Reciprocity and Radical Collaboration

I mentioned before the importance of honoring the people you work with, the members of your community. All the members of your community. This is an issue that was raised in the early church in James 2 (remember the brothers and sisters who showed favoritism to those with gold rings and ignored the ones with shabby clothes?) and continues to be an issue today – whether because of appearance, wealth, power, race, language, gender, sexual orientation. There are several lessons to be learned:

1. Who do you pay attention to?
2. Who is on the leadership team?
3. Whose ideas are the ones in action?
4. How are you making and carrying out your plans?
5. What are you doing all this for?

The answers to these questions have a two-fold foundation: spiritual and participatory. 

1. Spiritual. Jesus came to save all of creation. The debates in the early church about who salvation was for leaves no question that salvation and transformation was for all who believe, whether Gentile or Jew, just look at Peter’s vision in Acts 10 or the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. Moreover, throughout the Old and New Testament are reminders to care for everyone – the stranger, the poor, the orphan, the widow. We are called time and again to remember those often forgotten, disconnected, or overlooked.  
2. As a participatory action researcher, I am acutely aware of the processes utilized to work with communities. Asset Based Community Development is one such approach that begins with assets (rather than problems) and works with communities to utilize them towards reimagined communities. Broadway UMC in Indianapolis is a great example of how a church has embraced ABCD and reimagined the role of church in the community.

​Radical collaboration underlies ABCD and other forms of participatory action research. There are levels of participation ranging from passive viewing to partnering. Two different continuums of participation offer different language – Arnstein’s (1969) Ladder of Participation and Patton’s (2011) degrees of working together.

Arnstein's Ladder of Participation 

• Citizen Power: 
  • ​Citizen Control
  • Delegated Power
  • Partnership
• Tokenism 
  • Placation
  • ​Consultation
  • Informing
• Nonparticipation
  • ​Therapy
  • Manipulation

Patton's Degrees of Working Together 
Low-level working together as distinct entities

• Networking: Sharing information and ideas
• Cooperating: Helping distinct members accomplish their separate goals
• Coordinating: Working separately on shared goals
• Collaborating: Working together toward a common goal but maintaining separate resources and responsibilities
• Partnering: Shared goals, shared decisions, shared resources within a single entity

High-level, fully integrated working together

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Radical collaboration involves a high degree of reciprocity, so much so that individual ownership of an idea or a project or a church or a movement is impossible. Think about the view the early church had about possessions. They sold all they had and distributed the proceeds according to need among them (Acts 2:44-45; 4:32-35).
 
I am not proposing that radical collaboration necessitates selling everything we own. But, I am proposing that radical collaborate demands rethinking how we value our time, our talents and our resources. Over and over in Acts and the Letters (and in the life of Jesus), we see relationship elevated over wealth, power, status, propriety, expectations, identity, position.  
 
Radical collaboration requires humility, listening (this word pops up a lot!), recognizing privileges, seeking to honor and invite others to participate, letting go of control and ownership (something I find very difficult for churches to do with established ministry programs), and working through relationship. But, isn’t this the example that Jesus gave us for living in his Kingdom throughout the gospels?

Some suggestions:

1. Leadership should reflect the community demographics. Is your team filled with professional folks while your neighborhood is primarily working class? Do you have a token minority, or have you made a concerted effort to bring women, people of color, people with varied backgrounds and education, and others to the table? Consider who is making decisions and who needs to be at the table. As someone who has built boards looking for particular skills, I confess that it is sometimes easier to find easily recognizable skills among white men established in their careers. But, it is important to dig deeper to find folks of all backgrounds with equally valuable skills (organizers, fundraisers, visionary, action-oriented, communicators, influencers, connectors, etc.) that may not be reflected in their position of employment or the narratives we hold about social and economic value. Our society values social standing, especially with regard to economic contributions. And this is one way to work within and against that.
2. Begin attuning your eyes to possibilities. You will see people in a different light. You will seek to learn people’s gifts. You will value connections and connectors.   
3. Some questions I ask myself throughout my work is who is at the table? Who should be at the table? How and when were they invited? How does this affect the process? In one city, a church-affiliated foundation worked with the city to develop a community center. They held a community forum to get feedback from neighborhood residents. There was quite a bit of conversation surrounding this forum from both supporters and critics about who it was really for. The center and foundation maintain that they worked with the community to design and build the center. However, at what point where people consulted? From an outside perspective, the forum was held well after the conceptual ideas were decided upon and partnerships developed. The foundation had the money and made the decisions of what and where. Community folks helped decide the aesthetics. This process did not engage a very high level of working together. It certainly wasn’t empowering the community to develop this center together. It was, at best (using Arnstein’s Ladder) placation, a rung of tokenisim.    

If our goal is to invite people into a new way of doing community (informed by faith), then we must engage in the highest levels of working together and community empowerment. We must pursue reciprocity, especially because so often the very people we seek to serve are those who have been hurt by the church, who have been taken advantage of by even well-meaning folks, and who have been manipulated to further economic or personal agendas.

This takes a good deal of self-awareness and humility. It is hard work, but the harvest is bountiful!