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April 2009

Tim Catchim

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April 22, 2009 by Tim Catchim Comments (1)

47. Sex, Sin and Distortion

I am reading through James D.G. Dunn's book The Theology of Paul the Apostle. It uses the book of Romans as a template, or launching pad for discussing his theology. Dunn has this really cool insight about sex and idolatry I want to share.

"Paul thus sees the effects of sin principally in the distortion of humankind's two principal instinctual drives. It is not the sexual drive which is most fundamental. But just as the sexual drive can be sublimated and redirected into other channels, so the instinctive urge to surrender oneself to a greater can be sublimated and redirected. When it is thus cut loose from the truth of God, it becomes more a destructive than a creative force. And when it combines with the instinctive urge to create new life, the power for distortion of life and subversion of society becomes almost uncontrollable." WOW! This is some good stuff. I had all kinds of epiphanies as I read this.

1. Some of the most destructive things that have been done to and by humanity were empowered by a distorted understanding of God. Evil can be packaged in religion. This is a typical strategy of the enemy to pervert good into evil.

2. Our sexual drive can be channeled into unhealthy expressions, just as religion and worship can. The powerful thing about sex and religion is that a lot of times they can be very deceptive. unhealthy religion and unhealthy sex can, in the beginning, appear to give you what you are after. It takes some time for you to pick up on the fact that they are not truly delivering what they promise. You get just enough of God, just enough order in your life with bad religion that you think you have the real deal. You get just enough pleasure, just enough intimacy to think you have reached the climax of sexual experience. The truth is,religion and sex can be wonderful, if they are allowed to be channelled by God to their healthy expressions.

3. I of course can not get away from an application to ecclesiology. Reification is when you treat something that is a product of human creation as if it existed all by itself apart from the activity of humans to bring it into existence. The best example of this is institutions. Institutions are created by people getting together to do things over a period of time. The oddity with institutions is that even those who create them can experience the institution as something that in turn acts back on them as a reality outside of themselves. They create an organization, and then experience that organization as an outside entity that in turn influences them and calls on them to promote and preserve it with their resources.

This plays into our discussion because in an effort to "create life" for God we start organizations. The thing about organizations is that we tend to treat them as if they are realities in and of themselves. We reify them and give them a concrete status. As such, it positions the organization to compete for loyalty to the ultimate reality, God. Institutions flirt with idolatry because they can easily supplant the reason for their existence. Institutions tend to gravitate towards self-preservation, a quality that is anti-thetical to Kingdom values of dying to self and giving away our resources to produce life. Institutions are great if they serve a purpose of being a catalyst for life, and not self preservation. It is a tension we must live with, but it is a tension we must be aware of if we are to allow God to use the natural for the supernatural.

Pioneers of new Frontiers

Tim Catchim

April 9, 2009 by Tim Catchim Comments (0)

23. The Life of an Apostle

The following is taken from Margaret Wheatley's website

The challenges of paradigm pioneers.

While those who want to support new leaders are struggling with the dilemma of scale, individual leaders face very challenging conditions. They act in isolation, often criticized, mocked, or ignored by the prevailing culture. They have no way of knowing there are many more like them, pioneers struggling with new ways of leading. It is a constant struggle to maintain focus and courage in the midst of such criticism and loneliness. And, there are other challenges for these pioneers. These arise from the dynamics of paradigm shifts and how people generally behave when confronted with a new world view.

New leaders must invent the future while dealing with the past.

In speaking with these new leaders, it is very clear that they refuse to carry the past into the future. They do not want to repeat the mistakes of the past having, in many cases, personally suffered from ineffective or brutal leadership. They want to work in new ways, but these new ways of organizing, the new processes for implementing change, have yet to be developed. It is their work to invent them, and so they do double duty. They must simultaneously invent a new process or organizing form, and also solve the problems created by past practices.

It is difficult to break with tradition

It is not easy to invent the new. It is difficult to break free of the training, history, and familiar practices of the prevailing culture. New leaders certainly know that bureaucracy doesn't work, that corruption destroys communities, that aid administered from the top down most often fails. They refuse to repeat these practices, but they, like all of us, have been raised in these traditional ways. Past habits of practice exert strong pressures. When crises mount and people feel fearful and overwhelmed, we default back to practices that are familiar, even if they are ineffective.

Supporters want them to look familiar.

Those with the means to support new leaders often complicate their pioneering work by wanting them to use familiar and traditional leadership processes. Those with resources often feel it too risky to support experiments with new practices. It feels safer to ask for traditional strategic plans, business plans, measurements, and reports, no matter what the context of the initiative. On the surface these seem to be important skill sets, but there is now substantial research demonstrating the failure of these methods to produce desired results in the most traditional of organizations. Perhaps supporters are risk-averse, perhaps they are unaware that these methods don't work. Whatever the reason, sponsors insist that pioneering leaders conform to the past. Resources are not available unless new leaders can demonstrate competency in familiar leadership practices, even those that have consistently failed to achieve sustained change.

