God is with us

THE four-year-old boy was used to being popped into the bathroom while his mum dressed. She said it kept him out of trouble. While there, he would often take one of the soft, white towels hanging on the rail, and lay it carefully over the toilet seat. Then he would celebrate the mass, in Latin.

The Rev Lorenzo Lebrija laughs when he thinks about his little bathroom mass now. “I certainly remember conducting my little mass,” he says. “But my recollection of Latin is not what it was!”

Next spring, it is hoped Lorenzo will come to Scotland to lead some workshops about the innovative church laboratory he leads, TryTank. The lab is a way of carefully monitoring things that ‘work’ when churches try something new, and things that don’t. Hosted by the Church of Scotland, and partner, the Scottish Episcopal Church, it’s hoped by an exchange of ideas and techniques it will save different presbyteries time and money when trying new projects, and help them focus on the things that work, and why they work. One workshop will be for staff, another for congregations, and another for young adults.

“While I live in the US now, I was born in Mexico City from a Cuban mother and Mexican father. My family was about as religious as most families in Mexico at the time. Sundays in church, baptism, first communion, all were regular parts of life,” he says.

“I am the youngest of four boys and we pretty much were a little gang everywhere we went. From what I can remember, we were always ‘inventive’ in entertaining ourselves; my mom called it ‘trouble’.”

His parents divorced when he was young, and his mum was left with four rumbustious boys to raise.

“I remember the sense of community most. It was tough for my mom to raise us, but we always knew we had each other’s backs. When I was about nine, it was my turn to head to boarding school. We each went in turn. The school, Mary Help of Christians in Tampa, Florida, was another sense of community for me.

“It was at Mary Help where I first started to realise that the way I saw the world was through a theological lens. And I felt like a fish in water. I simply wanted to soak it all up. And I was 10 at the time, so I was a bit unique in that. I am lucky that I have some incredibly fond memories of growing up.

And the sense of community is something that has always stayed with me in how I see the church and our role in society.”

Lorenzo was curious and loved to learn, but school was not always top of the list of things he enjoyed.

“I was an average student until I got to university and was able to study things that were of interest to me rather than the prescribed curriculum which was not interesting.

“From Mary Help I went to the public school in Miami and then the local community college and then the local state university. At every step, I got to study more and more interesting things. At university I went from being average to graduating with honours.

“I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Political Science. I swore I would never see the inside of another classroom again. But then I got interested in business and decided to get a master’s in business administration. Once more I swore, ‘no more school’! But then I decided to become a priest, so off I went to get a master’s in divinity. I was ordained in June 2014 in Los Angeles. This time I just knew that I would never ever have need for school again. But then I got really interested in practical theology and the deep work of ministry. So, now I am getting my doctorate in ministry.

“I have one more class to go before the dissertation. At which time I will swear for good never to ever take another class.”

He laughs: “Which means I should probably start looking for my next school!”

“You’d think that based on this and my boarding school experience, it was obvious that the priesthood was in my future. But it was not. I am a firm believer that through our baptism we are all called to the priestly vocation. It’s just that for some, it’s a professional vocation as well. I felt I was saying yes to the one and no to the professional one.

“I do not believe that God guides our choices. This is proven by the sheer number of bad choices I have made in my life. That said, ours is a generous and graceful and fluid God who can work with whatever choice we do make.

“I do see God all over my decisions in the nudges and prompts I get to see. If I am quiet and contemplative enough, I sometimes even see these before I make a choice! But many times, I only get to see them in hindsight.

The Rev Lorenzo Lebrija

I do not believe that God guides our choices. This is proven by the sheer number of bad choices I have made in my life. That said, ours is a generous and graceful and fluid God who can work with whatever choice we do make.

“I think this is where a good prayer practice helps. If I am always actively inviting God into my choices, then I can learn to make better choices almost by instinct. An analogy to this would be a pilot. The reason they are always practising in the simulator all sorts of situations is so that when they happen, they don’t have to think too much about them, their training kicks in. It’s the same with our prayer life. It prepares us to always be inviting God into our choices. Pretty soon, we do it as a second nature. And we don’t even have to be conscious that we’re inviting God, but there God is!

“But the Holy Spirit is persistent if nothing else. No matter how involved I was in church or how much I lived my life by the values of Jesus, I still felt that something was missing. My heart was restless. And then God and I had a conversation and, perhaps for the first time, I gave God the chance to answer. It just became clear that this was my path. It always had been.”

