3.03.2009
3.02.2009
Fostering and Developing Entrepreneurs in Mission
* written by Mark Berry
There is currently a many voiced call to release the entrepreneurs in our culture… in the worlds of business and culture and, in some ways surprisingly there are voices in the Christian world too calling for innovation and innovators. Perhaps this is to do with the changing paradigm in which we live and breathe, perhaps it is the beginnings of not only a response to its challenges but a reflection of it’s natures. For many people and many years culture has been perceived as the bedrock on which we build, the things which sustain the status quo, the things which make us identifiable as British, Christian, European, etc. etc. In the Church Mission has been tacitly a tool of maintenance, a means to preserve the way we are or at least the way we perceive we are. Perhaps change is afoot? Mission not as a way of bracing the Church as it is, rather as engaging with the culture, seeing people not as products or numbers but as individual seedlings growing from the soil of their own history and context. Not a Church seeking to be relevant, but to be resonant. More and more voices are crying that instead of attractors we need innovators, instead of church planters we need entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage. - Niccolo Machiavelli
People who imagine the future, who look for possibilities not programmes.
Christendom is dying but a new and dynamic Christianity could arise from its ashes. - Stuart Murray
Inspired by Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordstrom, particularly their book Funky Business (2001) along with other writers such as Tom Peters and Bill Bolton, I have begun to explore some principles for encouraging entrepreneurs.
1. Recognition
Bill Bolton has written extensively on how to identify the entrepreneur. In his Grove Booklet The Entrepreneur and The Church (2006) he creates the acronym FACETS:
Focus – delivery
Advantage – selection of opportunity
Creativity – seeing many opportunities
Ego - motivation and courage
Team – multiplying effectiveness
Social – finding a cause.
Bolton with Professor John Thompson developed this tool to help begin to identify and understand the entrepreneurs within a business/academic environment but has since begun to use it in a Church/Mission setting.
This is incredibly useful but I also think that most of us can spot an entrepreneur instinctively, the question then becomes how are they recognised and released? I am also sure that most of us can remember a situation or an incident where an entrepreneur has been dismissed as just “rocking the boat” or “being awkward”. One of the great challenges we have is are we really able to join Sir Francis Drake when he prayed:
Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.
Journeying out requires the capacity to rise above the anxiety associated with encountering and embracing a potentially overwhelming, outside world. – Ann Morissy
Entrepreneurs are often the voices from the margins, liminal voices. Douglas Rushkoff in his book, Children of Chaos (updated as Playing the Future in 1999) calls us to think like new immigrants in a strange land, exiles one might say! He proposes that we “look to our children for signs of how to act and think. Natives of chaos, they have already adapted to its demands.” Often the voice of the entrepreneur is that of someone who “belongs” to neither culture, yet is passionate about both, who is native to the chaos…
Post-christendom… requires leaders who listen to the voices on the edge. This is where the apostle, the prophet and the poet are found. – Alan Roxburgh
The entrepreneurial voice is the voice of the poet and the prophet who more often than not feel constricted by institution and culture.
Another way of thinking about this poetic/prophetic voice is Poïesis, which Martin Heidegger describes as “the blooming of the blossom, the coming-out of a butterfly from a cocoon, the plummeting of a waterfall when the snow begins to melt”. The root of our word poetry, Poïesis means to create in a way that transforms and continues the world, to reconcile thought with matter and time.
The work of poetic imagination holds the potential of unleashing a community of power and action that will finally not be contained by any imperial restrictions and definitions of reality – Walter Brueggemann
Identifying, recognising and releasing the entrepreneurs can be vital and creative. If we are to find new ways of being Mission and resonating with culture and people we need to see entrepreneurs as pioneers and allow them to participate, to lead, to create. Solomon’s Porch in the Linden Hills area of Minneapolis give testimony to this.
There can be a tendency in Christian circles to complain about how things are. But creativity is providing a new way of living, seeing, hearing, or being, and we were blessed with several people who love the process of seeing a possibility and turning into something tangible. – Doug Pagitt
2. Direction
When we think of direction and development we are too often tempted into thinking about control and curriculum, what Paulo Freire would describe as a “Banking method” depositing the ‘appropriate’ information on a “need to know basis” and then leaving them to apply it. Entrepreneurs do not simply need to be “wound up and set off.” Releasing entrepreneurs is neither a matter of simply letting go nor one of delegation. Entrepreneurs need equal measures of freedom and direction in a context of continual development.
