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culture (8)
GUEST POST: "Christianity is no longer the norm"
By Curtis W. Freeman
...research professor of theology and director of the Baptist House of Studies at Duke Divinity School. His book Pilgrim Journey: Instruction in the Mystery of the Gospel
was published in September by Fortress Press as a sequel to Pilgrim Letters: Instruction in the Basic Teaching of Christ.
This proposal for reordering in discipleship isn’t an attempt to be “seeker-sensitive,” in the worst sense of the phrase, giving nonbelievers less to disbelieve. It’s a realistic response to our society’s profound cultural and political shifts. It’s a recognition that Christianity is no longer the norm and, therefore, does not feel normal to many of our neighbors.
We can no longer assume a basic familiarity with our faith that makes a sense of belonging, at least superficially, relatively easy to achieve. We must start with belonging in the sense of “faith as trust” in God and membership in God’s family, not belief in the sense of “faith as understanding,” because getting to the doctrinal affirmations is a much longer journey than it used to be. In post-Christendom, occasional church attendance is not a sufficient basis for making Christians—if that attendance happens at all.
Moreover, the disciple-making process is not about enculturating people into an affinity group of support and togetherness. It’s about cultivating a community committed to following Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6). In a secular society, to believe and behave, we must be able to grasp that we belong not only to that community but to God who created us and demonstrated a profound love for us in Jesus Christ.
Belonging, then, is not simply a matter of church attendance or even membership. It’s a covenant relationship based on trust and commitment. It’s deeper than cultural similarities or consumer attraction to a congregation’s programming. It’s belonging to God and one another in the ties that bind our hearts in Christian love. It’s the fellowship of kindred minds. It’s bearing one another’s burdens and sharing the joy of blessings. It’s a common journey and a common hope.
#SayALittlePrayer...
For someone on the TIME magazine list of the 100 most influential people in the race toward artificial intelligence.
#ReimaginePRAYER...and its impact on the future.
Scan the faces. Ask Spirit how to pray...
√Reimagine.Network
Ultimately evangelism is not the saving of America, but of Americans.
Quick Quote - Source - Jeff Hilles
We need to build relationships with individuals. Largely gone are the days when "events" bring an impactful gospel message.
BCWorldview.org
Deconstructing or Reconstructing Faith?
Phil Miglioratti @ The Remagine.Network
“Most pastors have heard of deconstruction and some say they’ve seen it in their pews, but no one knows exactly what faith deconstruction means.
Just because someone is re-evaluating what they believe, doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve quit believing entirely.” Lizzy Haselstine
#ItSeemsToMe…some evangelicals are deconstructing but many of us are reconstructing. Inviting a Spirit-led, Scripture-fed review and, as necessary, revision of the containers we have designed to carry, the templates we have constructed to codify, our beliefs and perspectives. A faith journey to assess where true faith has been contaminated or compromised by traditions and/or cultural biases we have begun to think of as correct - faultless - universal expressions of Holy Scripture.
“Many have been influenced by culture instead of by the church” (LH) ... but reconstruction recognizes that norms and standards of culture have also influenced the church. Identifying customs-traditions-values that steer or dilute Scripture is essential to both personal discipleship and corporate culture.
“People rely on their circumstances to create their worldviews” (LH) ... but so does our theologizing. Our creedal statements remain foundational but our interpretations and applications need constant, thoughtful reflection to identify perspectives that are based upon or shaped byour tribal/temporal context.
“Before we self-righteously point fingers at someone questioning God, take time to consider what that person may have gone through or be facing and pray for them. When someone is deconstructing their faith, it is not a time to criticize or be skeptical of them but to love them well” (LH) ... and to listen. They may have wisdom from the Spirit that applies to us as well. Failure to listen and learn will only result in more deconstruction (unbelief) than reconstruction (renewed belief).
GUEST POST ~ Culture and Why It Matters
The One Thing That Changes Everything
Bill Zipp
I love Kmart. But not for the low, low prices or the blue light specials. I love Kmart because wherever I travel in the United States, I can find a dead plant there.
Let me explain…
As a speaker, I’m often asked to address the topic of organizational culture. I begin my speech by putting a dead plant in front of the audience and asking the group what this plant needs. We generate a list—water, air, nutrients, re-planting, pruning—and discuss the ways in which this list parallels the corporate context.
