Leadership And Dam Management

The end of the millennium was coming up in a couple of years and I was hoping that I could cross into the next thousand year threshold leaving most of my religious baggage behind me. In the thought of leaving something behind there was the thought that I would have to let go of what I had. With the humdrum of weekly ritual I was halfhearted in what I was doing Sunday to Sunday. I was hoping for a fresh breeze of insight to push me in a new spiritual direction.

I didn't have to wait long. For the last 30 years, the margins of Christianity had been producing a steady crop of new revelators spinning the context of the New Testament in as many ways as the English language and rationality would permit. Most of these inspired folks would use traditional Christianity as a fulcrum to elevate their new ideas. Adding to their gravitas to move these ideas more dramatically into view, they applied to themselves ancient titles that had long been abandoned by the contemporary church, namely apostle and prophet. I thought I had been well inoculated against elements on the holy fringe since my last go around on the commune, so I had little fear of running off trying to find another Utopia. I never saw it coming.

I was invited to have breakfast at a local restaurant one morning, by the pastor of the small church I was attending at the time. He wanted me to meet a man who claimed to be an apostle. The ones I had either read about in the past or caught glimpses of usually played the role of deposed royalty trying to wrest control from the current political regime that had been in power for a least a century or two. Or they were men who were good organizers and had been able to marshal vision, men and money so effectively over time that they had reached a level of confidence in their abilities to award themselves the title. The man I met was black, a Caribbean, of Indian descent. Nattily dressed with southwest appointments, he spoke with a crisp English accent. He was an attorney and a preacher of some report. He was casual, self-assured, with a robust and happy demeanor. Introduced, he was immediately likable.

There were six or seven of us at breakfast at this busy restaurant, including his two traveling companions. Because of the number of us we had to sit between the booths in the main aisle way. First impressions were that he didn't have to feign being lost royalty; he carried himself rather nobly and he walked with the confidence of high clergy but he had no church, no business cards, and no congregation. This was a first for me. Anxious to hear what was behind this elegant presence, we gave him the floor. He got to the meat of things quickly.

He opened the idea that there is legitimacy outside the organized church, the counterpoint being that the organized church is, well, illegitimate. There wasn't any room for the ways and means of organized religion in his idea of the Kingdom of God. In his view all that was needed were a few essential pieces of social architecture: a visionary, a chain of command to keep order among the followers, and a way to gather and move money to the appropriate people; no buildings, no corporation filings, a purely relational organization. It was a lean vision that sounded exciting in an early New Testament way. As much of a maverick I prided myself in being, the idea of going out into a spiritual wilderness again was not appealing. I had been out there before and had found little comfort spiritually at the end of it all.

Fortunately, the foundations of scripture are full of circumstances where the holy lightning of revelation came in from the lonely barren places on the edges of society. What would a contemporary of John the Baptist, St. Peter or St. Paul look like today? As far as I was concerned, he might very well look like a black Carib who dressed like a Santa Fe art dealer and spoke a hip-hop version of the Queen's English. Of course, this made his claims all the more interesting. There are in America approximately 160,000,000 people who claim one of the various Christian doctrines as their own and go to church at least occasionally. If the organized church was illegitimate, it meant an awful lot of mamas have been lyin' to their children about Jesus and the role of the Reverend. His take on the New Testament was mesmerizing. He dismissed contemporary Christianity like it was an errant school child. He made the outrageous convincing.

It was my second formal meeting with an apostle, the first being 25 years earlier when I joined the commune. I could see that this new guy had taken the revelational ideas about the Kingdom of God, that were all the rage back then, a bit farther. During the commune days we were going to show contemporary Christianity how it was supposed to be done, refit the machine so to speak. In this new venue, Christianity was broken beyond repair. We were going to start afresh. Given my checkered experience with Christianity so far, why not? This guy looked like he might be able to pull it off. So we chewed away on our lumberjack breakfasts, our minds being subverted as quickly as our meals were being eaten.

He switched gears to talk about the offices of early Christianity, apostles, prophets and the like. As he talked he slowly got up and moved around the table. The place was packed. The waitresses squeezed around our table, pouring coffee and moving trays of food to other tables. The Apostle suddenly stopped behind one of the guys in our group. "The Lord has just spoken to me about this man here," he said in his best Oxford English. "I believe he is an apostle." He then continued on with what he had been expounding.

Now I have seen folks say grace in restaurants, and have even done it very unobtrusively myself a few times when it was initiated by my more zealous friends. But I had never attended an ordination of an apostle at 8:15 on a weekday morning in a busy local eatery.