Direction is not a matter of command and control, but of focussing, allowing and encouraging people to focus on what really matters. It is spiritual management rather than micromanagement. In a chaotic world, people cry out for individuals who can provide meaning for their… lives... Development is about mentoring, training disciples and coaching. It is the job of leaders to create new leaders. Leadership is about contaminating and being contaminated with knowledge. The distinction between learning, working and living is gone – it is one and the same things - Ridderstrale and Nordstrom
Note that Ridderstrale and Nordstrom are not writing as Christians about the Church/Mission but as businessmen about the world of business and marketting. They challenge business leaders to move away from being CEOs to being CSOs – Chief Storytelling Officers, who communicate the foundation stories and vision of a business, passing on the DNA of the company not a list of tasks and responsibilities, freeing ‘employees’ to determine action within the narrative and core values. Managers become mentors who learn with the employee. A more familiar picture for Christians might be the Celtic idea of Anam Chara – the Soul Friend.
Each person in the community was responsible to an anamchara, which means souls friend. The idea of the soul friend comes directly from the desert communities. There, the soul friend would be a kind of spiritual guide and counsellor, one with whom you share your own spiritual growth. These soul friends were a very important part of the support structure of the Celtic communities, and there was a well known saying that a person without a soul friend was like a body without a head. – Michael Mitton.
I believe that we need to challenge our systems, particularly our educational ones to think creatively and dynamically about how we think about direction and development as well as our institutional structures.
Our education systems, including theological colleges, are all too often learning regimes rather than talent spotters and developers – Bill Bolton
This will mean making a psychological shift from education seen as ‘experts’ imparting knowledge to the ‘ignorant’, knowledge that the educators determine as valuable to the learner, to development as an ongoing equipping; handing on tools for reflection and learning on and in practice. Entrepreneurs are unfinished products, and in many ways always will be and learning needs to be “life-long”, praxiological, reflective and creative, an ongoing process in the context and medium of action. We need to see direction and development as community activities, a part of the rhythm and life of a community of mission.
3. Personalization
Personalization firstly means moving from a system/practice where we have a list of jobs/roles and look for people to fill them, to one where we look at individuals and ask what they add.
Human beings are not bulk goods. They come in different shapes and forms. Each and every individual is different. Every now and then this is brought to our attention. But change takes time. It took the car industry close to 100 years to realize that women are not small men. We are moving to one-to-one leadership. The consequence is that each and every little system needs to be personalized.
People can be treated and approached, evaluated and rewarded, motivated and inspired in a number of different ways… People do not enjoy being treated as human resources or as a nameless and faceless customer x; they want to be seen and recognized as individuals. We have to tap the hidden treasures of the extended organizational tribe and its members. We have to start competing on the basis of feelings and fantasy – emotion and imagination… How can we expect to motivate and inspire people when we have not got a clue about what makes them tick? We should all learn something from Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines. “We are not afraid to talk to our people with emotions. We’re not afraid to tell them, ‘we love you’ because we do.” - Ridderstrale and Nordstrom
Secondly it means developing vulnerable leadership and community participation, where leadership is not a position to be defended and ‘obedience’ a sign of loyalty. Rather, it seeks to grow a pattern of community/culture which sees loyalty demonstrated by involvement , critique and engagement with the story of the community .
Passive obedience was once mistaken for loyalty. The entire notion of loyalty was wrapped up with control. Now, people are not loyal in a slavish sense. This is based on the realization that you can question the system without being disloyal. – Brian Baxter
A culture where critique and challenge is actively encouraged will provide fertile ground for entrepreneurs as they will feel liberated and encouraged to question, to reflect and to experiment.
4. Experimentation
It sounds obvious but innovation begins with experimentation. Bill Bolton says that at some point all good ideas are “half-baked” and many seemingly good ideas will fail. One of the most important lessons we need to learn comes from science: all results bring learning, whether they fulfil our hopes expectations or whether they “fail” to do so. When an experiment proves a “failure” it means we are one step closer to “success”!
By its very nature, creation involves a departure from traditional structures and frames. In a world of creativity-sucking board meetings, past structures have ruled the roost. Now, we have to be prepared to depart from the agenda… innovation requires experimentation. Experiments are risky. We can succeed or fail. So an innovative environment must have an exceptionally high tolerance for mistakes… we have to fail faster to learn quicker and succeed sooner… traditionalists should remember that the only way not to fail is not to try. And try we must. No failures; no development. The innermost mechanism of human progress is called failure. If it were not for all the fools trying to do the impossible - over and over again - we would still be living in caves... failure happens. Give people trust and it will happen more productively- Ridderstrale and Nordstrom
Having spent over ten years in youth ministry, I am fully aware of the heaviness of expectation that exists in the Church, that the weight of being tasked to ‘save the Church’, to get it right can be hugely de-motivating. We are constantly on the quest for THE answer, the programme, the structure, the activity that will “work”. Success becomes competitive and we fear failure. Entrepreneurs need to be liberated to fail and to reflect in order to learn.
