Sorry all for being so absent.  I am visiting my homeland and am a busy boy...think about having 16 Christmas DAys in a row and you you will get close to the experience!!  Anyhow, I have neglected my blogging duties and I hope you forgive me. 

Recently I got this manifesto developed by two friends Len Sweet and Frank Viola.  If you have read mine and Mike Frost's new book reJesus, then you will understand why I put it here.  I sign!

A Magna Carta
for Restoring the Supremacy of
Jesus Christ
a.k.a.
A Jesus Manifesto
for the 21st Century Church
by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola
 
Christians have made the gospel about so many things … things other than Christ.
Jesus Christ is the gravitational pull that brings everything together and gives them significance, reality, and meaning. Without him, all things lose their value. Without him, all things are but detached pieces floating around in space.
It is possible to emphasize a spiritual truth, value, virtue, or gift, yet miss Christ . . . who is the embodiment and incarnation of all spiritual truth, values, virtues, and gifts.
Seek a truth, a value, a virtue, or a spiritual gift, and you have obtained something dead.
Seek Christ, embrace Christ, know Christ, and you have touched him who is Life. And in him resides all Truth, Values, Virtues and Gifts in living color. Beauty has its meaning in the beauty of Christ, in whom is found all that makes us lovely and loveable.
What is Christianity? It is Christ. Nothing more. Nothing less. Christianity is not an ideology. Christianity is not a philosophy. Christianity is the “good news” that Beauty, Truth and Goodness are found in a person. Biblical community is founded and found on the connection to that person. Conversion is more than a change in direction; it’s a change in connection. Jesus’ use of the ancient Hebrew word shubh, or its Aramaic equivalent, to call for “repentance” implies not viewing God from a distance, but entering into a relationship where God is command central of the human connection.
In that regard, we feel a massive disconnection in the church today. Thus this manifesto.
We believe that the major disease of the church today is JDD: Jesus Deficit Disorder. The person of Jesus is increasingly politically incorrect, and is being replaced by the language of “justice,” “the kingdom of God,” “values,” and “leadership principles.”
In this hour, the testimony that we feel God has called us to bear centers on the primacy of the Lord Jesus Christ. Specifically . . .
1. The center and circumference of the Christian life is none other than the person of Christ. All other things, including things related to him and about him, are eclipsed by the sight of his peerless worth. Knowing Christ is Eternal Life. And knowing him profoundly, deeply, and in reality, as well as experiencing his unsearchable riches, is the chief pursuit of our lives, as it was for the first Christians. God is not so much about fixing things that have gone wrong in our lives as finding us in our brokenness and giving us Christ.
2. Jesus Christ cannot be separated from his teachings. Aristotle says to his disciples, “Follow my teachings.” Socrates says to his disciples, “Follow my teachings.” Buddha says to his disciples, “Follow my meditations.” Confucius says to his disciples, “Follow my sayings.” Muhammad says to his disciples, “Follow my noble pillars.” Jesus says to his disciples, “Follow me.” In all other religions, a follower can follow the teachings of its founder without having a relationship with that founder. Not so with Jesus Christ. The teachings of Jesus cannot be separated from Jesus himself. Jesus Christ is still alive and he embodies his teachings. It is a profound mistake, therefore, to treat Christ as simply the founder of a set of moral, ethical, or social teaching. The Lord Jesus and his teaching are one. The Medium and the Message are One. Christ is the incarnation of the Kingdom of God and the Sermon on the Mount.
3. God’s grand mission and eternal purpose in the earth and in heaven centers in Christ . . . both the individual Christ (the Head) and the corporate Christ (the Body). This universe is moving towards one final goal – the fullness of Christ where He shall fill all things with himself. To be truly missional, then, means constructing one’s life and ministry on Christ. He is both the heart and bloodstream of God’s plan. To miss this is to miss the plot; indeed, it is to miss everything.
