Integrating Loft preaching with old-school ISKCON

My mate David Jorm recently wrote about his visit to Gaura Yoga in Wellington, New Zealand.

You can listen to an example of the westernized kirtan that Dave described here. Just scroll down the page until you see "Roar Sound sound track".

My wife and I were there to open that center ten years ago, along with Khadiravan devi dasi and Sudevi devi dasi, and we were there for the first three years. Being passionate by nature I'm the guy they send to start new things. After that a more sattvic long haul maintenance dynamic kicks in and I go somewhere to start something else.

You can read my 2006 Congregational Preaching Journal article about the Loft preaching paradigm, and the 2008 article about our preaching in Brisbane for some background.

Since we left Gaura Yoga it has solidified and gradually and steadily built momentum. Today they have the original center in the city, a number of ashrams, and additionally an eco-retreat in the countryside.

Over the last four years Param and I have been working on pioneering our center Atma Yoga, here in Brisbane, Australia.

The working model of contemporary urban preaching of Krishna Consciousness is there in the form of Gaura Yoga. Without changing anything essential (like Srila Prabhupada's books) in ten years they have made enough devotees to significantly expand their operation, restock ISKCON temples in Australia and New Zealand, and take New Zealand (a nation of 4 million inhabitants) to number 5 in the world during the Prabhupada Christmas Marathon.

So there is no pioneering that needs to be done on that front. What we've been working on here is how to integrate a powerfully functioning center like this with an existing ISKCON temple.

As result our growth here has been slower and our rate of innovation lower. A lot of the work we have done up to this point has been laying groundwork and exploring how we fit together.

In the case of Gaura Yoga there was no official ISKCON temple in Wellington. There was a congregationally-run center in the suburbs, but no temple with installed Deities.

This meant that the center was able to move more freely.

Different ages = different bodies. Different sizes = different organizations

I listened recently to a question and answer session on leadership with Pastor Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church. One question was the changes in leadership as the size of the church changes. Driscoll explained as a church grows to a different order of magnitude of size it effectively becomes a different organization - one requiring a different style of leadership.

It's just like our body, really - you have the same name, but you have a different body when you're 20 from the one you had when you were 5. Similarly, the ISKCON temple in Dallas is still the ISKCON temple in Dallas, but it is a completely different organization from the one that Visnujana Swami set up.

And that's an important point with wide-reaching implications. Prabhupada disciples visiting our center here in Brisbane frequently remark that it has "the feel of the early days". Actually, Loft preaching is closer to the dynamic of the early missional ISKCON (the real "old school") than the dynamic that a lot of ISKCON centers have evolved to today.

What happens when a center has been established for some time and all the external props and processes of formalized Krishna Consciousness are put in place is that the internal value structure changes. It effectively becomes a different organization.

It goes from the early "start-up venture" days to being "a mature company", and it loses its edginess, and its appeal to new, young recruits.

The inevitability of multiple ISKCON centers per city

Recently the GBC has been considering multiple ISKCON centers in one city. It's an inevitable historical development that is currently being grokked. One center cannot be all things to all people. The reality is that a cutting-edge urban preaching center reaching out to a western population has radically different priorities to an established ISKCON temple serving Deities and an established congregation including many ex-pat Indians. You can't effectively do both in the same place at the same time.

In order to have these two centers functioning at their optimum we've discovered that you need to have separation and cooperation between the two - they need to be interdependent. Each can remain focused on its core values and identity. There needs to be a constant process of communication and negotiation between the two. One cannot be subservient to the agenda of the other. In this way they can coexist in a symbiotic relationship.

It takes time to build the network of working relationships and establish the understanding of how the whole thing fits together. Devotees have developed an unconscious model of temple=yatra, and rebuilding a conceptual model of a yatra with multiple, diverse centers operating in concert takes time.

One example I have used to help devotees grok this is that of movie theaters. In every city there are so many movie theaters, even in the same multiplex, and they have session times all over the place, including at the same time. It's not that there can only be "one center to rule them all" that has "the program" for a city. With hundreds of thousands to millions of people in each city, if we really are serious about making the world Krishna Conscious we need tens to hundreds of centers in modern metropolises.

Some will serve mature congregations, others will focus on serving the edge of the organization and people outside it.

Orthodox at the core, innovative at the edge.

The "all things to all people in one place" paradigm doesn't work. Do a yoga class, or some other outreach activity, in the temple and you'll upset the devotees (and rightly so I feel - I'm a devotee too). Do only temple kirtan and Bhagvatam class and you'll miss a large section of your target market of potentially interested persons. We have to do both strongly, without compromising one or the other.

Unfortunately this paradigm of "all in one place" is now being mooted to be extended to Prabhupada's books, the core of our orthodoxy. Some devotees want to write a compatibility layer, or as I call them "Defensive Annotations" into Srila Prabhupada's books. Instead, I believe that we should follow the successful principles demonstrated in Loft preaching: keep Prabhupada's books as they are and work out from there, writing more books to allow people to come in gradually.

Orthodox at the core, innovative at the edge. It's not all one.