The New Reality

Incarnational Practices

     The modernist mode of thinking is a practice most practitioners find difficult to overcome when learning to engage the PD process. The following activities are about learning to move outside of the modernist paradigm into a real understanding of culture amid marginalized people. When engaging an unfamiliar cultural setting it is best to learn to listen. The first incarnational practice is to listen more than speaking. This is a critical activity in the PD process. The listening process referred to herein involves listening without assuming or judging. It is a listening for the sake of understanding others. It is critical to understand how Christians and church are viewed amid the people being engaged. Listen for the critics, criticisms, complaints, and condemnations of Christians and the church. While listening avoid getting defensive and argumentative, but instead learn why they feel like they do. At all cost do not invalidate their opinions and brush them aside. Their feelings are real and should be respected. As Christ followers we cannot afford to take a position of superiority and diminish the opportunity to connect in culture. There must be a willingness to hear the voice of others and respect their voice. Their voice will give the practitioner significant clues about how best to reach the community with the Gospel.

      The second incarnational activity involves living amongst a marginalized people. Loyd asked the question, “Can we be one of you?” Living amid people in their culture on their terms allows for a listening that comes naturally and not mechanically or academically. Living amid people allows the practitioner of the PD process to hear more than their words, but allows for watching their faces as they reveal their hearts. The goal of the PD process is to gain an authentic relational understanding of people. It is only when listening is engaged in living amid the culture does a practitioner understand the relationship of what it means to be one with the people.

      The third incarnational activity is to learn the language, the slang, and the idioms of the community. The Bible has been through many translations and paraphrases; it is just as important amid the marginalized to speak the Gospel in their terms, even if those terms might be offensive within the institutional church. For many, the action of cultural translation may stretch boundaries of what has been perceived as acceptable limits, but one of the most honoring ways to connect with people is to speak in their language on their terms.

     The fourth incarnational activity is to create a contextually open environment where people are accepted and loved as human beings without judging their brokenness, flaws or lifestyles. The focus is upon developing authentic relationships that allows people to experience belonging without believing. People who are interested in Jesus Christ want an authentic experience of Christian spirituality. They are exploring faith and faith experiences in pursuit of a real spirituality that works. They are asking the questions, “Does Christ really make a difference and does your faith really work for you?” A contextually open community is a safe place where people who are exploring faith may belong without believing, acknowledge their interest and experiment with the Christian faith, experience the Gospel as reality, and experience a community of faith.

    The fifth incarnational activity is experiential discipleship. The seeker through the previous four incarnational activities has the opportunity to take a natural step through experiential discipleship. This style of discipleship is fueled through discovery. As the seeker pursues faith, Christ allows the seeker to capture him or her by becoming aware of Christ presence within them. Here the intersection of pursuit and faith become a reality leading to transformation. The transformation must come from Christ work within the seeker through the conforming work of the Holy Spirit to the image of Christ. Note this is not an external conformity to appear as a believer, but an internal conformity to Christ that demonstrates a real transformation. The greatest witness of the Gospel is the incarnational community of Christ followers living amid the cultures and peoples of the world. Leslie Newbigin asserts,

[What occupied] the center of Jesus’ concern was the calling and binding to Himself of a living community of men and women who would be the witnesses of what he was and did. The new reality that he introduced into history was to be continued through history in the form of community, not in the form of a book.[1]

Newbigin’s assertion turns things upside right by making the focus of the mission of Christ the community and not the book. Being people of the book does not create community, but being people of Christ does create an authentic faith community. The community of Christ results from living out the Gospel in the world as an incarnational and missional community. The pattern of the contemporary church had been to use the Attractional, Propositional and Colonial (APC) method as described in chapter one. The PD practitioner represents one of the greatest assets of the church to bring about transforming the presence of Christ amid marginalized people and people in all cultures throughout the world.

    One final recommendation is always be in pursuit of Jesus Christ, recognize how he is already present and active in the lives of all people, and truly love everyone unconditionally. A.J. Swoboda said, “We are not taking Christ to them. He is already present amongst them. We are learning to see where and how Jesus is intersecting with their lives, so that we may connect with them.” Welcome to a new journey and the pursuit of the mission of Christ.

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[1] Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1995), 52.

