The Marriage of Jesus and Jane Vella

I’ve recently joined a dialog with some other San Diego folks on the topic of leadership training. The common concern seems to be the development of a grassroots, trans-denominational, and locally generative alternative to traditional seminary. Recently Jason Evans introduced the work of Jane Vella as a catalyst, so today I want to briefly engage with how her work might be relevant to this topic by comparing it to Jesus’ leadership training methods and ask for your input.

(For an excellent orientation to this topic I’ll simply refer you to JR Rozko’s series, “Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education,” Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine. If you’re interested in this subject, it’s a must read.)

Jane Vella is one of the leading figures in the field of adult education. In Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach she reviews twelve principles for adult learning and demonstrates their effectiveness through short case stories. Essentially, Vella asserts that adults learn best when immersed in a learning environment that models equality, demonstrates relevance, and provides opportunity for hands-on discovery. I think there are some important and obvious ways the twelve principles converge with Jesus’ practices:

• Needs Assessment: A posture of “sympathetic listening” whereby the teachers meet the learners “where they are.” Teachers must learn student’s needs before knowing what and how to teach. The incarnation of Christ is the greatest example of sympathetic listening in human history.
• Safety: Adults learn best in an environment of grace. Jesus formed an environment of safety by assembled his community of disciples, going so far as to redefine their familial loyalties to himself, God, and one-another.
• Sound Relationships: Teachers and learners are committed to acting on each others behalf. Jesus included his disciples in almost everything he did, ministry, friendship, eating, sleeping, traveling, etc. His process was essentially deeply relational.
• Sequence and Reinforcement: Deliberately building chains of mastery. The Sermon on the Mount is sequenced from the simplest, basest human issues to the most complex relationships and struggles. Each teaching point (i.e. “blessing those who curse you”) depends critically upon and reinforces previous lessons learned (i.e. “letting go of anger”).
• Praxis: A learning feedback loop of action and reflection. Adult learners require concrete application not merely intellectual abstraction. The disciples were involved in ministry tasks from the beginning, starting with the simple and moving to the more complex.
• Respect for Learners as Decision Makers: Adults are decision-makers who need to determine their own learning path. By teaching in parables Jesus was providing open-ended stories and questions for his hearers to engage with, even honoring their choice at times to stubbornly misunderstand.
• Ideas, feelings, and actions: Adult learning must include the affective realm as a means of natural reinforcement. With Christ, the process of discipleship was hands-on and often involved powerful emotions, provoking ideas, and real-life situations.
• Immediacy: Adults need immediate relevance in learning. Jesus’ disciples they knew they were getting into something that had immediate, even urgent importance. As N.T. Wright has shown, to be a follower of Christ meant you were engaged with the most pressing matters of political life in first-century Palestine.
• Clear roles and role development: It’s important for adult learners to understand everyone’s role, especially their own. Jesus utilized the clear roles of rabbi and disciple that were inherent in ancient Jewish culture, and then redefined their roles at the end of his ministry, saying they were now his “friends.”
• Teamwork and small groups: Adult learning works best in a plurality of people focused on a unified lesson or task. Jesus sent out his disciples in teams to do their work. There were no isolated learners in Jesus’ community.
• Engagement: Adults need learning to be immediately hands-on. Jesus’ classroom was his ministry mission. He didn’t train his followers first, and then begin his mission; they were learning while doing in the midst of a lab environment.
• Accountability: Adult learning is reinforced by the support and positive pressure of peer expectations and feedback. The intimate relationships among Jesus and his disciples provided a natural setting for mutual accountability.

I’m struck by how transferable the ideas of Vella and the practices of Jesus are to our current cultural climate. The twelve principles of dialogue education seem to mirror many of the value shifts occurring in the emerging post-Christian era:

• Rejection of hierarchy/embrace of equality: Hierarchy communicates dominance and supremacy to emerging generations; open dialogue emphasizes the equality of teacher/learner, and learner/learner relationships.
• Rejection of mechanistic/embrace of organic: In light of the conspicuous failure of some Modern systems, emerging people pessimistically reject strict cause-and-effect thinking. Dialogue education allows for an organic apprehension of learning.
• Rejection of monologue/embrace of dialogue: The dominance of one voice can communicate supremacy and simple-mindedness. Dialogue allows complexity.
• Rejection of certainty/embrace of uncertainty: Again, certainty communicates arrogance, a posture that post-moderns often mistrust. Uncertainty, however, communicates humility and the self-confidence to be authentic.
• Rejection of monism/embrace of pluralism: In an increasingly pluralistic world, dialogue embraces the truths that everyone brings to the table. This is a far reaching subject that not only impacts the way we interact with learners, but shapes how we interact as the church with the world becoming learners ourselves.

