I'd gotten out of the habit of keeping my reading list (in the left-hand column of the blog) up-to-date. I've corrected that. I am currently reading some great stuff, especially Edwin Friedman's A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. If you are inclined hit the links and see if anything looks intriguing.
I've only read the first chapter of Gordon Mackenzie's Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace.Mackenzie worked at Kansas City's Hallmark Card for 30 years and struggled to maintain his creativity amidst a culture that always seemed to want to recycle old "successful" strategies rather than continue to be original and creative. I don't know Mackenzie, but I recognize at least one person who has provided some of the illustrations that accompany his great writing. Ironically, I discovered this book on a blog that my RSS reader aggregates daily, The Accidental Creative. Fantastic blog. Here is a description of Mackenzie's book by Accidental Creative creator Todd Henry. Check it out: Executional Love.
At the end of my book, Intuitive Leadership: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor, and Chaos, I write about nine different postures for leaders/people to consider as they try to engage with what God may be up to in the world around them. Each posture involves a transition, a change, a movement from one place to another, recognizing that often the way we are postured either facilitates or inhibits participation with God and others. To get somewhere else we must do something else - something different than what has brought to the place we are.
One of the most critical postures I write about is a posture of trust.
"I have a strong sense that many Christians and most leaders have a hard time with trust these days. In our culture many Christians feel embattled and have taken on defensive postures believing their very survival is at stake. The tenor of religious dialogue generally, and Christian dialogue specifically, contributes to a sense of being under attack. Everyone is shooting at everyone. Friendly fire is killing more than enemy fire - that is, if we could decide on who our 'enemy' is beyond the most recent person who offends us...This toxic lack of trust, and the active posture of suspicion in the broader environment, has invaded many places close to home, including our local church communities. Leaders feel at odds with their congregations and struggle to build meaningful relationships. Parishioners feel at odds with their leaders and struggle to be vulnerable with them. While we would never openly admit this to anyone out loud, many of us do not trust God. It seems we believe God is passive, and the role of leaders and church and theology in the face of God's apparent passivity is to defend him from all challengers. It is as if we believe that God cannot defend himself - and after what we have witnessed on the cross of Christ, maybe there is something there that is worth paying attention to, something very sacred and important to be discovered." (Intuitive Leadership, 244)
The transition that I suggest as a means of changing/challenging our posture so that we can trust is a transition from defensiveness to creativity. I might have also suggested a movement from fear to faith. They are very similar. Either way, this need continues to be more and more critical to me as I observe the trajectory of much of what is happening in the world around us. It seems that so much of what happens in popular American Christian culture plays to people's fear - such that we become incapable of living in the way that Jesus modeled and his disciples embodied. People and ideas that challenge the status quo are to be feared and shunned. Truth must be defended. Faith moves from being a radical orientation of dependence on that which/Who is unseen and hoped for to a proscribed set of dogma that is held to with certainty and subsequently defended unquestioningly (at times even violently). And in the meantime, God has left the building. Or at least, I have observed this dynamic in play.
But what if you're not afraid? What if you are more excited than concerned? What if you sense hope on the horizon and in your heart and have to do something about it? What if you want to propose and play and create and engage? That is what gets me up in the morning.
Now, why do I write all that? Because I just watched a movie trailer for a film that is coming out based on one of my daughter's favorite books: Kate Dicamillo's Newberry Award winning children's book, The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup and a Spool of Thread. Watching the trailer for this movie stirred me up and reawakened the impulse that fueled me when I sat down to write about a posture of trust and moving from defensiveness to creativity, from fear to faith. Watch it and see what it stirs in you.
My favorite line? "Oh Despereaux, there are so many wonderful things in life to be afraid of if you just learn how scary they are." Fantastic.
Tom Wright is both an Anglican bishop (Durham) and a pre-eminent New Testament scholar. I have been reading Wright for several years and in July, 2004, had the privilege to travel with my friend Jason Clark to Leicestershire, England, to attend a conference that featured him as its keynote speaker.
I have had many opportunities over the last number of years to meet and interact personally with some of my theological mentors. Surprisingly, that can be a deflating experience. In fact, being an interesting scholar does not necessarily translate into being an interesting (or compelling) human being. However, in the case of Tom Wright, it does. As good (and creative) a scholar as Wright is, he is an even more interesting person to interact with as a human being. Sometimes you interact with someone whom you quickly realize has given everything they have in the form of their writing - and if you try and get them to depart from the script it is not pretty. On the other hand, interacting with Wright you get the sense that you are just skimming the surface of what he knows and has to offer. I remember finding myself wanting to get through the "talks" (which I had flown to England to hear and were incredible in their own right), so that after the fact I could sit down with him in a group, drink a beer, and interact. That is the kind of guy he is. Not to mention prolific. Did I say prolific?
Anyway, you can watch him trying to engage Stephen Colbert on the topic of heaven and the resurrection. Usually I enjoy Colbert's irreverent, incessant, and hilarious interruptions of his guests with his meaningless dithering. In this instance I found myself wishing he would shut-up for awhile and let Wright complete a sentence. Oh well, it is funny (and it was broadcast on Comedy Central after all) and so I guess I need to shut up and take the book off my shelf and read it.
A couple of days following my second message on women and their role in the church (or lack thereof), I received an email from a woman in our church. With her permission, I want to share it - but first give some context.
