This past month I had a unique opportunity to attend two conferences. One was at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., and the other was at Columbia University in New York City. While the topics were very similar, there was a striking difference between the spirits, maybe even essences, of each program. The title of the conference in Silicon Valley was Frontiers of Social Innovation: a Forum for Global Leaders. It was exciting and exhilarating. Three hundred leaders from all over the world, who focus on changing the world for the common good, came together and spoke about how to leverage big data to create evidence based impact and draw impact investors to change the world. It was unapologetically aspirational, but firmly based in the real. Our heads were in the clouds, but our feet were on the ground.
At Columbia, the title of the conference was New Frontiers in Poverty Research. It was only a day long and had about 75 people in attendance. The speakers were incredibly informative, and the kind of research on which they were reporting has the capacity to really move practitioners in a direction to change the poverty rates in America in the right direction. But it simply lacked the excitement that the folks at Stanford generated. In fact, one of the key speakers from Harvard Business School’s Social Enterprise Initiative nearly warned against getting to aspirational. He told us that we shouldn’t try to come up with a policy that would change everything because it would never actually get passed. He urged us all to work on policy that would actually happen in the real world. It seemed like he would have scoffed at the Stanford conference agenda, and it seemed like they would have booed him off the stage.
I don’t mean to be too critical of the Columbia conference, because they may be the ones who actually make a real difference, but it felt like a killjoy. Change is possible, but barely. The West Coast approach was just the opposite — we are change, and it’s for good. The main difference in the two was innovation. The entire Stanford focus was innovation and it felt like that whole area of Silicon Valley just dripped with newness. No fear in failure! Failure was just a part of innovation. In fact, it was a necessary step. What didn’t work helped lead to the questioning that eventually did work. The next big thing was about to happen; the next big thing was happening — we are the next big thing!
All the participants in both settings discussed issues and ideas that are utterly familiar to people in my Baptist orbit: root causes of poverty, racism, gender inequality, access and participation in the global economy, micro enterprises, etc. While the conversations were close to home, my interlocutors were not. In Palo Alto, I met three other religious types, and one of them was Buddhist. In New York City, I didn’t meet another person who was there representing a religious entity. When I told people that I was part of something called the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship they looked confused and wondered what I was doing there. Christianity in particular, and religion in general, was mostly absent in conversations about “New Frontiers in Poverty Research” and “Frontiers in Social Innovation.” After the initial shock wore off that I was a religious leader, most of the people sort of understood why I was there. The fact was, and probably is, that many religious leaders are not on the frontiers in social innovation. We tend to get bogged down in the minutia of day-to-day church life, or consumed with denominational/denominetworkal (I take full credit for coining this derivative) politics that we forget our place in the public square. Beyond Christian voices in rogue politics of an election year or the fiery, prophetic voices for or against our latest modern moral issue, religious leaders (and maybe even religious people) are simply absent in important places and conversations.
In spite of my lament, there are some good Christian voices in important areas in the world, but the most stimulating aspect of the two conferences to me was the tension between tradition (represented by Columbia) and innovation (represented by Stanford). This tension is everywhere, but Christianity and most institutionalized religions, struggle with this tension because religion tends to be places mostly defined by tradition rather than innovation. There is always a tension between innovation and tradition, and vibrant faith walks that tightrope well. It resists the urge to bunker down and never change — which leads to total irrelevance, stagnation, and death. It also resists the urge to become unanchored from the traditions that held us and helped us this far. This is the balance of health and vitality, and it may even be biblical.
When the early Jesus movement was emerging in the middle of the first century, there was serious tension over the issue of including Gentiles. Within the New Testament we have competing voices on this issue and even a couple of mediating voices between the two poles. James and Paul represent the full spectrum. James holds a rigorous/traditional approach to obeying the Bible (it’s all important — see James 2:8-13). Paul represents a lenient/innovative approach to Gentiles — let them in without doing what the Bible says, i.e. food laws, circumcision, etc. In between these two, and years later, we read the Gospel of Matthew that follows James’s primary interpretation, but leans toward Paul. And then we have the Gospel of Luke that follows Paul’s innovation, but leans toward James. In the New Testament we have James and Paul as the two most extreme voices on the Gentile issue with Matthew and Luke mediating the gap between innovation and tradition.
As you can see, I’m not really advocating for tradition or innovation; I’m advocating for both. If the Bible models for us the capacity to hold the tension together without letting it fall to pieces, then maybe that is as much of a mandate for modern people of faith as any particular biblical edicts. It is certainly a more difficult space to navigate, but it is probably more generous to humanity, which is why holding the tension together is so important. Everybody, both traditionalists and innovators, are beloved.