Be ABOUT Relationships

I came across this neat acronym in relation to ministry for young people (say, 15-25):

ABOUT

A = Acceptance: show it

B = Belonging: build it

O = Ownership: promote it

U = Understanding: foster it, and

T = Trust: anchors everything.

Now, apart from never liking the word 'ownership' in this context, I think it's a good guide.

"Ownership" might point to participatory engagement or responsibility for oneself in the fellowship group. This can take a lot of mentoring or discipling for young people in some cases, but a fine objective, particularly if the young person is a bit of a social outlier. 

If you are guiding an organization or group (i.e. having final responsibility for it) the meanings can be adjusted, such as:

A = Act to bring results (don't procrastinate, but don't rush)

B =  Build the team (keep developing -- discipling in a church context -- you work with)

O = Organize performance (define the mission, provide resources, equip the team)

U = Understand the job (know the objective, customers, competition, strategy and people)

T = Trust anchors effectiveness (never do anything to destroy trust).

Discussing God -- with an atheist

The term 'atheist' has wide usage these days. It can run from a doctrinaire and thoughtful person, to what I call the 'village atheist'. The person who has picked up a few quips that mostly stop most Christians in their tracks, but absent any real thought by them.

A younger Christian raised the discussion of dealing with such views.

It started with a comment on Social Media by a Christian who made a reference to 'God'. Some bright atheist, or para-atheist (the Village Atheist type) compared God in ontology to Harry Potter, the Fairy God Mother and the Easter Bunny.

How would you come back, presuming the person is interested in chatting, and not a "quip-dropper".

If they are a quip dropper, you might ask what they think about life, the world and any 'hereafter'. If they come back a 'materialist' or 'naturalist': naturalist meaning one who finds in 'nature' its own ontological basis, as distinct from one who is interested in 'nature' for its own sake.

For this person, a simple question might be: "How is anything a dust-bunny says worth anything more than the bunch of dust that says it?" 

But seriously, folks:

First question, of course

'Why do you think your comic-book trio is equivalent to, I presume you mean 'God' as viewed in the Judaeo-Christian tradition?

You might alternatively ask such probes as. What do you think people mean by 'God', or what do you really think about 'God' (with a hint of irony), 'what 'god-function' do you think your comic characters fulfil' or 'Christians hold that 'God' explains something about them and the world...what does your fairy story  trio explain?'

Next stop

'Let me guess, you think 'God' is a religious idea, and you don't take 'religion' seriously. Would that be correct?'

Answer is probably 'yes'. so

"Do you know what 'religion' is or the purpose it seeks to serve?"

Answer probably about 'crutch' to give the believer some sort of comfort in the face of life's vicissitudes.

I like Clouser's definition of religion: that which is independently real, or that represents what is independently real. He discusses it in his boon The Myth of Religious Neutrality. 

There's another way of thinking about religion generically, according to Westphal. He identifies three types of religion

Exilic: typified by Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Bhuddism. These have a godless, or ultimate impersonal monism that one gets absorbed into and becomes one with...but with no more self. It is identical to final annihilation. Here the real world of every day life is at base illusory.

Mimetic: typified by both ancient and modern paganism: earth worship, the ancient pantheons, and modern extremities of environmentalism. This world is also finally impersonal and has none but a mechanical connection with the individual. Modern scientism and dogmatic evolutionism sit here.

Either option means life is in practical terms dust! But no one lives this way...what has to be explained to take one into what is real, is personhood, the reality of moral judgements, that values are possible, than knowledge is real and persons have an ultimate connection with what is basically real: the personal self-existing and self-revealing communicating Creator, Yahweh 

The alternative is Covenental religions, of which there are two, but perhaps their heretical derivatives are also covenental, but I think are actually Mimetic in concept. The two are Judaism as the pre-cursor and Christianity as the fulfillment.

