PART SIX: BEGINNING OUR JOURNEY
To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne. Revelation 3:21
Theologically speaking, heaven is the ultimate reality. And, philosophically speaking, I find that heaven fulfills my own loftiest, overall personal goal in that it embodies “the highest good for the longest time period.” That perspective, which is part of systems thinking, makes heaven very exciting for me, especially when I compare that goal to the downward spiral of our short-term actions and their unintended negative returns.
In the very beginning of the Laodicean letter, Jesus introduces himself, among other mentioned titles, as the Ruler of God’s Creation. I believe that the Genesis account of the first creation is there to inform our thinking about God and his intentions for the world. As we focus in on that first creation, we discover that living system ministry is modeled after the nature of living systems that God made in his first creation. But at the end of Revelation, we are introduced to the new creation.
In the new creation story, a city, made in heaven, settles down to earth. God is going to use divine technology to build a heavenly city for his people that will be far better than all the cities that humans have ever produced. But if God is including technology in his new creation, in his new heaven and his new earth (for how can you have a city without technology?), something very new and exciting is ahead, because technology was not a part of the first creation.
I have been searching for years to understand how our secondary culture, a culture that is characterized by its all-pervasive technology, can be an effective host culture to Christianity. Now I wonder if the presence of technology in the new creation indicates that what is ahead might be the perfect model for our secondary culture in this age. I think we will discover that a clear image of the new creation will fit those of us in secondary culture extremely well, and we will see that those of us who are in Christ Jesus are fit for it, too.
The first creation, with its living system level of order, has been the model for primary culture for all of human history. As primary culture people lived close to the natural world, they learned from infancy about the nature of the living systems all around them, and so their mental models were predisposed to be in line with God’s living system world. But now, in this final age, the new creation with its new Jerusalem technology can be the model for the many world cultures experiencing their own Great Transitions and becoming dominantly secondary.
Globally, secondary culture is taking over the role as the host culture and essential context of the church. But as we have shown, secondary cultures are not highly relational, nor do they draw understanding from living systems, so they have not been well suited to nurture Christianity, which is both highly relational and a living system. So now the problem is that both our maturing secondary culture itself and the church residing within the secondary culture need a model to follow to help them operate appropriately in the technologically focused context of our contemporary age.
Since the Great Transition, Christianity dwells in a new environment, and we must adapt to our changing world or we will no longer be contextualized to the culture in which we live. Christianity has been growing and developing in many parts of the world, especially where there is a predominance of primary cultures that reflect the living system design of the first creation, even though these primary cultures are now moving rapidly into a more dominantly secondary world. But in our Western culture, Christianity is still on a quest for relevance and spiritual vitality as it tries to adjust to our post–Great Transition culture. It seems that, where secondary culture has grown more dominant, the vitality of our Christian faith seems to have waned. And sadly, revivals have yet to be contextualized to secondary cultures.
So, what’s to be done? Is there hope for increased spiritual vitality in the Western world? The way I see it, the only hope for Christianity in the secondary culture is to follow the model of the new creation in heaven, which includes a city, which, in turn, includes technology, the touchstone of our modern culture! Although the physical aspects of human technology were not a part of the first creation, they will be a part of the new creation. With its divine technology, I think the new creation gives us something new: it models a perfect interrelationship of the physical, social, and spiritual aspects of reality all operating as living systems in one huge system. And to me, that perfect interrelationship is the ultimate goal of the cross of Jesus Christ.
Learning the Mental Models of the New Creation
I have been saying that our new secondary culture will not survive unless we can grow out of a destructive pattern of separation of the physical, social, and spiritual realms of reality and, instead, actively pursue a healthy, working interrelationship among these three aspects of our world. This was one of the key attributes of the first creation, and this is also the model offered by the new creation, with the added benefit of the perfect assimilation of technology.
I now want to set up a clear contrast between what happened in the Garden of Eden that damaged the first creation and what happens in the new creation that, for all eternity, will maintain life, glory, and goodness in that new creation to the praise of the Redeemer, Jesus Christ.