Lorenzo’s thirst for knowledge and natural curiosity came to the fore when he was asked one evening about how he saw the future of the church.

“As (with) most good ideas, TryTank came about over a meal as two like-minded people talk.

“It was the summer of 2018 and Ian Markham the dean and president of Virginia Theological Seminary and I were sharing a meal. We were talking about the future of the church when he asked me about what I really wanted to do for my vocation as a priest.

“I responded that I would love to use this desire to learn and creativity for the good of the church. I’d love to think up ideas that might allow experimentation. But the point is not to just have ideas, we need to be able to try them. Otherwise, they will just end up on a shelf with many other good ideas. So, we began dreaming up this idea of a think tank for the church. But we kept coming back to the fact that we didn’t just want ideas. We needed to act on them. We wanted a think tank that would come up with ideas but would also try them. And so was born TryTank. Not just ideas, we take them into the world and take them for a spin in real places.”

It took will, perseverance and collective working to get the project, a partnership between Virginia Theological Seminary and the Rev Kurt Dunkle, Dean and President of the General Theological Seminary in New York City.

The Rev Lorenzo Lebrija at the Consumer Electronics Show

Event presentation

“We then had our work cut out for us. Each of the two seminaries which jointly started TryTank went to work on getting buy in and I had to develop ‘a think tank that tries stuff’ into a real thing. Everything from how much will it cost to how do we find ideas or places to try them.

“On more than one occasion we also wondered, ‘what are we doing?’

“I was able to look at frameworks and basically got on a plane and just went places where innovation was happening (such as the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas) and to any group that would listen to me talk about TryTank. We needed partners.

“In the end, I believe the Holy Spirit has been very much in all this work. We now have done or are working on 68 experiments with some 200 congregations all over the US. We have now published our framework on how to try and it became a best seller. We also have close to 3,000 people who get our newsletter each month and many of those engage with us.”

It’s this knowledge and experience that the Church is hoping Lorenzo can share.

Not everything succeeds – and it’s worth learning the why and the how that that happened, then using that knowledge to save others making the same mistakes.

Equally, when something DOES succeed, then the why and the how of that success is well worth preserving and passing on.

As Lorenzo says: “I need to begin by saying that while we do not go out looking to fail, we very much expect it. If we aren’t failing, then we are not really trying hard enough. To push the envelope, we need to skip over incremental changes and go far.

In the science of innovation, this means that we are skipping the adjacent possible and are going a bit further away. The problem with skipping further away is that sometimes you go too far.

“Therefore, it is important to always find the minimum viable prototype. What is the fastest, cheapest way to try something without risking the bank?”

He’s really looking forward to his visit to Scotland.

“I am very excited about my visit to Scotland. While there we will be talking about TryTank and I will teach our simple framework to anyone who will listen!” he says. “I am very excited as well that we get to do this as an ecumenical effort. And I think it’s a brilliant idea that young people will be invited to participate as well in their own session.

“And to help support the people who will be learning this and taking it back to their own congregations, I am hoping to present to the Church of Scotland leadership and staff about how the administrative structures can be of most help to those who are out there trying new things.

Various TryTank events

“Although many people don’t realise it, they are already doing very creative and innovative things. I really do believe that if we can teach them the framework, then they will have a better chance to succeed and keep track of their efforts.

“Again, the holy spirit is already here. We just need to catch up with it.”

I ask him if he has a piece of advice for people thinking about, or planning, a new project.

He pauses and thinks.

“Commit to trying it. And know that it will never be perfect when you do, so don’t wait for perfect before you do. Author Simon Sinek says: ‘It’s better to do it than talk about how perfect it could be.’ You will never get it perfect, so go and try. And learn. And get better.

“We at TryTank are big into futures work. This means that we are always looking for signs of where the church is headed. Next year we’ll be releasing a short film showing some video snippets of the church in 2032. It will look different than it does today. And while that can scare some people, it really excites me.

“It excites me because God is with us and God is inviting us to go along. I literally get up and am excited to get to try more things. And for that I get up with a smile each day and say, thank you, Jesus!” ¤

Although many people don’t realise it, they are already doing very creative and innovative things. I really do believe that if we can teach them the framework, then they will have a better chance to succeed and keep track of their efforts.

The Rev Lorenzo Lebrija sharing communion