The result of Christianity is that it has real-world pay-offs: modern notions of human rights, education for all, equality before the law, the dignity of the individual, the meaning of justice and the very basis of modern material life: science, are true elements of the understanding of what is true. It underwrites knowledge as being instrumentally true, and, at the limit, ultimately true.

It also explains the disjunct between our experience of life and our ambitions in life, most prominently exhibited in 'suffering' and acts of evil, even within ourselves or are victims of. Whence evil? Cannot be answered in either Exilic or Mimetic religious frameworks. Both bring the insight of the earthworm to their contemplation.

Doing the talk

A small group from my church met today in our training centre to talk about talking about their faith to those outside the faith.

It was a short session on developing an approach to using normal language for the gospel.

It went well, but here's the astonishing thing:

I have been an active member of a Christian gathering in one place or another for over 40 years. In no church I've participated in across the four countries they've been in has anything similar been done!

All 'evangelical' churches, but evidently left the skill of personal gospel talk (1 Peter 3:15) to happenstance: so it mostly didn't happen, or it was up to the paid guy.

Now, a real evangelical church would be routinely helping people develop the skills and knowledge to communicate the gospel to their friends. So, I guess there are almost no truly evangelical churches! 

More thoughts on suffering and evil.

As I keep thinking on this, I'll keep on posting.

Here's a comment I recently made on a Capturing Christianity video:

1. The question of eternity. As an abstraction this means little to people, but your illustration brings it home. I've used a similar one. "It takes about 30 years to really get to know someone, your closest buddy (or your spouse). Let's say there are about a billion Christians ever, over all history taken together. So in the eternal New Creation, our first 30 billion years would be spent getting to know everyone. After that, I'm at a bit of a loss."

2. But on a more substantial note, I'm glad you brought in the effect of 'world-view', the conception of 'real reality' that a person holds.

Most people who seek to mount the misoantitheist argument (the argument from suffering/evil) do so from within their anti- or non-theist world view, or a world view that captures the 'god' into the cosmos, the domain of our life-world, to 'be nice' to us, cause we think we're worth it! Pride driven to the max.

But this is not Yahweh, the God who created, as you rightly point out.

This brings an utterly different conception of reality, and its frame of reference is given in the creation account: fundamentally, mankind is in God's image and so makes meaningful choices. The creation is man's domain (Genesis 1:26-28, 2:19-20a and Ps 115:16). Mankind has rejected fellowship with God (Genesis 3:17-19). Man will live for ever, either in fellowship with God facilitated by Christ and his gift of new life, or in enmity with him in rejection of Christ.

God in his desire for man to return to the joy of knowing God has not hidden our plight from us, but allowed us to be engulfed by it, but with many mercies of relief and ultimately in the greatest mercy: the option to turn to him in belief and repentance.

Suffering tells us the state of nature we are in, evil shows us who we, as mankind, really are. This is us!

They represent the siren of hope telling us that where we are is not right, it is not who we were made to be, and there's a way out. Like the fire alarm in an apartment tower.

In these terms, ponder Luke 13:4, Yeshua's answer to the 'problem of evil': repent!

Then I added an appendix:

Just another thought came to me as I was watching a marvelous lecture: "Shakespeare is civilisation" by Andrew Doyle on the Ideas Matter channel. He mentioned Shakespeare's way with words and, having just made the above comment, these lines sprang to mind, from Macbeth:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

**Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing**.

This is mankind confronted by its own limitations despite all effort that we might make. A great marker that we are incapable of resolving the very problem we seek to lay at God's feet: the problem of evil, or suffering, that has its apotheosis in death.

There is no resolution within our domain and by our effort. Nothing we can do staves it off and all our gestures, summarized neatly I think in Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness" are a nullity in our realm. This is all the power of mankind gives us: despair! It requires external intervention; and in Christ it is the creator who intervenes: the one rejected is the one who saves!

Did we make **this** 'god' in our image? I don't think so!

