Books @ Leadership Network

Devotion to Doctrine

            My travel companion this month has been Larry Hurtado (represented by his book How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus (Eerdmans, 2005). His particular research to discern how ordinary people came to believe in Christ has always seemed to me the right way to go. Modern Christians always want to go from doctrine to devotion (from “head” to “heart”). Yet it seems obvious that this is not the way earliest Christians came to Jesus. They came with their heart and figured it out later.

            Hurtado’s critique of academic research into the “cultic” origins of Christianity is the same. Modern people always assume that ideas evolve; that the evolution of ideas requires time; and that this evolution is shaped more by outside sociological forces than personal intuition. The common sense of modernity leaps to the assumption that surely the worship of Jesus as God evolved over several centuries, shaped by a variety of pagan religions. Hurtado argues that actual research does not endorse modern common sense. The worship of Jesus as God began almost immediately after the crucifixion, and against all reasonable odds.

            Hurtado’s careful work may seem slow to some believers, but consider that he is building a case of credibility against significant modern prejudice. I recall the first time someone was physically healed in a worship service I led, several solid church members left the church alarmed by non-rational grace interrupting the liturgy. Surely healing evolves, takes time, and is shaped by outside forces. They actual story of the person healed didn’t really count. What did she know?

            A common theme in Hurtado’s research has been the early emergence of what he describes as “binitarian devotion” on the part of early Christians. Non-Biblical sources confirm that Jesus was perceived by ordinary Jews expecting the Messiah as uniquely divine within decades. The scandal of Paul’s conversion was that he embraced a radical innovation of faith that seemed to challenge monotheism. The “binitarian” faith elevated Jesus to the right hand of God, divine in a special way, crucial to salvation not just through relevant words and impressive deeds, but by his eternal and immediate presence.

            In time the intellectual conundrums of “binitarian devotion” would be resolved by “Trinitarian thinking” (although some would argue the mystery still boggles human imagination). Of particular interest to me is Hurtado’s exegesis of Philippians 2:6-11. This is perhaps one of the earliest devotional hymns or affirmations known, and a favorite of mine in clergy coaching seminars. It reveals that the motivation of Christians to live or die for Christ fundamentally lay in their readiness to surrender all to be in Christ. It is a call to humility and obedience … and more.

            I am struck once again by the limitations of trying to explain a non-rational grace in rational ways. It is like forcing rose petals into a box and expecting the scent to stay put. Modern scholars check the box, observe the petals, and think they have insight. Meanwhile, the modern church listens to the scholars analyze decaying rose petals, and wonder why they can’t smell any aroma. Common sense suggests that the aroma was, after all, a figment of the imagination influenced by romantic stories about flowers. They forget that it was the aroma the led earliest Christians to the rose in the first place. Doctrine never leads to devotion. Devotion may lead to doctrine … but more importantly it leads to the God beyond all gods.

Tom Bandy

www.ThrivingChurch.com

The Starfish and the Spider

I have really enjoyed reading The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. In many ways, I feel like I found a book to explain how we operate at Mosaic - a decentralized and catalytic organism.

The subtitle is misleading though.  Actually the organizations the authors describe aren’t leaderless but full of leaders!

Here are some insights:

“The blows to the recording industry, the attacks of 9/11, and the success of online classifieds and a collaborative encyclopedia were all driven by the same hidden force. The harder you fight this force, the stronger it gets. The more chaotic it seems, the more resilient it is. The more you try to control it, the more unpredictable it becomes. Decentralization… the absence of structure, leadership, and formal organization, once considered a weakness, has become a major asset. Seemingly chaotic groups have challenged and defeated established institutions. The rules of the game have changed.”

Centralized (coercive system): clear leader in charge, specific place decisions are made, rules need to be set and enforced or the system collapses

Decentralized (open system): no clear leader, no hierarchy, no headquarters, to influence people is to lead by example, everyone entitled to make her own decisions, rules and norms but not enforced by any one person, power distributed among all the people and across geographic regions

“A leader is best when people barely know that he exists; not so good when people obey and acclaim him; worst when they despise him.” – Lao-tzu

If you would like the full notes and to sign up for my monthly email newsletter, send an email to me at eric@mosaic.org with “Starfish” in the subject heading.

Eric Bryant

interview with Dave Gibbons about liquid leadership

A couple of weeks ago on a web show, I got to interview Dave Gibbons about the things he was thinking and about his new book, The Monkey and the Fish: Liquid Leadership for a Third-Culture Church. I'm hearing quite a bit of buzz about this book, and how it unpacks perspectives of how the world is changing, and offers questions (instead of answers) to better navigate those changes as well as any culture in which you find yourself.

