“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”
Wayne Gretzky
“In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth,
while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped
to deal with a world that no longer exists.” Eric Hoffer
The future is already here; it just isn’t evenly distributed. Unknown
In The Up Side of Down Thomas Homer-Dixon contends that five “tectonic stresses” are accumulating deep underneath the surface of today’s global order. The five stresses he identifies greatly increase the risk of a cascading collapse of systems vital to our wellbeing — a phenomenon he calls “synchronous failure.” Scary stuff: so what is the “up” side? He writes,
We can get ready in advance to turn to our advantage any breakdown that does occur.. We can boost the chances that it will lead to renewal by being well prepared, nimble and smart and by learning to recognize its many warning signs. 1
It has become a cliché that we live in a world that is changing so rapidly, we cannot cope. Many of our cherished assumptions are not shared by the next generation, assumptions which helped us to find stability in a world that is increasingly a strange place.
We grieve this loss – loss of familiarity, and loss of meaning. Where we do not grieve, we react – with a defensive posture, and sometimes with denial. A more positive posture, and the one which is taken by organizations which are negotiating these rough waters, is to become learners, and to adapt to change while finding the ground that is not shaken.
That unshaken ground – the solid Rock of God’s covenant faithfulness – is offered to us in narratives that show both sides of the story – adaptation, and fear and reaction. Narratives like Israel moving from Egypt to the Promised land offer us both the hope of moving forward, and a warning against those who continually long for the security of the past – who want to return to Egypt.
But while the answer seems simple – “let’s move ahead” — we already know that the answers are NOT easy. They are difficult – as difficult as anything we could face. We wrestle with changing language (“Christian” and even “church” now have multiple contexts and usage) – we wrestle with whether adaptation equals compromise. We have exegetical and theological work to do, and we also have to “exegete” our changing world. These tasks are neither simple nor secure. They require faith to engage. And as one seasoned leader put it, faith is spelled R I S K. Faith requires that we encounter the living Lord of the Church, and that encounter will always leave us changed.
One leader who speaks prophetically into this place in time is Henri Nouwen. Henri wrote a short meditation on leadership, reluctantly, in the late 80s’.
In In the Name of Jesus, he is working with two stories. The first is the story of the three temptations in Matthew 4. The second is the story of Jesus three questions to Peter in John 21. Henri is going to describe for us “the leader of the future.” He characterizes the temptations like this:
- 1. the temptation to be relevant.
- The question: “Do you love me?”
- The movement – From relevance to prayer
- 2. the temptation to be spectacular
- The task: “Feed my sheep.”
- The movement – From popularity to service
- 3. the temptation to be powerful
- The challenge: Someone else will lead you
- The discipline – From leading to being led.
Nouwen describes the leader of the future as the praying leader, the vulnerable leader, and the trusting leader. I think these terms need reinterpretation for our time and location. I translate like this:
- the praying leader = the listening leader
- the vulnerable leader = the vulnerable/transparent leader
- the trusting leader = the surrendered/powerless leader
Speaking from John 21:18, Nouwen writes that the mature leader will follow where he/she does not want to go. There are components of surrender and vulnerability here. The Christian leader of the future, the missional leader, is “radically poor” — takes nothing for the journey, is radically dependent on Christ (Mark 6:8; Luke 10:4). The discipline needed for this radical dependence and willingness to be led is theological reflection. He writes,
“Just as prayer keeps us connected with the first love, and confession and forgiveness keep our ministry communal and mutual, so strenuous theological reflection will allow us to discern where God is leading.” 2
I want to connect Nouwen’s argument for the need of theological reflection with the same argument made by Robert Webber in The Younger Evangelicals.3 Webber writes that the new leadership “is not shaped by being right, nor is it driven by meeting needs. Instead, it arises out of (1) a missiological understanding of the church, (2) theological reflection, (3) spiritual formation, and (4) cultural awareness… These four areas represent a circle of leadership.” Connecting theological reflection explicitly with the missio Dei, he writes,
“We do not define God’s mission. It defines us. It tells us who we are, what our mission is, how we are to do ministry, worship, spirituality, evangelism. There is no aspect of the Christian life, thought, and ministry that is not connected with God’s mission to the world.