Some Questions for Consideration: How are these similar to current models of ministry leadership training? How are they different? How could these be used to create a discipleship and leadership training approach both effective and accessible to anyone? What are opportunities and pitfalls?

Technorati Tags: Education, Jane Vella, Jason Evans, Jesus, JR Rozko, Misisonal Leadership Training, Seminary

The Worker’s Wages Part 2: The Biblical Lens

(This is the second in a six-part series exploring the dynamics of clergy pay in missional churches. See previous installments: Prelude | Part 1)

When I first posted my initial prompt asking whether clergy should be paid I received a quick response from an old family friend simply stating, “The worker is worthy of his wages,”referencing Paul 1 Timothy Chapter 5 and Jesus in Luke 10. That would seem to settle it then, wouldn’t it?

Well, not for me. My questions are: What kind of work? What kind of wages?

It’s too easy to read these passages through our Modern market-based lenses where work is a 40-60 hour a week assembly-line-optimized style of productivity and wages are either paid hourly blocks of labor or annual salaries with compensation packages. This is clearly how we’ve read Paul and Jesus, with most Pastors in the U.S. making between 70k and 97k per year. Some who identify with being “missional” believe this kind of professionalism is detrimental to mission, but most would probably at least agree it’s unsustainable considering our trajectory.

We can’t simply graft isolated passages onto our contextual paradigms but we can’t ignore our context either paradigms either, so what I’m aiming for is an understanding of a church leader’s work and wage that is:

• Biblically Consistent: I identify pretty strongly with organic and anarchist approaches, however I’m troubled by the tendency to dismiss the OT model of leadership and place it in opposition to what is usually characterized as a more “organic” NT model.
• Genuinely Contextualized: I find there’s often a polarity being wrestled with between a Christendom approach characterized by professional clergy and a pre-Christendom approach characterized by non-professional clergy (please excuse the gross generalization). These both strike me as essentially restorationist approaches, with the former seeking to restore Constantinian supremacy and the latter seeking to go “all the way back” to a presumably pristine pre-Constantinian form. I think they’re both naive. You can never go back. We are in new territory, and the landscape grows curiouser and curiouser every day.

Personally, I need a biblically-informed way to think about and practice leadership vocation that makes sense for the future, not the past. We’ll start with trying to become biblically-informed, so let’s take a brief look at the aforementioned passages.

1 Timothy Chapter 5:17-18
It’s interesting to note that in this chapter Paul is giving practical advice about the general care of the neediest people in the community – namely, older widows – and out of that advice he suddenly switches gears to the care of the church elders who govern:

The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, “Do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain,” and “The worker deserves his wages.”

In order to lend credibility to this advice Paul quotes Deut 25:4 and Luke 10:7. I think these passages are telling, so let’s look at them too, in reverse chronological order.

Luke 10:5-7
The occasion here is the sending out of the 72 disciples. Jesus has given them authority to heal the sick and drive out demons and now he is giving them practical instructions for the trip:

“When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; if not, it will return to you. Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house.”

By using the Greek word misthos (which generally to work-wages of some form) Jesus is clearly saying that the disciples ministry alone is worthy of being considered “work.” However, it’s interesting to notice that Jesus sent them out with nothing (v4), essentially making them itinerant beggars. Moreover, what he says they are permitted to receive, strictly speaking, is not payment – it’s hospitality. Jesus seems to be saying that their payment will come in the form of care, not that their care will come in the form of payment. (As a bit of an aside, it may also be that he is warning them against capitalizing on this care and hospitality by admonishing them to not “move from house to house.”)

Deuteronomy 25:4
Here in Deut. we again find practical instructions focused on the just care of people in the community. But strangely enough, sandwiched between negotiating conflicts and caring for widows we find this:

Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.