And when resources are scarce, and competition grows among different projects, it is easy for pioneers to lose their way. Against their best judgment of what works in their community, they agree to comply with procedures and practices they know can't succeed. Over time, they fail, not from lack of vision or willingness to experiment, but because they have been held back from those experiments. We destroy these pioneers by insisting that they conform to the mistakes of the past.

There is no room for failure.

As pioneers, it is impossible to get it right the first time. No one has yet drawn accurate maps--explorers learn as they go. The maps that pioneers create will make it easy for large populations to migrate easily to the future, but their own explorations require great sacrifice and constant learning. Our present culture doesn't support this kind of experimentation. We want right answers quickly; we ask people to demonstrate success early in their ventures. We evaluate them based on short-term measures. We seldom give adequate time for the explorations and failures that are part of mapping a new territory. Instead of offering additional resources to their explorations and experiments, we abandon them in favor of safer projects that employ familiar, flawed means.

We want them to fail.

This is the greatest, unspoken difficulty pioneering leaders encounter. Society does not want them to succeed. To acknowledge their success means we will have to change. We will have to abandon the comfort of our familiar beliefs and practices. People naturally flee from such changes and thus, even as the old ways fail, we hold onto them more fiercely and apply them more zealously.In his seminal work on paradigms, Thomas Kuhn described the behavior of scientists when confronted with evidence that pointed to a truly new world view. (see The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1996, 1974) When the new evidence clearly demonstrated the need for a change in paradigms, scientists were observed working hard to make the evidence conform to their old worldview. In defense of the old, they would discard or reinterpret the data. (This was always done unconsciously.) And in the most startling instances, they actually would be blind to the new information-even with the data in front of them, they literally could not see it. For them, the new did not exist.

When the paradigm is changing, it is common to experience each of these dynamics. How often do we see an innovative approach, and then characterize it as traditional? How often do we observe new leadership practices and deny their existence? How often do we treat their successes as anomalies or as exceptions to the norm? How difficult is it for us to acknowledge them for what they are, radical departures from tradition, the first trail markers of our way to the future?

Mohammed Junus, the founder of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and pioneer of micro-lending to the poor, tells the story of trying to get support from traditional bankers for his first loans to poor people. Dr. Junus wanted to loan very small amounts of money (often not more than a few dollars) to give Bangla people the means to start their own businesses. Whatever evidence he presented, the bank's reply was always the same: "The poor are not credit worthy." Frustrated, he then loaned his own money to the poor, and was paid back on time. But the bank's response was the same. Even after several years of successful lending to the poor, Dr. Junus was still greeted with the same old belief, "The poor are not credit worthy." He realized that no matter how much evidence he might accumulate to demonstrate the contrary, the banks would never see his evidence nor change their beliefs. (Grameen has since loaned millions to the poor, and developed a model for micro-lending that is used worldwide.) http://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/supportingpioneerleaders.html

I couldn't help but think of apostles as I read this article.

Organic Leadership

Tim Catchim

April 8, 2009 by Tim Catchim Comments (0)

Trying to lead in an organic community is a different bag of tricks. I have the ghost of former leadership paradigms always creeping in. I love this new environment of leadership though. Such an adventure. Most of all I like how it allows me to be me without manipulating other people in the name of Jesus. Great freedom here, but great challenges as well. Right now I am learning the art of community engagement. I never did much of this before in my ministry career. This is too my fault of course. I am now learning to be in conversation with the people I am trying to "lead" and it is a beautiful process. No more depending on charisma and personality. God and discernment, community and gifting, and most of all calling are prerequisites to leading people. All of this is a gift, skill set and discipline.

In trying to put my thoughts together on this, I created a diagram to sort of help myself distill my thoughts on this new way of approaching leadership. The following diagram represents the paradigm I was both formally, and informally trained to lead in.

The leader goes off and spends time with God and gets a vision from God, that oddly enough would also align with his or her own values, giftings and passions, or shortly put, their spiritual DNA. In turn, they would develop a strategy of how to accomplish this vision and turn to the community and basically say, "Here is my vision, are you with me or not?" As you can see, this puts a lot of pressure on the community. Not to mention it basically treats the community as a support structure for the leader. In other words, the community is there to follow the leader and serve his or her vision. (The vision of course being narrowly interpreted by a few for the many.) In raw straight forward terms, the leaders in this situation ends up harvesting the members energy, time and gifts for "their" vision. It assumes that the leader knows what God wants the people in the community to do. I could say a lot more about this model and its limitations, but I will stop here for time purposes. I will say however that there are times and situations when this model of leadership is appropriate, so don't get me wrong here.

