Don't Look Back #dmingml

Just finished reading this inspiring and informative book about David & Carol Bussau, written by Philipa Tyndale.

David was an orphan, became a successful businessman, only to divest himself of his wealth and become a champion of the poor.

As a result of David's efforts in social entrepreneurship and micro finance, he came to co-found Opportunity International. He also represented Australia at Ernst & Young's World Entrepreneur of the Year Awards in 2003.

Here are my top 10 picks from the books I read this year #dmingml

1. Counterfeit gods, Timothy Keller

2. The Speed of Trust, Stephen Covey

3. Derailed, Tim Irwin

4. The Prodigal God, Timothy Keller

5. The Long Road to Freedom, Nelson Mandela

6. Priceless, Tom Davis

7. Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, Immaculee Iiibagiza

8. Amazing Dad: Letters from William Wilberforce to his children, Stephanie Byrd

9. Leadership and the New Science, Margaret J. Wheatley

10. To Change the World, James Davidson Hunter

Is it time for the church to have a huge garage sale? Read my review on Phyllis Tickle's "The Great Emergence"

The Great Emergence
Phyllis Tickle, #dmingml

  Coming from a large family with six children, it was highly probably that one of us had an affinity for garage sales. Calling either my brother or sister and letting them know that there was a huge garage sale in the area with great bargains typically resulted in an immediate, “I’m coming now!” Some people always seem to be on the lookout for a bargain: It doesn’t matter if they need the item or not, it’s a bargain!

Similarly, having recently relocated the family from Colorado, U.S to Melbourne, Australia, we went through a massive cleanout and hosted a garage sale for the neighborhood and our friends. The actual sale was relatively painless. Determining what things to keep and what to sell or give away, required some serious thinking about whether or not we needed it, was it redundant, would we be better buying something that had superseded it, did it have sentimental value, and could we possibly sell something that cost us so much to begin with?

In her book, The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle presents to readers a view of history that they have unlikely had before. Rather than focusing on single, major events, she focuses on 500-year terms as cultural snapshots where she claims all of the events, intellectual debates, evolving scientific discoveries culminate in such a way where the Church is forced to have a huge rummage sale. Consequently, the Church is confronted with the need to ask of itself some serious questions: Are we still relevant? Has this practice become redundant? Do we still need this? Is there a better way to function? Are we presenting the gospel and living it in a way that is challenging and relevant all at the same time? What should be unique and distinctive about the Church? Is it time to change the way we do church to reach people with the gospel, and so on? Not by any stretch of the imagination does Tickle downplay the significance of such questions, but equally as much, she does not attempt to find potential solutions to the problems she identifies.

Rather, Tickle creates a construct or framework that shows periods of historical upheavals and their relationship to the church and how over time this created pressure on the Church to adapt and find more meaningful ways in which to engage the culture. The immediate challenge she proposes is, that the church currently finds itself in another 500-year period where change is imminent. What is not clear from Tickle, is how the Church should change, and how will that change be facilitated.

While I didn’t particularly find Tickle’s construct of “500 years” to be terribly profound or helpful, it does encourage the reader to engage history and understand how the Church responded to various crises (or not), and carefully consider how the Church might respond to present day challenges.  The “500 years” construct also came across to me as a little simplistic and taken too far would likely result in us missing how God was at work outside of the construct, and during the in between times. Given that her construct is built around key historical events, there are many years that fall between the cracks of when one 500-year period finished and a new one began.

In the first scenario I opened this blog with, I wrote about my siblings’ positive response that a garage sale was to going to be held. In this case, they would be the recipients.
Today, the Church is going through a social upheaval where it is arguable that for many churches the focus is not adequately centered on the needs of the recipient and their ability to engage those needs, but instead on their own insecurities and concerns about maintaining denominational integrity.