4. Being a follower of Jesus does not involve imitation so much as it does implantation and impartation. Incarnation–the notion that God connects to us in baby form and human touch—is the most shocking doctrine of the Christian religion. The incarnation is both once-and-for-all and ongoing, as the One “who was and is to come” now is and lives his resurrection life in and through us. Incarnation doesn’t just apply to Jesus; it applies to every one of us. Of course, not in the same sacramental way. But close. We have been given God’s “Spirit” which makes Christ “real” in our lives. We have been made, as Peter puts it, “partakers of the divine nature.” How, then, in the face of so great a truth can we ask for toys and trinkets? How can we lust after lesser gifts and itch for religious and spiritual thingys? We’ve been touched from on high by the fires of the Almighty and given divine life. A life that has passed through death – the very resurrection life of the Son of God himself. How can we not be fired up?
To put it in a question: What was the engine, or the accelerator, of the Lord’s amazing life? What was the taproot or the headwaters of his outward behavior? It was this: Jesus lived by an indwelling Father. After his resurrection, the passage has now moved. What God the Father was to Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ is to you and to me. He’s our indwelling Presence, and we share in the life of Jesus’ own relationship with the Father. There is a vast ocean of difference between trying to compel Christians to imitate Jesus and learning how to impart an implanted Christ. The former only ends up in failure and frustration. The latter is the gateway to life and joy in our daying and our dying. We stand with Paul: “Christ lives in me.” Our life is Christ. In him do we live, breathe, and have our being. “What would Jesus do?” is not Christianity. Christianity asks: “What is Christ doing through me … through us? And how is Jesus doing it?” Following Jesus means “trust and obey” (respond), and living by his indwelling life through the power of the Spirit.
5. The “Jesus of history” cannot be disconnected from the “Christ of faith.” The Jesus who walked the shores of Galilee is the same person who indwells the church today. There is no disconnect between the Jesus of Mark’s Gospel and the incredible, all-inclusive, cosmic Christ of Paul’s letter to the Colossians. The Christ who lived in the first century has a pre-existence before time. He also has a post-existence after time. He is Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End, A and Z, all at the same time. He stands in the future and at the end of time at the same moment that He indwells every child of God. Failure to embrace these paradoxical truths has created monumental problems and has diminished the greatness of Christ in the eyes of God’s people.
6. It’s possible to confuse “the cause” of Christ with the person of Christ. When the early church said “Jesus is Lord,” they did not mean “Jesus is my core value.” Jesus isn’t a cause; he is a real and living person who can be known, loved, experienced, enthroned and embodied. Focusing on his cause or mission doesn’t equate focusing on or following him. It’s all too possible to serve “the god” of serving Jesus as opposed to serving him out of an enraptured heart that’s been captivated by his irresistible beauty and unfathomable love. Jesus led us to think of God differently, as relationship, as the God of all relationship.
7. Jesus Christ was not a social activist nor a moral philosopher. To pitch him that way is to drain his glory and dilute his excellence. Justice apart from Christ is a dead thing. The only battering ram that can storm the gates of hell is not the cry of Justice, but the name of Jesus. Jesus Christ is the embodiment of Justice, Peace, Holiness, Righteousness. He is the sum of all spiritual things, the “strange attractor” of the cosmos. When Jesus becomes an abstraction, faith loses its reproductive power. Jesus did not come to make bad people good. He came to make dead people live.
8. It is possible to confuse an academic knowledge or theology about Jesus with a personal knowledge of the living Christ himself. These two stand as far apart as do the hundred thousand million galaxies. The fullness of Christ can never be accessed through the frontal lobe alone. Christian faith claims to be rational, but also to reach out to touch ultimate mysteries. The cure for a big head is a big heart.
Jesus does not leave his disciples with CliffsNotes for a systematic theology. He leaves his disciples with breath and body.
Jesus does not leave his disciples with a coherent and clear belief system by which to love God and others. Jesus gives his disciples wounds to touch and hands to heal.
Jesus does not leave his disciples with intellectual belief or a “Christian worldview.” He leaves his disciples with a relational faith.
