Pulling a hat out of a rabbit -
What a back word statement this is and yet there is something profound within it. It is tempting to dismiss new ideas and ways of doing things as crazy and so far outside of the box when they do not fit our logic or thinking. When we are challenged to do something that we have not done before we succumb to the temptation to do what has been done before, only dressed up a bit different. It is easy to grab onto or buy into something familiar with the belief that if you do it, it will be better or more popular, because you're the one doing it. In actuality, though, that is highly unlikely. But, you say I will care more, that will make the difference. The news is this - if you have an elephant and dress it up as a clown instead of the ringmaster, you still have an elephant with different clothes. What do you do?
As followers of Jesus, the Anointed One, we should consider the alternative, which is choosing to turn the question upside down, to do it backwards, sideways, or in a significantly more generous and risky way. Like pulling a hat out of a rabbit. Jesus did this throughout his ministry. He turned the world on its head. He challenged people to leave their religious ways for an open relationship with him as the Messiah. To boldly be open before God. The works and the lives he touched in his earthly ministry were transformed. That is what pulling a hat out of a rabbit looks like and is about - the process of transformation, not becoming or conforming to the religious expectations, but to be saturated and transformed by Jesus, the Christ.
If we want Jesus to do something remarkable with our lives it will be through a remarkable transformation he bring to and in our lives.
A remarkable life starts with the problem you set out to solve and the way you choose to solve it is Jesus.
Dr. Doug
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Friday, June 26, 2015
New Decisions are called for in New Times.
New Decisions are called for in New Times.
Personally, I find one of the most objectionable questions an
interviewer might ask is: “Knowing what you know now would you have done things
different or would you have made another choice?” Please, just take a moment to
think about the question, hopefully you understand my angst.
In the past you made critical choices, they were based on
what you knew about the world as it was. You had the best information available
at the time. You made a choice and now you are living with it, the good or the bad,
the ugly or outright repugnant results.
But now, you know more and the world is different. You’re
more informed, but still there are things unknown to you.
So why should we spend so much time defending those choices
or trying to force the present onto the past. What is in the past can’t be
changed, it is. Acceptance or regret we must always be learning from our
experiences as we move into creating a better future.
We don't get the opportunities to re-decide, there are no
redoes, which means that most of our time is spent in the act of doing, not
choosing. And if the world isn't changing (if you're not changing) that doing
makes a lot of sense.
The problem comes from falling in love with your status quo.
When we are in love with our status quo then we live in fear of change and
making another choice, a choice that might or might not work.
You might have been right then, but now is not then, it is
now.
If the world isn't different, you have no need to make a new
decision.
The only question, then, "is the world different
now?"
The answer is “yes.”
Change is inevitable.
Dr. Douglas
Sunday, March 22, 2015
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.
[1] Lesslie
Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission
(Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1995), 52.
Saturday, March 21, 2015
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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