© 2002 Merlyn Cox
© 2002 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
“O Lord, how manifold are all your works!” says the Psalmist, “In wisdom you have made them all. The earth is full of your creatures. Yonder is the sea, great and wide; creeping things beyond counting are there, living things both great and small.”
Manifold and amazing they are-the only reason we seem not to appreciate them more, is that they are so abundant, and in their rush to live, they sometimes get in the road of our well ordered lives.
After the last two weeks of rain, I noticed tiny creatures emerging everywhere, across the carpet, between the pages of books, in the cupboards, across my windshield at night. I don’t find the millipedes crawling out of the bathtub nearly as interesting as those under the close up lens of a television camera. Lady bugs are cute when seen in isolation, but a nuisance when they swarm the house, and they give off a rather unpleasant odor when roasted by the halogen lamp in my office.
“Be fruitful and multiply” is the marching order of all creation, and its creatures obey with nary a pause to consider our feelings about the matter. That such creatures are manifold is hard to deny; that they reflect God’s wisdom, we often forget, or don’t notice.
Nevertheless, there is an overall serenity and order and harmony to nature that has always inspired those who go there in search of it.
Yesterday morning early I went out to check on the rhubarb, and play with my brother’s dog, and the whole world seemed bathed in glorious color and illuminated by the gentle and warm rays of the sun, as if being highlighted by the artist who brought it all into being, causing my spirit to soar and dance. It was another one of those “most beautiful the days has ever seen, or ever will”- — until the next one, which hopefully will be tomorrow.
It is no small thing, I think, that Jesus sought to commune with the Creator-Father in nature’s setting. With regularity he withdrew to the wilderness, to the highlands and mountains of Mt. Tabor and Mt. Hermon, to the Mount of Olives, to the garden of Gethsemane.
He went to nature early on to clarify in his own mind and soul his purpose and commission to mankind. During his public ministry he often withdrew from the crowds and went there to refresh his soul. He went there in the final hours before his betrayal to draw strength for the trials that were to come. Jesus went to nature to commune with the Heavenly Father, and apparently found there a temple of God’s wisdom and goodness. And so he taught us to look to nature and see the lessons that can be learned there, lessons that apply to our human situation, as well as to all those other creatures, large and small.
“Which one of you by being anxious,” Jesus asked, “can add even one inch to his stature, or an extra hour to your life?” “Consider the lilies of the field, they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was not adorned like one of these. And if God so clothes the grass and flowers that are here today and gone tomorrow, will he not also take care of us?” “Not even a sparrow,” Jesus said, “can fall from the sky without the Heavenly Father’s knowledge. Of how much more worth are you than many sparrows.”
So, why should we be anxious, when God knows our needs before we ask. He even knows the very number of the hairs on our head, including those we lose as the years pass by, and as worries and trials come and go.
Some may say, “That’s all well and good, but in the rough and tumble of the real world, it won’t help much, at most it may help me to survive another day. The world is a highly competitive and often hostile place. We need to be realistic. You can’t always escape to a romantic setting in the country. What do stories of birds and bees and sparrows and lilies have to do with that world?”
Maybe more than we think.
I recently came across the work of a man by the name of Dee Hock. Few people will probably recognize the name, although he is the founder of the largest financial enterprise the world has ever seen, Visa International.
He was raised in rural Utah, went to college, and in 1951 he took a job at a small, floundering branch office of a consumer finance company. After a few months, when the manager left, the job fell to him. He decided, along with three other young men, to trash the company manual, ignore the established commandments, and do things as common sense, conditions, and ingenuity suggested. Within two years, business had tripled and it was leading the rest of the company in profitability. At that point, they came to the attention of the power structure, which said, in effect, “you can’t do things this way!”
He exited and went to another company, where the same thing happened. He then moved on to still others with the same results each time, great success followed by the wrath of the bureaucracy for trying to change things-and his departure. All those then thriving companies, he likes to point out, are now no longer in existence.
Some years later he was working with the Bank of America when the credit card movement was getting underway, and it was soon out of control. Losses were in the hundreds of millions, and no one knew why or what to do.
By then, Hock had more experience than most in this new area and was known for his ability, despite his unorthodox ways, and was given the job of trying to make sense of it all. He did a great deal of research and came to the conclusion that what was needed was an organization that could guarantee and settle transactions anywhere in the world within twenty four hours.