There is another way of approaching leadership however. I will use the trendy word organic to describe it, but it really is a good term to use when explaining this different approach. The following diagram illustrates this.

As you can see, it starts with people being in conversation about their individual values, giftings and passions in a community setting. On an individual level, this approach provides a pathway to discover what God is up to and how I fit in with it in my own situation outside of a group dynamic. Community is a great place to discover and affirm your spiritual DNA. However, what happens if God is brewing things together where a pattern starts to emerge in a community with peoples DNA? This in my mind warrants a process of discernment on what a group can do collectively for God. This sort of creates a group dynamic for collective ministry efforts.

In organic communities, often times people may not have a homogeneous passion or calling. People may be called to vastly different directions in ministry. This is what can make house church and simple church sort of challenging if you have a conventional church background. You are so used to operating primarily on the collective, group dynamic level that you skip the personal discovery of gifts and calling etc. This leaves you sort of wondering if we should be "doing more" on a group level. (There is of course a place for serving as a group etc) Leadership in an organic environment is more like facilitating people to learn their gifts and operate in them. Leadership is not telling other people what to do for God, as if any of us know that for other people! When you do this, you actually end up cloning people after your own DNA. Cloning is when you take one persons DNA and try to reproduce it in another person. Everyone has different DNA when it comes to ministry direction. You do not pick your DNA and you can not clone people or communities after your own DNA. TO try and do this ends up being manipulative at best and spiritually abusive at worst. A more healthy approach is to nurture the DNA that is already there into healthy expressions so it can flourish into life giving forms.

Another contrast to the top down approach is the vision and strategy are open ended in this organic model of leadership. They are not tied to one persons perception of the situation. You do not arrive at a destination here. It is a constant journey which feeds off of your DNA and calling of God in the context of community. Any feedback on this?

A Different Front Door

Tim Catchim

April 8, 2009 by Tim Catchim Comments (2)

Thinking a little bit more about organic leadership and communities, I had an epiphany the other night about institutions. I suggest that the role of institutions is specialization in Kingdom tasks. I recently talked to an old college buddy of mine whom I have not talked to in over ten years. Needless to say we have both changed a lot since then. Surprisingly though, he has been having some of the same thoughts I have been having about leadership and community. In fact, he is preparing for a "church plant" in the Atlanta area as we speak.

The cool thing about it though is that he is not going to do the traditional franchise model of church planting. Instead, he is going to "parachute" into a new area by starting a non-profit organization.

I have been having similar thoughts about church planting lately, but my conversation with him sort of helped me connect some dots. In order to share the good news in Clarksville TN, we need to develop relationships with people. Doing the house church thing can sort of make it challenging to do this. However, we have recently started an organization called the Harvest Network which will help people grow their own food in their back yard. My thoughts now a days are leaning towards the non-profit functioning as sort of a hub of relational activity and then as a result of those relationships, new vibrant families of Jesus would form. Sort of a spin off, or by-product of the non-profits activities

In other words, the non-profit is the engine that generates a meaningful, redemptive connection with the community. It is out of these relationships that new organic communities of the gospel can be formed in peoples homes, Starbucks, or anywhere. In the franchise model, traditionally speaking, you get a building to do church and attract people to the services. In this model (I am not sure what to call it) you may get a building, but it is for the purpose of serving people day in and day out through whatever services your non-profit will provide. The organizations service to the community would then be the catalyst to form relationships with the lost. If I were to diagram this, it would look something like this:

The only way to pull this off is to have intentional relationships with people outside the interests of the non-profit. These kinds of relational pockets and networks already surround a lot of the non-profit organizations. The apostolic role in this situation would be to facilitate communities out of these pockets, made up of individuals who are open to relationships and the gospel. In this model, the non-profit would appear to take the place of the conventional style institutional church, while having a lot of the same benefits that institutions bring to the table. The major difference is that the non-profit''s interests are not to draw people indefinitely into itself. The non-profit naturally creates the formation of organic communities, while the conventional style church traditionally sees organic communities as a crop to be harvested and gathered into the confines of the church. This model reverses that and does not see the non-profit institution as a final destination. The organic communities formed around it would instead be the fertile ground for the seeds of the gospel. The goal would not be to get them into the box, but to get the gospel to them right where they are, and better yet, to nurture their faith in that very context. You would not ask them to "come to church". You would ask to eat lunch, have a cup of coffee, pray with them. Share their story and pray.

Tim Catchim

April 2009

Sex, Sin and DIstortion

Tim Catchim

47. Sex, Sin and Distortion

Pioneers of new Frontiers

Tim Catchim

23. The Life of an Apostle

Organic Leadership

Tim Catchim

A Different Front Door

Tim Catchim