07.31.10
Posted in life happens at 10:06 am by len
The creative thinkers and practitioners seem to be multiplying. And never have we had such easy access — at least those who are digital immigrants or digital natives. Last night at a friends home I watched as his sixty year old mother maneuvered deftly around the iPad. Yes — the iPad, not merely an iPod.
In other words, not merely the range and ease of access to a conversation like the one here: leadership, culture, mission, change — but the growing span of generations who are finding their way around.
This past week I have been dipping around three books that I previously read, and discovering some new riches. Point three I guess — there is so much information and experience on offer that no one can take it all in. It’s another reason that when engaging change processes we need to cast a wider net, include more voices from the margins.
The books I was revisiting this past week are Earl Creps, Off-Road Disciplines, James Bryan Smith, The Good and Beautiful Life, Bruxy Cavey, The End of Religion, and two new ones actually — Keith Meyer, Whole Life Transformation, and Len Sweet, So Beautiful (given by a friend, though I think Sweets book is a couple years old now).
On top of this I was sifting through some file folders and found a 2004 edition of Cutting Edge magazine. Cutting Edge is published by the Vineyard USA, and often with some great interviews and articles. The title of this old one is “As The Wind,” subtitle, “The Spirit in the Church.” This issue contained a great interview with Steven Sandage, who co-wrote Transforming Spirituality with LeRon Shults in 2003. If I have time this week I’ll post an excerpt from the article, one of the better ones I have read this past year that uses a holistic approach to view spiritual life and growth.
* * *
This is going to be a busy week. A wedding today, some other things to do tomorrow in addition to METRO. Thursday we fly to Ontario. I may take a blog holiday from the 6th to the 9th or so, I’ll see how it goes.
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07.30.10
Posted in poetry/prose at 11:15 am by len
Rhythm of purpose,
Ground of Time,
Life itself
and love the rhyme –
All the flow
must upward go
and nameless Be.
Containing time
but not contained,
and all who dwell there
still the same –
Becoming.
At one still point
we all move,
fleshed within
the flow of love
Incarnate.
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Posted in complexity/systems, ekklesia, emergence, leadership, transition at 9:33 am by len
In “When Complex Systems Fail,” Marg Wheatley discusses the need to increase knowledge and make it accessible to those who can bring change. Because we have built huge and interconnected systems, they are increasingly complex. This complexity is far beyond the ability of individual minds to grasp. Moreover, change processes, because they affect EVERYONE in a complex system, are easily sabotaged or resisted. The only way to reduce such resistance is to include all stakeholders at some level.
But the piece that grabbed me is a piece I have been trying to articulate in a variety of ways for the past three or four years. It is this need to build a creative commons; it is the need for leaders at all levels to take off their hats and shed their individual roles, with the power that accompanies them (and induces the distance that prevents free dialogue) and come together. It is the recognition that conversation and dialogue are near the essence of the kind of leadership we need now. Read the rest of this entry »
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07.29.10
Posted in generous orthodoxy, gospel at 11:23 am by len
In this strange space we are all entering, like it or not, some good words have lost their meaning. If I use the word “Christian” to describe myself, it comes with a host of associations for people, most of them negative. So I understand and sympathize when someone tells me they no longer use that label. I find myself often saying “Jesus follower” – especially with friends on the street.
“Christian” seems to have been a term used for self-description, and it only occurs a couple of times in the New Testament. There was no anti-practice to worry about yet. Christendom, that great compromise, had not yet been invented. And now many of those who call themselves “Christian” can identify the right beliefs, but practice something that would not be recognizable by the apostle Paul.
It wasn’t so long ago that I came across Garrison Keilor and his little dictum, “Give up your good Christian life and come, follow Jesus.” Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in ekklesia, formation, mission at 5:00 am by len
What is the relationship between the two?
It seems to me they are intimately connected – so much so that to split one off from the other is to attack the fabric of the gospel.
I see the relationship as mutually empowering – yet the traction comes from mission. Which gives us a lovely picture of interdependence in dynamic rhythm – as life in the Trinity. Community and mission… so how about a bicycle? I’m sure this isn’t new.
The critical practice requires rhythm and harmony. Balance is dynamic and not static. The wheels are not swappable, and you can’t do without either one. Traction comes from mission, and discipleship in community has a specific direction or telos — the fullness of Christ. You can click the image for a larger version.
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07.28.10
Posted in complexity/systems, ekklesia, emergence, transition at 11:45 am by len
In 2007 David Fitch offered an overview of the work that Mark Lau Branson is doing around appreciative enquiry. Alan Roxburgh likewise applauded the benefits of using”appreciative enquiry” in local congregations as part a transformation process. Alan suggested AI as a tool which enabled people to be “listened into speech.”
Mark’s book – Memories, Hopes, and Conversations: Appreciative Inquiry and Congregational Change, arrived on my desk after an afternoon reflecting on the potential of narrative therapy as a healing proces. I had made the further connection to memory, and hope, and salutogenesis – I was ready for some further reflection on processes of communal healing and growth.
Here’s what David wrote:
“Mark Lau Branson presented a workshop where he talked about the work of leading transformation in congregations. It described the contrast between typical church “problem solving”, (i.e. go into a church, study the problems, talk solutions and then propose a plan to implement solutions) – and Appreciative Inquiry — asking questions about where God has been at work and then stoking the imagination as to how to further participate in these ways as a body. He called the latter interpretive leadership. He said the deadest churches he had been had still been places where God had been wonderfully at work, but there were no witnesses.”