At that time I didn't know the man being ordained very well. Only that he was a businessman of some sort and owned a retreat center outside of town. The Apostle continued on eloquently and forcefully about authority in the kingdom of God. By then our coffee cups were frozen in mid air, forksful of food almost in the mouth. He had ambushed us. We were in the middle of a ritual and we didn't know what to do. The waitresses had even stopped next to the table with their coffee pots at the ready like altar servers. The booths on either side had also stopped their conversations to watch what looked like a rotary club initiation. The guy he stood over had a blank look on his face. We couldn't have upset the norm in the place if we had decided to hold it up at gunpoint and have all the customers empty their money into a hat that was being passed around. We had everyone's attention.

Then as soon as it started, it was over. The Apostle sat down and dug into his breakfast, the waitresses poured coffee, and life resumed, but now there were two apostles sitting at the table. It is one thing to talk about your ideas, quite another, as I found out that morning, to engage them. You have to have juice, a sense of moment, superior presence. He had all three. Not many people can call themselves apostles and get away with it. It is one of the more dicey titles in the New Testament. Much of Christendom had the title 'apostle' buried with the original 12. But in the margins of Christianity the title carries a sense of primary agency with God, a man for the nations, a heightened level of spiritual power to subdue the unbeliever, a master builder of the Kingdom of God, and if you're not careful, a nutcase. The apostle was an organizational key to unlocking the mysteries of Christianity. From that spiritual office, the rest of the of the holy offices could be engaged, the prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, elders and deacons--a flying wedge decimating contemporary ideas of Christian orthodoxy. I had heard this 25 years ago in great detail.

So I wondered, how do you engage this Kingdom without any formal structure? With no church buildings, where is it? Working, or rather wandering around full-time, how do you earn your keep? Who keeps track of the dough? Or more importantly, where does the dough come from? Not that I am totally focused on money, but it always seemed to occupy the quiet center of these new movements. Preaching full time without a formal structure to support you is like working a high wire without a net. I didn't have to wait long to find out the answers. The newly recognized Apostle invited me on a road trip for a week, where we would be visiting a number of communities in West Texas and southern New Mexico, "establishing the Kingdom of God," and not to worry about expenses. Yeehaw! I imagine they invited me along because I had demonstrated a working knowledge of the weirdo language of fringy spiritual authority that had included apostles and prophets.

There were four of us headed across the West Texas plains, two businessmen, the Apostle and myself. The names of the towns best describe the countryside, as we cruised through Levelland, Brownfield, Plainview, Sweetwater and Midland. With nothing to distract us in the countryside, we chowed down in rich conversation about everything in our Christian universes. It was a let-your-hair-down kind of talk about contemporary Christianity. For the first time ever I didn't have to defend it. It was refreshing, exhaling all my complaints to an Apostle who instantly absolved me by agreeing with everything I said. Soon enough we got into the meat of things, pointedly asking, exactly how does this "kingdom" work? The Apostle said he goes to a community he has been invited to, and among those assembled, there are usually a few men of good report. If he is invited back and those that have heard his message believe him and accept his authority as an apostle, he appoints those men of spiritual stature capable of rule, as elders in the city at large. Now I thought that was a stretch but big ideas always intrigued me. Here he was moving Christianity out of the street address of the local denomination, and pinning it to the regional borders of the community. Of course that was just the beginning. Soon "we" would be stretching those borders to encompass national boundaries. The template of his construction was becoming strangely familiar. But the presentation this time seemed more elegant and more thoughtful. As familiar as presentation of this new kingdom was to the ragged band of utopians I started with, there is always a hope that the new spin on weary scripture will produce the magical order we had always hoped for, that there would be lightning in our steps and thunder in our voices; that our sword of truth could cut through the fabric of our humdrum religious reality and we could step through that dimension into a new spiritual place that could embrace the scale of our religious divisions. And, of course, that we get to be in charge goes without saying.

We have no context of authority without power and control. I was about to join a new fraternity of brothers, because I had abandoned the others that I had joined with. Moving on in Christianity is pretty much like everything else based on membership, you leave everyone and everything behind. It's a new group with a new vision and new membership requirements. The previous group had failed to fulfill our collective expectations and properly control the power they had. It was a normal experience in Christian America today. It was a church of temporal power, numbers and achievements. Failure in that realm is failure whose definition is taken from corporate America, from whence the church is modeled, or given the history, corporate America from the church. It is hard to tell. Not having the flexibility to accommodate change, the church is a brittle structure and fractures easily. I was surprised to find that the Apostle had been thinking for a long time but had just recently started actually building this new organization with his revamped ideas of the "Kingdom."