Couses of course

One can attend endless of those ceremonial speeches that are given at church gatherings -- you may know them as that performative art-piece 'the sermon'. You know, the 20-40 minutes of words you most likely forget as soon as you leave the auditorium in which it was given.

Well, the church I am part of has stepped past this massive error in Christian discipling ('education' or training or equipping) by conducting courses for those interested in upping their skills and/or knowledge in living the Christian live.

Here are the three courses on offer this term:

1. Telling your story: how to 'give one's  testimony'.

2. Reading through John's gospel with a friend using a specific app for shared reading, and

3. Running a 'Beyond Hope' session/s for your friends or neighbours.

All good starting points.

BUT

I'm more than a little concerned at (1), not having attended it yet. I may do a report on it in a few weeks time after I have.

Most 'testimonies' are boring, unless spectacular, like Paul's, or David Wood's, inevitably self-centred if not self-serving and irrelevant.

As one apologist points out, the 'testimony' the old-time mainstay of 'witnessing' is that it is personal, and in being personal, largely sending an inherent subjective message. What we do need to be able to do is give a reason for the hope within us. 1 Peter 3:15. Peter didn't say 'give a tesimony', now, did he?

So, far better if we 'workshopped' 1 Peter 3:15 the way we would give an account for the hope we have in Christ to our friends.

Like I've written before, one needs a set of three formats for this:

1. the 'elevator' pitch. A short, punchy couple of sentences.

2. the 'coffee chat'. A longer duration set of ideas that you can weave in to a chat, and

3. the 'dinner discussion'. Here you  prepare the sort of road map for a longer discussion, with a few of the obvious by-ways, shortcuts and diversions that might spring up.

All in 'everyman' language of course. Not a theological word amongst them.

My basic approach to "Why are you (a) Christian?" is to adopt Greg Koukl's approach crossed with Francis Schaeffer's.

Christianity gives the best explanation for the 'way things are' and for the resolution of the human dilemma.

This invites two questions:

1. "What do you mean/what is 'the way things are?' ", and,

A: we all have a sense that things are not the way they should be: they are 'broken' in some way...nothing is not only perfect, but most things are not at all good.

[This relates directly to the suffering we all see and experience, the frustrations of life and its misdirections ( 'fate' as some may call it). That it is not 'natural' to us as if it was, we would not detect it, it 'just is'. If someone takes this view, they are looking at life's dilemmas and disasters with blank, impassive non-comprehension, lying to themselves that it is of no matter.]

2. "What is/do you mean by 'the human dilemma?" Schaeffer calls it the manishness of man: that man is both noble, and cruel and life is both of great sadness and great joy.

A We all know that there's something wrong, we have shortcomings and endlessly do things we don't want to do, or wish we hadn't done, and the inverse, we don't do things we want to do. We live in a world of frustration, of evil, of suffering that we deeply rebel against. Why? 

Christianity also deals with this realistically, in terms of the real world we know in two ways: our humanity is real, and our despair is real.

Christianity is direct about our personhood, its significance and its reality: it is really real!

Every other construction of the world fails to do this. Maybe not overtly, but always at least implicitly. 

1. They regard the world, and/or the dilemma as illusory, or can only be resolved by denying our nature with final anonymous absorption into the impersonal divine (or in half-baked nostrums such as Buddha's). (Westphal's 'exilic' religions, e.g. Hinduism.)
2. They regard mankind as subservient to the world, continuous with it, it being a impersonal 'force' of some sort. (Westphal's 'mimetic' religions, e.g. Paganism, in modern and ancient forms.)
3. We are integrally continuous with the material world and can only truly be described materially; our human-ness being an abstracted, if not illusory subservient phenomenon on and derivative of the material reality. Modern doctrinaire and informal atheism and agnosticism of convenience rely on this, as does hedonism. Again, reality is at base impersonal.

