A Right Brained Church?

Last week I finished Daniel E. Pink‘s A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future.  Great read full of good analysis, helpful illustrations (not just stories, but pictures, too!), and practical suggestions for developing your right brain abilities.  This book has been on the shelf for a few years, but it contains the type of stuff that was never talked about in seminary, and thus, for me, was exciting, informative, and suggestive.  There is plenty of stuff in here that I think could be utilized by any church leader, especially since church leadership demands employment of our creative capacities.

Here are Pink’s “Six Senses” of right brain thinking that he believes will define the future:

• Design
• Story
• Symphony
• Empathy
• Play
• Meaning

I never considered myself a right-brain person growing up.  Maybe it was just me.  But over the past few years my ministry has demanded that I employ right brain capacities.  I’ve had to tell stories, design experiences, put together devotional guides using creative tools (writing, layout design, images, etc.), paint a big picture for people as I’ve exercised leadership (symphony), employed empathy in understanding the people I lead, played alongside children, students, and other adults leaders, and helped groups derive shared meaning.  I’ve been doing this right brained stuff.

The church is pegged as being a left-brained institution with a very left-brained discourse.  We have a chance to redefine that stuff.  Logic will continue to be important, but this right brain stuff cannot be denied.  We need a whole new mind.  And this means reclaiming the right brain and doing some cool, creative stuff.

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The 3, The 12, & The 120

I think the church has been given a gift in Andy Crouch’s Culture Making.  Before I say anything else, I need to offer a command: read this book.

As Christian people we are called to create and offer culture to the world.  As human beings we are created in God’s image.  When we create, we reflect our Creator.  As Crouch illustrates in his book, this motif is evident in the Genesis account, but is not confined there.  Culture making takes place throughout the biblical narrative.  The biblical story, being our story, invites us to a life of faithfulness that includes creating spaces in our communities where the life of the Kingdom is found manifest.  This can be in a group as small as a family or tightly knit group of friends, but can grow to be larger.

In the third part of his book, Crouch illustrates how we can go about creating culture.  The task begins very small.  The context for culture making is named as The 3, The 12, and The 120.  The principle is simple.  Crouch cites examples from movies, books (writer, editor, publisher), and forms of government that focus centrally on about three people, widens to around 12, and reaches to approximately 120.  The numbers aren’t always exact, but they fall near that range.  Christians will immediately think of Jesus, his inner circle, the twelve, and then other disciples (the 70, for example) that Jesus commissioned during his ministry.

When we think of creating culture, whether we are lay leaders, ordained clergy, or other church staff, we never go about creating culture by ourselves.  We need others.  Crouch states:

Absolutely no one makes culture alone.  There may be periods of solitude where we work alone to shape our contribution to our own cultural sphere and scale.  But for our work alone to bear any fruit at all, we will need to join with a 3.  So one of the most important questions for our calling is, Who are your 3?  Who are the few people you trust enough to risk creating something together?  What is the cultural sphere and scale where you could imagine successfully proposing a cultural good?  Who might be members of your 12?  Who might be drawn into the circle of the 120 who will eventually lend their effort and energy to moving the horizons of possibility with you?

These are all great questions.  So, who are your 3?  Who are your 12?  And who are your 120?  And what are you creatively discerning and formulating together for the good?  What will you invite others to take part in?

Surround yourself with friends, dream big, and get to work.  May God bless your labors.

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The Curse of the Analytic Mind

The risk in thinking “worldviewishly” is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it.  We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, write worldview books.  These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods.  And they will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans.  They can create a cultural niche in which “worldview thinkers” are privileged while other kids of culture makers are shunted aside.

But culture is not changed simply by thinking.

-Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Rediscovering Our Creative Calling

This week I’ve been reading Andy Crouch.  It has been quite enjoyable.  In fact, this is one of the best books I’ve picked up in a while that offers a helpful challenge to Christianity.  I’ve been convicted just as much as I have been encouraged.  That is the mark of a good book.