Galileo - "The earth is declining."

Recommendations

The intent of this paper was to learn if the practices and strategies used by alternative missional ecclesia to engage the Gospel amid marginalized people coincide with the concept of the Positive Deviance Approach. The conclusion has been that the practices and strategies of the alternative missional ecclesia do indeed reflect the Positive Deviance Approach. The realization that the alternative missional ecclesia are practitioners of PD process at varying degrees presents a new approach and process of creating ecclesia not practiced amongst the institutional church. After interviewing and observing the practitioners’ within the research group there are some recommendations to delineate for those who are interested in adopting a Positive Deviance Approach.

The following is a delineation of those recommendations for church practitioners who desire to engage the Positive Deviance Approach. The first recommendation of this paper is to prepare for a journey that will challenge all your assumptions concerning ministry and sharing the Gospel. The second recommendation is to read appendix B of this paper, A Field Guide to Positive Deviance. Become completely familiar with it and the terminology. The third recommendation is to visit the Positive Deviance Initiative website at http://www.positivedeviance.org and become familiar with the narratives of the various applications of the Positive Deviance Approach. These three initial steps will help a person to learn what the characteristics of a practitioner of PD process appear like. Beyond these initial recommendations the following recommendations are for the purpose of fleshing out the PD process in an ecclesial context.

Defrag

Learning new ways of living begins with a change in thinking. This does not resonate with the PD process of behaving into a new way of thinking, but since it is most likely from the modernist mindset one is working from we will begin here. This change in thinking requires a time of defragmenting from the prevailing training received in the modernist church planters’ boot camps that are present in the institutional church’s arsenal.

The term defragment or defrag is a common computer term used in reference to clearing unwanted data and reorganizing the data on a hard drive. In many ways this computer maintenance term is a great metaphor to start this section on recommendations. Just like the hard drive in a computer, a person needs to defragment his or her perspectives, thereby allowing them to take in new information and perspectives. For example, imagine you are with Galileo in the year 1563 C.E. standing together facing the east watching the dawn. Both of you are experiencing the same physical reality; the sun emerging on the horizon to signal the start of a new day. As you watch the sun emerge it becomes obvious that you and Galileo disagree on the interpretation of what you are witnessing. You are part of the medieval worldview that imagines the sun as rising to warm the earth. The earth is the center of the galaxy for you. But Galileo interprets and imagines what he sees as the earth declining, because the sun is at the center for him, not the earth. It is the same reality just different perspectives. In order to engage the Positive Deviance Approach in the ecclesial context it will require a new perspective that is imaginative and creative. Perspective is a person’s reality and the majority of church practitioners do not recognize they are stuck in the Attractional, Propositional and Colonial mode of the institutional church. Just as in medieval times the prevailing perspective was an earth centric universe, so as church practitioners in contemporary culture our way of thinking must be reformatted to a sun centric perspective.

            The limitation of a modernist perspective that only views the church and the world in a black and white worldview will greatly hinder any learning that may be accomplished. The movement of the church must be away from a propositional (APC) perspective in order to gain a real presence in contemporary society. The modernist paradigm (the propositional perspective) equation of proposition + knowing = understanding is not within the makeup of the Positive Deviance (PD) process. The PD process turns the modernist paradigm on it head with the equation understanding + knowing = relationship. It is not sufficient to propositionally understand a culture or marginalized people. What is sufficient is for practitioners to engage relationally in order to authentically understand a culture or marginalized people as if they are one with them. The PD process is not about coming into a culture or amid a marginalized people with the answers of what is the best way to reach them with the Gospel. It is actually about coming into a culture or marginalized people and allowing them to indicate what, how and why is the best way to reach them with the Gospel. The ability to interpret culture differently is the result of eliminating modernist assumptions and applying a new imagination (semiotics)[1]. The process must first begin with the practitioner through defragging his/her hard drive of the assumptions that will limit one’s ability to imagine a different reality filled with a world of incredible colors instead of just black and white.

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[1] Semiotics – the ability to interpret signs and symbols.

