I've been trying to figure out why my robotic vacuum hasn't been running long so I was on the phone and e-mail about that a bit in the early evening and worked on my potted plants on the balcony and also did some cooking. I made a German potato salad and also some "chocolate-chip macadamia nut bars with shortbread crust." They're both new recipes and both keepers, which is nice. It's inevitable that sometimes when I try a new recipe it's not the greatest but these two are both really good.
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I found my sermon notes, but then pastor e-mailed me his notes too, so I'd like to revisit the tentmaking issue to add to what I said last time.
So basically he used pronouns and developed it from there, as ways to and not to relate to the city (in his sermon) or (in the case of tentmaking) the country people. Since he was thinking of a church specifically (i.e., our church) we have to change it a bit to fit tentmaking.
Church IN the city - focus just on what happens inside the church, the programs. I suppose tentmaking could get too much into programs, but somehow I don't thinking that's the main concern.
Church AGAINST the city - it's bad and irredeemable; take a stand for Jesus... Now this is where tentmaking would come in. That is, this is the tentmaker's stance against the host state if nothing else, which is why they are willing to use deception (why don't they just come straight out and apply for a missionary visa?).
Church OF the city - assimilation, becoming like the city. I don't think that this is generally the issue either, although it could be in particular cases. Out of these three poor choices, I would have been the closest to this one in Russia, mostly because I didn't have much contact with Westerners.
Then Pastor says we should live FOR the city. We should not work for our own sakes (which would be to assimilate) nor for the tribe's sake (which would be to disdain the city) but for the city's sake. Remember, we're in a city here, and pastor was preaching to us regarding how we should be and minister in the city where we live, but we might subsitute "city" for "country" in the case of tentmaking.
This is really good and really important and I don't know how to stress it adequately. The thing is that how can you go somewhere using deception, which right away shows lack of respect and perhaps disdain, and expect to have a flourishing ministry? Maybe it's possible that you can be used anyway, but unless you can picture God using deception and disdain I think those are probably sins.
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Okay, this next section is 2 pages long, which is lucky for me because it's already 1 a.m. and I have a long day tomorrow.
The section title is "PROBLEMS WITH THE INFORMAL ORGANIZATION." This section is mainly irrelevant because the mission administration had such a tight grip on things that problems weren't allowed and if problems did crop up they would have been snuffed out or at least quarantined pretty quickly.
The first sub-section is "Social Costs." This section deals with there being too much social interaction on the job. I never was aware of this being a problem. There was a certain amount of this going on, but I never knew of it being a problem or interfering with anyone's work or being abused or such. Everyone was conscientious about their work and I wasn't aware of any slackers.
The next sub-section is "Resistance to Change." In the case of the Vienna mission, I don't think that the informal organization was the biggest issue for resistance to change. Rather, I think it was more a problem of getting all the various and widely dispersed parties on board for change to happen, depending on what the change was. For example, if it was a very major change, it could involve all the 20 some missions, workers living in the East Bloc countries and the US printing office, or even translators in the East Bloc countries. Since the informal organization was the brain child of the administration I don't think that it would have been much of an issue regarding resistance to change.
The final sub-section is a little more interesting for my purposes and is titled "Staffing Inflexibility."
"...The requirements of the informal organization are factors such as personality, social background, or other status attributes. If a particular individual does not fit into the existing social organization, productivity will likely suffer. In short, there are two types of requirements for effective staffing, techincal and social." (p. 445
I suppose you might guess who it was that maybe didn't fit into the existing social organization... Before I arrived in Vienna I had no idea that that would be the case, that I wouldn't fit into the social organization. But it's very clear that the work I was given was way less than what I could have done, so my productivity alone was under par, although I think my standards were probably much higher than the mission administration's standards for me. However, the mission also had to divert attention to me since I was not progressing along a normal path (although I'm not sure how they wanted me to progress - I just know my actual path wasn't normal by any standard), so that might have decreased productivity for certain individuals who had to attend to me.
This text, though, is talking about someone who does not fit into a social organization. There were several ways I did not fit into the mission, but I think that it's possible to say that this is one way I did not fit in. This is especially true if you consider my primary identity group, the secretaries, which I didn't identify with enough. I think that fitting into that group was probably a key to fitting into the whole organization because that pegged me as far as who and what I was and by not fitting in well enough I became sort of a mystery that they didn't maybe know what to do with, socially speaking, because I needed a social home - a social group - to fit in to. I hadn't really thought of it quite like this until now, but it's possible that there was some of this type of thinking going on there regarding me.
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That's it for tonight. Next time we'll start in on organizatonal culture. That should be fun. I have two doctor's appointments tomorrow. One is the allergy doctor and he should check if there's anything to this neverending moderate chest congestion and then the other is the neurologist and I'll find out about the results of my lumbar MRI. My legs are worse today but they were pretty good the past few days until today again. When they're bad it's tiring to walk because it takes so much effort to walk.