One of our destinations was a small town in southern New Mexico to appoint the first batch of elders over a town. Such has been my fortune, I would actually get to see some real construction happen. Denominational boundaries would be eclipsed and real unity could begin. The only way Christian unity has occurred in the past, from what I have read, has been with the tried and true method of manpower, money and weapons. Folks are not inclined to give up their preferred faith easily. The English, for example, hacked away at the Irish for three hundred years using every method of physical terror known, trying to get the Irish to see their version of the love of Jesus. All they managed to carve out for their long-term extreme evangelical efforts were two percent of the population. Of course they were very successful at starving millions and driving out a great portion of the population to America. But the Anglicans came by it honestly, watching the varied agencies of the Vatican use all sorts of ingenious means of physical coercion to keep the faithful from straying. I was anxious to see what the Caribbean Apostle and the sons of the pioneers could accomplish in the cause of unity.

Looking back, those poor guys who accepted this dubious honor of being elders, accepted the responsibility without a clue of how to effectively engage it. They were hoping that ordination came with a manual, and maybe for effect, a small caliber handgun. They, like me, were lost in the intellectual imagery of their own bit of spiritual paradise with them in charge. It was the same type of vision that motivated forebears who dreamed below decks in the mid-Atlantic on slow moving wooden sailing ships, the westward dream of empire and land. However, this evening the new elders only framework for ruling and establishing this new spiritual "Kingdom" was learned listening to the anointed man preach. He followed in the footsteps of pastors and preachers who blessed, married and buried their forefathers. On the other side of their psyche were the tales of the pioneers conquering the vast expanses, weather, buffalo and Indians in exercising real dominion. So you had this religious docility married to western pioneer empire building.

The living room of the home we were meeting in was packed with the spiritually itchy. That night we were going to watch the next phase of the Kingdom come to pass. Three men were about to be formally ordained to spiritually rule over a small town. Per St. Paul's pointed admonitions, women were out of the race regarding spiritual offices. This had been the case with the last group I was with, too. Women by and large were kept on a short leash. This kept things on a clean rational level and away from the swamp of relational questions which they tended to bring up regularly for no apparent reason. Men were in charge and that was that. We had been blasting around Texas and New Mexico all week, the four of us high-fiving, back slapping and yeehawing, no uncomfortable questions from the female quarter, just a veritable stream of male consciousness raising.

That night we heard an exotic menu of spiritual possibilities; the Apostle listed them with the cultured aplomb of a French maitre d'. The way things were explained, a new level of spiritual authority was going to be unleashed. We might possibly touch the ancient holy way of doing things, see those miracles we had read so much about, have command over evil spirits and the like. That night was the high point. From that moment attrition set in. Thankfully it was a short distance to the bottom. I saw that people seemed to need the Apostolic point man there to heighten the moment with exotic prose and possibility. In a word they wanted church.

When he left, the flock of "sheep," so docile and compliant the night before, had reverted back into the feisty group of hardy sons and daughters of the pioneers who brooked no foolishness. It was Monday and it was time to pay. That morning those three elders woke up to become targets of opportunity for everyone with a complaint about authority. In the larger ecumenical community they had no standing whatsoever. These elders-at-large were seen as an abstract hierarchical concoction by fringy revelators. There was of course no rational base for their title even though their biblical texts had made room for the role. And through no fault of their own they could not defend it on either side. So they were squeezed like grapes from both ends. They were no longer neighbors, co-workers and friends; they had titles. They had been selected as betters within their peers, and as wild variables within the Christian community of leaders. They were engaged in the heady business of spiritual governance. Were they capable? They would very soon find out.

It is known that the idea of challenging authority is one of the greatest pastimes of humanity, whether in public or in private; the powerful or those imagined as powerful become a whetstone to sharpen the common man's sense of humor. They were locals, known quantities. The mystery was never there. Without a certain measure of the mystical they couldn't function. We have a very narrow range of thinking regarding authority. The earth is still flat in this aspect of leadership. We have been trained very well not to accept our peers in spiritual matters. We have great difficulty seeing beyond the spiritual horizon of possibility regarding each other. A twenty two-year-old seminary graduate had more hope of being heard then one of those elders. One in particular had been a rancher all his life. A real cowboy of vast experience in life, but sadly he wasn't accepted by his peers as a man capable of spiritual leadership. He wasn't expert at manipulating information about this new kingdom. Real experience didn't really count for much in this ascending moment. There was drama created when someone could twirl the holy words into all sorts of interesting configurations. All we had to do was sit back and watch. If you couldn't create this weekly drama we had been geared to listen to for millennia, you weren't accepted as a leader. It didn't matter whether there was a formal organization or not, we knew how things worked.

