Well done. Keep pushing this discussion. There is not enough of it (yet) in conversations within the Church. Grateful for your articulate and courageous thoughts.

J.R.

Also, since I have no idea when I’ll next get back to checking out blogs and the development of your series, here are several quotes that I find provocative on the subject of paradigm change, organizational cultures limiting new wineskins, and choosing continuance over conformity.

“Many great organizations have launched ambitious sustainability initiatives only to see them wither away in a short time. The reason is simple. Your company is not defined by the initiatives it undertakes – it is defined by its culture. And to make sustainability work, it needs to be integrated into that framework.” ~ Green Canary, a division of EnviroMedia Social Marketing. http://www.greencanary.net/comms.php

“From what has been told to me by elders, I’m not here to continue to try to be them, but I’m here to know their story which is the ancient oral tradition, the history of how I came to be here as a person of culture. My responsibility is to define myself based on that knowledge, and to include the experiences that I have in the world now as part of that history.” ~ R. Carlos Nakai, member of the Ute and Navajo tribes, in the world music compilation set, *Planet Soup*

Never in the past 10+ years of church plants, mergers, and transitions that I’ve been involved with, have I experienced it working when modernistic/managerial paradigm people try to lead the way to a holistic/missional enterprise. And I have not seen them give up control and let the new insiders lead. It’s exactly what the father of all church consultants, Lyle Schaller, predicted over 10 years ago: “When the sequential [i.e., managerial model] church leaders do not accommodate the concurrent [i.e., non-linear, holistic] thinkers, the concurrent people lose hope.”

If leaders within the old managerial paradigm want their seminary, church, or other organization to survive long into the future, at some point, they have to transition the leadership to the new insiders. They could either give it over all at once, or perhaps it works within their incremental-change method to have a two- or three-generation plan. I suspect there may be holistic-paradigm people that God would call into that role to accept the baton. I am not one of them, and sounds like that is not your calling either.

So, for those like us, it makes more sense either to start something that embodies new-paradigm holism from the outset, or find and support those who have started something like this. That’s the route I’ve been taking …

P.S. I always prefer to give as thorough and considered a comment as possible, never knowing if/when I’ll get back to blogs for follow-ups. And this is a vital topic, JR. Thanks for tackling it!

Hope to get more of your feedback in future posts brother.

"To change the seminary paradigm from Christendom/management to Misseo Dei/missional will require putting holistic people in positions of teaching and of “power.” (Now that’s a major irony!) And so, it may well take a minimum of two or three more generations of highly intentional decision-making and follow-through for a seminary to overhaul its system by grafting in holistic administrators and professors, and letting them change the organizational DNA.

I haven't quite gotten there yet, but changing existing Seminary systems over the course of generations is not something that interests me. Even if we get differently thinking people in those positions of "power," I think there are other major obstacles in the way (to be addressed later).

Perhaps this what you were saying as you went on. I have been a part of the same unity-as-uniformity phenomenon that you speak of and just don't have much patience for it.

This is truly a wineskins issue for me. No interest in trying to refurbish the old wineskins anymore, we need new ones. Sadly, and man, this is a whole other can of worms, the larger Christian community hasn't built a Christlike "unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground" sort of mentality into our DNA. We are so hell-bent on our own preservation that we have little capacity for any real resurrection sort of hope.

I worked in multiple departments at a theologically conservative/evangelical seminary from 1996-2007, and got to know a lot of the students, professors, and administrators. So, I had a birds-eye view to observe the culture clash between the managerial versus missional paradigms as you’ve begun to describe. I witnessed the effects on people when more of a business bottom line dominated over a concern for holistic discipleship and witness. And although I saw sincerity about the system moving into the future, and a (very slow) degree of change in that direction, the systems are – sadly – still overwhelmingly geared to an information-conveyance, power-directive approach.

We can’t totally fault the seminary for this. It’s just manifesting what’s in the DNA of its management systems and its management-style leaders. I’m reminded of a quote I found in a leadership book at the seminary. It comes from Price Pritchett, in *The Ethics of Excellence.* He states: “The organization can never be something the people are not.” To change the seminary paradigm from Christendom/management to Misseo Dei/missional will require putting holistic people in positions of teaching and of “power.” (Now that’s a major irony!) And so, it may well take a minimum of two or three more generations of highly intentional decision-making and follow-through for a seminary to overhaul its system by grafting in holistic administrators and professors, and letting them change the organizational DNA.

But this raises a whole other issue that I think may be THE major reason why this is difficult. And that’s the problem of how to collaborate across these two paradigms when the value sets of each are truly different – even if adherents of both say they are drawn from Scripture – and these two value sets inherently lead to two conflicting sets of strategies, structures, and methods. How do you find "unity" in the midst of two incompatible approaches to the entire way you see the world and interact with it?

In my experiences with such attempts at unity, they typically veer off toward unification and conformity. Managers just want to manage; it’s who they are and what they do. But attempting to control information, power, and positions doesn’t work in a world that values open-sourced, shared-responsibility, and parity. That kind of world calls forth missional, not managerial. I’m not even sure there is any in-between paradigm that works very well, and I’ve been wrestling with that issue since the mid-1990s. And it makes me sad …

It would make my heart glad to find a place where pro-missional collaboration is more possible. But in any case, for now my own path through that conundrum has been to "download" as much holistic, missionally-minded material as I can, so those who are ready to construct (or reconstruct after deconstructing!) in a missional paradigm have yet another voice available.

Grace on the other hand is not an intellectual consequence to control or grasp. It is something to be experienced and received, and thus cannot reside in the intellectual framework. It is intellectual untenable because it doesn't make sense from our perspective.

What this means is we have to begin with a framework that creates an intentional space of grace for people to wrestle with what it means that our actions and circumstances, or the things we use to judge, don't define us.

What I find in the Gospels is a model for doing this: the Jesus model. It's gathering together a group of twelve and wrestling with the story of Good News together. It's small enough to be effective, and large enough to create momentum.

Funny thing is, Jesus changed the world with that structure.