Our understanding of the importance of mental models shows us that we don’t need merely to avoid doing what Adam and Eve did, but more basically, we need to avoid thinking as they thought. We will do similar things to what they did if we use the same mental models they used.
So what were Adam and Eve thinking that pushed them over the edge? I can think of at least four things they may have been thinking which led to their sin when faced with the decision of whether or not to eat the forbidden fruit. In stark contrast to their mental models are four clear alternatives that I will call the new creation mental models.
If the four Adam and Eve mental models would drive us to do what Adam and Eve did, the four new creation mental models will drive us to do what Christ did and will show us how to prepare for his coming kingdom.
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ADAM AND EVE
MENTAL MODELS
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NEW CREATION
MENTAL MODELS
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CONTROL
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I can do what I want to do, the way I want to do it.
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God is in complete control.
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CHANGE
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What I do produces the effect I want.
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In living systems, effects are produced by multiple interrelated causes.
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TIME
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I can do a quick fix to get what I want.
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God makes everything happen in his time.
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SPACE
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I can do this myself by breaking it down into simple parts.
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All physical, social, and spiritual realities are perfectly interrelated through Jesus Christ.
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Control. When we use the Adam and Eve mental model, “I can do what I want to do, the way I want to do it,” to do ministry in secondary culture, we give precedence to what human dynamics control, such as what a leader, organization, technology, or money directly makes possible in ministry. When we use the new creation mental model, which says, “God is in complete control,” we know the idea that we actually have control is just an illusion. A living system ministry practitioner is openhanded about his or her work, constantly evaluating his or her activities and adjusting them to the environment of the living system, which he or she knows is complex beyond understanding.
Change. In all of creation, we find that things take on new forms, grow, learn, and so on. What causes change? While Adam and Eve had one idea of what can cause change, in the new creation, there is a different explanation. Adam and Eve reasoned that “What I do produces the effect I want.” People who use that mental model to do ministry in secondary culture assume that one can produce change by works, that an effect is produced by a direct cause. In ministry, we might change one thing in a particular church or neighborhood, but our concept of change is illusionary because we haven’t understood how true change occurs in such an environment. The actual way that change in any ministry context really occurs is described by the new creation mental model: “In living systems, effects are produced by multiple interrelated causes.” In ministry, therefore, we must work comprehensively in a redemptive manner with all the many interconnected variables in our church or neighborhood’s broader reality. If we don’t, the living system itself will reverse things back to how they were originally operating. That’s just the way living systems work.
Time. Eve was looking at the fruit. It looked good. And Satan said, “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil (Gen 3:5, italics mine). He did not say, “Four or five years after you have eaten. . . .” The implication was that the answer would be immediate and direct. Adam and Eve were thinking short term. “I can do a quick fix to get what I want.” They were thinking, “Oh! The knowledge of good and evil is available? Who knew? Great! I want it now!” And they proceeded to commit the sin that would give them the short-term answer to what they were looking for and, in so doing, damaged all of creation for the rest of human history. The unanticipated and unintended negative returns of their quick action were never even considered by Adam and Eve. Short-term answers may appear to be good, but what are really important are the long-term results.
Space. When Christians use Adam and Eve’s simple space mental model to do ministry in secondary culture, they say, “I can do this myself by breaking it down into simple parts.” Ministry practitioners need to do ministry in secondary culture with the new creation mental model that says, “All physical, social, and spiritual realities are perfectly interrelated through Jesus Christ.” The three realms of reality were designed to operate in an interconnected manner before the fall and will do so again in the new creation. Now, in this present time, this is also God’s intention, but it will require a redemptive process for these three realms to be in harmony, because fallenness created separation.