The momentary ascent of the elders was awkward for all. But looking back, it really wasn't the ordination that was the problem. It was the thought that by creating new roles of authority, there would be a spiritual release of sorts. A dynamic level of flow would be established. But all that happened, even in this stripped-down version of Christianity, was all too familiar. What we really wanted was a new spin on our static belief, someone in charge to tell us how to do things and how to interpret that which we considered sacred. We hadn't determined that there was a difference between the itchiness that comes from pure boredom produced by the rituals so dear to orthodoxy, and the deeper intuitive passion to seek out spiritual things on our own. Church leadership has long felt that this individual seeking business is dangerous. It goes back a long way.

St. Augustine, a recognized champion of the faith, said sometime around the early fifth century, "There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity....It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn."

For a very long time we have been conditioned to find comfort in ritual orchestrated by paternal authority figures and to view spiritual exploration on our own as a dangerous pastime. One of the teachings of Catholicism was that one was not responsible for bad decisions made by our authority figures. Our sole responsibility was to obey, and in obeying, whether the decision was right or wrong, we could be assured of our salvation because of our obedience and not worry about the act itself. So the Apostle was stuck, like the dam managers, trying to put life in the dying river without really disturbing the man-made constructs of power. Our spiritual journey could only take place safely within the confines of the well-managed river.

The authority structure put in place that night initially was very weak and needed lots of apostolic maintenance. It was a difficult blend of old rational and new organic ideas. But the value was in exploring our mental latitude and longitude by pushing beyond the horizon of our everyday thinking. In time, the elders quietly abandoned their titles and stood again as regular guys, neighbors and friends in the community. The Apostle continued with his message of the Kingdom, experimenting with the faithful as he went along.

The Snake and Klamath Rivers

On the Columbia River system restoration is a word that has many meanings. For the vested interests along the river, it is viewed as a modest tune-up within the existing system. Just add wiers and fish ladders. Others see restoration as radical surgery, removing the guts of the machinery and letting valuable water spill down the riverbed.

The Endangered Species Act propels restoration. The act demands that species threatened with extinction be protected in as many ways as are possible. The act has had draconian effects on logging in the Northwest with court rulings protecting the spotted owl. Now wild runs of salmon are in danger of extinction on the Columbia and its many tributaries. One of the more recent battles was on the Snake River, where forty percent of the salmon originated. All the runs in that river system, both salmon and steelhead, are either extinct or on the Endangered Species list.

A scientific solution was recommended to breach the earthen sections of the four lower Snake River dams: Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and the Lower Granite. If the dams were breached, the salmon runs would have a 99 percent chance of recovery. The studies found the dams were not designed for flood control so there was no danger from flooding if the dams were taken down. Irrigation provided on this stretch of river is only one percent of the irrigation on the total system. The dams provide only a small amount of the region's power. Power conservation in the region has eclipsed the power needs of the dams. There would be no significant loss of power in the system. The river transportation system, heavily subsidized by taxpayers, that allows the port of Lewiston, Idaho to exist would have to be abandoned, but preexisting truck and rail modes could easily handle the increased traffic. The new stretch of free-flowing water revitalizing the salmon and steelhead runs would be a boon to commercial fishermen, tribal members and the local economies.

When these findings came out, the vested interests screamed bloody murder. The science and economics were ignored and restoration was scuttled. The congressmen from the region introduced a ten-year moratorium on the issue. By that time there will probably be no salmon left in that part of the river system. The problem will have moved into extinction.

The Klamath River 200 miles south of the Columbia River, once home to a great run of salmon, has been the scene of the most vociferous environmental political battles in history. On the upper plateau of the Klamath River basin the Bureau of Reclamation built seven dams, 18 canals, 45 pumping stations and 516 miles of irrigation ditches to irrigate 230,000 acres of farmland. Farmers have relied on the irrigation provided by the dams for over a hundred years. Downriver from the farms is home to the Yurok and Hoopa tribes who have treaty rights to fish salmon from the river in perpetuity. Nearby coastal fishermen depend on the returning runs of salmon up the California coast to the Klamath for their livelihood. The federal and state governments oversee the entire river system through their various agencies to make sure that waters of the river are distributed equitably for farming and for fish. The established priorities for the river were first to protect the salmon, secondly the rights of the native tribes and finally the irrigation rights of the farmers.

