Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Musings on teachability
"The illiterate of the year 2000 will not be the individual who cannot read and write, but the one who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn." - Alvin Toffler
"The most successful corporation of the 1990s will be something called a learning organisation."- Fortune Magazine
"The most successful corporation of the 1990s will be something called a learning organisation."- Fortune Magazine
Friday, October 16, 2009
Essence of Christian Growth - Lesson from Willow Creek Community Church
I have just stumbled upon this article while reading my daily read from Ravi's Zacharias Ministry. The article is food for thought, especially on how some church leaders do church nowadays.
Having been experienced my part of being required to fill up statistics of members' attendance weekly for Sunday services and cell group meeting as a leader, and having required to attend endless leadership meetings after meetings on Sunday, I realise the futility of such activites, if it is not translated into something that is more relational-based, spiritually rejuvenating, sustainable and life-giving.
All the records of attendance only serves to interpret participation and nothing else. Yet, the church leaders were so insistent of doing this weekly with legalistic emphasis on its meaning to church health. Their basis of argument? Simply that a healthy church will result in numerical growth, not just quality growth. After 10 years of my experience in my previous church, I beg to differ. Both are very important and are very related to church health. However at different stages and seasons of a church's life, its growth takes place differently. There may be some seasons of the church being cleansed and pruned for its mistakes and therefore it may be inevitable that some members will leave. It doesn't mean that it isn't healthy.
Sometimes, it does matter a lot to the church, to God and to the leaders themselves, if they bother to stop whatever they are doing, and reflect upon themselves whether what they are doing are still relevant to the needs of the people in the current culture and context.
Willow Creek Repents?
Why the most influential church in America now says "We made a mistake."by ChristianityToday, 18 October 2007
Few would disagree that Willow Creek Community Church has been one of the most influential churches in America over the last thirty years. Willow, through its association, has promoted a vision of church that is big, programmatic, and comprehensive. This vision has been heavily influenced by the methods of secular business. James Twitchell, in his new book Shopping for God, reports that outside Bill Hybels' office hangs a poster that says: "What is our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider value?" Directly or indirectly, this philosophy of ministry - church should be a big box with programs for people at every level of spiritual maturity to consume and engage - has impacted every evangelical church in the country.
So what happens when leaders of Willow Creek stand up and say, "We made a mistake"?
Not long ago Willow released its findings from a multiple year qualitative study of its ministry. Basically, they wanted to know what programs and activities of the church were actually helping people mature spiritually and which were not. The results were published in a book, Reveal: Where Are You?, co-authored by Greg Hawkins, executive pastor of Willow Creek. Hybels called the findings "earth shaking," "ground breaking," and "mind blowing."
If you'd like to get a synopsis of the research you can watch a video with Greg Hawkins here. And Bill Hybels' reactions, recorded at last summer's Leadership Summit, can be seen here. Both videos are worth watching in their entirety, but below are few highlights.
In the Hawkins' video he says, "Participation is a big deal. We believe the more people participating in these sets of activities, with higher levels of frequency, it will produce disciples of Christ." This has been Willow's philosophy of ministry in a nutshell. The church creates programs/activities. People participate in these activities. The outcome is spiritual maturity. In a moment of stinging honesty Hawkins says, "I know it might sound crazy but that's how we do it in churches. We measure levels of participation."
Having put so many of their eggs into the program-driven church basket, you can understand their shock when the research revealed that "Increasing levels of participation in these sets of activities does NOT predict whether someone's becoming more of a disciple of Christ. It does NOT predict whether they love God more or they love people more."
Speaking at the Leadership Summit, Hybels summarized the findings this way:
Some of the stuff that we have put millions of dollars into thinking it would really help our people grow and develop spiritually, when the data actually came back, it wasn't helping people that much. Other things that we didn't put that much money into and didn't put much staff against is stuff our people are crying out for.
Having spent thirty years creating and promoting a multi-million dollar organization driven by programs and measuring participation, and convincing other church leaders to do the same, you can see why Hybels called this research "the wake-up call" of his adult life.
Hybels confesses:
We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ?self feeders.' We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.
In other words, spiritual growth doesn't happen best by becoming dependent on elaborate church programs but through the age old spiritual practices of prayer, bible reading, and relationships. And, ironically, these basic disciplines do not require multi-million dollar facilities and hundreds of staff to manage.
Does this mark the end of Willow's thirty years of influence over the American church? Not according to Hawkins:
Our dream is that we fundamentally change the way we do church. That we take out a clean sheet of paper and we rethink all of our old assumptions. Replace it with new insights. Insights that are informed by research and rooted in Scripture. Our dream is really to discover what God is doing and how he's asking us to transform this planet.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Importance of History to Our Faith and Life
Below is a great article that I have read today, reminding all Christians on the need to remember and make sense of the past, and its relationship to the present. We are all people with a past - we are who we are, due to the events and experience that took place in the past. Strangely, this importance was never talked about in the previous church I was in. As a result, we miss certain deep truths of life and our understanding of our faith in God when we failed to comtemplate make sense of the past happenings, be it in church ministry, work or our personal lives. To those who only have time to serve God but never anytime to reflect, this article is directed towards you.
People With a Past
by Jill Carattini, managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia
I confess that I have never been a student especially enticed by the subject of history. Whether studying the history of the Peloponnesian War or the history of Jell-O, I associate the work with tedious memorization and an endless anthology of static dates and detail. But this stance toward history, coupled with our cultural obsession with the present moment, is a powerful force to be reckoned with and an outlook I have come to recognize as dangerous. It is a thought perhaps to take captive, lest it produce in me a sense of forgetfulness about who I am and from where I have come.
