Let’s learn and innovate as if our future depends on it

I sense that most of us approach vocations ministry with an inherent bias. Like a family system where (for better or worse) people raise their children as their parents raised them, we take our personal experiences as discerners and the behavior of our own vocation directors as baselines for how we help nurture for the next generation.  After all, we are here; it worked.  The problem is that whether we discerned a decade ago or several decades ago, the world and discerners have changed.  

In organizations steeped in tradition, adaptation and change can be tricky. Consider the decisions in our congregations forced by the invention and widespread use of the automobile, television, computer, and cell phone during the 20th century.  The world fails to ask our permission as to how its evolutions might benefit or detract from our missions, even less so in an increasingly secularized environment.  

To be sure, we vocation ministers have changed too.  Exterior forces continue to move us in the direction of increasing sophistication in the evaluation of candidates for our congregations. However, progress in the approach to finding prospective members doesn’t seem to have evolved much at all.  Rather, we tend to summarize each successive generation with a few generalizations gleaned from popular sociology and leave it at that.  “This particular generation likes [blank] or does not like [blank,]” we tell each other to knowing nods.  

What if rather than attracting roughly 500 men and women to religious life in the United States each year, God is asking us to find a way to attract 1,000 or even 2,500?  If that were the case, how would we build our capacities of attraction and engagement?  I would suggest we need to learn from the best of the secular trades:  communications, marketing, human resources, information technology, graphic design, data analytics, and economics. Yes, economics.  It might be the most influential and least understood aspect of our work.  (We tend to treat budgets as higher than God.  At least we are allowed to question God.)

What tactics we might collectively employ in reaching such heights lives beyond the scope of this article.  What I propose is simply this:  some organizations learn well, transmitting that data to successive generations, and some do not.  In his doctoral thesis, now retired Col. John A. Nagl makes this exact point in the context of military organizations.  He notes that the American Army’s shortcomings as a “learning organization” were contributing factors to the American woes in Vietnam.  Nagl’s thesis title evokes the words of British officer T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935) who describes organizational learning as, “messy and slow, like trying to learn to eat soup with a knife.”  (Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam).

The key phrase in all of this is to learn.  Think of the dogged effort it takes for a relatively ungifted student to conquer math, spelling, or reading.  It’s a slow, arduous, uphill climb. I suggest that as religious in the American church we find ourselves in a similar moment in finding and engaging candidates.  Whatever modeling our forebears demonstrated, we face a fundamental opportunity to embrace the struggle of improvement and to intentionally pass along its hard-won fruits—not just of tactical success but of how to learn in the context of vocation ministry.

Recently, at a social before dinner, a Jesuit from another Western country described the decline in the number of religious and capped his commentary with the comment, “Eventually, the tide of history buries all of us.  You just can’t fight it.”  Attempting to be polite and not spill my drink, I refrained from comment.  But inside I was screaming.  Really?  Such defeatist thinking is self-fulfilling.  Moreover, the great founders of religious congregations did not ride the tide of history but cooperated with God’s grace to create it. Prayerfully, God seems to be offering a grace, not just to succeed but to learn how to learn.  It will surely be “messy and slow.”  Can we embrace it?

Father Bill Murphy, S.J. is a vocation promoter for the Midwest Jesuits. Comments, questions, and collaborations are welcome at umivocpro1@jesuits.org.