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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