“For this reason theological reflection is inextricably linked with the missio Dei. It is not an abstract objective discipline that is subject to reason, logic, or science. It is instead a communal reflection on God’s mission that arises out of God’s people as they seek to discern God’s work in history and his present action in the life of the community. “4
In short, we won’t escape the pragmatism or Triumphalism that have subverted our church culture unless we are willing to do theological work. And this is not mere study, but disciplined submission to our active and living Head as he reconstitutes our communities as a faithful witness in a fallen world.
Gary Nelson reaches a similar conclusion in Borderland Churches. In the fourth chapter, “Landscapes and Tool Kits,” Gary calls for pastoral leaders to “face the call” of borderland living. In conversation with leaders moving into the borderlands Gary has noted four repeating themes. These are not held in some kind of synthetic balance, but often in great tension. The call of leadership today is to be apprentice-pastor-theologian-missionary.5
Apprentices are formed in the hard disciplines of prayer, study and reflective action with the intention of producing passionate followers of Jesus. Disciples “systematically and progressively arrange their affairs” under the guidance of the Word and Spirit.6
Pastors are committed to the formation of a genuine community of faith. Only genuine communities can fling themselves boldly into the world. I recall Jim Wallis with a parallel thought: “Community is the place where the healing of our own lives becomes the foundation for the healing of the nations.” 7
Missionaries intentionally cross borders, learning the language, the rhythms, and the values of those they engage. Missional leaders must understand the times and places where they dwell in order to have genuine encounters.
We must also be theologians. “The role of theology has been suppressed in the last decade because of our love for the pragmatic… deep theological and biblical reflective frame must be formed in the pastor’s life.” 8 Leaders must not only “have” a theology, they must be adept at doing it. The tension of the first themes is informed by the practice of theological reflection. Gary notes that when this is absent, the content required for effective borderland living is also absent.
Poets and Missional Imagination
This new leadership type may be a unique blending of types we already know. Within the five-fold gifts of Ephesians 4 there are certain combinations that appear new, uniquely suited to times requiring innovation and adaptation: the poet, the synergist, and the boundary-crosser. These types are primarily a blend of prophetic and apostolic, though the boundary-crosser may add a strong element of pastor and evangelist. Let’s consider the poetic type.
The poet is especially oriented to helping us recover missional imagination. The synergist is like an abbot figure. The boundary crosser is a prophetic networker with pastor-at-large overtones. Alan Roxburgh describes the poet and the synergist in The Sky is Falling.
The poet, like Adam, helps us make sense of our experience. The word in the prologue of John tells how Jesus “became flesh and lived among us.”9 In a similar way, the poet shapes words so that what was hidden and invisible becomes known. Poets remove the veil and give language to what people are experiencing. This is only possible when the poet him/herself lives within the traditions and narratives of the people – “The poet listens to the rhythms and meanings occurring beneath the surface.”
The leadership of poets, however, is not expressed in a modern manner. Poets “are not so much advice-givers as image and metaphor framers… What churches need are not more entrepreneurial leaders with wonderful plans for their congregation’s life, but poets with the imagination and gifting to cultivate environments within which people might again understand how their traditional narratives apply to them today.”10
Without missional imagination, faith communities become stuck moving in circles. The purpose of formation, however, is to enable us to widen our embrace, to move outward and make known the grace of God to all creation. The congregation that exhibits the fullness of Christ inevitably proclaims and performs the gospel, both declares and demonstrates. In the new world that is dawning, we will need leaders of all kinds; if these functions are often transparent or invisible, like yeast hidden in dough, powerfully influencing change by birthing a new world, all the better.
It is at the level of the imagination that the fateful issues of our new world-experience must first be mastered. It is here that culture and history are broken, and here that the church is polarized. Old words do not reach across the new gulfs, and it is only in vision and oracle that we can chart the unknown and new-name the creatures.11
Theopoetics
The term theopoetics was first seen in the form of theopoiesis, used by Stanley Hopper.12 Since then, theopoetics has served as a noun referring to a particular devotional quality of a text, a genre of religious writing, and a postmodern perspective on theology. A useful working definition of the term would be the study and practice of making God known through text.