Failure is just part of the culture of innovation. Accept it and become stronger. - Albert Yu, senior vice president of Intel
If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever happen - Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher
Experimentation means seeing opportunities to learn and taking them even if they have a high risk of failure. We need to create an atmosphere and a culture of risk taking and experimentation, of innovation.
5. Innovation
Measured change or infinite innovation? Whether we like it or not we live in a time when change is and has been happening at an incredible rate. I once heard a famous British astronomer tell an interviewer that he has met both Wilber Wright – one of the Wright Brothers who made the first manned flight in history and Neil Armstrong – the first man to walk on the surface of the moon. In my own life time change has been even more rapid. Recently in Houston, I visited the Space Centre, where a guide informed us that the two operational Mission Control computers and the back-up computer had a combined computing power less than a modern common or garden calculator. From a personal perspective as a teenager, I saw the first home computers made available, by the 'great' entrepreneur Clive Sinclair. Now my 8 year old nephews have PCs in their bedroom with wireless connectivity, and kids in our local secondary school do their homework by accessing it from home on the school network and hand it in by saving it into a folder on the server! We live in a time of infinite innovation. Should we accept the received wisdom that change should happen in small doses, or welcome a culture where the only constant is change? The latter is the natural habitat of the entrepreneur and chaos for them is a highly creative place.
Economists have already borrowed the concept of 'adaptive zones' from evolutionary biology. Joseph Schumpeter, in particular, drew parallels with the biologists' recognition of 'adaptive zones' in his economic models. He observed that times of economic boom occur when swarms of entrepreneurs try to implement an innovation at the same time. However, those who enter this new space and pursue the new opportunities discover that their business models, formed and nurtured former practices and processes, are ill-adapted to cope with the new. Those who survive, and go on to flourish in the 'adaptive zone' are those who can also transform their structures and systems to accommodate the new opportunities. - Ann Morisy
Conventional levels of and perspectives on innovation will get us nowhere. Economies of soul do not emerge from predictable, incremental innovation. To be successful in the 21st century we will have to learn how to practice infinite innovation. Infinite innovation is the never-ending pursuit of creating more and more value for all stakeholders inside and outside the organization - Ridderstrale and Nordstrom
A culture of infinite innovation also means accepting the uncomfortable reality that all is provisional, even our notions of Ecclesiology and Theology, as South African Missiologist David Bosch said: “The Christian Church is always in the process of becoming; the church of the present is both the product of the past and the seed of the future… we need an experimental theology in which an ongoing dialogue is taking place between text and context, a theology which, in the nature of the case, remains provisional and hypothetical.”
Doug Pagitt from Emergent and Solomons Porch Church agrees, “I am increasingly convinced that what matter in our efforts is our willingness to experiment and try – to develop expressions of faith that are fully of our day and time, recognizing that our efforts will be adapted and changed in years to come. Our role is to do our part in our day and time.”
From a business perspective, Tom Peters echoes the challenge to cultural innovation: “It is the foremost task and responsibility of our generation to re-imagine our enterprise and institutions, public and private. Many would argue that the culture of change that we inhabit necessitates a change in the way we, the Church, think. We cannot stabilize, nor can we embrace a structure/culture of decline unless we accept the inevitability of extinction. Bill Bolton and others argue that as business is adapting to a new ecosystem, so the Church needs to acknowledge the world we live in and to embrace the ‘dangerous journey’, not simply for reasons of survival but for reasons of Mission.
Many landmarks that have served us well are going to disappear and these changes will be difficult and painful but they threaten us only if we let them. For me this is a call to re-imagine the church in today’s world. To think in new and different ways about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus and a member of his body the church. It is a call to release the entrepreneurs in our midst and for all of is the think in more entrepreneurial terms. In this process we will become more in tune with today’s culture and be able to make a far more relevant contribution to it than we do at present. – Bill Bolton
There is currently a many voiced call to release the entrepreneurs in our culture… in the worlds of business and culture and, in some ways surprisingly there are voices in the Christian world too calling for innovation and innovators. Perhaps this is to do with the changing paradigm in which we live and breathe, perhaps it is the beginnings of not only a response to its challenges but a reflection of it’s natures. For many people and many years culture has been perceived as the bedrock on which we build, the things which sustain the status quo, the things which make us identifiable as British, Christian, European, etc. etc. In the Church Mission has been tacitly a tool of maintenance, a means to preserve the way we are or at least the way we perceive we are. Perhaps change is afoot? Mission not as a way of bracing the Church as it is, rather as engaging with the culture, seeing people not as products or numbers but as individual seedlings growing from the soil of their own history and context. Not a Church seeking to be relevant, but to be resonant. More and more voices are crying that instead of attractors we need innovators, instead of church planters we need entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage. - Niccolo Machiavelli
People who imagine the future, who look for possibilities not programmes.
