One of the most perplexing mysteries of our current state of perception is how we can live in a world so alive with possibilities, so deeply relational and connected, so absolutely NOT fixed but walk around with a perception the world is fixed, solid, stable and unchanging.
Jesus invited people to realize there was a wider envelop of existence available to them, a bigger reality, a hidden wholeness where they could live and move and have their being. When we grasp this fundamental shift, a shift in our identity occurs. In this world of possibilities and potentialities (you will do even greater things than I, said Jesus) another shift occurs as well.
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Awareness, awakeness and day dreaming.
So bone fishing was my entry’ into awareness and waking up. How about you? You might be
a follower of Jesus, bible reading maniac, bible quoting, memorizing machine. You might be a sermon, book and seminar junkie. But none of those imply awakeness. My life is an example. And the whole mystic and spirituality tradition of the church proves it.
My life in the last 6 years of this journey has had some of the most incredible spiritual depth and growth I have ever experienced. Much of it due to waking up, some of it due to great pain, some of it due to engaging new patterns and practices that have helped me come to grips with how our lives are storied.
All of us live in a constructed reality; personally and socially constructed. This has been and remains the most profound and powerful insight that waking up has brought. What do I mean?
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We need some new metaphors. I think it is quite clear the two bucket theory is untenable, and the owners manual for life metaphor reduces the bible to a behavior manual. Both the theory and metaphor generate so many problems that it is time we start searching for an alternative approach to the text.
This is always how paradigm shifts occur. When a paradigm is initially adopted it answers a variety of questions very well. Those adopting the paradigm realize it doesn’t answer all questions and those unanswerables go on a shelf for further reflection and research. No paradigm is perfect, no model can answer all the questions.
Eventually the current paradigm, always historically and contextually rooted, answers fewer and fewer questions well and the shelf with the unanswerables becomes overloaded and near collapse. This is when a new paradigm begins to emerge. We are undoubtedly living in such a new paradigm time.
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What happens when we claim the text and the author have a very specific cultural location that 
makes some of what is in the text “no longer correct?” Ouch, I know. For some of us we have been taught and trained to hear those as fighting words and to remind the offender this is the inspired word of God they are talking about.
What if each culture being written to and each author writing is at a particular stage of development or stage of cultural progress and we HAVE to take THAT into consideration as we think about the bible? That was the suggestion at the end of our last post.
This is of course one of what might be several possible solutions. I think some in more traditional church contexts as well as seminaries and more technical hermeneutics texts have tried to make it sound that because the text is inspired there is a muting of the culture boundedness of the text. If we continue to maintain that position we have learned nothing from the most glaring example where we tried using that line of defense. (a “defense” we don’t need)
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Can we grow to the place we are comfortable with our knowledge limits and open to what others can teach us? Are we open to the idea we do not have all the answers and much of what we hold is simply wrong, we just aren’t sure which parts?
I am not sure we are. Taking this position would seem to fly in the face of the very system the church has engaged where mythos has collapsed into logos. Where the power of the story and narrative (mythos) is overshadowed by the rules, rationality and certainty (logos). Another word use for this by experts like Karen Armstrong is “fundamentalist system;” rules, doctrines and lifestyle statements to insure as much conformity and uniformity as possible. This is the essence of the socialized mind we have been discussing.
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The move from the socialized mind to the self authoring mind might well be characterized by the move from being told what to see, believe and how to fit in, to how to see, come to your own conclusions and what what it means to be an interdependent individual. (have you gotten his book yet?)
The question I think facing the church as we head into the second decade of this millennium is whether or not we are comfortable with facilitating peoples journeys within the context of community or whether we are more concerned to create cookie cutter clones who believe the same thing, quote the same verses, have the same views on the Left Behind series, homosexuality, politics, woman’s role in marriage and church and genetic engineering.
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The Art of the Idea is the best creative book I have read in the last couple years. At velocityculture we try and broker resources when we come across really good ones. Well this is one…Tom Peters meets Seth Godin and voila you have John Hunt’s new piece. 
I picked this up in Cape Town South Africa and am really glad I did because what I didn’t know was Hunt is from South Africa. Apart from the sentimental value the purchase holds, I am taken by his freshness about how fresh ideas are critical to our in-flux world.
I am incredibly concerned about the dearth of good, fresh and original ideas when it comes to church ministry, church 2.0, and our ministry intersection with culture. Until we are able to generate enough curiosity to think in original and contextual ways I am afraid “church” in the West will continue to be marginalized with an impotent voice at best. Sometimes we just need others’ genius to jump start our ideation process. Sometimes we need to enter a more quiet state to free up some creative brain space. And sometimes just reading a piece like Hunt’s is enough to ignite some new flames.
One of the things I am doing with a number of church both here in the States and abroad is helping churches begin to thing through their creative process. How do you generate ideas? How do ideas then get moved through a process that navigates sorting, discerning, enfleshing, and executing them? We need lots of work in this area as well. Whatever we decide to do we need to stop laying conventional tired ideas on yet older worn out ideas that have outlasted their welcome and shelf life. I think Hunt’s book may be a huge help to all of us.
And he has about the coolest book website I have ever ever seen. Make sure you hit all the tabs at the bottom to allow the site full lateral scrolling.
Today Robert Kegan may be one of the most important figure in adult ego development and how we make sense of self, his latest book Immunity to Change is an important contribution and the culmination of a career of research and work.
Our last post we discussed the idea of self development, ego development or adult meaning making schemas… all refer to the same idea that adults have the ability well into their golden years to continue the mental development that gives greater choices, the ability to assimilate broader complexities and a posture of embracing more mystery, paradox and ambiguity.
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Jane Loevinger is one of the pioneers in the area of ego development or how we see the world and how we make sense of our lives (including God, others and the universe around us) are what experts refer to as meaning making systems. Meaning making, or the development of the “self” or “ego,” is what goes on as we learn to make increasingly sophisticated meaning of the world around us.
A five year old thinks there are monsters under the bed at night. When we come in and turn on the light and show them there is nothing to be scared of we are often greeted with the explanation that “of course the monsters hide for the light they are only there in the dark.” This is the way a 5 year old makes sense of their world. If that was still going on at 13 years of age we would be concerned. Most of us are familiar with child development and the name of someone like Jean Piaget. We are less familiar with adult development.
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This continues the March 8th post on 3 things I remain convinced of…
1. here
2. The best ways of doing ministry have yet to be found and we are in an “idea” crisis
Idea crisis, creativity dearth, innovation desert. We have to own that part of what we are called to do is design, create and come up with better ways of doing it.
We have to own this one deeply, passionately and relentlessly. This is not because we have to be innovative or don’t like the way we have always done it. We have to own this because God is always doing a new thing and inviting us into new territory and terrain.
I am convinced the best ways are yet to be found and furthermore am totally convinced by my experience that some of those “best ways” are actually in the ideas that will come from people who we don’t know yet and who don’t follow Jesus yet.
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