HomePDX - Conventional Wisdom Will Not Work

HomePDX

            HomePDX is the offspring of the Bridge. It was found by Ken Loyd as a church for the homeless in Portland. Soon it morphed into a broader ministry to the homeless of Portland. Ken might be best described as a friend to all people with his broad smile and love for everyone and anyone. Ken lives an intentional life of engaging marginalized people. When you see him with his skeleton and hello Kitty tattoos on his arms along with his gray Mohawk he is not what people conceive in their minds as the typical pastor. Ken is probably the most intuitive and innovative Positive Deviance Approach practitioner I have met so far. His willingness to engage the culture of those he desires to reach by becoming a native with them represents the highest level of respect and honor of a people group I have ever witnessed. Ken is in the process of beginning another ministry amid the “Travelers”[1] and turning the leadership of HomePDX over to Bruce Arnold. Bruce has worked along with Ken for several years now and is integrated into the HomePDX community.

HomePDX practices and strategies

            The homeless culture, those who live outside, is a broad community consisting of destitute men, women and children and youth who are part of the “unwanted tribe.” The mentally ill and some addicts make up this marginalized people. Ken entered into their culture by a practice and strategy of developing trust through understanding their culture. Bruce Arnold has followed his example. But Ken has learned the fine and difficult art of bridging cultures. He has learned how to engage the homeless culture from within it. Ken states. “Everybody deserves to be loved.” As a PD practitioner Ken has culturally fluidic capabilities. In the eyes of the homeless Ken is a native.

            When interviewing Ken he indicated that building trust amid the homeless is all about loving people. He said, “Everyone deserves to be loved.” Ken may not have originally coined the phrase, but he certainly lives it out every day. He shared that most outside groups coming into downtown are there with the purpose of evangelizing and not loving people. Ken’s Positive Deviance process turns conventional evangelism upon its head and takes away being purpose driven to being people driven. Ken confided that sometimes “there is nothing glamorous about loving people such as alcoholics, but Christ called us to love our neighbor as ourselves.” The goal is access of the Gospel through the theological praxis of the love of Christ.

In developing HomePDX Ken employed much of the same practices and strategies used at the Bridge. He integrated into the culture, essentially he went native. He is able to understand the culture better than any of the others ministers reaching out to the house-less in Portland.

Bruce Arnold recently described to me his PD activities. He took a weekend and spent it living on the streets as one of the members of HomePDX. When he addressed the HomePDX community at the gathering on the following Sunday he stated, “I have the utmost respect for anyone who lives on the streets.” The community went totally silent and Bruce wondered if he had said something wrong. A community member told him, “No one ever tells us that they respect us.” Bruce gained clout that day amid the community.

            The community of HomePDX has self-identified itself as a church. Ken has never called HomePDX a church, at least not amid the Portland community, but the people who attend do. The community followed the pattern set out in Acts as they navigated creating their own identity as “Christians.” This is further evidence of the PD process in action amid the marginalized. HomePDX has also designed its own practices. It recognizes those from within their midst who are called as pastors. They have developed the practice of ordination from the community. Not an ordination from above, but from below. This designed practice indicates the community’s wisdom and intelligence at recognizing what the Holy Spirit is doing and whom the Spirit calls.

            As representative positive deviant practitioners no other group has demonstrated the high level of intuitiveness and counter-intuitiveness as the members of the HomePDX. The team followed the steps of PD process by first, not assuming to have the answers, but understood the community would supply the answers about how to reach them with the Gospel. Second, it was an intuitive venture at the grass roots level where they learned another cultural perspective that allowed them to become one with the tribe. Third, the community had ownership of the practices and strategies put into play and came up with the answers to spreading the Gospel amidst themselves. Fourth, was a recognition that conventional wisdom would not and did not work amongst the tribe of the house-less. Finally, the community was allowed to self-identify and developed self-regulation as well. All of this transpired through PDA leadership that was uninformed of the practices and strategies as Positive Deviance.

            HomePDX is achieving ecclesial contextualization of the Gospel amid the homeless and marginalized people of inner city Portland. They are accomplishing this through the use of the Positive Deviance Approach as a way to empower ecclesial contextualization with theological praxis. The descriptive Christology of the Gospel is in full view at the HomePDX. The unconditional love, as exemplified by Christ, is what drives the praxis of HomePDX.

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[1] Travelers are youth whom travel the country exploring and living off the streets and barrowing couches whenever possible to sleep.