Canopies of Trust
Adapted from Andy Crouch’s opening talk at the 2022 Redemptive Imagination Summit.
Everything changes when you come back. Second dates are more consequential than first dates! Relationships begin — really begin — not the first time you meet, but the second, when you return and reconnect.
Everything changes when you come back. Our team at Praxis has heard this from me many times over the past few years. It’s a core principle of our community, and really of any community.
We’ve seen this principle at work in our accelerator programs at Praxis, which require a commitment to two week-long retreats. The first week is intense, exciting, and often powerful and helpful in its own right. But when we come back a few months later for the second week, something is different and deeper right from the start. There is more trust. There is more honesty. And there often is more progress and more transformation.
Everything changes when you come back. We know this is true in venture building. “Follow-on investments” matter. It’s one thing to invest one time — it’s another to invest in the next round. It’s one thing to make a single gift — it’s another to give year after year as an organization grows.
This year, more than 350 friends came back to the Praxis Summit. This number is especially impressive given that we’d been apart for three years. As impossible as it would have been to imagine in May 2019, we had no way to come back together in person until finally, in 2022, we were able to regather.
And about fifty friends joined us at the Summit in 2022 for the first time. If you’re one of them, we’re so grateful you came — but what we really hope is that you will come back. That’s when your membership in our community will really, in the fullest sense, begin.
The psychiatrist Curt Thompson, who has been a good friend to many of us, has spoken and written powerfully about this basic dynamic using the terms rupture and repair. Rupture and repair, Curt has taught us — drawing on attachment theory and interpersonal neurobiology — are at the foundation of all healthy relationships.
Absence and presence. Rupture and repair are found in this most elemental rhythm. We experience it first in the relationship between child and parent — most often child and mother, though this dynamic applies to every caregiver in the child’s life. The parent disappears, even just for a moment, and while we as adults know this is quite normal and natural, for the child it is a major event. The child has to absorb the parent’s absence and learn to trust that the parent will return.
You were away, but then you returned. You were gone, but then you came back. Absence and presence is the beginning of trust.
But deeper cycles of rupture and repair play an equally important part in our relationships.
Failure and recovery. Failure can happen, and often does, without anyone being at fault. Failure can happen simply because of changing conditions and the vulnerabilities of the world. How do we respond when failure happens?
I have never quite gotten over reading an article years ago in the Harvard Business Review based on studies of middle managers at a large company. Some advanced in their careers; others got stuck. What made the difference, the authors of this study found, came down not to whether they had experienced failure — they all had — but to how they failed. Successful managers failed quickly, boldly, and loudly. Unsuccessful ones failed slowly, timidly, and quietly.
In the past few years all kinds of plans and expectations failed. Not one of us has made it to today without living through more or less dramatic failures. But here we are. We have found ways to recover and move forward. Failure and recovery build resilience. They build trust: the confidence that the next time something unexpected and hard happens, we can make it through.
We have found ways to recover and move forward. Failure and recovery build resilience. They build trust: the confidence that the next time something unexpected and hard happens, we can make it through.
But of course there is another kind of failure we must reckon with.
Sin and forgiveness. Not just failure, which may be the result of circumstances alone, but fault. Broken promises. Betrayal. These ruptures, too, are part of our lives.
And this is true in every room — the Praxis Summit being no exception. Walk into a room like the Praxis Summit and you may feel that you have walked into a room of bright and beautiful people, and you have. But you have not just walked into a room of bright and beautiful people. You have walked into a room of sinners. For all our desire to be friends and companions to one another, we are also threats and dangers to one another.
And we live in a world where sin is not just personal but structural, where even without wishing it we find ourselves participating in and perpetuating exploitation. As Scott Kauffmann says whenever he teaches the Praxis Redemptive Frame, exploitation is not just “out there” but “in here.” It is in us.
We so wish this were not so. It is so. And so we need to practice confrontation, telling the truth in love; and repentance, turning around; and forgiveness, extending mercy when it is not deserved, because mercy is only mercy when it is not deserved.
Here we have to say that we are especially grateful that although some of our community have been sinned against in very particular ways by others in the community — you still came back. And some of you have experienced the ways that our own community, captive as it is to principalities and powers, perpetuated sin without intending it, in ways that caused real damage and pain — and you still came back. That is a huge commitment to the gospel and an extraordinary testimony to the power of Jesus in your lives. If this community is ever to be truly redemptive, it will be because of those kinds of choices.