The problem was, no bank could do that, no stock corporation could do it, no nation could do it; in fact, no existing form of organization they knew of, or could think of, could do that. It called for a new kind of institution and organization, very different from any that we’ve known, one that allowed all the parts to work together as a whole, without the whole necessarily knowing what all of the parts were doing, let alone being able to control them. It would be far too complex for that.
Where did he look for a model of such an organization? He looked in nature.
In nature Dee Hock found there are countless examples where organisms adapt quickly to their surroundings, work with others, even those they compete with, in a kind of symbiotic relationship, not necessarily knowing what everything else in the system is doing and not needing to know-a kind of blending of self-interest and other interest at the same time.
A simple example: Flowers and plants attract bees, and gladly produce and share their nectar; and the bees, in turn, pollinate the flowers and plants, and they all thereby survive and thrive. If the bees of the world should decide, “Let’s get organized, so we can control this thing, it’s much too random and chaotic and no one seems to be in control,” what do you suppose would happen? (The former Soviet Union might be a good example of what would happen.)
In nature there always seems to be a fine balance between chaos and order, and the world we live in is becoming more and more complex and chaotic. New ideas and technologies such as the smelting of iron, for example, often took generations to cross a single continent. Now information can be distributed and accessed virtually all over the world instantaneously. I can access most of the web sites in the world in a second or two.
Not long ago you had to wait a week for a check to clear. That was called “float time.” During that time the banks had your check or money, not you, nor the party you sent it to. Hock says we must now understand bank transactions as the transfer of monetary value between parties which is done at nearly the speed of light. There is no “float.” Everything is virtually instantaneous.
We get annoyed if it takes more than five seconds for our charge card to be OK’d at a filling station or restaurant. At least I do, and then I begin to wonder, did I send in the last check on time?
And you can’t ask to wait and see if there is enough gold at Fort Knox to back it all up. There isn’t. Most of these monetary value transfers now have nothing to back them up except a promise. You have to trust the institution to screen and guarantee the transfer value.
You don’t even transfer a piece of paper. Dee Hock points out the transaction is merely a steam of electrons and photons, traveling and changing and at a speed no one can comprehend. At the end of it, you get a slip of paper saying what has happened, although no one saw it happen. You don’t have a transfer of money, per se, only information. Banks, he says, are no more than institutions for the custody, loan, and exchange of guaranteed alphanumeric information. If you don’t have a system that accepts and guarantees these electronic phantoms, the system collapses.
So, Dee Hock asked, what would a flexible, but stable, institution look like that could do this? He says it would have to be an organization that was owned by all its participants, no one of which has an inherently greater or lesser position, or able to buy or sell their position. Participation is always voluntary and nontransferable.
Birds and bees and trees and flowers, as it were, all have equal value in this kind of institution. Each participant has to trust that they will not be inferior to any others. Authority and control would be distributed equally among the participating entities.
The institution would have to be totally flexible, able to change quickly, yet remain durable. Above all, in order to do this, it would have to be built upon a statement of purpose, simple and clear, that everyone could agree to. If you don’t have that statement, you don’t have an organization-period!
Institutions, Hock insists, exist only in the mind. They are nothing more than manifestations of the old idea of community. According to Black’s dictionary of law, “a corporation is an artificial person or legal entity … regarded in law as having a personality and existence distinct from that of its several members …”[1] In other words, a corporation is a mental abstraction.
You can’t point to or touch a building and say this is the government, or this building is General Motors, or for that matter, this building is the church of Jesus Christ. It may be a reflection and a result of that reality, but it is not the thing itself
It was a long and arduous process: laying the foundation, getting organizations from all over the world to agree, and to trust each other as equal partners, with no one of them in control. But it happened, and the results, as they say, are history. VISA represents over 22,000 owner/members, with a billion people doing 14 billion transactions, producing an annual volume over a one and quarter trillion dollars, making it the largest single block of consumer purchasing power in the global economy.
The actual setting up of the biggest financial institution in history took about 90 days and $ 30,000 dollars. It was created mainly by volunteers at the bank who were given permission to use their time on the project. It involved bank presidents, cashiers, accountants, managers, and custodians, all pitching in, and rank was never mentioned in the process.
During the pressure to get the cards sent out, the bank president knocked over a table of address plates, to his great embarrassment. A lady custodian bent over to help and said reassuringly, “That’s OK, it can happen to anyone.” Everyone pitched in to get things back together and the work on track again.
In the process, he said, leaders spontaneously emerged and re-emerged, none in control, but all in order. People astonished themselves by what they could accomplish and the talents that emerged. Position became meaningless; power over others became meaningless; time became meaningless.