Christians don’t follow a book. Christians follow a person, and this library of divinely inspired books we call “The Holy Bible” best help us follow that person. The Written Word is a map that leads us to The Living Word. Or as Jesus himself put it, “All Scripture testifies of me.” The Bible is not the destination; it’s a compass that points to Christ, heaven’s North Star.
The Bible does not offer a plan or a blueprint for living. The “good news” was not a new set of laws, or a new set of ethical injunctions, or a new and better PLAN. The “good news” was the story of a person’s life, as reflected in The Apostle’s Creed. The Mystery of Faith proclaims this narrative: “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.” The meaning of Christianity does not come from allegiance to complex theological doctrines, but a passionate love for a way of living in the world that revolves around following Jesus, who taught that love is what makes life a success . . . not wealth or health or anything else: but love. And God is love.
9. Only Jesus can transfix and then transfigure the void at the heart of the church. Jesus Christ cannot be separated from his church. While Jesus is distinct from his Bride, he is not separate from her. She is in fact his very own Body in the earth. God has chosen to vest all of power, authority, and life in the living Christ. And God in Christ is only known fully in and through his church. (As Paul said, “The manifold wisdom of God – which is Christ – is known through the ekklesia.”)
The Christian life, therefore, is not an individual pursuit. It’s a corporate journey. Knowing Christ and making him known is not an individual prospect. Those who insist on flying life solo will be brought to earth, with a crash. Thus Christ and his church are intimately joined and connected. What God has joined together, let no person put asunder. We were made for life with God; our only happiness is found in life with God. And God’s own pleasure and delight is found therein as well.
10. In a world which sings, “Oh, who is this Jesus?” and a church which sings, “Oh, let’s all be like Jesus,” who will sing with lungs of leather, “Oh, how we love Jesus!”
If Jesus could rise from the dead, we can at least rise from our bed, get off our couches and pews, and respond to the Lord’s resurrection life within us, joining Jesus in what he’s up to in the world. We call on others to join us—not in removing ourselves from planet Earth, but to plant our feet more firmly on the Earth while our spirits soar in the heavens of God’s pleasure and purpose. We are not of this world, but we live in this world for the Lord’s rights and interests. We, collectively, as the ekklesia of God, are Christ in and to this world.
May God have a people on this earth who are a people of Christ, through Christ, and for Christ. A people of the cross. A people who are consumed with God’s eternal passion, which is to make his Son preeminent, supreme, and the head over all things visible and invisible. A people who have discovered the touch of the Almighty in the face of his glorious Son. A people who wish to know only Christ and him crucified, and to let everything else fall by the wayside. A people who are laying hold of his depths, discovering his riches, touching his life, and receiving his love, and making HIM in all of his unfathomable glory known to others.
The two of us may disagree about many things—be they ecclesiology, eschatology, soteriology, not to mention economics, globalism and politics.
But in our two most recent books—From Eternity to Here and So Beautiful—we have sounded forth a united trumpet. These books are the Manifests to this Manifesto. They each present the vision that has captured our hearts and that we wish to impart to the Body of Christ— “This ONE THING I know” (Jn.9:25) that is the ONE THING that unites us all:
Jesus the Christ.
Christians don’t follow Christianity; Christians follow Christ.
Christians don’t preach themselves; Christians proclaim Christ.
Christians don’t point people to core values; Christians point people to the cross.
Christians don’t preach about Christ: Christians preach Christ.
Over 300 years ago a German pastor wrote a hymn that built around the Name above all names:
Ask ye what great thing I know,
that delights and stirs me so?
What the high reward I win?
Whose the name I glory in?
Jesus Christ, the crucified.
This is that great thing I know;
this delights and stirs me so:
faith in him who died to save,
His who triumphed o’er the grave:
Jesus Christ, the crucified.
—
Jesus Christ – the crucified, resurrected, enthroned, triumphant, living Lord.
He is our Pursuit, our Passion, and our Life.
Amen.