There’s one problem with that ingenious idea, however. Where do you find a dead plant on demand? The solution: Kmart. They’ve never failed to deliver. There’s always a good supply of dead plants on their shelves from which to choose.
When I take my dead plant to the check-out line to pay for it, I ask the attendant if he or she could discount it for me because the plant is, obviously, quite dead. A conversation like this ensues:
“I’m sorry, sir. I’m not allowed to do that.”
“But the plant is dead,” I reply.
“It’s not our policy to discount dead plants. Then everyone would want them.”
“And that would be a problem?“
I’ve learned a lot over the years from dead plants about what it takes to build great organizational culture, but first, allow me to answer these two questions: What is culture and why does it matter?
WHAT IS CULTURE? WHY DOES IT MATTER?
Simply stated, culture is the combination of beliefs and behaviors any group of people embrace, from businesses to churches, families to nations. It’s the way people in these groups think and the way they act over time.
If a sports team believes it cannot win close games, its behavior reflects that belief when minutes turn to seconds on the clock. They stop playing with a sense of urgency and give up. In business, culture drives how we participate in meetings, how we treat our customers, and how we go about pursuing our goals and responding to the obstacles that arise related to them.
Culture is the undercurrent of all that goes on in your organization and the riptide that drowns any initiative that drifts into its flow. It’s the one thing that changes everything. Which makes building great organizational culture one of your top priorities as a leader.
The stark reality is this: you may have the best product at the best price. You may have the most brilliant strategy being executed by the most talented staff. You may have the latest cutting edge technology and the slickest social media presence, but if your culture is broken, all of that stuff—every bit of it—is dead on arrival.
Or in the words of Peter Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast!”
THREE P’S OF CULTURE
Okay, here’s what I’ve learned about culture: Great organizational culture has three intersecting lines. The first of these lines is your company’s guiding principles, its core values. That line then intersects with the products and services you provide and the way you treat people. Let’s address each in turn.
1. GUIDING PRINCIPLES
The starting place for culture is with beliefs. That is, a common set of characteristics a company is committed to carrying out, no matter what. You may refer to these as core values, or, as I do here, as guiding principles.
Companies with great organizational culture have intentionally identified a handful of these qualities and defined them as a group. Often, this process begins with individuals in the organization identifying their own core values, explaining them to each other, and affirming the shared commitments that surface in the process.
Don’t, however, jump into this process lightly. It isn’t for the faint of heart.
“Coming up with strong values—and sticking to them—requires real guts. Indeed, an organization considering a values initiative must first come to terms with the fact that, when properly practiced, values inflict pain and demand constant vigilance,” warns the ever-insightful Patrick Lencioni in Harvard Business Review. “If you’re not willing to accept the pain real values incur, don’t bother going to the trouble of formulating a values statement. You’ll be better off without one.”
2. PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
If you’ve ever participated in a core values exercise like the one described above (It was all the rage a few years ago.), your company may have assembled a list like this: communication, respect, integrity, excellence.
Don’t those words sound great?
Here’s the problem with the items on that list. They were the core values of Enron as stated in its annual report shortly before the company’s epic meltdown, one of the worst scandals ever to have rocked the business world. Ouch!
The challenge, then, in building culture is not coming up with the ideals we espouse but actually embodying those ideals in the demands of day-to-day life. Doing them /no matter what/.
This means having your guiding principles drive the quality of the products you bring to market and the integrity of the services that support those products. It may mean declining to offer certain services because they don’t align with your values or refusing to provide certain products, regardless of their profit margin.
In other words, the creation of a company culture that’s consistent with its convictions requires that your values inform every marketplace interaction—from advertising to sales, from accounting to operations—or they are, like Enron, empty words on the wall (or in a glossy annual report).
3. RELATIONSHIPS WITH PEOPLE
Culture begins by what we say we believe, our guiding principles, and it continues by acting on those beliefs with specific, repeated behaviors. First with our products and services, and next in our relationships with people.
Token phrases, such as, “People are our greatest asset,” cause instant eye-rolls and cynical skepticism. Not, however, within companies with great organizational culture. These firms have allowed their values to inform daily interactions with their employees, creating an environment of mutual trust and respect.