Apparently even beasts deserve to eat. Moreover, the ox’s sustenance comes from the work itself. That is, his care is tied intimately to his work. Here’s what I’m noticing so far:

1. Ministry is real work: Jesus and Paul seem to make this clear. Of course, everyone in ministry leadership knows this, but not everyone outside of ministry leadership does, and that seems to be a growing problem in post-Christian cultures. Every pastor has dealt with the question, “What exactly do you do all day?” But for some reason this was apparently enough of a problem in the first century that Jesus and Paul needed to reinforce it. Can this tell us something about the nature of ministry work?

2. The work of ministry involves the reciprocity of giving and receiving, not the transaction of buying and selling: The distinction is subtle but important and lies in the general lack of reckoning value and extracting profit. There is a recognition of the contribution people do or do not make (especially in 1 Tim 5), but no reckoning of specific value or profit. The ox gives work and eats of the grain upon which he treads. Jesus receives from the Father and gives to the itinerant disciples; the disciples give what they’ve received to the people of the towns; the people give the disciples food and shelter. This is a cycle of gifts whereby what is increased is the kingdom, not individual wallets (one could say it is the Kingdom that profits, not people, or even that they are “laying up treasures in heaven”). Along the way people extract from the increasing Kingdom for their own needs, but not for their own profits.

3. Christian leaders are part of the society of the poor: This is humbling, but I just don’t see any other way to understand these passages without recognizing that each is dealing with the care of those who are lowly. Paul’s “elders who govern” are mentioned in the same breath as old widows who have nothing left (1 Tim 5). In fact, it would appear that church elders are even worse off than young widows (v11-16)! Jesus sends out the disciples as beggars – which is appropriate, given that prior to Luke 10 Jesus is referring to “the least”as “the greatest” and turning away followers with a warning about the poverty of his own society (Luke 9:46-50; 57-62). It’s possible to read this as a deficiency in the early church (many have), but I don’t think so, for reasons I’ll address in Part 4.

4. The fundamental driving ethic is a community of inclusive care, not an economy of exclusive transactions: Seeing the “wages” as payment sets these passages in opposition to other relevant biblical paradigms, especially Exodus 16, Acts 2, and 1 Cor 8, but also (IMO) including that of the Priests and Levites who are not so much functioning as a profiteering professional class but rather are key servants participating in the gift-cycle of sacrifice, particularly by the “eating” of the sacrifices (more on this in Part 3). Of course payment can be a kind of care and a kind of gift, but such gifts can all too easily become corrupted into something else such as profit, power, or status – especially, I would add, in market-cultures where profit often is the currency of power and status.

5. There is something qualitatively different about the work of governing, teaching, and preaching: I’m deeply uncomfortable with this statement, so please correct me if you think I’m wrong, but I can’t get away from it based on Paul’s words in 1 Tim 5:17: “The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching” and the more I rflect on the biblical paradigms as a whole the more I’m struck by the distinct role of certain people with these gifts. It would be easy to suggest that Paul’s “double-honor” is actually an upside-down term, but I don’t think that’s true to the spirit of this statement. I think it’s clear that Paul is saying there is something different about the kind of work these leaders do that must be honored through the intentional care of them, perhaps partly because they must “eat of the sacrifice” and perhaps partly because it’s apparently easy to forget that what they do is “work.”

This has gone on long enough. What are your thoughts? Disagreements, insights, additions?

Technorati Tags: Christendom, Church, clergy, Deuteronomy, Jesus, Leadership, Luke, Paul, Timothy

Pat Robertson Falls From the Ladder of Being (And So Do We)

Poor uncle Pat. He just prefers his answers to be easy. The “main and plain” not only for the Bible but world as well – and who can blame him? Most of us want the Bible – or science, or politics, or television – to explain the schematic of life, not scribble all over it indelibly.

We prefer divine judgment to disaster. We prefer all homosexuals to be perverts and all feminists to be frigid. We cherish our villainous CEO’s as much as our historical fascist dictators and romantically pit them in battle against our crusading forces. We prefer WWII to Vietnam or Iraq.