Christendom is dying but a new and dynamic Christianity could arise from its ashes. - Stuart Murray
Inspired by Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordstrom, particularly their book Funky Business (2001) along with other writers such as Tom Peters and Bill Bolton, I have begun to explore some principles for encouraging entrepreneurs.
1. Recognition
Bill Bolton has written extensively on how to identify the entrepreneur. In his Grove Booklet The Entrepreneur and The Church (2006) he creates the acronym FACETS:
Focus – delivery
Advantage – selection of opportunity
Creativity – seeing many opportunities
Ego - motivation and courage
Team – multiplying effectiveness
Social – finding a cause.
Bolton with Professor John Thompson developed this tool to help begin to identify and understand the entrepreneurs within a business/academic environment but has since begun to use it in a Church/Mission setting.
This is incredibly useful but I also think that most of us can spot an entrepreneur instinctively, the question then becomes how are they recognised and released? I am also sure that most of us can remember a situation or an incident where an entrepreneur has been dismissed as just “rocking the boat” or “being awkward”. One of the great challenges we have is are we really able to join Sir Francis Drake when he prayed:
Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.
Journeying out requires the capacity to rise above the anxiety associated with encountering and embracing a potentially overwhelming, outside world. – Ann Morissy
Entrepreneurs are often the voices from the margins, liminal voices. Douglas Rushkoff in his book, Children of Chaos (updated as Playing the Future in 1999) calls us to think like new immigrants in a strange land, exiles one might say! He proposes that we “look to our children for signs of how to act and think. Natives of chaos, they have already adapted to its demands.” Often the voice of the entrepreneur is that of someone who “belongs” to neither culture, yet is passionate about both, who is native to the chaos…
Post-christendom… requires leaders who listen to the voices on the edge. This is where the apostle, the prophet and the poet are found. – Alan Roxburgh
The entrepreneurial voice is the voice of the poet and the prophet who more often than not feel constricted by institution and culture.
Another way of thinking about this poetic/prophetic voice is Poïesis, which Martin Heidegger describes as “the blooming of the blossom, the coming-out of a butterfly from a cocoon, the plummeting of a waterfall when the snow begins to melt”. The root of our word poetry, Poïesis means to create in a way that transforms and continues the world, to reconcile thought with matter and time.
The work of poetic imagination holds the potential of unleashing a community of power and action that will finally not be contained by any imperial restrictions and definitions of reality – Walter Brueggemann
Identifying, recognising and releasing the entrepreneurs can be vital and creative. If we are to find new ways of being Mission and resonating with culture and people we need to see entrepreneurs as pioneers and allow them to participate, to lead, to create. Solomon’s Porch in the Linden Hills area of Minneapolis give testimony to this.
There can be a tendency in Christian circles to complain about how things are. But creativity is providing a new way of living, seeing, hearing, or being, and we were blessed with several people who love the process of seeing a possibility and turning into something tangible. – Doug Pagitt
2. Direction
When we think of direction and development we are too often tempted into thinking about control and curriculum, what Paulo Freire would describe as a “Banking method” depositing the ‘appropriate’ information on a “need to know basis” and then leaving them to apply it. Entrepreneurs do not simply need to be “wound up and set off.” Releasing entrepreneurs is neither a matter of simply letting go nor one of delegation. Entrepreneurs need equal measures of freedom and direction in a context of continual development.
Direction is not a matter of command and control, but of focussing, allowing and encouraging people to focus on what really matters. It is spiritual management rather than micromanagement. In a chaotic world, people cry out for individuals who can provide meaning for their… lives... Development is about mentoring, training disciples and coaching. It is the job of leaders to create new leaders. Leadership is about contaminating and being contaminated with knowledge. The distinction between learning, working and living is gone – it is one and the same things - Ridderstrale and Nordstrom
Note that Ridderstrale and Nordstrom are not writing as Christians about the Church/Mission but as businessmen about the world of business and marketting. They challenge business leaders to move away from being CEOs to being CSOs – Chief Storytelling Officers, who communicate the foundation stories and vision of a business, passing on the DNA of the company not a list of tasks and responsibilities, freeing ‘employees’ to determine action within the narrative and core values. Managers become mentors who learn with the employee. A more familiar picture for Christians might be the Celtic idea of Anam Chara – the Soul Friend.