The story of our world is rupture without repair.
- Simple absence from one another, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic but also by the architecture of loneliness that so characterizes the Western, technological world, has bred mistrust and suspicion.
- Then there has been the failure of systems that had promised to protect us. Even those systems designed with the best of intentions have not served most of us well over the past few years.
- And most deeply, we have seen exploitation without repentance or repair — so often justified by the belief, or the pretext, that the other side is so exploitative that all we can do is manipulate and undermine in turn for the sake of our own side.
All this has created a crisis of trust that stretches all the way from neighborhoods to nations.
Scott Kauffmann said something very powerful to me as we discussed this recently: in this kind of crisis, it is nowhere near enough simply to be on the “right side.”
Of course we seek and hope to be on the right side. But what is broken and in need of repair in our world will not be fixed by us, or anyone else, simply being right. It will come through us being sacrificially present, sacrificially committed to recovery, and sacrificially committed to repentance.
What is broken and in need of repair in our world will not be fixed by us, or anyone else, simply being right. It will come through us being sacrificially present, sacrificially committed to recovery, and sacrificially committed to repentance.
I think this may help to clarify some language we use at Praxis, and that one hears in the broader Christian world, that can be misunderstood, and perhaps is sometimes misintended: the language of “cultural renewal.”
We use this language to describe the telos of redemptive strategy — seeking not simply to leverage culture, or even just improve culture, but to renew culture.
But this phrase, if not carefully qualified, can have a connotation of cultural nostalgia. It can seem to imply that we are seeking to turn the clock back to some imagined golden age, decades or centuries in the past, when the world seemed to work better for people like us.
True, whenever we teach on this aspect of Praxis’s vision we always emphasize that we are pursuing creative restoration — not simply a rewind to some past state, but a new creation that opens up new possibilities rather than just repeating past patterns. But why use the language of restoration or renewal at all? What are we trying to renew? And what exactly are we aiming to restore, to bring back to life and remake in a new way?
I’ve come to believe that the real goal of cultural restoration is not to restore a particular past culture — as if there were a time in history that was unambiguously better, for all image bearers and creation itself, to which we could return — as it is to restore the cultural conditions we all were instinctively seeking when we first arrived in the world.
The goal of cultural renewal is to make available and possible what we all believed was available and possible the first time we opened our eyes. We were born in hope, even before we knew what hope was, that there was a world of love and creative possibility in which we had a role to play. And such a world would only come into existence if there were a cultural environment adequate to recognize us, care for us, and bestow dignity on us. Every one of us, in the early moments of infancy and childhood, held on to that hope.
Many things have happened in our world to rupture that hope.
True cultural renewal would repair the shared conditions of our common life so that the hope of flourishing, felt instinctively by every human child, could be fulfilled.
True cultural renewal would repair the shared conditions of our common life so that the hope of flourishing, felt instinctively by every human child, could be fulfilled.
In The Life We’re Looking For I write about “canopies of trust,” the relational contexts where promises are made and kept in such a way as to generate healthy, creative, imaginative life. These canopies can be as small as a friendship or as wide as a nation, and indeed these canopies cascade from large to small in healthy societies. In the book I focus on the unique role of “households” in offering persons a canopy of trust, but we build these canopies here at Praxis, too. A venture is a canopy of trust. An investment or a grant creates a canopy of trust. Each accelerator class is its own small canopy of trust, and at the Praxis Summit we invite each class of fellows into and under a wider canopy.
Building canopies of trust — through rupture and repair — is our most basic work as human beings. Restoring canopies of trust that have been ruptured without repair is our most basic work as a redemptive community.
Building canopies of trust — through rupture and repair — is our most basic work as human beings. Restoring canopies of trust that have been ruptured without repair is our most basic work as a redemptive community. It is the work of each of our ventures. It applies to our participation in our neighborhoods, cities, nations. It is the work of those of us who came back together at Summit from May 11 to 13, in the year of our Lord 2022 — and those who will come back at Praxis events in the future.
We used these three days to “come back” and to talk about what we could repair together. And that is what we will do the next time we come back as well. Indeed, this is what we should be seeking to do in some way every time we come back, whether two of us for coffee or hundreds of us for Summit. Because repairing the canopy, after it has been torn, is what redemptive communities are for.
