Day four at Northern Sem in Chicago. It’s gone very well. Today was spent on narrative theology, the importance and impact of story. A video clip of Phyllis Tickle and Don Miller (VIMEO) on story was helpful, and we also talked about the framework of mission, memory and mystery – elements of the Big Story. Then worked on an exercise in ethnography, using the movies Chocolat and Lady in the Water.
We only have two and a half hours this afternoon – barely enough to complete another exercise relative to the research issue that will guide much of the effort in the DMin program from here forward.
The days have been long – partly because I have been building part of the PPT at lunch time, and doing some revision of my resources and presentation in the evenings — in addition to two movies. I discovered a great Tex-Mex restaurant just behind the Seminary: Uncle Julios. Reasonable prices and huge portions. In general the portions seem about 25% larger here than in Canada, which means I can never finish a meal…
I used a book that came to me late in the game in the discussion of a theology of place. Sheldrake, Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory and Identity. A helpful discussion especially the first thirty pages. A book I need to look up yet is Sidewalks in the Kingdom.
“There are seven aspects of love that seem necessary for the transformation of the heart that is profoundly alone. They are: to reveal, to understand, to communicate, to celebrate, to empower, to be in communication with another, and to forgive.
“The first and key aspect is to reveal. To reveal someone’s beauty is to reveal their value by giving them time, attention and tenderness. To love is not just to do something for them but to reveal to them their own uniqueness.. the revelation that heals takes time.
“The second aspect is to understand. If no one understands us, how can we find our own inner peace? [In particular, those who have lived in chaos need the security of order]. Read the rest of this entry »
About ten years ago Leader to Leader ran an article on “cult” versus “culture,” noting that we have to choose one or the other. Far too many churches, coming out of the frame of modernity, have developed leadership cults. it’s the personality thing. A multi-gifted, charismatic personality or set of personalities sit at the center of a ministry or community. The alternative is to cultivate a leadership culture.
A leadership culture doesn’t happen by accident, particularly in these times when “big” is still equated with success. These days are passing as we increasingly recognize that numbers are no measure of success, and in many cases are counter-productive. What draws the crowds may only be a passing fad, and may be appealing to a consumeristic tendency, the desire to be entertained, to come and passively consume the religious goods and services. One of the lovely things about the rising culture is the desire to be producers, and unwilling to simply consume.
A leadership culture recognizes that in the community of God’s people, we are all players. We all have a gift and a ministry, and we are all called to live on mission in the wider neighbourhood. Note I am not arguing for a democracy. We are all players, but differentiated. We acknowledge the unique call and unique gifting and level of maturity of each person, and we weight their input accordingly (though even here acknowledging that wisdom comes as a gift to us – I can’t tell you how many times I have been brought up short by the “weaker brother.”). Moreover, God gifts leaders to lead, and we submit to the leadership and call of the Holy Spirit among us. So, there is genuine submission, even as the context is one of mutuality (Eph 5:21).
A leadership culture is intentional in developing and equipping (Eph 4 – katartismos) gifted ministry. The first step is in cultivating a discipleship culture. This is going to involve a bunch of things, beginning with some way of discerning the APEST signatures of individuals. What sort of gifts are they functioning in, and what is their level of development and maturity? getting people face to face in groups small enough to allow vulnerability. Placing people in groups of ten to fifteen along with a mature leader allows them to begin to grow in faith and practice. When they go out together on mission, the “need to know” factor increases and
“In human beings there is a constant tension between order and disorder, connectedness and loneliness, evolution and revolution, security and insecurity. Our universe is constantly evolving: the old order gives way to a new order and this in its turn crumbles when the next order appears. It is no different in our lives in the movement from birth to death.
“Change of one sort or another is the essence of life… when we try to prevent the forward movement of life, we may succeed for a while… but inevitably there is an explosion..
“And so empires of ideas, as well as empires of wealth and power, come and go. To live well is to observe in today’s apparent order the tiny anomalies that are the seeds of change, the harbingers of the order of tomorrow. This means living in a state of a certain insecurity, in anguish and loneliness, which, at its best, can push us towards the new. Too much security and the refusal to evolve, to embrace change, leds to a kind of death. Too much insecurity, however, can also mean death. To be human is to create sufficient order so that we can move on into insecurity and seeming disorder. In this way we discover the new.”
More from Jean Vanier..
David Fitch writes in The End of Evangelicalism on “Evangelicalism and the Caffeine-Free Diet Coke”
“A key actor in this book is the political and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek. Žižek can be obscure, profound, entertaining, and bizarre, often all at the same time. He has strengths to lend to this project as well as weaknesses. He will guide the first half of this book’s political analysis of evangelicalism.
“One of Žižek’s more famous cultural analyses surrounds his illustration of the Caffeine-Free Diet Coke. In his book The Fragile Absolute he narrates how Coca-Cola was originally concocted as a medicine (originally known as a nerve tonic, stimulant, and headache remedy). It was eventually sweetened, and its strange taste was made more palatable. Soon it became a popular drink during Prohibition that still possessed medicinal qualities (it was deemed “refreshing” as well as the perfect “temperance drink”). Over time, however, its sugar was replaced with sweetener and its caffeine was extracted, and so today we are left with Caffeine-Free Diet Coke: a drink that does not fulfill any of the concrete needs of a drink. The two reasons why anyone would drink anything—it quenches thirst/provides nutrition and it tastes good—have, in Žižek’s words, “been suspended.” Read the rest of this entry »
Why do we hunger for beauty? This is a question Steve Bell asked in a haunting song around 1995.
Why do we love what we love? How do we train our desires? This is the key question of spiritual formation.