Dave Gibbons Webshow - Innovation3 from Todd Rhoades on Vimeo.

The book title, The Monkey and the Fish, comes from this Eastern parable:

A typhoon stranded a monkey on an island. In a protected place on the shore, while waiting for the raging waters to recede, he spotted a fish swimming against the current. It seemed to the monkey that the fish was struggling and needed assistance. Being of kind heart, the monkey resoved to help the fish.

At considerable risk to himself, the monkey moved far out on the precarious limb of a tree, reached down, and snatched the fish from the waters. Scurrying back to the safety of his shelter, he carefully laid the fish on dry ground. For a few moments, the fish showed excitement but soon settled into a peaceful rest.

- An Eastern parable

As you get a copy of this insightful book, chime in and add a comment about what this means for you and your church.

// DJ Chuang is a Director at Leadership Network, launching digital initiatives, and connecting multi-site churches and Asian American pastors.

Churched

        I like to browse the “spirituality” section of the major bookstore chains to get an update on the current dialogue (or rock-throwing contest) between established religion and pagan culture. The very choice of books selected for promotion is often revealing. This time my eye went to Churched: One Kid’s Journey toward God despite a Holy Mess by Matthew Paul Turner (Waterbrook Press). Since I also grew up “churched”, and often feel like an outsider among the converts and critics that populate the book stalls, I was eager to gain some additional insight. Besides, on the front cover A.J. Jacobs said this was a book “at once funny and full of humanity”.

        Unfortunately, my copy must be missing a chapter. Most of the book is dedicated to funny anecdotes revealing the foibles and hypocrisies of the institutional church (particularly the “fundamentalist” kind). This is coupled with touching stories of coaching by clearly loving parents, who resist critical thinking in favor of compassionate but obedient faith. Somewhere or other in the story, the author is supposed to reveal how and why he found God, started to love Jesus, and returned to church. But I missed it. Exactly when, how, and why did that happen? On page 154 (3/4 of the way through the book), the young teenager realizes that “it wasn’t so much that I was weird, but that fundamentalism was weird.” OK. I got that about 125 pages ago, and although I have been chuckling through the book, I’ve not learned anything new.

        By the time I got to page 211 (there are only 13 pages left), it is clear that growing teenager increasingly ambiguous about faith and doubts the pastor’s credibility. The final pages skim a life that has since endured countless church services (not quite sure why), dabbled in Calvinism, played with independent mega-churches, and found some solace in the loving and non-judgmental relationships of a nameless “small country church in Maryland”. (It’s the one name I want to know, and don’t get). The tale ends with a skeptical young adult attending another independent church in downtown Nashville. The worship feels like “the aurora borealis on steroids and a timer”, but at least it’s “not hurting anybody”. High praise?

        So exactly where is the turning point? Where does the churched kid find God? In the very last three pages it is revealed that he establishes a personal friendship with a pastor who seems (maybe) authentic, and finally accepts communion without being afraid. It seems to me that the reason why he was afraid, and the story of his journey to fearless faith, is the real story we long to hear. But it hasn’t happened. I now understand that the book was chosen by the marketers of the book chains because of what it said against religion, rather than for what it said in its favor. Secular therapists are cheering. God, contemporary readers now understand, is the absence of fear, a vague feeling of acceptance, a form of self-actualization, or a kind of heightened appreciation of friendship.

        Most of all, I am disappointed in A.J. Jacobs. I respect his writing very much, and he said the book was “funny and full of humanity”. It is funny, but it isn’t really full of humanity. It is full of ecclesiology, and the rejection of ecclesiology; and full of psychological abuse, and an unguided therapeutic journey to wholeness. One suspects that there are profound existential questions buried between the paragraphs about incarnation, divine purpose, the human condition, and ultimate hope, which is what “being human” is actually about. But these never surface. They are buried under the jibes and jokes, sarcasm and satire that make this book an enjoyable one-time read that will be soon forgotten.

        That’s OK, of course. It’s good to laugh. Yet there is a larger, deeper, more urgent conversation between Christian faith and pagan culture that is in serious jeopardy today. Culture really wants to write off faith as a psychological boondoggle or a quirky sociological phenomenon. Faith wants to write off culture as a complicated obstacle course on the way to salvation or one vast demonic deception. Autobiography has historically been one of the most effective strategies to do this. But will these deeper biographical sketches find there way into popular bookstores?

Tom Bandy

www.ThrivingChurch.com