I’m analytical and critical.  I love to break down a discourse, a book, an event, a newspaper article, a poem, a piece of art, a movie, a play.  I enjoy asking questions.  And I enjoy sharing my opinions.

But the true desire of me heart, in recent days, has been to undertake a creative, cooperative venture with other like minded people to create something in our world that is helpful, hopeful, and true.

For those of us (myself included) who tend to analyze culture, I hope that Crouch’s words remind us that to think about and analyze our world is not alone sufficient.  We have to create.  We have to get about the business of bringing about new things.  You don’t like the current culture, whether it be national or ecclesial?  You’re discouraged by an institutional or communal structure you think is outmoded, outdated, sluggish, apathetic, restrictive, or errant?  Quit complaining and get to work.

As Crouch himself has written, “The only way to change culture is to create more of it.“

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Identity, Creativity, and the “Emerging Church”

It is Friday morning and I hope yours is going as well as mine thus far!  My job with the bus company has me up early each day and gets me started, and then I move to a coffee shop or my living room to research and write.  As I’ve been perusing my blog reader this morning I’ve found a few items I think that are of note.

First, Dan Kimball writes about how the meaning of the term “emerging church” has changed in the 5 years since he published his book The Emerging Church.  I tend to agree with many of his observations.  For anyone tired of the term, I would strongly recommend checking out Kimball’s analysis and clicking through his links to other bloggers and thinkers who have dropped the term all together.  The “emerging church” that I was attracted to around 6 years ago has evolved into something else–now I’m striving to practice historic, orthodox Christian faith.  Admittedly I have a  Protestant/Baptist predisposition, but am learning a great deal from the Church Fathers, the Monastics, and Reformers.  I’m currently in a Methodist context, and have been for a few years.  Anyway, here is an excerpt from Kimball’s post:

So…. the first thing that has changed in the 5 years since the book The Emerging Church came out is that in my opinion, the definition has changed. I am not wedded to any term and I don’t think most people are. I, like most others, are wedded to the gospel and to Jesus’ command of making new disciples – not a term to describe it. I have gone through the disiullusionment stage about church, and been hurt by the church and the whole deconstruction phase and questioning phase.

So I understand that very deeply. But the urgency of eternity here and the here-after and the people who are not yet Christians who need to hear about experience in this life the saving gospel of Jesus is what enabled me to rise me out of that. I want to focus time, prayer and energy on healthy evangelism and new disciples of Jesus being made who weren’t Christians before in our new cultures and new generations. That may involve all varieties of conversations including anything from music and art to justice to leadership to all types of thing. But underneath it is evangelism and the words of Jesus in Matthew 28:18-20 and Acts 1:8 and mission driving it all. So in moving ahead, I don’t think using the term “emerging church” as it is generally defined today, describes this like it used to.

Next, I thought this post from Accidental Creative was quite good, entitled “Identity vs. Masks.”  The quote from Thomas Merton drew me in.  I’m all for creativity in ministry–in fact, I think it is critical in efforts to contextualize the gospel.  If we take a missionary approach to our culture, our communities, our cities, our ministries will express diversity reflective of the true nature of the Kingdom of God.  In order to contextualize our ministries effectively we’ll have to be bold in implementing our own creativity.  Here’s a portion of this post from Accidental Creative:

Many of us move through life wearing someone else’s clothes. We produce someone else’s art. We make someone else’s music. We write someone else’s words.  We replay someone else’s arguments. We don’t have the courage and the conviction to stand on our own and speak our own thoughts and craft our own work. We don’t have the courage to say “I don’t know” and to make it up as we go. We are wearing a mask…

The best antidote for all of this is – wait for it – unnecessary creating time. It’s critical that we have time to create for ourselves (and no one else) in which we can take on projects that fuel us, give us life and the opportunity to explore new means of expression. We discover ourselves and our unique “voice” as we act. We need to build intentional, structured time into our lives to express ourselves in new ways and to take creative risks where there’s a safety net.

Lastly, for anyone out there exploring the possibilities of launching an internet campus, here’s a great link from Tim Stevens.  A United Methodist Church decided to baptize someone over the web.  Check it out.

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