We like all our Christians to be saintly (or sadistic) and our artists avante-garde (or addicted). We like our blacks and whites, our gender-roles, our partisanships, our winners and our losers. Oh how we love our losers. As Americans we prefer our sports with easy acronyms and decisively-bloody endings – NFL, NASCAR, MMA. The rest of the world can keep Soccer with its low scores, slow pace, and ambiguous endings.

It’s easy to read the Bible this way – and most of us do – until you get to Job, and Ecclesiastes…and Jesus. I recently heard John Goldingay summarize Writings:

“Proverbs says: ‘These are the rules of life: follow them. They work.’ Job and Ecclesiastes says: ‘We tried them. They don’t work!’”

Pat Robertson is echoing Proverbs when he condemns the Haitians for their tragedy, and so are we when we condemn him back. Earthquakes are more complicated than ancient Hebrew Proverbs. As is God, Haitian history and (believe it or not) Pat Robertson as well. It’s a Proverbs world that tries to make sense of tragedies with God or science, and it’s a Proverbs world that vilifies uncle Pat, too. Of course he’s wrong, and it’s important to say so, but slipping into his black-and-white shoes won’t change a thing.

What the world needs in an age of easy Bible answers and pretentious scientific posturing is more of Job, more of Qoheleth, more of the wounded-realist who has tested the prevailing ideology and found a few holes alongside the hope. Wounded realists are compassionate radicals, pushing relentlessly for understanding and justice (like Job) but wisely recognizing the imperfections in all of us (like Qoheleth). This requires a humility almost totally absent in the world of liberal/conservative, saved/lost, science/faith, gay/straight.

Psychologist J.P. Guilford called this oversimplified paradigm, “convergent thinking.” Robert Inchausti, commenting on the career of economic-thinker E.F. Schumacher in his excellent book, Subversive Orthodoxy, explains:

“[With convergent thinking] the paradigm is natural science, with its stipulative definitions and its verifiable hypotheses. Problems that come from the “real world,” Schumacher argues, do not yield to such reductionism. They usually demand a synthesis of irresolvable antinomies of some sort or another – such as freedom and order or security and risk – and this requires divergent thinking, that is to say, rule breaking, re-categorizing, and renaming kinds of processes so that we may rise to a more inclusive vision that synthesizes apparently irreconcilable oppositions into a higher conceptual unity.”

Alongside Schumacher, Inchausti places this progression of thought on a “ladder of Being,” reckoning it to be a more inclusive and creative approach to problem solving, saying,

“To the degree modern thought has [reduced] all things to their materiality, it has turned convergent thinking into an absolute, thus making ethical and philosophical problems increasingly difficult to solve – postponing them inevitably until some new science can be developed that will reduce every variable to controllable, atomistic, material elements.”

In this way, even though Modernity claims to liberate us from superstitions, life’s problems are tackled in remarkably similar ways by the scientist and fundamentalist alike: take a pill or memorize a Bible verse. That will solve all your problems. Reduce all complexities to their simplest encapsulated form and don’t question the experts.

Here is why we struggle to solve the problems of religious and ethnic pluralism, political and ethical dilemmas like abortion and stem-cell research, social ills like poverty or the disaster in Haiti. Convergent thinking always favors the simplistic, the decisive, the bloody. Convergent thinking turns Haiti into a divine object-lesson or a pragmatic political opportunity (just you wait and see). At its worst we find a willful ignorance that can only be described as arrogance or laziness (is there a difference?).

Not surprisingly then, Schumacher’s prescription outlined in A Guide For the Perplexed is a radically humble spiritual journey that begins with learning from both “society and tradition” and ends with “dying to oneself,” that ultimate act of faith best articulated by Jesus, by far the most perplexing figure in human history. It’s the presence of metaphor, paradox, and irony in scripture – especially in the incarnation of Christ – that most closely resembles real life and forces us into a posture of God-directed, unified humility. What we need most is the divergent Spirit of Christ.

In the days to come unified humility is what we’ll see in diverse partnerships of relief. Those who see themselves in the ravaged Haitians will bring the most mercy. That’s divergent thinking. That’s humility, and God is in it. It’s also what we’ll see in those who forgive Pat Robertson, not because they’re better than him but precisely because they recognize themselves in him. That’s the only way to make a difference and it’s the only way to climb back on the ladder of Being.

