Thinking together is a lost art. As a teacher I do hard thinking, then I tell you about all my insights. If you think it is insightful, clever, smart or feels new to you, you register your acceptance of my insights with a nod or a “great message Ron,” and assume those insights will now change your life. But we haven’t thought together. And we certainly haven’t come “to know together.”
Thinking together and coming to know together requires a posture of being that will accommodate new shifts in us. We have discussed the two components of the social field. Now we look at the four ways of being or listening.
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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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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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