Characteristics of Gridlocked Systems

I’ve been reading A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix by Edwin H. Friedman, in preparation for my doctoral dissertation. This book is about how emotional processes are what need to be engaged when thinking about leadership and change within an organization, not logic, reason, or methodology.

Friedman, in the first chapter on “Imaginative Gridlock” deals with the characteristics of a gridlocked system, and there are three:

1. An unending treadmill of trying harder;
2. Looking for answers rather than reframing questions; and
3. either/or thinking that creates false dichotomies.

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Planting Churches in the Real World

I just received this notice from my friend Joel Rainey and thought I would share it with you.

Missional Press would like to announce it’s latest publication. Planting Churches in the Real World is written by Dr. Joel Rainey, Director of Missions for the Mid-Maryland Baptist Association, a network of more than 50 evangelical churches located in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area. Dr. Rainey has been involved in planting more than 30 churches, and trains church planters nationally and internationally. He lives in central Maryland with his wife and their two sons.

Most church planting literature highlights enormously successful ministries. While such ministries can serve as a noble benchmark for every church planter, they are far from the norm. Most who plant churches will never see their name in lights, and all who plant churches will find it to be one of the most difficult things they have ever sought to accomplish. Read more

The Mission of God: Knowing God in Israel

Chapter three begins with a discussion of the God who makes himself known. God, in the Bible, is known by what he does and what he says. And two mighty acts of God are recorded as occasions for Israel to come to know their God: the exodus and the return from exile. Read more

Searching for a Missional Hermeneutic

In Chapter one of this book, Christopher Wright begins to lay out the search for a missional hermeneutic. We need to move past the search for a biblical basis of missions, but to see the Bible through a missional lens.

Drawing from Luke 24, Wrights begins to express his basis for a missional hermeneutic. He believes that beyond a messianic centering of the Old Testament there is a missional thrust as well. Luke 24:45-47 states:

45 Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, 46 and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, 47 and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. (ESV)

In this, “He seems to be saying that the whole of scripture (which we know as the Old Testament) finds its focus and fulfillment both in the life and death and resurrection of Israel’s Messiah, and in the mission to all nations, which flows from that event.” Thus the proper way for disciples of Christ to read the Bible is both messianically and missionally.

In doing this, we need to move past trying to express a “Biblical Foundation for Missions.” We need to see the Bible not as containing several verses about being on mission (ie Matthew 28:19-20), but to see everything through a messianic and missional framework.

One of his concerns is how the Western world has failed to recognize the transition of Christianity, and thus it’s global hermeneutic. At the beginning of the 20th century, 90% of all the world’s Christians lived in the West or the North (primarily Europe and North America). Today, 75% of all Christians live in the South and East - Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia and the Pacific. “The whole center of gravity of world Christianity has moved south - a phenomenon described, not entirely felicitously, as ‘the next Christendom’…”

Yet Western culture has rejected, according to Wright, the very thing that led to the protestant reformation. “There is a great irony that the Western Protestant theological academy, which has its roots precisely in a hermeneutical revolution (the Reformation), led by people who claimed the right to read Scripture independently from the prevailing hegemony of medieval Catholic scholasticism, has been slow to give ear to those of other cultures who choose to read the Scriptures through their own eyes, though the situation is undoubtedly improving”

“The phenomenon of hermeneutical variety,” Wright goes on to say, “goes right back to the Bible itself, of course. The New Testament was born out of a hermeneutical revolution in reading those Scriptures we now call the Old Testament. And within the early church itself there were different ways of handling those same Scriptures, depending on the context and need being addressed. Jewish and Greek forms of Christian identity, the product of the church’s mission, felt themselves addressed and claimed in different ways by the demands of the Scriptures. Paul wrestles with these differences in Romans 14-15 for example.”

A missional hermeneutic, therefore, must include a recognition of multiple perspectives and contexts from which and within which people read the Scripture. What persons of one culture bring to the text may illumine the text in ways that people from another culture may not have noticed.

If this is the case for Wright, are there any boundaries for reading the biblical that are right or wrong? What is important, Wright points out, is a “plurality in interpretation”, not pluralism as a hermeneutical ideology nor even relativism. “The starting point for understanding the meaning of biblical texts, in my view, remains a careful application of grammatico-historical tools in seeking to determine as far as is possible their authors’ and editors’ intended meaning in the context they were spoken or written. But as we apply those tools and then move to appropriate the significance and implications of these texts in our own context, cultural diversity plays its part in the hearing and receiving of them. But it is a diversity with methodological and theological limits.”

Though we, in the West since Enlightenment, like to claim that we can have an objective and. rational view of scripture, this is a myth. The reality is that the Bible cannot be separated from who we are, the experiences that have shaped our lives, and the context we live in. “The Bible is to be read precisely in and for the context in which its message must be heard and appropriated.”

A missional hermeneutic also embraces liberation. It actually subsumes liberationists readings into itself. While not promoting a social gospel, but a liberationalist gospel, “[i]nsomuch as the Bible narrates the passion and action (the mission) of this God for the liberation not only of humanity but of the whole creation, a missional hermeneutic of Scripture must have a liberationist dimension.”

Finally, a missional hermeneutic moves past postmodernism. While postmodernism “celebrates the local, the contextual and the particular, it goes on to affirm that this is all we’ve got.” The grand narrative is missing. Yet since the incarnation of God, the church has wrestled with problems of multiple contexts but has sustained the conviction “that there is an objective truth for all in the gospel that addresses and claims people in any context.”

The Mission of God: Definitions

I hoped to have had this post on Tuesday but I got behind on a computer project I was involved in. I do some IT consulting on the side and had a software-based phone system that was giving me fits, which I finally finished up yesterday. So I’m late on this post…Please forgive me.

Christopher Wright gives us, in the introduction, several definitions centered around the word mission so that the reader gets an idea of how he is thinking and describing his thesis.

Mission - “Fundamentally, our mission (if it is biblically informed and validated) means our committed participation as God’s people, at God’s invitation and command, in God’s mission within the history of God’s world for the redemption of God’s creation.” He goes on to describe the word mission in a more general sense of a “long-term purpose or goal that is to be achieved through proximate objectives and planned actions. Within such a broad mission…there is room for subordinate missions, in the sense of specific tasks assigned to a person or group that are to be accomplished as steps toward the wider mission.” He also states that the Bible gives us a picture of a God who is entirely purposeful, and thus on a mission.

Missionary - This word refers to people who engage in mission, most often in a culture other than their own. They are typically sent by churches or agencies to work in mission or on missions.

Missional - This word is simply an adjective “denoting something that is relates to or characterized by mission, or has the qualities, attributes or dynamics of mission.” Wright goes on to argue that Israel had a missional reason for existence, not necessarily a missionary mandate to go to the nations.

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