Each person in the community was responsible to an anamchara, which means souls friend. The idea of the soul friend comes directly from the desert communities. There, the soul friend would be a kind of spiritual guide and counsellor, one with whom you share your own spiritual growth. These soul friends were a very important part of the support structure of the Celtic communities, and there was a well known saying that a person without a soul friend was like a body without a head. – Michael Mitton.
I believe that we need to challenge our systems, particularly our educational ones to think creatively and dynamically about how we think about direction and development as well as our institutional structures.
Our education systems, including theological colleges, are all too often learning regimes rather than talent spotters and developers – Bill Bolton
This will mean making a psychological shift from education seen as ‘experts’ imparting knowledge to the ‘ignorant’, knowledge that the educators determine as valuable to the learner, to development as an ongoing equipping; handing on tools for reflection and learning on and in practice. Entrepreneurs are unfinished products, and in many ways always will be and learning needs to be “life-long”, praxiological, reflective and creative, an ongoing process in the context and medium of action. We need to see direction and development as community activities, a part of the rhythm and life of a community of mission.
3. Personalization
Personalization firstly means moving from a system/practice where we have a list of jobs/roles and look for people to fill them, to one where we look at individuals and ask what they add.
Human beings are not bulk goods. They come in different shapes and forms. Each and every individual is different. Every now and then this is brought to our attention. But change takes time. It took the car industry close to 100 years to realize that women are not small men. We are moving to one-to-one leadership. The consequence is that each and every little system needs to be personalized.
People can be treated and approached, evaluated and rewarded, motivated and inspired in a number of different ways… People do not enjoy being treated as human resources or as a nameless and faceless customer x; they want to be seen and recognized as individuals. We have to tap the hidden treasures of the extended organizational tribe and its members. We have to start competing on the basis of feelings and fantasy – emotion and imagination… How can we expect to motivate and inspire people when we have not got a clue about what makes them tick? We should all learn something from Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines. “We are not afraid to talk to our people with emotions. We’re not afraid to tell them, ‘we love you’ because we do.” - Ridderstrale and Nordstrom
Secondly it means developing vulnerable leadership and community participation, where leadership is not a position to be defended and ‘obedience’ a sign of loyalty. Rather, it seeks to grow a pattern of community/culture which sees loyalty demonstrated by involvement , critique and engagement with the story of the community .
Passive obedience was once mistaken for loyalty. The entire notion of loyalty was wrapped up with control. Now, people are not loyal in a slavish sense. This is based on the realization that you can question the system without being disloyal. – Brian Baxter
A culture where critique and challenge is actively encouraged will provide fertile ground for entrepreneurs as they will feel liberated and encouraged to question, to reflect and to experiment.
4. Experimentation
It sounds obvious but innovation begins with experimentation. Bill Bolton says that at some point all good ideas are “half-baked” and many seemingly good ideas will fail. One of the most important lessons we need to learn comes from science: all results bring learning, whether they fulfil our hopes expectations or whether they “fail” to do so. When an experiment proves a “failure” it means we are one step closer to “success”!
By its very nature, creation involves a departure from traditional structures and frames. In a world of creativity-sucking board meetings, past structures have ruled the roost. Now, we have to be prepared to depart from the agenda… innovation requires experimentation. Experiments are risky. We can succeed or fail. So an innovative environment must have an exceptionally high tolerance for mistakes… we have to fail faster to learn quicker and succeed sooner… traditionalists should remember that the only way not to fail is not to try. And try we must. No failures; no development. The innermost mechanism of human progress is called failure. If it were not for all the fools trying to do the impossible - over and over again - we would still be living in caves... failure happens. Give people trust and it will happen more productively- Ridderstrale and Nordstrom
Having spent over ten years in youth ministry, I am fully aware of the heaviness of expectation that exists in the Church, that the weight of being tasked to ‘save the Church’, to get it right can be hugely de-motivating. We are constantly on the quest for THE answer, the programme, the structure, the activity that will “work”. Success becomes competitive and we fear failure. Entrepreneurs need to be liberated to fail and to reflect in order to learn.
Failure is just part of the culture of innovation. Accept it and become stronger. - Albert Yu, senior vice president of Intel
If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever happen - Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher
Experimentation means seeing opportunities to learn and taking them even if they have a high risk of failure. We need to create an atmosphere and a culture of risk taking and experimentation, of innovation.