Having breathed new life into organizations, how do we sustain it? Paradoxically, the answer lies in ‘disciplines’.  This is what I have called ‘practices’ in earlier posts. The disciplines help organizations sustain disequilibrium, thrive in near-chaos conditions, and foster self-organization. If taken to heart, they can also foster changes at the individual level. Indeed, they must be internalized if their far-reaching benefits are to be fully realized. 

According to Pascale et.al., There are seven critical disciplines. These are:
1.    Infuse an intricate understanding of what drives organizational success.
2.    Insist on uncompromising straight talk.
3.    Manage from the future.
4.    Reward inventive accountability.
5.    Harness adversity by learning from prior mistakes.
6.    Foster relentless discomfort.
7.    Cultivate reciprocity between the individual and the organization.

Each of the seven disciplines can stand alone, but enormous power exists in the relationship among them.

From a previous blog.  but I thought this would be entirely appropriate given our topic on equilibrium. 

In reJesus, I have devoted a section to the exploration of the absolute and abiding role of Jesus in the life of faith and in the Christian community. I will eventually get to blogging around the book more systematically, but needless to say that I am now absolutely convinced that in order to ‘(re)find ourselves’ at any given point in time, we need to return to Jesus and constantly line ourselves up with what he was on about. He is the Founder after all.

Why do we need to constantly reboot back to Jesus? It seems to me that the problem is that his people have a nasty habit of pushing Jesus out of his own community. Of displacing him. Think this is wrong-headed? Well, even in the NT itself we have a scene of Jesus knocking at the door of the church asking to be let in (yes, Rev.3 is not about personal evangelism after all.) Question: What is he doing outside his church when he is meant to be Lord of the church?! It seems that it didn’t take long for the church to remove Jesus from his rightful place in his community.

But why do we do this when all our confessions call him ‘Lord?’ Well I think it is because Jesus is always very difficult to deal with, and religious-minded people really do struggle with his form of ‘religion.’ Actually what Jesus taught cannot properly be called religion at all, in fact Ellul rightly calls it ‘anti-religion’ precisely because it undoes all religion. It effectively dissoves any need for a complex mediating institution with all its priestly/churchly paraphrenalia, and opens up the God-relation to all who will repond direclty to its call. That’s why the religious folk hated him. He de-legitimizes everything they stand for (priesthood and institution) and opens it up to the people. they must take him out.

Here’s what I think: Christianity minus Jesus equalls religion. And this happens in more churches than we are given to believe. We marginalise Jesus all the time and in so many subtle ways. And we do this because dealing directly with Jesus (or God for that matter) is always a disturbing thing to a sin-wracked people who would prefer a stable, more controllable, religion. Like all living systems, churches seek equilibrium. We want to settle down. We want to bolt down the Revelation and make God understandable, accesable, and therefore more controllable–a ‘God-on-tap.’ Sociologists call this ‘the routinization of charisma’ (google that!) and it is written through the structures of all religions including our own.

But Jesus disturbs our equilbrium. He won’t be controlled. He won’t be handled only by priests and professional religionists. He won’t be domesticated. He is Lord! Yes, Jesus is our disequalibrium. And the way back to an authentic Christianity is simply to put Jesus back into the equation. Christianity plus Jesus equals World Transformation.

Most of you know I am somewhat obsessed with the role that the Incarnation should play on our approach to mission.  Here is an edit...a cut...from my (and Deb's) book on the Incarnation>>incarnational thing.  We have to take it out...a bit too technical and too long for the chapter.  So I thought that we should not 'waste' the work...

As evangelical Christians, we have tended to focus on the salvation-events associated with Jesus' death, resurrection, and return. Now while we fully affirm the orthodox understanding of these events, we believe they can only be properly understood and are meaningful only in the light of that which precedes them: namely, the Incarnation. We must take the whole phenomenon of Jesus seriously, not just cherry-pick the elements that suit our theological sentiments.