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in formation, learning at 5:00 am by len
Click the image for larger…
Emerging Culture Resource List
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07.27.10
Posted in formation, pilgrimage at 9:04 am by len
Or, “why having too many thoughtful, passionate, and engaged friends can ruin your life.” Just kidding.
But it is difficult some mornings to get to my own work when my friends are posting great stuff. On Sunday morning Paul Fromont posted an excerpt from John O’Donohue in Eternal Echoes. John warns against living on the surface, endlessly distracted by the next task. It’s a doozy and it runs like this:
“…When you choose someone or some way of life, you invest your heart. Choice becomes an invitation to commitment. When you commit you deepen presence. Though your choice narrows the range of possibility now open to you, it increases the intensity of the chosen possibility. New dimensions of the chosen path reveal themselves; a new path opens inwards to depth and outwards to new horizons. Your choice has freed your longing from dispersing itself over a whole range of surface. When we avoid [making those] choice[s] we become victims of distraction. We flit like the butterfly from one flower to the next, delightfully seduced by its perfume and colour. We remain secretly addicted to the temporary satisfaction and pleasure of immediacy. Kierkegaard divided the life journey into stages, and he saw that the aesthetic stage was the wanderer whose longing is magnetized on the endless array of novelties. We celebrate the surface unwilling to become acquainted with the depths where the darkness plies its slow and patient transfigurations. The colour and excitement of the surface, though delightful, are ultimately deceptive; they keep us from recognizing the habit of our repetitions and the boredom and poverty that sleep there… [When] we go below the façade of repetition and risk the danger of encounter, challenge, and responsibility. When [we] choose with discernment, integrity, and passion, [we] submit [ourselves] to the slow and unglamorous miracle of change…”
There is a fantastic story that illuminates this truth, penned by Madeleine L’Engle in the late 70′s. “A Wind in the Door” is part of the TIME Trilogy. If you haven’t read these, pick them up one day, they rival CS Lewis space trilogy and in some ways surpass it.
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07.26.10
Posted in complexity/systems, ekklesia, leadership, mission at 10:40 am by len
I’m often on this topic, and I think I must have come at it from fifty different angles this past couple of years. Here is one more you may find helpful. And it may shock you to know that the three questions I will share date back to 1967.
One of the large shifts that is happening as we attempt to find the center in this missional conversation is from the church at the center to God at the center, and His purposes in redemption. “It is not the church of God that has a mission in the world, but the God of mission who has a church in the world.” (Bosch) He is forming a people for himself. At the core of that purpose, we are formed for mission — to partner with God in both performing and proclaiming the good news. God is faithful in keeping his promises to Abraham, promises we inherit in Christ.
So if this is the core of God’s purpose, then governance and leadership in the ecclesia must align around this center. Lloyd Ogilvie, in 1967, asked three questions.
* What kind of people do we want to deploy on mission?
* What kind of community creates that kind of person?
* What kind of leadership cultivates that kind of community?
(This last question was probably “creates” rather than cultivates.. my adaptation)
The answer is a leadership that empowers people, nurtures teams, supports collaboration, shares knowledge, and cultivates a leadership culture. The shift we need has been well documented by a variety of sources. This example is adapted from Roxburgh in The Sky is Falling.
If it’s a metaphor you need, leaders must move from:
* Hero to host
* Director to Producer
* Map reader to Navigator
* Knower to lover
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Posted in ekklesia, theology at 5:15 am by len
An interview with Mike Cosper at JoeThorn.net. HT to Daryl Dash.
Q. What place does theology have in corporate worship?
Our worship services are necessarily theological. It’s never a question of whether or not we’ll do theology when we gather – it’s a question of what kind of theology, or of what depth of theology we will do.
The goal of a pastor of worship is to accurately and thoroughly give voice to the theology that shapes the life and practices of the church, and the goal of the gathering is to give language and expression to the core values an theology of the church.
I’ve developed a little memory device that helps teach the way that the Bible explains worship. It’s called “Worship 1,2,3”
Worship has ONE object – the triune God, revealed in the scripture as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Worship has TWO contexts – the broad context of all of life (unceasing, living-sacrifice worship) and the narrow context of the gathered church, who gathers to encourage and build one another up, offering a foretaste of what is to come when Christ returns an heaven and earth are joined together. (Jeremy Begbie calls this an “echo of the future,” which is one of the coolest phrases in all of Christendom.)
Worship has THREE audiences – Our Triune God is both the object of worship and one of its audiences, but the scriptures also tell us to pay attention to two other audiences – the Gathered Church (Colossians 3:16, Hebrews 10:23-24), and the watching world (1 Corinthians 14:22-40).
***
Elsewhere, Innagrace Dieterich writes,
“Worship is not a doorway out of the world, a path deeper into self, or an abstract communion with God, but a way into the world through an alternative vision and way of life. Participation in the Lord’s Supper teaches Christians how to remember, how to eat, and how to live. The bread when lifted up and blessed, thrusts our vision both forward toward all of God’s gifts and backward toward the bread we had for breakfast, to the gifted and social nature of our existence, to the interconnectedness of worship and life.”
“Recognizing their own hunger, their own need for forgiveness and reconciliation, Christians stand in solidarity with the hungry, the dispossessed and the marginalized. Nourished and strengthened in a new relationship with Jesus Christ, those who break bread together are drawn into and participate in his ministry of conquering need, overcoming alienation, and accepting the despised.”
Cultivating Missional Communities, 34
See also “worship as prayer.”
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