well and the practices they have learned living faithfully in the way of Jesus can then significantly impact the larger systems. Not only does the small and local generatively change the large, but attention to the polarity of small-large-small-large reminds us that none of us in our local context are detached from the larger forces that have formed us and formed the other systems we encounter.
In other words, the value of the thesis small is good is not to indicate that large is bad but rather that small is good. It’s good. Full stop. So the next time you show up for a protest, or a concert, or a church service, and there’s a small group there, focus on what’s good in that group, what it can do together, because small is all and if you live that way the large will reflect it.
Having said all that, now go back up and read the other nine theses. You’ll see how they inter-relate, with later theses further clarifying this first one.
Tomorrow, or some time this week, you may be with a group and your first reaction will be to think about who isn’t there rather than who is. When that happens, say it is again, small is good, small is all.