Adam and Eve’s mental models are based on simplistic, low-level assumptions about reality. They collectively describe poor, blind, and naked people doing the best they can. These statements are the predominant mental models of secondary culture people, and they clearly describe the activities of well-meaning Western Christians. They tell us “how to do the job.” People use this works-based thinking to reduce their perception of the complex world to something understandable, but that perception is an illusion. They want to know “how to do the job,” but cannot bring all the factors involved into consideration, and, thus, what they do is ineffective.
All four new creation mental models tell us “how the job gets done.” Those who choose the new creation mental models learn to operate effectively in the complexity of the real world, never oversimplifying it, but rather constantly adapting their activities to its tough discipline. Through constant redemptive learning, they are able to see how physical, social, and spiritual systems interrelate with each other.
Finding Total Redemption in the New Creation
Western, secondary culture believers have a fragmented and splintered understanding of redemption. We clearly understand that we are redeemed vertically, but we do not talk much about the total redemption of God, the perfect redemption that will culminate in a new creation. We seldom imagine ourselves as totally redeemed believers living with God in heaven. We explore our own personal redemption and sanctification as we have experienced it here on this earth, but do we even consider that God is redeeming the whole of creation? I believe Jesus Christ wants us to understand the total redemption he has in mind, and that this understanding should shape the way we do ministry.
Redemption is high-level reality. Yet, with our cognitive minds, we see only small pieces of the enormous whole of the total redemptive plan God put into motion through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Both the miracle of personal redemption and God’s larger plan of the redemption of all creation are much, much bigger than what we see or understand.
Jesus, the Ruler of God’s creation, is now the Redeemer of the fallen first creation. Because he is now also both fully God and fully Man, he is the perfect king over the new creation, which will represent a total integration of the three realms of reality. This is the highest goal possible: the eternal and total redemption of all creation in which the physical, social, and spiritual aspects of reality are all perfectly interrelated.
While secondary culture needs to look forward to the new creation to gain its heading, there is a problem. Heaven is perfect and secondary culture is not. So for us to even walk in that direction, there needs to be a constant redemptive process at work. The redemptive work of Christ will restore even our secondary culture to perfection, as Jesus promises to restore all things in heaven and on earth. But let us not be complacent and forget that, while heaven is perfect, down here things are not. We must constantly be about this business of seeking total redemption and choosing the redemptive process all the time.
When Jesus knocks on the door of the bride, will we answer? The church that doesn’t respond to his knock is a church living in an illusion—assuming that he is already in the house, that things are going the way they should go. But while we sit in the house of our illusionary world, Jesus is outside the door, wanting to come in to transform our weak church, living in its illusion, into the real church.
Many of our illusions are connected with the wretched, poor, non-redemptive activities that we are doing in all three aspects of our world. As Christians, we are spiritually redeemed, but God wants us to join him in his total process of redemption—not only spiritually, but physically and socially as well. Yet, we remain inside our buildings, inside our organizations, focused on our programs and on our resources (or, more likely, our lack of resources). Somehow, we think that something wonderful is actually happening directly through our low-level efforts—but that is an illusion! We are living in an illusion if we think that our organizations or programs alone are causing anything that relates to God’s ultimate purposes to happen at the significant level that God expects.
Christ wants to draw us out of that illusion! If we let him in, he will teach us how to work with him in living system ministry. All those things that we do through our programs and organizations can become meaningful, but only when we are immersed in the whole redemptive process that God is doing. God will use our constructs. Even now, he is redeeming technology, redeeming our thought processes, redeeming the abilities of the physical, social, and spiritual aspects of our reality to all operate as one interrelated system. He is redeeming our focus to new creation thinking so that we will fit the perfect environment of heaven.
Aligning Our Actions to the New Creation
Aligning our actions to God’s living systems is an extremely high goal. To do this, we acknowledge that we live in a fallen world. We must constantly engage in a repentance-permeated life as we lay before the church the highest goals possible. If we are to reach the high-level order of living system ministry that God wants for his church, we have to have extraordinarily high goals, far beyond what we can do with our low-level efforts. Having high goals keeps us properly aligned with living systems.