Is this really any way to run a business?
Dee Hock thinks so. He believes that the 400 year old model of the institution as a machine with cogs and wheels will have to go and be replaced by one that reflects the way nature works, and the way human beings work best, one that can bring order out of chaos, and above all, utilize the most wasted resource of all-human ingenuity.
Right now people are still largely treated like cogs in a machine to be controlled from above and the cost in human spirit and waste is beyond calculating. (We call them human resources.) Institutions, Hock believes, will have to change or they will continue to fail-and may, quite possibly, destroy the world.
Of course, he didn’t go over to the Pentagon and tell the folks there that they should organize like the birds and bees, that they should learn from the flowers in the field, that they needed to learn to “surf the chaos,” as some have called it.
Actually, the generals called Dee Hock first. You see, the military has a vested interest in creating an organization that is not only efficient, but that weds together different skills into a whole, whose parts need not check with command central every time a decision needs to be made.
There is little “float time” even on the battle field now-a-days. Tank battles are often over in a few minutes, fighter plane engagements often in seconds, and if you don’t have personnel trained to take initiative and adapt to the situation rather than wait for instructions from higher up, you’re lost.
In the Gulf War the first thing the military went after, you may recall, was command and control. (You may also remember General Schwartzkof’s gesture of cutting off the head.)
Interestingly, the one institution that best represents this new kind of structure in our world, the Internet, was created by the National Security Agency. The idea was that if there were ever nuclear war, there would almost always be communications open from any one place to another because of this web of networks that no one group could control, or completely destroy, and therefore, no one could completely shut down.
But is this any way to run a business?
I’m reminded of a book by Robert Greenleaf, entitled “Servant Leadership.” [2] Greenleaf was not a pastor or theologian. For thirty-five years, he headed up management research for the world’s largest corporation, A.T.&T. In fact, he started the management research and training movement.
Greenleaf’s thesis, drawn from years of experience, was that servant leadership was not simply a vague and lofty ideal, it was a pragmatic necessity, and increasingly it is becoming the only kind of leadership people will accept.
Increasingly, he believes, “people will not casually accept the authority of existing institutions. Rather, they will freely respond only to individuals who are chosen as leaders because they are proven and trusted as servants. To the extent this principle prevails, the only viable institutions will be those that are predominantly servant led.”[3] The meek, Greenleaf suggests, those living humbly before God and in keeping with his will-namely that of service-will indeed inherit the earth.
Greenleaf quotes a well known college president who said: “The problems that so sorely trouble the world today [are] the problems of management and labor, problems of race, of social levels and special privilege, of nationalism and international relations. If these and others problems will be solved eventually in accordance with the essential teachings of Jesus, for the simple reason that the universe (is) built that way.”
The wisdom of all Creation is folded up in Jesus of Nazareth, and if the world is not yet operating according to his teachings, it’s not because it won’t work, but because we have not yet tried it. We may soon have to in order to survive.
And what, then, of the church? How well does it reflect the wisdom and purposes of God reflected in his creation?
Can we really imagine a church where authority and power are shared by all the participants, where neither financial gain, nor power, nor prestige are of any real importance; where human resources are valued above all else; where, at times, any one might be the leader, regardless of their title; where people are so bound by a clear purpose that they are held together despite all their obvious disparities and different needs, and march, as it were, in the same direction, toward the same goal, even though everyone knows it cannot possibly be achieved in our lifetime?
Hmmm … seems like someone may have already suggested such a thing.
“You are the body of Christ,” he said, and “each part of the body, whether it be the hand or foot, or ear or eye, is equally important to the whole, and it cannot be whole without them.”
Jesus said, “I am the vine and you are the branches, without me you can do nothing. Abide in me, as I abide in you.”
Nature has much to teach us, and perhaps most simply and importantly, the world works best when it works in the way God created it to work. By the way, Dee Hock says that everything one needs to know about leadership, he learned one rainy day from a one horned cow-but that’s another story.
“Countless are the things you have made, O God; by your wisdom you have made them all…”
"The heavens tell out the glory of God, heaven’s vault makes known his handiwork.
“One day speaks to another, night to night imparts knowledge, and this without speech or language or sound of any voice.”
Are we listening?
Merlyn Cox is a pastor serving in the North Indiana Conference of the United Methodist Church. He has been a reader of the Urantia Papers for 18 years, and worked with Meredith Sprunger in initiating The Spiritual Fellowship Journal in 1991, and served for ten years as associate editor. He is currently chairman of the Education Team for TSF.