5. Innovation
Measured change or infinite innovation? Whether we like it or not we live in a time when change is and has been happening at an incredible rate. I once heard a famous British astronomer tell an interviewer that he has met both Wilber Wright – one of the Wright Brothers who made the first manned flight in history and Neil Armstrong – the first man to walk on the surface of the moon. In my own life time change has been even more rapid. Recently in Houston, I visited the Space Centre, where a guide informed us that the two operational Mission Control computers and the back-up computer had a combined computing power less than a modern common or garden calculator. From a personal perspective as a teenager, I saw the first home computers made available, by the 'great' entrepreneur Clive Sinclair. Now my 8 year old nephews have PCs in their bedroom with wireless connectivity, and kids in our local secondary school do their homework by accessing it from home on the school network and hand it in by saving it into a folder on the server! We live in a time of infinite innovation. Should we accept the received wisdom that change should happen in small doses, or welcome a culture where the only constant is change? The latter is the natural habitat of the entrepreneur and chaos for them is a highly creative place.
Economists have already borrowed the concept of 'adaptive zones' from evolutionary biology. Joseph Schumpeter, in particular, drew parallels with the biologists' recognition of 'adaptive zones' in his economic models. He observed that times of economic boom occur when swarms of entrepreneurs try to implement an innovation at the same time. However, those who enter this new space and pursue the new opportunities discover that their business models, formed and nurtured former practices and processes, are ill-adapted to cope with the new. Those who survive, and go on to flourish in the 'adaptive zone' are those who can also transform their structures and systems to accommodate the new opportunities. - Ann Morisy
Conventional levels of and perspectives on innovation will get us nowhere. Economies of soul do not emerge from predictable, incremental innovation. To be successful in the 21st century we will have to learn how to practice infinite innovation. Infinite innovation is the never-ending pursuit of creating more and more value for all stakeholders inside and outside the organization - Ridderstrale and Nordstrom
A culture of infinite innovation also means accepting the uncomfortable reality that all is provisional, even our notions of Ecclesiology and Theology, as South African Missiologist David Bosch said: “The Christian Church is always in the process of becoming; the church of the present is both the product of the past and the seed of the future… we need an experimental theology in which an ongoing dialogue is taking place between text and context, a theology which, in the nature of the case, remains provisional and hypothetical.”
Doug Pagitt from Emergent and Solomons Porch Church agrees, “I am increasingly convinced that what matter in our efforts is our willingness to experiment and try – to develop expressions of faith that are fully of our day and time, recognizing that our efforts will be adapted and changed in years to come. Our role is to do our part in our day and time.”
From a business perspective, Tom Peters echoes the challenge to cultural innovation: “It is the foremost task and responsibility of our generation to re-imagine our enterprise and institutions, public and private. Many would argue that the culture of change that we inhabit necessitates a change in the way we, the Church, think. We cannot stabilize, nor can we embrace a structure/culture of decline unless we accept the inevitability of extinction. Bill Bolton and others argue that as business is adapting to a new ecosystem, so the Church needs to acknowledge the world we live in and to embrace the ‘dangerous journey’, not simply for reasons of survival but for reasons of Mission.
Many landmarks that have served us well are going to disappear and these changes will be difficult and painful but they threaten us only if we let them. For me this is a call to re-imagine the church in today’s world. To think in new and different ways about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus and a member of his body the church. It is a call to release the entrepreneurs in our midst and for all of is the think in more entrepreneurial terms. In this process we will become more in tune with today’s culture and be able to make a far more relevant contribution to it than we do at present. – Bill Bolton
2.25.2009
Why We Read the Bible Differently
We Read the Same Bible:Why Do We Get Such Different Answers?
by H. Darrell Lance
H. Darrell Lance is Professor Emeritus of Old Testament Interpretation at Colgate Rochester Divinity School/Bexley Hall/ Crozer Theological Seminary, and is past editor of The InSpiriter, a quarterly publication of the Association of Welcoming & Affirming Baptists.
How can people read the same Bible and get such different messages from it?
This is not just a problem between so-called conservatives and liberals: two people may both regard Scripture as the inerrant Word of God and nevertheless come to verbal blows over the interpretation of the Book of Revelation. Two others may hold that the Bible is essentially a human document but still quote favorite passages as "proof texts" in a theological debate. No matter where we locate ourselves on the theological spectrum, we find that we understand and use the Bible in ways that often say more about us than they do about the Bible.