In order to have any real personal experience and positive interaction with a living system, we need to discover its entry point. Finding the entry point demands adjusting your own mental models so that you train yourself to see the high-level, living system reality that is there, rather than seeing only the low-level reality that one cannot nurture and that will not produce any fruit.
It is critically important that we maintain as our bottom line an understanding that we are working in a living system. To do this, we must search for the living system part of the culture and make sure we are not focusing on the low-level part of the culture. One way we can find the living part of our secondary culture is to watch for negative feedback from our actions. James said, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds” (Jas 1:2). I consider it joy when I discover negative feedback! Rather than hiding from or denying negative feedback when it comes, we confess it and use it to see how the living system really works. Then we find a substitute that works better in the living system part of the culture. So, if there is no fruit from what we attempt to do, but rather, things fall apart, we may not be participating in the living system. But if there is fruit (over the long term), we have found what is living. We could say to ourselves, “Negative feedback is my friend because it tells me how the system works, so that what I do ultimately can be fruitful.”
Aligning our actions to God’s new creation is a high goal indeed. Though we may never achieve all that we desire, we pursue this path, because it is the path that leads to the fulfillment of the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven, as it is in the coming new creation.
Entering the Doors of the New Creation
In the last century, the social science of cultural anthropology was used by missionary practitioners to contextualize the gospel to the primary cultures of the world, and in one generation, Christianity became a world religion. The result was the huge growth of the faith in primary cultures, mostly in the developing world. Through this process, the integrated discipline of contemporary missiology was born.
One of the challenges of our day is that primary cultures, with their valuable relational aspects for spreading and nurturing spiritual vitality, are departing from the scene, and the newly developing but immature secondary cultures taking their place are not as relationally oriented. This has resulted in Christian decline in secondary cultures and a proliferation of low-level, organizational approaches to missions. As primary cultures rapidly disintegrate, what will we put in their place? The practitioner science of cultural anthropology that was so useful for missiological practitioners in primary culture was never applied to, nor is it adequate for, secondary culture. As I mentioned earlier, I believe the relevant practitioner science to contextualize the good news to our present day secondary culture is systems thinking. I believe the decline of Western Christianity can be reversed when there is a relevant way to approach contemporary secondary culture with the gospel. The science of systems thinking can be integrated into missiology to give us a systemic and organic approach to missions that will fit our secondary culture.
My premise is that the new creation can be the model for today’s immature secondary culture. With heaven as the model for our culture—that perfect place that includes God’s technology—and with an appropriately designed practitioner science, I believe the gospel can be contextualized to secondary culture, the decline of Western Christianity can be reversed, and secondary culture believers can experience revival.
Living system ministry is not just a clever option, a new way to do the same old stuff. Living system ministry is designed to bring spiritual health to our secondary cultures. God’s living systems were the model for primary cultures. The new creation is the ultimate model for us in this new, dominantly secondary culture. In the new creation, physical reality (including technology), social reality (including all the redeemed of all ages), and spiritual reality (including the triune God and his kingdom) are all operating together as one huge interrelated system.
We began with the problem of counterproductivity and how it so easily occurs in our society, our cities, and our churches, and now we end with the possibility of seeing huge tasks being done here on earth in God’s ways with God’s power. In the middle, it’s all about redemption.
The hope for vitality in Western Christianity in our technological age is not found in our past, but in our future. We can’t go back to Eden. Nor will we be able to escape the growth of technology, should we even want to. As the benefits of technology continue to spread throughout the world, people will long for something to give direction to the way life will be.
Heaven is that very practical and very real goal that can give shape to the way we live here and now. The new Jerusalem, with its perfect technology, is the perfect interrelationship of the three realms of reality—the physical, social, and spiritual creation, all operating as one living system, together eternally giving glory to the King, Jesus Christ, who was, is, and always will be the Ruler of God’s creation.
To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne,
just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne. Revelation 3:21
(text excerpted from The Cat and the Toaster, pp. 263–342)
This condensed version is 