The fact that God became a man in Jesus is one of the most remarkable of all events and should inform everything Christian. For one thing, the humanity of God in Jesus gives the gift of our own humanity back to us, because in him we have the most perfect expression of all humanity. Now we know what God wants his people to be like.

"To be truly redeemed by Christ is, therefore, to impose on oneself the task of imitating him.  As man Jesus is my model because as God he is my Redeemer.  Christianity can be defined as a faith together with a corresponding way of life, imitation. (Louis Dupre,  Kierkegaard as Theologian, (Sheed and Ward, 1963), 171.)

A loss of a sense of the humanity of God directly results in the loss of our own sense of humanity, and much of Christian history and spirituality has been inhumane as a result.

However, the Incarnation also shows us how God engages his world. He does not overwhelm us with a cosmic display of awesome power (he certainly could have), but rather he comes to us, hidden, in vulnerable humanity. He invites us to respond to him out of our freedom—no bullying, no forced decisions, but rather drawing us in his love and grace, through the sheer power of sacrifice. This too has massive implications for discipleship and mission. If the Incarnation sets the way in which God engages the world, then it also provides the primary ‘model’ of the way we should engage the world.

The Incarnation  reminds us that, in the New Testament and beginning with Jesus’ earthly ministry, God’s love was expressed in understandable ways. “The Word became flesh so that flesh might encounter and respond to it: “we beheld his glory.” Jesus translated the message of the kingdom into a language that could be grasped by a tax collector and a prostitute, and leper and a Samaritan, and learned Pharisee and an uneducated fishermen.”   Paul, following this approach, was able to become a Jew to the Jew and a Greek to the Greek for the sake of gospel witness.  And the Jerusalem church had to learn that there can be a faith community in Samaria that is authentically Christian but distinctive from the Christian community in its Jewish context.  Darrel Guder can therefore rightfully say that “What the early Church learned and affirmed is essential for...incarnational mission today. Incarnational witness is possible because of the fundamental translatability of the gospel into every arena of human existence.” (Darrel Guder,   The Incarnation  and the Church’s Witness,  (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1999)  page, 51-2.)

But all this tracks back to what Jesus started in the first place.  the Incarnation sets the pattern and Jesus himself initiates the mission in such a way that it would be possible to carry this message beyond Israel to all the nations. He deliberately trains his disciples so that, in their mission to the nations, they will be able to translate the gospel into every culture in distinctive and appropriate ways. “That is the necessary by-product of making disciples of all the nations.  That means that one will not have to become a practicing Jew in order to follow him. The word will continue to become flesh in all the diverse ways in which humanity forms itself into distinctive cultures. The story will be told in every town, which is what began at Pentecost.”   With the Incarnation shaping our understanding of God and firing our imaginations, everything about how we engage the various people in our world changes. 

One of the most radical things that any of us can do to be incarnational is both simple and profound—to be like Jesus. We are, in all contexts and all circumstances to bear witness to both his name and his message. This is after all what we are meant to be on about. And as Kinnaman and Lyons note, even non-believers understand this. “When they (outsiders), see Christians not acting like Jesus, they quickly conclude that the group deserves the ‘unchristian’ label. Like a corrupted computer file or bad photocopy, Christianity, they say, is no longer in pure form, and so they reject it.” (Kinnaman  & Lyons, Unchristian, (Grand Rapids, Baker 2007), 29)

The fourth principle of a living systems approach to organization teaches us that merely enhancing the effectiveness of an existing organization seldom yields radical innovation. At best, it only optimizes the existing organization.   In many ways, this is what church growth theory did for the institutional church in the 60’s and beyond. It maximized the prevailing model but did not fundamentally alter it—it remains gripped by the inherited paradigm or systems story.  Therefore “…optimization founders because efforts to direct living systems, beyond very general goals, are counterproductive. Like herding the proverbial butterfly, living things can be ushered forth with reasonable expectation of progress but they do this in their own unique way. This seldom conforms to the linear path that we have in mind.”  At SMRC we found trying to lead our 20-something community was akin to herding cats—very hard to direct, control, and predict and we had to adjust our approach to organization and leadership.  This adjustment led to some amazing creativity and innovation as we surfed the edge of chaos.