Granted, working with human beings is infinitely more difficult than bringing products and services to the market, but this is where culture becomes deeply embedded in a company. And while volumes have been written on the subject, I offer some simple advice. Be honest. Be human. Be both at the same time.
Being honest involves speaking with clarity and candor and avoiding the deceptive guise of minimization or exaggerated overstatements. Honesty without humanity, however, can be harsh and hurtful. So along with clarity and candor, provide kindness and compassion. In other words, be human. And while you’re at it, be humble.
For my faith friends, you’ll recognize this concept as becoming more like our Savior, who is ”full of grace and truth.” Again, not one or the other but both completely. A fullness of grace and truth has the potential to create the greatest culture your company has ever experienced.
If your organization were a plant, how healthy would that plant be? Would it be dying on a shelf at Kmart or thriving in a fertile garden?
The choice is yours as a leader. It’s a choice to pay attention to the one thing that changes everything, empowering your people to stay true to their guiding principles with all your products and services and all your relational interactions.
With thanks to BillZip.com
Christianity's American Fate:
How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular
How did American Christianity become synonymous with conservative white evangelicalism? This sweeping work by a leading historian of modern America traces the rise of the evangelical movement and the decline of mainline Protestantism’s influence on American life. In Christianity’s American Fate, David Hollinger shows how the Protestant establishment, adopting progressive ideas about race, gender, sexuality, empire, and divinity, liberalized too quickly for some and not quickly enough for others. After 1960, mainline Protestantism lost members from both camps—conservatives to evangelicalism and progressives to secular activism. A Protestant evangelicalism that was comfortable with patriarchy and white supremacy soon became the country’s dominant Christian cultural force.
Hollinger explains the origins of what he calls Protestantism’s “two-party system” in the United States, finding its roots in America’s religious culture of dissent, as established by seventeenth-century colonists who broke away from Europe’s religious traditions; the constitutional separation of church and state, which enabled religious diversity; and the constant influx of immigrants, who found solidarity in churches. Hollinger argues that the United States became not only overwhelmingly Protestant but Protestant on steroids. By the 1960s, Jews and other non-Christians had diversified the nation ethnoreligiously, inspiring more inclusive notions of community. But by embracing a socially diverse and scientifically engaged modernity, Hollinger tells us, ecumenical Protestants also set the terms by which evangelicals became reactionary.
#ReimaginePRAYER... Outward and Forward
Outward and Forward do bot replace Upward and Inward, but they are just as strategic.
- Use these 6 "spheres" as a template for equipping believers to pray outward and forward
- The spheres are based on who you pray with:
- You, with Jesus (1:1 lime John the beloved)
- You and a few friends/small group, with Jesus (1:3 like Mary, Martha and lazarus; 1:72 like the mission teams)
- You and your congregation, with Jesus (1:120 in the Uppde Room)
- You and a diversity of believers from across your community/city, and Jesus (citywide coordinatioin)
- You and any of the above, with Jesus, focused on cultural issues and institutions (Mars Hill)
- You and any of the above, focused on the nations (evangelism, disciple-making, church planting, missions)
Sphere #1 ... in my CLOSETYou and the Lord; one-on-one. Prayer-Closet Intercession. |
Reply by Malva Birch |
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Sphere #2 ...with my COHORTSExploring the unique dynamics of small group prayer; Bible studies, Sunday School classes, fellowship groups, prayer teams... |
TURN - The Upper Room Network |
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Sphere #3 ...throughout my CONGREGATIONRelating to the issues and ideas unique to the dynamic of praying with others; small or large all--the-congregation gatherings |
Praying Together from 25 Different Locations |
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Sphere #4 ...across my CITYPrayer, often collaborative, for the well-being of a city. Every family. Every affinity. Every community. |
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Sphere #5 ...penetrating my CULTUREFocused on an outpouring of God's Spirit, bringing a renewed Christ-centeredness to the Church and a spiritual awakening in our nation's culture. |
Crying Out To God: Beyond Passive-Prayer into Passionate-Prayer |
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Sphere #6 ...for other COUNTRIES•Global Focus (Nations / Missions) Prayer that reaches beyond our national borders ~ That the earth may be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea! |