Making God known through text? Phil Rollins has helped us identify this as a slippery venture.13 But one of the main concerns of theology has been to bridge the complex world of experience with the story of God. Phil Zylla writes, “As experiences increase in complexity and depth the facility of language loses its capacity to express the hope of the gospel in relationship to the reality that we perceive and into which we attempt to live.”14
Zylla references Donald Capps 1993 book, The Poet’s Gift. Capps proposed that we consider poetry as a source of vision and inspiration for the pastoral task, and as a source of renewal for pastoral theology itself. In Capps view, both pastor and poet share a common passion for probing what is occurring beneath the surface. Both seek to understand the complex reality of human experience; both exhibit a deep care for words; both seek to ground reflection on actual situations; both seek to understand or pursue wisdom; both seek to write about the anomalies and tragedies and the unexpected blessings of life with thoughtfulness and passion.15
This is not far from the James Smith’s pursuit. While Smith is ostensibly pursuing a theology of cultural engagement,16 theopoetics pursues integration and honesty in the recognition that only whole persons before God will deeply experience the divine. Moreover, it is only as we invite others to live as whole beings before God that they will experience God in a meaningful way. We are embodied, and we live in a world of ambiguity in our daily experience: recognition of these realities is more likely to prove fruitful for a whole life spirituality than attempting to deny them.
Theopoetics isn’t entirely new. Reading the work of Bernard of Clairvaux or William of Saint Thierry, one is dipping in an ancient stream, swimming along a different path of knowledge. Recently I picked up a novel that has sat on my shelf nearly thirty years—Charles Williams Shadows of Ecstasy. A day or two later, a copy of Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, arrived. As I browsed through the volume I came across Smith’s argument that the erotic is precisely the lever we must reconsider in spiritual formation, so carefully employed by Hollywood and Madison Avenue. With our practiced dualism we have neglected this area and left the door wide open for more secular agendas. Smith notes the romantic theology of Charles Williams. Then a few days later we listened to Steve Bell in concert, telling the stories of his own growing devotion, rooted in people like Francis and in the great liturgical traditions.
Steve performed a number of his oldest compositions, including Why Do We Hunger for Beauty? As people hung on the words, and as the music brought water to our souls, I realized how hungry for God ‘churched’ people are. We dwell in the world of ideas, where the real is shadowed but not present. Appeals to the mind abound: but appeals to the soul, and our ability to live in that place, seem tenuous at best. We rightly recognize and are attracted to the beauty we see around us, but it too often becomes an end in itself rather than a path to something enduring. Beauty and love are ikons of the true: ikons rather than shadows, because shadow implies some lack of reality or something less than good. But beauty and love are not merely shadows or less than good, they are only less than God.
So we end with theopoetics, because after all there is no way to use mere words to describe the transformative power of love, any more than mere words can describe the lover’s experience of the beloved. We use word-pictures and rhyme and music because poetry and music help words take flight, and the experience of love is both rooted and wild and words need wings to approximate it. We end up in the song of songs, or in the poetry of Saint John of the Cross.
Your eyes in mine aglow
Printed their living image in my own…
Only look this way now
as once before: your gaze
leaves me with lovelier features where it plays.17
1 Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Up Side of Down (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2006) 21.
2 Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus (New York: Crossroad Books, 1989) 85.
3 Robert Webber, The Younger Evangelicals (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2005) 240-241.
4 Ibid., 241.
5 Gary Nelson, Borderland Churches (Chalice Press, 2009) 83.
6 Ibid., 84.
7 Jim Wallis, Call to Conversion (San Francisco: 1979) 81.
8 Nelson, Op Cit. 84
9 Alan Roxburgh, The Sky is Falling: Leaders Lost in Transition (Eagle: Allelon Pub., 2004) 165.
10 Ibid., 166
11 Keefe, Perry, “Theopoetics: Process and Perspective.” Christianity and Literature 58,4, (Summer, 2009) 579-601.
12 Miller, David L. “Introduction.” In Why Persimmons? and Other Poems: Transformations of Theology in Poetry. Atlanta: Scholars, 1987. 3.
13 Notably his book, How (Not) to Speak About God.
14 Zylla, Phil. “What Language Can I Borrow?” in McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry, 9,129
15 Ibid., 130.
16 In particular in Desiring the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009)
17 Nims, John Frederick. The Poems of St. John of the Cross. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1968. 20.
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