According to many biologists and other consistent observers of the Klamath River, the whole system was on the verge of ecological collapse. Salmon runs were diminishing quickly, pollution from farm fertilizers had accumulated to a biological breaking point, and to top things off, there had been a persistent drought dangerously lowering the river levels to where there wasn't enough water to fulfill all the managed entitlements.

In the spring of 2001, a federal judge cut off water rights to the Klamath basin farmers. The outrage of this judicial act made national news. The American Farmer was under siege once again. The sagebrush rebellion had a new cause. The property rights of Americans were under attack. Two hundred fifty thousand acres of crops began to wither under the summer heat with no water. To raise political consciousness, bucket brigades were started. Convoys of trucks started out from all points bringing water and money, trying to raise awareness of the embattled farmers of the Klamath. Presidential candidates were even drawn into the fray.

Downstream the native fishermen were having another bad year. The building of the dams and canals, coupled with the farming and attending pollution, had depleted the salmon runs from tens of millions to tens of thousands. This year was the worst. The water in the river was very low and the shallow water allowed temperatures to reach 80 degrees, much too hot for spawning fish.

After three months of bitter political wrangling the federal government ruled in favor of the farmers. But it was fall. Most of the crops were dead. Some farmers were ruined. Prices of land in the basin dropped like a rock.

About the same time the much needed water for spawning was being used to water dead crops, a larger than normal run of Coho salmon were making their way up river. Within a short distance, the water was too hot and too shallow. Thirty thousand fish died in the hot shallow waters of the Klamath River. It was the worst federally managed disaster in memory. Fishermen drove to Washington DC and dumped some of the dead salmon on the steps of Congress to show their disgust for the management policy.

Both battles, on the Snake and the Klamath rivers, are about the ever-increasing conflicts of power against life. Even though the restoration benchmarks of the salmon being listed on the Endangered Species list were met in both circumstances, politically it was almost impossible to rule in favor of values that have not taken hold with the majority of voters. We might be able to make rational assent to the intrinsic value of the salmon and the free-flowing river and pass laws to demonstrate our concern, but when the rivers in question are still producing power, true restoration winds up looking like window dressing.

Management policy in both situations has bent to vested power interests even though we had laws plainly protecting the life of the river. In place of a true remedy that was clearly outlined, management opted for essentially no change to the current regime. Instead a host of committees, conferences and monies to study the problem have been instituted. The question is, "How can we keep everyone happy and not really change anything?"

In the mid '90s the Boston Globe ran a series of stories of sexual abuse by the priests within the local diocese of the Catholic Church. The disheartening fact of the stories was that the Bishop knew that certain priests were pedophiles, but when a problem would crop up, the priest in question would be moved to another parish. One priest was notorious with hundreds of allegations of abuse. The newspaper story set off a national scandal that had bubbled beneath the religious surface for probably centuries. It was out in the open from New York to San Francisco; suits were being filed by congregants against sexually abusive priests. Hundreds of millions of dollars were being spent to defend the Catholic clergy and settle law suits.

In the end the National Conference of Bishops established new rules to govern the priesthood and protect the congregation from sexual predators within the church proper. The real problem was not addressed. The church did what it does best; they added more restraint to a problem in which the restraint of the natural sexual drive was the cause. The issue of priestly celibacy however was ignored. The center of the power structure, celibacy, jacked up holiness, was not touched. Institutionalized loneliness for the serving priests is still the order of the day. And yet like the river, honest sexual drive pushes against the institutionalized order. When the institutional resolve crumbles in some lonely priest, the tensions released flow as catastrophe to some child, not love. Here was a situation that has cost the Catholic Church hundreds of millions of dollars, almost bankrupting entire dioceses, and causing an incalculable offense to the faithful. If the Church was ever confronted with a time to truly change its position on priestly celibacy, it was then. A religious system confronted with real change to protect the intimacy and relational vitality of its constituency opted, like the river managers of the Snake and the Klamath, to keep things essentially just as they were. Will Catholic children and the salmon still be at risk? Absolutely, because nothing has really changed. The circumstances that caused the problems in the first place have not been truly addressed.

The Apostle I met was far downstream from Catholicism and its hierarchical ascetic ways. In fact he didn't recognize the denominations and saw the church as one entity. He did however hold on to the orthodox view of authority. He was in charge, that is, if you accepted his authority. He interpreted scripture to his satisfaction and delivered that interpretation to his flock. At its most elemental he was as orthodox as the Pope in the use of religious power. If success favored him, and people and money flowed within his control, a rationalized accepted way of doing things would develop which would bend towards temporal power and away from life. Dams would be built, and spiritual life would be jeopardized, all for a good cause.

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