My Areas of Non-expertise: Down the Generalist Rabbit Hole

Reflections on terminal degrees, polymaths, narcissism, and the Church.

My daughter, not yet fully a drama queen but at least a drama princess, was recently in a theatre performance of Alice in Wonderland. This installment of DruGroup reminds me of the first chapter of that volume, where we are told,

"She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it)."

The below might be categorized as pretty good advice I'm giving myself. I have no plans to follow it. Fall down the rabbit hole with me if you will…

Many years ago, when I had about 200 fewer grey hairs on my beardless head, I was interviewing for a position at a University (a position I later declined—so apparently I was interviewing them too.) One of the things I was grappling with then, and perhaps now, was the question of what my "field" was.

Though well into “middle-age” it still didn't seem like I had an area of expertise. I had not advanced my formal education to the realm of a terminal degree, which, depending on if you are ABD (All But Dissertation) is either much more or much less depressing than its medically foreboding name would suggest. Without a coping stone to the bricks in my wall of education, I felt ever consigned to be in the overlooked but oft-relied upon generalist category. Generalists are people that specialists tend to believe have failed at specializing.

When serving as a second-chair leader, (which I did for more than 19 years in three organizations) you become somewhat proficient at a little bit of everything as you hire, coach, and solve problems with a broad swath of leaders. Sometimes you fill in for a month or more in a role, other times you have to brush up on an area to help it out or to launch things, and as such your experience grows laterally, not vertically. A second chair leader usually becomes the proverbial “jack of all trades; master of none." Those who want to be kind to you then append to the proverb: "but oftentimes better than a master of one.” They say this compliment while foisting work upon you that they don’t want to do themselves, as they might do to a highly paid but indispensable administrative assistant.

Speaking of kind people: there was at least one in my aforementioned interview. I had confessed the fact that I didn't feel like I had a true "field of expertise,” which is a difficult disclosure to make in a room where everyone has at least one of those terminal degrees from esteemed institutions made of bricks and mortar founded centuries prior. One of those who interviewed me, a brilliant professor who seemed to have a bit of an E.F. Hutton quality in the room, said,

"Actually, I might suggest that your field is 'the Church.'"

This comment took me aback at first. I had never really stopped to consider that perhaps in my seemingly random leadership years I might have been building my own sort of practitioner’s capstone by learning the ins and outs of the Church in many if not most of its forms. My biography at times has included the line "he has led in small, mid-sized, and large churches in rural, suburban, and urban areas." Seen from one perspective, this suggests my experience was extensive and varied. (We won't examine overmuch the other perspective, which signals that I had trouble holding on to a job.)

I bring this up for a reason, and not only because it focuses on one of my favorite subjects, myself, which is an area of expertise for any narcissist-writer, which may indeed be a redundant coupling. The reason is this: I have a vast bandwidth of interests which you may have noticed in my copious writing in books, articles, missives, over the last 25 years since I began writing online at a now-defunct “e-zine” and three subsequent personal websites and other publications. I might at this point and clarify that “e-zine” is actually what many thought online magazines would be called back in 1996 when I started such online writing.

I should digress and remind us all that in those days there was no Google, no Wikipedia, and no YouTube. And it was a long time before Facebook or Twitter, the latter of which has included my various spastic tweets sent under the influence of coffee and cough drops since just 2008, a full 12 years after I began writing online. Believe it or not, most people called the internet “Cyberspace” in those days. We accessed said Cyberspace via an arcane series of beeps, whistles, and static called “dial-up” or what my daughter would derisively call “a potato.” More evidence of the potato-ness: the year after I began writing online (1997) I doubled my internet speed by acquiring the newly available 56k modem, which meant I could access the internet at 56,000 bits per second. Of course, today an outdated computer on a slow connection can download a 1 GB file in around 32 seconds. That same file would have taken 3.5 days to download on my brand new 56k modem in 1997. (Now you see why there was no YouTube.) The three low res pictures in this email would have “loaded” slowly, revealed line by pixelated line, if at all, back in those days.

But, getting back to me, I have written about, but not limited to, the following subjects: spiritual formation, organizational leadership, professional Basketball, diversity, the writing of books, the trials of women, pregnancy, and motherhood as seen from an omniscient male perspective, conflict management, biblical literature, non-biblical literature, non-literate Bible-believing people, ecclesiology, fatherhood, manhood, the Pope, Christian nationalism, in praise of religious freedom, the Olympics, the dangers of denominational work, sin, and holiness, theistic evolution, immigration, and Willy Wonka, leadership emergence theory, baby amnesia theory, and life rhythm theory, habits, productivity, Sabbath, and the Letter from Birmingham Jail, E-mail management, and marriage, current events, history, futurist predictions, historical fiction, and science-fiction, ethics, the Eucharist, spiritual abuse, and positive psychology, the eclipse of evangelicalism, the emerging church, the sunset of church growth, and the sunrise of microchurches, lifemapping, sexuality, technology, evangelism, and discipleship, Star Wars, Tayvon Martin, church planting, and customer service, social media, leading meetings, getting published, jerks, faith deconstruction, and faith reconstruction, the Catholics, the Methodists, the Wesleyans, the Nazarenes, and the Essenes, as well as Republicanism, Democratism, Clintonism, Trumpism, Libertarianism, Conservatism, Classical Liberalism, and that what all too often follows all of them, not to mention a run-on paragraph like this one: Nihilism.

After that logorrheic litany, I am reminded of the great pleasure I had in reading, several years ago, John Hodgeman's superbly vainglorious book The Areas of My Expertise: An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order, a title I highly recommend in equal measure for its humor as for it's invented pseudo-facts (and in part just for its indispensable catalog of 700 hobo names.)

The point is that I am all over the place. When people like me want to pat ourselves on the back for this we welcome being called a "Renaissance man" or "polymath," although I’m loathe to embrace the latter, since I became a writer at the behest of my 11th grade English teacher who reassured me that there would be no math. Of course, when we are depressed at our lack of depth or impact our self-loathing forces us to suspect these qualities are mere randomness, lack of discipline, or even a fear of failure to specialize.

However, if I am truly honest about it, that esteemed Doctor in the interview room was closest to the truth. Without intentionality on my part, and because of a quarter-century plus of experience, my field is "the church." It is what I know best. It is what I have seen from the greatest variety of perspectives. It is what people most often ask for my advice about. It is my “field.” Or at least, that’s what other people think. It’s what people most often pay me to advise them and coach them about (and what people pay you to do does have some value, assuredly). But as this rabbit hole meandering makes clear, I’d like to also talk about all the other things mentioned above, and much much more. If you thought my above list of published subjects to be bewildering, you should see my unpublished drafts folder!

But the truth is my primary expertise is about the faithful and unfaithful among those who, in Antioch, a few years after the ascension of Jesus began to be called "Christians." When those people, the Kingdom of God expressed in its organized earthly form, gather together, we call it "the Church."

That's my field, but I'm not sticking to it.

Remember, I generally give myself very good advice, (though I very seldom follow it).

How about you, what are your areas of expertise, or lack thereof? What’s your rabbit hole full of?