Mental filters
This raises an acute question for the traditional Baptist tenet that the Bible is our sole authority in matters of faith and practice: Yes, the Bible is the sole and final authority -- but when interpreted by whom? When a simple believer goes to the Bible to find guidance and comfort for his or her soul, the process is far more complex than the act of simply opening a book and reading it. The meaning of Scripture is never transferred from the page to the brain like a fax machine; rather it has to be understood and interpreted by passing through a number of mental filters or lenses of which most people are totally unaware. Let me list some of the most obvious and elementary:
1 - Translator
The typical reader of the Bible, even the scholar, reads it in English or another modern language, not the original Greek or Hebrew. Now anyone who has studied a foreign language, modern or ancient, knows that it is often extraordinarily difficult to convey the meaning of one language in that of another and sometimes quite impossible. As the cliche puts it, "Something gets lost in the translation." Moreover, there are different English translations, and one need only compare the same passage, e.g. Genesis 1:1-3, in three or four different translations to realize there can be wide variations among them.This is not surprising, because translation itself is already an interpretation. For example, translators must constantly wrestle with passages where the original Greek or Hebrew texts are textually corrupt (i.e. they have obvious textual errors), or which contain obscure words that no amount of scholarly effort has yet fully clarified, or familiar words used in an unusual or ungrammatical way. What is the translator to do in these cases? One cannot simply leave a blank in the text. Nor can one insert a lengthy note to explain the difficulties of the text and all the possible variant meanings (although the better translations will often indicate in a footnote when the translators are making a judgment call). The translators must simply punt; they must make their best guess as to what the text means and offer some English rendering. The conclusion is inescapable: to place our faith in a particular translation is to place our faith in the person or persons who did the translating. An unwary reader, however, may impute equal authority to every passage, unaware of where the ice may be dangerously thin. So the translator is a powerful filter that inevitably influences the reading of the text.
2 - Gender
Another filter is the sex of the reader; the reader obviously is either male or female. Consider the famous passage in Micah 6:4-6: "With what shall I come before the Lord and bow before God on high? Shall I come before him with whole burnt offering? . . . Shall I give the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" As I learned in seminary teaching, a woman student can have quite a different insight into that text than a typical man. So our gender and all the issues that go with gender identity are another filter.
3 - Background and knowledge
Readers have more or less education. One may be untrained in logical thinking or in asking questions and hence never engage the text in an intellectual way. Another may perhaps have little formal education but have the gift of wisdom and profound insight. Another may have a Ph.D. and be highly trained in scientific method but have little inkling of how to read an ancient text. Perhaps one has studied history but not philosophy, psychology but not comparative religion, literary criticism but not anthropology. No one's background and knowledge is exactly like that of anyone else.
4 - Moment in history
We live in one particular moment of history. Most white residents of the Deep South in 1848 would have had quite a different understanding of "Bid slaves be submissive to their masters" (Titus 2:9) or "Let those who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honor" (I Timothy 6:1) than will their direct descendants of 150 years later.
5 - Comfort level with issues of sexuality
Discomfort over issues of sexuality -- any kind of sexuality -- is another lens through which we read Scripture. Despite the way in which sex seems to pervade American culture, sociologists tell us that of all Western countries, the only one that is more uncomfortable with issues of sexuality than our own is Ireland. We believe that God created life, our bodies, hands, eyes. But did God really create our genitals? Did Jesus have genitals? The furor a few years ago over the film The Last Temptation of Christ is convincing evidence that many Christians consider it blasphemous even to raise such a question. These cultural attitudes affect powerfully any reading of the Bible on the issue of sexuality in general, let alone the issue of homosexuality.
6 - and ...
One could list these filters ad infinitum: A woman who was repeatedly raped by her father will feel differently about the word "Father" as applied by Jesus to God than will one who had a loving human father. A conservationist will have a different slant on the Genesis directive to "conquer the earth and subdue it" than will a civil engineer who builds bridges and dams. A happily married couple will read Paul's reluctant view of marriage -- Stay single if you can, but "it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion" -- differently from a voluntary celibate. No two people ever experience life in exactly the same way, because no two people can occupy the same space to view the world from the same precise angle. Truly, each of us is different from everyone else on earth.
"The interpretive context"
What we have been describing is one aspect of what James Smart calls "the interpretative context," the unique set of circumstances in which every person reads, understands, and interprets the Bible. We think we are absorbing the meaning directly from the page, but this act of comprehension in reality is already an interpretation, "the result of an instantaneous and unconscious process by which the words on the page receive specific meanings in our minds. The history of interpretation tells us what widely divergent meanings have been found in the same text" by earnest readers, people of good will, but each person a unique collection of historical experiences who invariably reads and understands the text through those experiences. Hence no one has "direct access to the content of Scripture" no matter how brilliant one's scholarship or profound one's faith. "Every apprehension of the text and every statement of its meaning is an interpretation, and however adequately it expresses the content of the text, it dare not ever be equated with the text itself".*
The issue of authority
In those last words, we are faced with the issue of authority: How confident can I be that my interpretation is the correct one? Indeed, how confident can I ever be that I have grasped the nature of Scripture itself? How does revelation occur? Does the Word become text, or does it become flesh? There are issues at stake far weightier than, e.g. whether the "vice list" of I Corinthians 6:9-11 is adequately translated.
So, where are we?