The second scenario at the beginning focused on my wife and I needing to determine what we needed to keep and what we wanted to sell. The emphasis is on us as the host. They were questions we asked of ourselves. Similarly, the Church must ask of itself some important questions. Is there in fact a way to engage the culture without compromising its integrity and commitment to biblical doctrine? What are some of the denominational practices we are holding onto for dear life because we fear by letting them go, we will lose our distinctiveness, or worse, lose worshippers who routinely turn up each week? Given my reading of the gospels, I am of the opinion that Jesus would not hesitate to leave the ninety-nine worshippers for the one that is lost, and he would choose to invite those who would not be found in a church to eat with him, rather than attend a party sponsored by the Pharisees.

One certain truth that Tickle highlights is that change is ever present, and for the Church to remain static and unresponsive to those changes will result in irrelevance and ineffectiveness in fulfilling the mission that Christ gave to his disciples and to us. We may as well just shout from the rooftops that God is dead!

Key things I have learned from my first DMin semester at GFU. An incredible journey of discovery and intrigue!

·     Perspectives on Changing the World

Hunter’s essays challenged me about some long held assumptions regarding how I am to act as an agent of change and some of the more traditional ways that Christians typically believe they have open to them as they seek to change the world. Made increasingly difficult by the fact that we live in a diverse society where there is no one, dominant, culture, what has emerged is that God has become far less obvious than he once was. Sadly, by pursuing some of the more traditional and stereotypical channels to influence culture (e.g. politics) Christians have had limited success, thereby reinforcing negative attitudes towards Christians that have alienated them from places within our culture where they could have a stronger and more transformational influence.
I would like to have explored at a deeper level, what practicing the faithful presence of Christ could look like in a number of different leadership contexts we are either working in or pursuing. Personally, and corporately, this could be very insightful.

·     Absence of women in Missiology reflections

I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation and interaction with Dr. Cathy Ross, Director of Training and Lecturer in Mission & World Christianity, London School of Theology. I had never previously thought about the absence of women in most discussions, reading and research about missions, and yet, as Cathy revealed, to do so leaves out key characteristics of Jesus’ ministry expressed in hospitality, service and relationship. Her focus was not so much egalitarianism, as much as recognition that women complete a greater, fuller, more meaningful picture of missions, and what it should and can be.
Given that this is a sensitive issue in Christendom and secular organizations alike, it would be helpful to explore not merely the role of gender in global missional leadership, but also look at how attitudes towards this are changing and what can be done to facilitate discussion and healthy change further in this area. Introducing the concept of gender in my dissertation topic on cross-cultural leadership would be interesting, but unfortunately, I need to narrow my focus not pursue other interesting tangents. Intriguing nonetheless.

  ·     Theology of Hierarchy

I found it interesting that the different perspectives and undergirding assumptions on leadership we have considered via Hunter, Heath & Potter, Bebbington, and Wheatley, have each led us to the position that we do not really have a healthy view or theology of hierarchy that is universally accepted. We explored the impact and role of class, authority and influence in the context of leading and managing change. There is no doubt that the example of Jesus provides us with a bit of a conundrum in that he surrendered the power and status of his divinity that was rightfully his and subjected it to the authority of men. In so doing, Jesus totally confounded the wise of this world. He did not act in accordance to the stereotypes they had become familiar with as portrayed through the elite – the hypocritical religious leaders who burdened people with unscriptural rules rather than setting them free, and the powerful Roman rulers who loved to oppress and enslave the free. In Wheatley’s treatment of leadership and the new science, I began to see that certain hierarchies create organizations with structures that prevent growth, limit ideas and control the flow of information in and out of the organization. Current organizational and leadership processes are often evaluated in the context of an existing rigid leadership structure that do not allow new meaningful processes to be created because they are bound within the same structure that the old ones existed in.
I need some more time to reflect on this in the context of my dissertation topic on cross-cultural leadership and what traits are transferable across cultures. While I have come to the position that leadership behaviors are imminently grounded in the virtues that a leader might have, the creation of those virtues and adherence to them appear to be motivated by a set of core beliefs or worldview. I am wondering if this might be analogous to Wheatley’s hypothesis that we sometimes are unable to see the whole because of our tendency to focus on the parts. The inverse may also be true. We broadly define leadership without understanding the interconnectedness of the parts – the core beliefs, the virtues, the behaviors and ultimately their effectiveness in driving results.
Some questions I have about this include – Is it possible for a biblical view of hierarchy to become universally accepted? What might prevent this from happening? Most leadership books focus on structure rather than process, and behavioral traits rather than the virtues they are grounded in, and how are they different? I will be focusing on this in my dissertation topic.