When Deth began the series, "Neglected Women of Faith," I thought the most compelling aspect of the series was the time he allocated at the end of the message for different women from our community to stand up and share a response. The four-part message series covered the women named in Matthew's genealogy: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. Deth told each woman's story and then, at each of the three gatherings, a different woman would respond - 12 in all over the course of the series.
In my two sermons I did less storytelling than preaching/teaching. That is appropriate given the theological and exegetical nature of the passages we referenced. What I missed being able to do is allow space for someone to respond. Which is why I want to share what a woman in our community shared with me. She was a big fan of the messages. I'll say that up front. I am not sharing her email in order to promote myself. I am sharing it to further illustrate the struggles that many women have had trying to live out what God has called them to be and do. She has given me her permission and so with out further explanation her reflections.
"Hey Tim- Yes, I double-dipped on Sunday! :) I REALLY enjoyed the teaching... it evoked a whole host of responses from me and my friends, and I cannot thank you enough! On one hand, I was thinking, 'SEE! The truths I held in my heart were being PREACHED from the front and by a man!' And on the other hand, I am indignant that these passages had not been studied and taught through a culturally contextualized lens! I feel as if so many other passages have, but these have certainly been left aside. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
I was a leader in 'the church' for 13 years in Austin... in different capacities: college ministry, church staff, church planter, small groups leader, worship leader, house church and community house leader, etc... and all the while, there was something that never let me be fully free in those contexts. And I, like many others, have had 'the book' thrown at us or have been undermined and insulted because we were women. Gender issues, along with race issues (and class), are still so present in the church. And until they are addressed directly, I guess people don't realize how pervasive they are. It's about a continual renewal of mind and subtle and more obvious changes to come in line with the Galatians passage you are teaching from.
So thank you. It's just liberating and healing to hear what you taught. If you don't mind, could you pass on the titles to the books you were using to study and quote from? My roommates and I were all curious and wanted to read more on it."
If you would like to see a few of the resources I used for those messages, I list them below in a post titled, "Non-Stop Action."
Just outside of Kansas City is William Jewell College, a small, private university with a Baptist tradition. William Jewell is a great school and over the life of our church we have had a number of students and staff become a part of our worshiping community.
Driving to work this morning I was listening to Morning Edition on the local NPR affiliate, KCUR. In between national news segments KCUR did a brief story that immediately caught my attention. Local reporter Steve Bell opened the segment with this statement:
"A group of young people, mostly teens, is involved with an urban restoration project in Kansas City, MO. The project is named for the scripture that inspired it: 'Matthew 25.'"
He continued, saying:
"Jeff Buscher, campus minister at William Jewell College, is supervising the renovations at four homes in the urban core. Buscher heads the Matthew 25 Project, aided by cooperation from the city, the Local Investment Corporation and the Community Cadet Club."
I know Jeff. He is the campus chaplain at William Jewell. He and I have interacted on multiple occasions, both at Jacob's Well and when I have had the opportunity to be up at Jewell for speaking at a class.
The Matthew 25 Project is a really great initiative. You can read about the project briefly on the KCUR website. You can also listen to the streaming broadcast of the story I heard this morning on the same site.
I am sick of Boston teams winning everything in sports.
That said, KU alumni Paul Pierce is such a stud and he played so amazingly well (MVP) over the NBA playoffs and championship (which I normally can't stand) that I overcame my distaste for big market purchased franchises and actually rooted for the Celtics. Then I remembered that I really like Kevin Garnett and discovered how much I like Doc Rivers and Ray Allen. As a result I might be forced to confess that if I were a fan of the NBA and had to pick a team to root for, I would probably pick the Celtics...
...but only because Paul Pierce was first a Jayhawk.
The Red Sox, the Patriots, and the Bruins can still go hang.
It has been a crazy-long and full end-of-week, weekend, new-week stretch.
We are wrapping the inaugural missional training center offerings today. It has been great. Classes began Thursday and except for a day-off on Sunday, we have gone hard for five days. I think everyone is full (and tired).
Sunday was not an off-day for me, however. Just the opposite. We did a power-sprint through passages from 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy relative to women and their role and function in the church. If you are interested in some of the better resources that I interacted with, here is a couple you might consider checking out.
Finally, my family is split up over the next nine days. Mimi, Mabry, and Annie are with 18 others from the JW community, on their way to Croc, Mexico (outside Monterey), to spend a week building houses and doing educational development alongside YouthFront's team that is in residence year-round. As I blog, I think they are around halfway through their 22 hour journey. Blaise and I are bachelors and living large. Look out.
We're off to a great start. Yesterday was a full day of learning and engagement. Here's a quick quote from Alan Roxburgh:
"The most effective approach to forming mission-shaped life is to develop organizational structures that fit the environment in which the church is located. Environment has to do with the values, ethos, and systems of belief and life in a local area. This means we won't be able to create structures for mission-shaped life in a church without being aware of the environment in which the church finds itself. While this sounds like a sensible and reasonable way of going about the process of forming structures, it is also one of those assumptions that runs counter to the ways we normally go about church life. In most circumstances, church structures are assumed to be environment neutral, that is, church structures are simply developed out of what has been done in other churches of a similar type and really have little to do with the environment in which the church is located."
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