Recently writers like Jamie Smith and William Cavanaugh have been pointing beyond the rationalist theologies of Modernity to more ancient ways of knowing. Both reference the thought of Augustine and acknowledge the affective foundations of the will, and that right desire is not innate but formed by culture.
Consumer culture is one of the most powerful systems of formation in the contemporary world… “it trains us to see the world in certain ways.”
The conclusion? How we relate to the world is a spiritual discipline. Cavanaugh references one corporate manager who stated it blunting: ‘Corporate branding is really about worldwide beliefs management.’”
Cavanaugh writes of the social basis of our longings in Being Consumed,
“Others are .. crucial to one’s freedom. A slave or an addict, by definition, cannot free him or herself. Others from outside the self — the ultimate Other being God — are necessary to break through the bonds that enclose the self in itself. Humans need a community of virtue in which to learn to desire rightly.
“Augustine does not assume that individuals simply have wants that are internally generated and that subsequently enter the social realm through acts of choice. Nor does he assume that desires are simply real because people have them, nor that what one really desires is fully transparent and accessible to one’s own self. For Augustine, desire is a social production: desire is a complex and multidimensional network of movement that does not simply originate within the individual self but pulls and pushes the self in different directions from both inside and outside the person.” (9-10)
This is critically important as a discipleship issue because eventually, we become what we adore. We want to train our hearts through traditional spiritual disciplines — and especially corporate disciplines, which have a sacramental character — until our desires are habituated.
More than mere beliefs, and more than worldviews, this is about a pre-conscious, affective dynamic. The heart has its reasons that reason cannot know. And this is another reason that cultural exegesis is so critical in our time. “The Story of Stuff,” the PBS special report, “The Persuaders,” are critical films to help us critique the forming practices of our materialist culture. And thinkers like Slavoj Zizek are more and more important to us.
Check out this clip from Zizek’s film.
Further on modernist epistemologies and how they have led us away from biblical anthropogy and thus away from biblical praxis: James K.A. Smith, “Outline of a Charismatic Epistemology”
See also “love, rightly ordered.”
Northern Seminary offers a Doctor of Ministry Program with an emphasis in Missional Leadership. I’ll be teaching in the program this month, starting Monday the 23rd for five days. Yes, Five days in Chicago in January – not the best time to visit the city, but so it goes! Here is the blurb from the website.
“Joined by leading missional church thinkers and practitioners, Dr. Alan Roxburgh (The Sky is Falling, Missional: Joining God in the Neighbourhood), and Dr. Craig Van Gelder, Dr. David Fitch, author of The Great Giveaway and The End of Evangelicalism?, is directing the program, which provides a practical and academic framework for pastors and congregational leaders to think critically, creatively, and faithfully about ministry in their context. The cohort is limited to fifteen students.”
Download a PDF about the DMin in Missional Leadership.
One of shifts that is expressed iin this program is a move from quantitative to qualitative measures. This is not intended to express a movement away from the concrete, but rather an expression of the wider epistemological shift away mythical “neutrality” and abstraction, toward real places, real people, and their stories. As part of that shift, I will include one text on ethnography, and some readings from appreciative inquiry. A movement toward alternative measures and a recognition that the narratives really are critical in understanding a culture, is a needed change. In some ways this could use a course all it’s own – a concept like “social imaginary” moves us far beyond the level of ideas and worldviews to something deeper.
The ethnography text? Moschela, “Ethnography as a Pastoral Practice.” I’m making a lot of use of media in this course, and part of the requirements I defined were this: watch four movies (those were tough choices!), listen to three talks (including Brueggemann), and select two hours of the BBC Special “Human Planet.”
The mission of a community is to give life to others, that is to say, to transmit new hope and new meaning to them. Mission is revealing to others their fundamental beauty, value and importance in the universe, their capacity to love, to grow and to do beautiful things and to meet God. Mission is transmitting to people a new inner freedom and hope; it is unlocking the doors of their being so that new energies can flow; it is taking away from their shoulders the terrible yoke of guilt and fear. To give life to people is to reveal to them that they are loved just as they are by God, with the mixture of good and evil, light and darkness that is in them; that the stone in front of their tomb in which all the dirt of their lives has been hidden can be rolled away. They are forgiven; they can live in freedom.
Jean Vanier, Community and Growth
“Benedictine prayer life, besides being regular, is reflective. It is designed to make us take our own lives into account in the light of the gospel. It is not recitation for its own sake. it is the bringing to bear of the mind of Christ on the fragments of our own lives. It requires steady wrestling with the Word of God. It takes time and it does not depend on quantity for its value.
“Not so long ago a prayer-wheel mentality of the spiritual life was beginning to eat away at monastic communities. Like the industrialized world around them, where assembly lines had become the model of life’s best operations, the notion that more is better invaded [us]… prayer got faster and more mechanical. In a simpler society, Benedict had called for regular prayer punctuated by long periods of sacred reading and equal measures of meaningful work. Our culture, though, turned the spiritual life into a more-is-better world. Read the rest of this entry »
We had planned a trip to Revelstoke, in the heart of the Rockies. If in Revelstoke amidst beautiful scenery, why not BE there? And why read about prayer or practices of discipleship, instead of actually praying? So I nearly failed to take anything with me, other than a camera..
In the end, however, I saw Joan Chittester sitting meditatively on our coffee table, and brought her along. When it came time to sit on the bench you see above (click the image for a much larger version), I eventually asked Joan to join the conversation. I read only a few pages on prayer from chapter 3. Chapter 3 is titled, “Prayer and Lectio: The Center and Centrifuge of Life.” I’ll summarize the first part of this rich and warm chapter, in Joan’s words, below. Read the rest of this entry »