So where are we? Are we hopelessly cast adrift on a sea of relativism, each one using the Bible to paddle toward one's individual preconceived notions of theological terra firma? As we have seen above, in one sense, there is no alternative to this, since we cannot exist outside the bag of skin in which we live and can have no other perspective on the world except that provided by our own experience. We cannot see farther than the sight each has been given; this is the meaning of human finitude. But there is an alternative to extreme individualism. We can carry on the task of interpretation, not as individuals, but as members of a community. I share my best information and insight with you, and you share yours with me. Our individual weakness becomes our common strength because it brings us together, at the same time delivering us from the temptation to claim absolute certainty for our own finite interpretation.
______________
*James D. Smart, The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Church: A Study in Hermeneutics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970), pp. 53-54.
This article was originally published as an editorial in The InSpiriter, vol.2 no.4. (Spring 1998)
2.23.2009
Rainbow Faith Conference 2011
Dear Readers,
Please excuse my absence from posting over the last couple of months. My hubby and I were taking a much needed vacation, and I was in the early planning stages of organizing the new Rainbow Faith Conference, first to be held in the summer of 2011 in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
As a gay Christian, I am excited about the possibilities for ministerial and lay vision, post-conference ministry application, and the personal edification for all participants the Rainbow Faith Conference will produce. I am also excited about the participation of people from a wide array of faith communities. This conference will give participants the ability to network with other GLBT people of faith, and (in the case of sponsorship) to let other GLBT people of faith know what you're doing on a large scale through exhibit booths and speaking time.
I am currently in the process of looking for volunteers with expertise in the following areas to help organize the conference: lodging laison, local church laison, marketing & publicity coordinator(s), exhibit coordinator, speaker recruiter(s), worship arts leaders, travel agent(s), and legal experts.
Please stay updated withthis blog for information on the Conference. If you are interested in taking part, please email me, and I will send you an email notification of updates.
Blessings!
Daniel
Please excuse my absence from posting over the last couple of months. My hubby and I were taking a much needed vacation, and I was in the early planning stages of organizing the new Rainbow Faith Conference, first to be held in the summer of 2011 in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
As a gay Christian, I am excited about the possibilities for ministerial and lay vision, post-conference ministry application, and the personal edification for all participants the Rainbow Faith Conference will produce. I am also excited about the participation of people from a wide array of faith communities. This conference will give participants the ability to network with other GLBT people of faith, and (in the case of sponsorship) to let other GLBT people of faith know what you're doing on a large scale through exhibit booths and speaking time.
I am currently in the process of looking for volunteers with expertise in the following areas to help organize the conference: lodging laison, local church laison, marketing & publicity coordinator(s), exhibit coordinator, speaker recruiter(s), worship arts leaders, travel agent(s), and legal experts.
Please stay updated withthis blog for information on the Conference. If you are interested in taking part, please email me, and I will send you an email notification of updates.
Blessings!
Daniel
12.14.2008
Evangelism Without Additives
What if "evangelism" meant just being yourself?If the gospel really is good news, why do most Christians avoid evangelism? Why is "witnessing" often a negative experience, for both the sender and receiver? Wouldn't it be great if you could communicate the good news without having to become a spiritual salesperson?
What if....
you didn't have to make a speech in order to "witness"?
you could use everyday experiences to nudge others closer to Jesus?
the things you're already doing counted as evangelism?
Evangelism can be as normal as asking great questions and paying attention to the people Jesus misses most. It involves doing things you already do, but with a little more intentionality. Just by being yourself and becoming unusually interested in others, you can discover that people will ask you about Jesus. This isn't another program or pitch. It's a handbook on how to make real connections with the people formerly known as lost. Think of it as evangelism for the rest of us.
Purchase Evangelism Without Additives at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400073774/offthemap
Re-Thinking Evangelism
Some food for thought on the words and methods we use in conversing with non-Christians.....
Go to http://doableevangelism.com/the-lost-interviews/ to see the full interviews.
Go to http://doableevangelism.com/the-lost-interviews/ to see the full interviews.
Jim and Casper Go to Church
As I was researching some of the OffTheMapProductions material, I encountered the following video with Matt Casper and Jim Henderson talking about their research for the book, Jim and Casper Go to Church. A bit of background: Casper advertised his soul on Ebay to the highest bidder, offering to go to one church for every bid increment of $10. Henderson ended up bidding $504, but only asked Casper to go to 10 different churches and blog about his experiences. The experiment resulted in dialogue (always a good thing), and the book mentioned above. In this short clip, Casper and Henderson share some insights from one church they visited in particular. I think their insights are helpful for those planning to or already working in church plant situations.
Subscribe to:
Comment Feed (RSS)