Richard Weaver is one among many who have warned about the dangers of presentism, the cultural fixation with the current moment and snobbery toward the past. More than fifty years ago, Weaver warned of the discombobulating effects of living with an appetite for the present alone:
"Recurring to Plato's observation that a philosopher must have a good memory, let us inquire whether the continuous dissemination, of news by the media under discussion does not produce the provincial in time. The constant stream of sensation, eulogized as lively propagation of what the public wants to hear, discourages the pulling-together of events from past time into a whole for contemplation."(1)
Weaver contends that carelessness about history is in fact a type of amnesia, producing a mindset that is both aimless and confused. For how can we understand the current cultural moment without at least some understanding of the moments that have preceded it? History is not a static bundle of dates and details anymore than our own lives are static bundles of the same. But instead, history is the vital form in which we both take account of our past and fathom the present before us.
This point was driven home for me in a church history class full of future pastors. We were studying the fourth century, which was privy to a great influx of believers who left their communities behind and fled to the desert in search of solitude. To a group of people called and passionate about the church as a community, the great lengths some of these pilgrims went to live solitary lives was hard to understand. Words like "abandonment" and "responsibility" readily crept into our conversations.
But imperative to understanding this flight of believers (and arguably to understanding a part of our own story) is recognizing that this history did not come to pass in a vacuum. Up until the fourth century, the church had been under fierce persecution. Torture and martyrdom were prevalent; believers were recurrently in danger and often met in secrecy. When Christianity was suddenly made legal in 313, the church found itself in the midst of an entirely different set of challenges. People were now coming to Christianity in droves, and for the first time in the life of the church, nominal belief and careless faith was a reality. In this historical context, pursuit of the desert life was an expression of faith in response to faithless times. For the dynamically committed Christian, the desert was viewed as a way to not only secure and live out one's convictions, but to preserve the faith itself.
We may not understand the motives of those who chose to live their lives in caves of prayer and solitude, but I believe it is quite possible that God continues to set apart remnants who stand in the midst of time "like dew from the Lord, like showers on the grass, which do not depend upon people or wait for any mortal" (Micah 5:7). Refusing to be historians, we miss truths such as these. We are people with a past that locates us in the very story we live today.
For the Christian, history is all the more a sense of hallowed ground, for it is ground where God has walked and faith is kept. We believe that history resides in the able hands of the one who made us to live within time. We believe that who we are today has everything to do with events we have not seen ourselves. And we live as a people called both to remember and to be ready, for we look to the author of the entire story, who was and is and is to come.
(1) Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 111.
People With a Past
by Jill Carattini, managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia
I confess that I have never been a student especially enticed by the subject of history. Whether studying the history of the Peloponnesian War or the history of Jell-O, I associate the work with tedious memorization and an endless anthology of static dates and detail. But this stance toward history, coupled with our cultural obsession with the present moment, is a powerful force to be reckoned with and an outlook I have come to recognize as dangerous. It is a thought perhaps to take captive, lest it produce in me a sense of forgetfulness about who I am and from where I have come.
Richard Weaver is one among many who have warned about the dangers of presentism, the cultural fixation with the current moment and snobbery toward the past. More than fifty years ago, Weaver warned of the discombobulating effects of living with an appetite for the present alone:
"Recurring to Plato's observation that a philosopher must have a good memory, let us inquire whether the continuous dissemination, of news by the media under discussion does not produce the provincial in time. The constant stream of sensation, eulogized as lively propagation of what the public wants to hear, discourages the pulling-together of events from past time into a whole for contemplation."(1)
Weaver contends that carelessness about history is in fact a type of amnesia, producing a mindset that is both aimless and confused. For how can we understand the current cultural moment without at least some understanding of the moments that have preceded it? History is not a static bundle of dates and details anymore than our own lives are static bundles of the same. But instead, history is the vital form in which we both take account of our past and fathom the present before us.
This point was driven home for me in a church history class full of future pastors. We were studying the fourth century, which was privy to a great influx of believers who left their communities behind and fled to the desert in search of solitude. To a group of people called and passionate about the church as a community, the great lengths some of these pilgrims went to live solitary lives was hard to understand. Words like "abandonment" and "responsibility" readily crept into our conversations.
But imperative to understanding this flight of believers (and arguably to understanding a part of our own story) is recognizing that this history did not come to pass in a vacuum. Up until the fourth century, the church had been under fierce persecution. Torture and martyrdom were prevalent; believers were recurrently in danger and often met in secrecy. When Christianity was suddenly made legal in 313, the church found itself in the midst of an entirely different set of challenges. People were now coming to Christianity in droves, and for the first time in the life of the church, nominal belief and careless faith was a reality. In this historical context, pursuit of the desert life was an expression of faith in response to faithless times. For the dynamically committed Christian, the desert was viewed as a way to not only secure and live out one's convictions, but to preserve the faith itself.
We may not understand the motives of those who chose to live their lives in caves of prayer and solitude, but I believe it is quite possible that God continues to set apart remnants who stand in the midst of time "like dew from the Lord, like showers on the grass, which do not depend upon people or wait for any mortal" (Micah 5:7). Refusing to be historians, we miss truths such as these. We are people with a past that locates us in the very story we live today.
For the Christian, history is all the more a sense of hallowed ground, for it is ground where God has walked and faith is kept. We believe that history resides in the able hands of the one who made us to live within time. We believe that who we are today has everything to do with events we have not seen ourselves. And we live as a people called both to remember and to be ready, for we look to the author of the entire story, who was and is and is to come.
(1) Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 111.
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