#dmingml

Memo to Leaders: It¹s Time to Find a New Beach

This is the second review of a two-part series analyzing Margaret J. Wheatley's excellent and thought-provoking book, ‘Leadership and the New Science’ as part of my DMin (Global Missional Leadership) with George Fox University.

  The daily news is filled with powerful changes, and many of us feel buffeted by forces we cannot control… I listened one night to a radio interview with a geologist whose specialty was beaches and shorelines. The interview was being conducted as a huge hurricane was pounding the Outer Banks of the eastern United States… The interviewer asked: “What do you expect to find when you go out there?” Like the interviewer, I assumed he would present a litany of disasters – demolished homes, felled trees, eroded shoreline. But he surprised me. “I expect,” he said calmly, “to find a new beach.”

  Throughout her book, and indeed with this remarkable story, Wheatley continues to push the reader beyond the realm of accepting that we merely live in a rapidly changing world from a fatalistic position, and that somehow we must try and manage this by seeking some mystical balance that will bring peace, harmony and balance. Instead, she presents the perspective that says a life that is immune from chaos, disorder, disturbance and disequilibrium, does not allow us to be recipients of new information that has the potential to foster growth and new life, thereby leaving us empty and one step closer to death.

  Wheatley challenges our pursuit of balance where we largely seek to minimize change, claiming that equilibrium has become a prized goal in adult life. Why is this she asks? Is change so fearsome that we’ll do anything to avoid it? By pursuing such a state, it would appear that we have no energy to respond to change and no capacity to grow. How so, you might ask?  In classical thermodynamics, equilibrium is the end state in the evolution of closed systems, the point at which the system has exhausted all of its capacity for change, done its work, and dissipated its productive capacity into useless entropy [“Entropy” = A gradual decline into disorder] (p.76).

  There are many concepts that Wheatley explores in great depth as she takes us on a journey of discovery in relation to managing change and the potential growth that can come from processing new information and the new relationships that might result from them: Our reactions to change or lack of responsiveness, and the fact that there are many times where we have become so fixated on the one factor that is pressuring change or the factor that is itself under pressure to change, that we miss the whole. We don’t see a new beach. Instead, we expect to see in some self-fulfilling way a disastrous or unwanted result where we can see no benefit beyond the immediate chaos and confusion we currently find ourselves in.

  I love beaches! White sand, the peaceful lapping of waves, a crystal blue sky, a hot sun, interspersed with the rhythm of reading a gripping novel and cooling off with an invigorating swim. Is it always like this? No. I also enjoy hearing the sound of waves crashing onto the shore, the wind furiously whipping through the air and blowing the spray from the waves into the air, watching storm clouds develop and the bursts of thunder as it gets closer. But what is it that I really like? Is it the sand? The waves? The wind? No. It is none of these, but all of them. It is not the parts, but the whole.

  Whether we experience tragedy and chaos as a person or we find ourselves in a larger organizational context where change is occurring or imminent, it appears we can choose how we process change, what we want to learn as we change from one state to another, and sometimes even understand (but not always) why change is necessary. Human nature, Wheatley would argue, would also want to over analyze every component that has changed or changing, and totally miss seeing how they are each interconnected – the whole system. We move deeper into the details and farther away from learning how to comprehend the system in its wholeness.

There are many organizations and churches today in crisis. Not because they lack the resources or potential to change, but because they have become wearied by the energy it takes to preserve itself in that state, that they lack the ability and capacity to look beyond the storm to the new beach.

  As a leader I pray for vision to see more than I can with my eyes, and to hear more than I can with my ears. I pray that my heart will have the capacity to change and not be afraid of what it cannot yet feel. I pray that my mind will not be comfortable with merely acquiring information, but pursue wisdom that brings insight and understanding.

#dmingml