PART FOUR: ALIGNING OUR ACTIONS
Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest. and repent. Revelation 3:19
I believe my vertical redemption is complete in Christ. I thank God for my salvation through the atoning sacrifice of Christ, and that my name is written in his book. However, the outworking of our horizontal redemption—seeing the kingdom of God come on earth as it is in heaven; seeing the church become the purified, holy bride—is far from done. I am interested in seeing what God will do in his huge plan for the redemption of the whole creation, beyond the priceless redemption of individuals into his family. That is where much work of redemption is needed today, and that is the realm where we need to participate in the redemptive method, walking a repentance-permeated life.
Looking at the verse above, I see that the word love comes before four other powerful words: rebuke, discipline, be earnest, and repent. I am glad Jesus starts with the word love. He is not treating us as things, or harshly. But he is being firm. He tells it like it is. Jesus’ tough love alerts us to align our actions to the way God does things in his world, rather than being misfits who blindly cause damage to living systems. He clearly does not want our ministry to bear temporary fruit or for us to be lukewarm believers. He wants us to work with him in his way in his living systems so that we will bear much fruit, the fruit that remains.
The repeated warning to repent in the letter to the Laodiceans is like the warning to “mind the gap” on a London subway platform. Just when we are about ready to form a simple plan to do a ministry activity, Jesus says, “Stop right there! Think it over! Mind the gap!” That stops us in our tracks. Could we be about to fall into a gap or run into some unexpected obstacle?
For us to align our actions with God’s ways, he is going to have to train us to think the way he thinks. Discipline is a good thing. Through his discipline, we will learn to be intentionally self-disciplined. If we learn to submit to God’s training, we will learn how not to fall into the gap.
In earnest repentance, we stop and take a sober estimate of our ministry actions and what they are producing. We are determined, more than ever, to pursue productive actions. Earnest repentance will help us to maintain a humble attitude in assessing our Christian activities and not begin to rely again on our Western self-sufficiency.
Horizontal repentance cannot be just a one-time event. We must fully commit to and align with a redemptive living lifestyle characterized by passionate, ongoing change of thinking that keeps taking into account the bigger picture and the actual long-term results of our actions.
Understanding High Order and Low Order
The simple illustration of the cat and the toaster in unit 1 points to two overarching realms of life, two different orders of reality. What God makes, I call high order. What man makes is low order.
What I am talking about is not the difference between good and evil, or even the difference between right and wrong, but the difference between what is high and what is low. We get this idea from God himself.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isa 55:8,9)
Living dynamics that occur beyond the perception threshold are not easily observable. Simplistic, low-order, cause-and-effect activities are very observable, while complicated, high-order social system dynamics happen above the normal threshold of how we understand social reality. All of these complex elements seem like chaos to us because they happen above and beyond our ability to understand them. But we can cross the perception threshold and learn to see living systems.
Living in our dominantly secondary culture, surrounded by low-order reality—the things that man makes—we think in low-order ways. We easily lose touch with God’s high order. When we brush up against high-order reality with our low-order mental models, we usually misperceive God’s high-order creation as chaos. Yet, here we are, stuck in low-order thinking! As we continue in this vein, our actions—and reactions—will be low-order actions. They will not, therefore, be in sync with the high order of God’s living systems that are around us. Like a bullet tearing into flesh, our low-order activities will inevitably, though in our case unintentionally, cause damage to high-order life.
If you find you are expecting a simplistic cause-and-effect result from what you are planning to do in ministry, or in any social system setting, remember that this is not how living systems work, but how low-level systems like machines operate. If this is your expectation, you should immediately ask yourself, “Am I treating my church or ministry like a machine or a living system?”
Tools in the Master’s Shop
God gives us many tools that help us see beyond our own perception threshold so we can discern the system’s own plans. Some of these tools include:
Asking System Questions. If you want high-order results, you cannot say, “How do I do the job?” We rephrase the question, “How does the job get done?” We form the question that way because, realistically, in a social system, there are simply too many factors at work. No one person or organization can orchestrate any significant change in any complex social system through Western organizational activity, even those that are well funded. When you figure out what the real system is that drives the activity (by wording the question properly), you can learn how to participate successfully in the activity, because you are then using the whole system to do the job and not just your individual effort or your organization. We want to do evangelism and church planting and ministry training the way the kingdom and the broader social system works, not just the way our own organization works. This is how we can begin to align our actions with the system.
Uncover the Principles. A social system’s inner principles describe its inner character. Because principles focus on this inner, organic part of a ministry or social system, and not on the more structured organizational part, by discerning its true principles, we may be able to hear the system talk. Once we have identified the principles, and we begin to make our ministry decisions based on those principles, we put ourselves in a position to keep listening to the organic part of our system. Our resulting actions, then, will be aligned with our system. Principles define a positive existing dynamic we don’t want to lose! Principles, rather than policies, are influence points that move us in a positive direction.
Hexagon Listening Groups. Sometimes a group of people who are grappling with an issue relevant to all of them need to be able to see their issue in a clearer way, to hear their own system speak. Briefly, hexagoning is a group activity that evokes scores of variables everyone can think of around the topic or issue at hand. The more variables, the better picture they have of the interrelated complexities of the issue. But the multiplicity of variables soon becomes overwhelming to the group. To address this complexity, we have the group put the variables into categories so they can better deal with them. As each category is named in a way that reminds the group of all the variables it contains, and written on a board for all to see, the group soon has a pretty good visual picture of the larger issue it is addressing. We find that, usually, this shared vision has been invisible to the group before this exercise, or if not entirely invisible, it has never been well defined. This process brings it out where all can see it.
Scenario Planning. “How can what we propose be counterproductive?” That is the question we should always ask about any project or enterprise we are about to begin. When we begin to answer this question, we are engaged in what social scientists call scenario planning. Peter Schwartz1 defines the practice as a disciplined way of thinking, using imagined “stories about the way the world might turn out tomorrow, stories that can help us recognize and adapt to changing aspects of our present environment.” These stories have a specific purpose: They help a group articulate the different pathways that may develop from today’s situation and determine different ways of navigating those possible pathways. Scenario planning essentially is disciplined daydreaming.
Immersion in the Living System. The best place to start to learn both consciously and subconsciously about living systems is by living in the social system in which we work and minister. It takes time to become immersed in your social system. You have to develop trust. I often tell young seminarians wanting to plant a church in the city, especially among people with many personal struggles, not to expect to be supported by the church for six years. Whether or not the number is six, the point is, it takes years to discern the living system in the community and become part of it. It takes years to form community because it is a living social system. Even when a church grows rapidly, it can take several years for it to develop its fully functioning organic nature.
1 Peter Schwartz, The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1996).
(text excerpted from The Cat and the Toaster, pp. 163–216)
This condensed version is 