“In fitness landscape terms , it is impossible to get to a distant and higher fitness peak (discover radical breakthroughs) by climbing still higher on the peak one is already on (optimizing).” Or, as previously stated in The Shaping of Things to Come, if one wants to dig a hole in another place it is no good digging the same hole deeper and better.     Rather if we wishes to activate genuine innovation in the organizations we serve, we need “…to descend into the unknown, disregard the proven cause-and-effect formulas, and defy the odds. We need to embark on a journey of sequential disturbances and adjustments, not a lock-step march along a predetermined path. We may only be able to see as far as our headlights, but proceeding in this fashion can still bring us to our journey's destination.”
.

The third principle of nature, self-organization and emergence, captures two sides of the same coin of life.   “Self-organization is the tendency of certain (but not all) systems operating on the edge of chaos to shift to a new state when their constituent elements generate unlikely combinations. When systems become sufficiently populated and properly interconnected, the interactions assemble themselves into a new order: proteins into cells, cells into organs, organs into organisms, organisms into societies. Simple parts networked together can undergo a metamorphosis.”  A single fire ant can't possibly drive off an attacking wasp but a whole nest of them are deadly to organisms much larger than themselves. But this can be demonstrated right under your hat…a single brain cell is useless by itself - but millions of them together can perform analytic miracles the likes of which we have yet to fathom.

Most change in complex systems is emergent; that is to say it comes about as a result of the free (and often informal) interactions between the various ‘agents’ in the system. In an organization the agents are people—themselves complex systems. Complexity theory suggests that when there is enough connectivity between them and the complexity reaches a critical point, emergence is likely to occur spontaneously. 

Just so that we can get this concept nailed down, let me quote Roxburgh and Romanuk again, “The principle of emergence was developed to explain the ways organisms develop and adapt in differing environments.  Contrary to popular notions that they develop through some top-down, pre-determined, well planned strategy, emergence theory shows that complex systems develop from the bottom up.  Relatively simple clusters of cells, or groups of individuals, who individually don’t know how to address a complex challenge, when they come together will form, out of relatively simple interactions, an organizational culture of a higher complexity that can address these challenges. In other words the answers to the challenges faced by organisms and organizations in changing environments tend to emerge from the bottom up rather than get planned before hand from the top down.  This is why we describe missional leadership as the cultivation of environments within which the missional imagination of the people of God might emerge.”  To my mind, it is not just ‘missional imagination’ that must be cultivated, but rather Apostolic Genius which is latent in the people of God.  Try and remember this because it is a vital concept of leadership that is delved into in the chapter on Apostolic Environment.

Emergence is the outcome of all this: a new state or condition. At the end of this chapter I will present the case history of the Emerging Missional Church, but this phenomenon can appear just about anywhere a system allows the free flow of information and relationships and create the conditions of bottom up learning.  The classic example of our time is that of the World Wide Web. A few hundred, or even thousand computers linked together do not together make an emergent phenomenon.  But a few million computers interconnected around the sharing of information, in many ways like the structure of a human brain, creates an emergent entity with a distinct life of its own.  A colony of fire ants has very effective emergent capabilities and constitutes an organism weighing 20 kilograms, with 20 million mouths and stings. And a group of them on the march is just about impossible to stop.  A jazz ensemble creates an emergent sound that no one could imagine from listening to the individual instruments. Two hundred years ago, Adam Smith was on the scent of these insights. As one of the pioneers of the new discipline of economics, he called our attention to the "invisible hand" of the market economy and its aggregate effects as a commercial force. Smith recognized that individual choice did not explain everything since individuals, as members of communities, constantly generate relationships and dependencies that suit them. All of this, he noted, added up to a more complex emergent phenomenon called ‘an economy.’ It is a powerful ‘social force’, or an emergent structure, that seems to have a life of its own. And none of us could doubt the influence of the economy on our daily lives.