Technorati Tags: David Allen Hubbard, E.F. Schumacher, Earthquake, Ecclesiastes, Haiti, Humilty, J.P. Guilford, Jesus, Job, John Goldingay, Pat Robertson, Proverbs, Robert Inchausti

The Myth of Selfless Giving

Jason Evans posted an interesting piece today about the problem of giving to receive, based in part on a current NPR story about conscientious capitalism in efforts like The Red Campaign. He quotes Harvard professor Richard Weissbourd from the story, who laments,

“I do feel like, as a country, we have lost a sense of morality for its own sake,” says Harvard professor and psychologist Richard Weissbourd, who teaches about moral development. “You should just be generous to be generous. You should do what’s right because it’s right, not because of what you get back.”

I protested a bit in Jason’s comments, saying there’s no such thing as selfless giving, and he asked for a deeper explanation of my position, so… Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: gifts, Giving, Jason Evans, Jesus, Matthew, NPR, Self-Interest

Church as a Costume

It’s fun to dress up.

When we celebrate Halloween or go to masquerade parties, dressing up becomes a way to explore our inner desires. When I was a kid my best friend and I once dressed up like Ninjas for Halloween, complete with fake throwing stars and swords. We stole out at midnight and scaled neighborhood trees, hacked random bushes, and kicked and chopped at each other savagely.

Of course, neither of us actually knew any martial arts fighting techniques – mastering any martial art requires years of intense devotion and practice, a price we certainly weren’t willing to pay – but wrapped in black gear and brandishing fake weapons made us feel like the real thing, and we bloodied each other all the more for it. There’s something about dressing up and pretending that ramps up our short term enthusiasm and it’s far easier than becoming the real thing. It’s easier in the same sense that buying new running shoes is easier than becoming genuinely fit. Sometimes we buy these things because they make us feel the part for a little while. Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: Church, Costuming, David Allen, Jesus, Matthew, Tools

Church Told to Stop Feeding the Poor

UPDATE: Today the AZcetnral.com news site picked up this story. Some of the quotes in the article are priceless.

_________________________

Crossroads United Methodist Church in Phoenix feeds the hungry, but today they were told they can no longer continue this practice because in doing so they constitute a “charity dining hall” and, as such, are breaking local ordinance.

Even though this hateful decision has been masked in a facade of local code issues, Rev Escobedo-Frank rightly identifies at the root issue:

“Or, are we just discriminating against people who are poor and who don’t have homes, because we don’t like what we feel when we see them? The real issue, is not that there are hungry people out there, or that we serve food in church, the real issue is that we are afraid. Afraid to reach out a helping hand; afraid to see what the economy could do to us; afraid to face our worst fears…”

Afraid indeed.

Last year I wrote over at Twoshirts.org about the case of a Detroit teenager accused of murdering a homeless man: Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: Church, homeless, Hungry, Jesus, Matthew, News, poor, twoshirts.org

God's Missionary Incarnation

(This is part of the continuing conversation we started this week about the vision of Ikon Community)

Jesus Christ is the prototype of the Church.

Theologian Chris Wright says Jesus is the “hermeneutical coherence” through which all disciples must read the texts that “lead up to” and “on from” Christ. In our case, this means developing a prophetic imagination that is able to grab hold of Christ’s example to be a foundation for our own gathered lives as missional pilgrims in 21st century America.

Not surprisingly, examples of Christ acting as a missionary to his own culture are everywhere in the gospel narratives, but I’ve chosen a specific passage to highlight because I believe it reveals so much about Christ’s overall posture toward the people of God, the world, and the gospel itself: John 5:1-30.

In this passage Jesus comes to the pool at Bethesda and encounters a cadre of sick and disabled people. This is much like the world in general – broken and in need of redemption – and Jesus meets those needs, bringing healing to one lame man in particular, liberating him to walk (John 5:5-8). This is the powerful demonstration of the eschatological Kingdom breaking into the present; the good news has come.

That alone is an expression of God’s mission. However, we learn something of Jesus’ theology in this passage as well. When pressed by the Jewish leaders to answer for his Sabbath-breaking healing efforts, Jesus responds, saying, Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: Christopher Wright, Church, Jesus, John, mission, missional