None of these give humanity a true grounding that is consistent with our life-world and our being in this world. None can ground personhood as a basic constituent of reality and as true: we have true and valid experiences of the world which is truly there, we can make decisions that have real and substantial consequences for both us and (usually) others, and the world is truly there and is intelligible to us. We can produce knowledge that is true knowledge and can communicate it to others with congruent effect.

The grounding of personhood, and of our real reality is only in the description of creation in Genesis 1-3:8a. Personhood is significant, enduring and personal...as is our Creator.

All other conceptions of reality fail to grant the person 'connection' with reality. The person is either ultimately absorbed into 'the one' and de-personalized, ground into dust (materialism/evolution) or a pawn of fates/destiny (most pagan and neo-pagan vague conceptions).

It is only the Genesis description of Creation that gives mankind robust and enduring identity that is directly connected to and an echo of (in the image of) the self-existing creator. 

Bible School -- an Equip-meet curriculum.

New believers and young Christians need to be properly instructed, trained, about the Bible.

Let's see how we could do that in 10 monthly half day-evening sessions.

Before dinner is the first segment, with the second segment after dinner, and optional conversation following over Port and cigars (only kidding).

February

1. Old Testament overview and textual history

2. Old Testament archeology and historical context (this might include intertestamental period)

March

3. New Testament overview and textual history

4. New Testament archeology and historical context (this might include the early church)

April

5. Pentateuch/Torah

6. Concept of 'God' in the OT

May 

7. Synoptic Gospels

8. John's Gospel 

June

9. The Former Prophets

10. The Latter Prophets

July

11. Acts and Romans

12. 1 and 2 Corinthians

August

13. Pre-exilic Writings

14. Paul's shorter letters

September

15. Post-exilic Writings

16. General Epistles

October

 17. Revelation

18. Who is Christ--who is God? 

November 

19. How does Salvation work?

20. Basic Christian Questions (intro to basic apologetics, but this would be the ground work for a weekend seminar the following February) 

On the following Sundays' gatherings, participants could be invited to, in pairs, give their reflections/thoughts on the material they had on the prior Saturday. 

Who's next?

My local church has run into a problem.

The guy who organizes one of our ministries: teaching English to new migrants who have no English, has become too unwell to continue.

He randomly asked a couple of the more able teachers if they would take over his role jointly. Big surprise (to them and to him): they said no.

The organizer called this 'succession planning'.

I'd call it a panic.

This is how 'succession planing' really works.

Take my business example.

I had 9 direct reports managing a total of about 80 staff in professional services in a multi-billion dollar operation.

The one who was obviously most on-fire: competent, energetic, knowledgeable, insightful I spotted as soon as she started working in the division. I kept her close: asked advice, bounced ideas off her, shared the development of some projects...I even loaded her up a little with some of 'my' work. She thrived.

That was 4 years before I moved on. I moved on. She was able to step into my role (thanks KH). That's succession planning. It started 4 years before I needed to activate it.

There were two other staff who had potential. I started developing them immediately. For one younger woman I made the position of 'team leader' for a small group. She thought it was just 'window dressing'. I didn't push back on that idea with much energy, because it wasn't, and I subtly loaded her with more responsibility and gradually expanded her remit and the pressure she was under. Not heartlessly, but in a manner calculated to see her make decisions.

At one time I gave her an assignment and started to say..."Gisele, if you run into any dead-ends..." she cut me off with "I know, bring you solutions, not problems".

I replied: "Not at all, if there's a dead end, or you find a challenge that you are not sure on, drop in to my office and we can chat about it, then work out what the options might be". Never strand someone: help them grow, not sink.

Another staff member, Simon, was a 'quiet achiever'. Not that quiet, as always ready with a good idea or amusing but positive contribution. There we no slots for quick advancement for him, but I sent him on an Executive MBA program. His next step, in a couple of years,  was 'UP'.

So that's succession planning; it's long term development of people, bringing them into the decision-responsibility circle and supporting their growth.

It is not a 'knee-jerk'.

Knee-jerks never work.