This weekend, on November 30^th, I will mark four years of blogging. And just today, I’ve discovered that I’ve been nominated for “Best Religion/Philosophy Blog” in Canada. Wow. And voting closes tomorrow, so what can I say? Vote now? I’m kinda late getting my “campaign” started, but I only just found out I was even in the race at all. Shows how oblivious I can be — but thanks, whoever nominated me. I even get a fancy badge of honour to display. Now, in the unlikely event that I actually make the cut into the final round of voting, I’ll need y’all to go and vote again next week, okay?

Mike Todd caught this the other day as well… Seth Godin asks, What happens when we organize? Seth opens his post with the observation that “Most power occurs because one side is better organized than the other.” This is a good description of an imbalanced power structure such as happens in the church where a divide exists between clergy and laity (Seth gives other examples). These structures are being upset in the present changing environment where Internet tools and a shift in values toward egalitarian ideals drive collaboration and spontaneous organization around a goal rather than simply falling into a rigid power or authority structure. Books such as Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us and Clay Shirkey’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations fill out the rest of the picture. The message is that the power structures are beginning to crumble under the realization that they really aren’t necessary, and their reaction to the changing milieu appears to be confusion — for the most part, there’s an instinctive desire to oppose this new disorganized organization, this “grassroots” movement that threatens to upset everything. Unfortunately for them, they are ill-equipped to meet this challenge; Ori Brafmann and Rod Beckstrom’s book The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations gives a good explanation of why this is so. Boiling it down to a single sentences though, one might latch onto the one which Seth Godin ended his post with, as I believe it to be highly accurate: “The system doesn’t know what to do with a movement.” They’re as ill-prepared for what’s coming at them as “Officer Opie” was.

A little while back I decided that I would like to feature a few guest-bloggers from time to time, and that I should share some of the books in my review pile around so that a few others might be able to produce some short reviews and reactions, lightening my book review load in the process. Like the other day, today’s post is a book review guest post, combining both ideas. This one is by Dianna, a friend and journeymate. We’ve known her and her husband for more than 20 years now, and we not only share a CLB, but also our current journey in a home-based small group church.

Today I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s latest book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us. I began over breakfast in a local hotel restaurant, where I’ve been known to show up for breakfast with no companion other than a book. (Today it was also a prelude to an oil change.) As I read along quite enjoying myself, I arrived at page 79.

Fear, Faith, and Religion

People who challenge and then change the status quo, do something that’s quite difficult. They overcome the resistance of people they trust, people they work for, people in their community. Every step along the way, it’s far easier to stop and accept the thanks of the balloon factory workers than it is to persist and risk the humiliation of failure.

On Friday I talked about Recasting Your Story and raised the question of whether the retelling of our story helps distance us from its pain and allow us to move on. This is an important question for church-leavers and I had expected a bit more dialogue on the subject… perhaps it’s not a good question for a Friday afternoon, especially based on a metaphor. I would encourage a further review of the post, as it ends with some unanswered questions which are followed by two comments which only raise more questions. For instance, if retelling our story helps remove the pain, does the retelling of hope have a negative effect? Why or why not? Friday’s post included an excerpt from Paulo Coelho’s book, The Zahir, in which the author says “I try to understand why people are so afraid of changing.” For this discussion, there is another relevant excerpt in the book which I discovered Coelho also talks about on his blog when he mentions the concept of “the accommodating point.” He writes,

Someone had recommended Paulo Coelho’s books to me, so I picked up a couple of his titles and this week I read through The Zahir. On the whole it feels like he’s telling a story infused with a worldview, with the story being just a vehicle for the ideas, a kind of mystical interpretation of love as a force in the world. At times this wore on me because I wasn’t completely buying the worldview but I wanted to hear the story, to make it move faster… which is ironic, given theme the book. It’s a quick read though, and setting aside major portions of its theme, I wanted to appropriate an excerpt that had me thinking in metaphoric terms. Back in January 2005 I wrote some early thoughts about The Importance of Story, and more recently I wrote a piece about Coffeeshop Poets and the ways in which an older story was rejected in favour of a new one.

I’ve previously mentioned Barb Orlowski’s research among people who have left institutional church — there’s still time to participate in a brief confidential survey, and she’s doing a final call for assistance in her study. Noteworthy in this connection is a story on her work in the Winnipeg Free Press with some introductory material on spiritual abuse.

Christine Sine put me onto an upcoming conference in Seattle at the end of February. It does look interesting; there are a lot of emerging conferences around, but this one seems to be attempting to engage missional, emerging, monastic & multicultural “streams,” or should we say “conversations”? That’s the gist of what they’re attempting to do anyway, and the list of participants includes a healthy cross-section of emergent and missional and others who are seeking to reimagine church, recover lost practices, redefine spiritual formation, or engage culture. Lots of good stuff attempting to change the face of our faith expressions for the better, and they make an interesting intersection when they’re brought together. I’m not likely to be able to attend, but after my brief overview, I like the shape of the discussion.

I introduced the concept of Shalom yesterday as I was concluding my last post on the missional order. I should take this opportunity to explain that my many musings on this subject over the past week-plus, although they are tagged “missional order”, do not represent the formal outcome of or substance of discussions in our gathering at Seabeck. Many of these themes emerged at one or more points in the discussion, but the thoughts I present are my own ruminations arising in these post-Seabeck weeks. Of course, many of my thoughts go back to much older ruminations, and I’m busy wrapping them all up in this series. A series, mind you, which I never intended to be a series. Nonetheless, I’ve summarized it as such in a sidebar below. Back to Shalom, a concept which also makes an appearance in Luke 10, where a blessing of peace is extended to those from whom the 70 sought hospitality, and the notion of “a people of peace” arises in the reception of the greeting of peace.

When I left off, I had just been quoting from page 1 of Walter Brueggemann’s, The Land: Place As Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, and we noted on the walk of the Christian faith, we are not the only ones in places of exile. We left off saying that we can least afford to lose the promises we’ve been made which connect who we are with where we’re bound — the three things our stories are to remind us of while we’re in exile. We’re intent on remembering who we are, which connects us with our story and the promises made to us — and in connecting with the past, we are assured of a future. Part of that is illustrated in our interconnectedness with our family. Somewhere there’s a photograph when I was an infant, with me and my mother and my grandmother and my great-grandmother and my great-great-grandfather that was printed in the newspaper under the heading “Five Generations.” Things like this were once taken note of, especially in smaller communities. We’re down to just three generations now, but someplace we have photographs of my kids with their great-grandfather. We have old family photographs copied, someplace, with names written on the back as best anyone could remember who they were, knowing that if we didn’t write them down now, they’d be lost. (Not this photo!) And we have some stories. Connecting with the past is important for a people in exile.

I’ve been working up to this all week, and I doubt I can cover it off in a single entry, but let’s see what we come up with, shall we? Just piecing together some themes following the Seabeck Gathering sponsored by Allelon, I have begun to consider The Role of The Rule (and other disciplines) as part of The Subversive Nature of the Ordinary in helping to keep us on the path during a mapless quest or an aimful wandering — a Peregrinatio. Len picked up a theme from me of covenant renewal, which I commented further upon, saying I didn’t plan to hit the theme until today, that I was just foreshadowing. Well, the pressure’s on.