Notice: My Smaller Blogs Going Off-Line Soon

To those who are visitors and subscribers to my futuristguy2 and SuperHero Sidekick blogs, this is to let you know I switched back here to futuristguy as my primary blog last year. As time went on, it made more sense to keep blogging here than to spread things out too much. I already consolidated the material from these and my RadoXodaR blog into futuristguy, and will be taking futuristguy2 and SuperHero Sidekick off-line by the end of this month. So … be sure to subscribe to futuristguy if you want to keep up with my thoughts and essays. Meanwhile, thanks for your interest in this blog, and hope you’ve found some constructive help herein!

I will also be adding resource items and additional details to pages on my Opal Design Systems site as time goes by. This is more of a resource site related to my curriculum on systems for cultural contextualization of ministry, and I don’t plan on regular blogging there.

My blogs about movies and media will stay on-line – Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Max Headroom – and I will be adding another to them soon – so watch for that announcement …

Brad Sargent, aka the futuristguy

 

Becky Garrison on “Fashion for Change” and “Ancient Future Disciples”

Today is the traditional day set aside in Western liturgies to celebrate the visit of the wise men to the baby Jesus. Over the years, it has become my second most favorite holiday, right after Easter weekend. Anyway, I set aside part of this day for reflection, prayer, and writing. One of the things I decided to do was to share a bit about Becky Garrison, a friend of mine who brings gifts of advocacy, insight, and challenge to disciples, ministries, churches, and movements. And lo and behold, she does so with both seriousness and satire!

Becky and I connected through that missional mogul, TallSkinnyKiwi (also known as Andrew Jones, who happens to be one of the instigators of my entry into blogging nearly 10 years ago). We’ve been in touch for a few years now, with lots of emails and a few in-person visits to round out the virtual relating.

 

Launched Today: Opal Design Systems Website!

Well, I’ve finally landed on a name I like for my curriculum series project — “Opal Design Systems.” Check out the website if you want to see of exactly what it is that I started R&D on in 1991 (P.S. feedback welcomed!) and more details on why I chose this name.

The ultra-short version of the story is this: My Dad was a jeweler, and I’ve seen all kinds of gemstones through the years. I’ve grown attached to opals as an analogy representing organizational systems that bring together flashes of brilliance from all kinds of people, and that is done by design. So, this curriculum is about how to create intentional and sustainable activities for an intercultural group of people, who integrate together their different ways to process life while following Jesus, and who use interdisciplinary approaches to build Kingdom enterprises (churches, ministries, businesses, community agencies) and to collaborate with others in their communities.

The first series in the Opal Design Systems will be eight books, the first of which is due for publication early in 2012. This inaugural volume is titled, Safe Houses for God’s People. It’s about discerning malignant ministry, dismantling systems of spiritual abuse, and (re)building safe and sustainable places of discipleship. A difficult topic, but with a redemptive edge.

More on that in another post sometime soon … but for now, a well-earned rest is calling my name … and I do believe I also hear the faraway cry of a hazelnut latte, calling for a time of celebration!

 

A Few Reflections on World AIDS Day

 

Malignant Ministry ~ Excerpt 1

I’m heading into the final stretch on editing my book about spiritual abuse, and am pretty sure I can finish it soon. It’s exciting to be this close to completion, since I started this particular book almost four full years ago, and it looks like the launch will be in January, which is “Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month”! I’ll be posting some excerpts on my blog, the first one today: a five-year-old shares her view on the differences between sin and evil, and I share some thoughts on why spiritual abuse at least constitutes evil.

 

Today I Launched into the Last Editing Lap!

Katie's Chirp-Chirp Bird Reminds of God's Faithful Provisions ...

When we’re on a real-world journey, unexpected situations unfold that turn out, providentially, to help us better understand what God created us to be and to do – why we are here and what we can contribute to the expansion of the Kingdom through our own unique design. I’m about to embark on what seems to be the beginning of closure in one major stage in that journey for me. This will still take a while, like one last big push uphill in a steeple-chase race.

And though I don’t have a clue what’s coming after this, there are a few important things that have become for more settled in my soul over this last stretch of 20 years. (Note that I said these realities have become more settled over time, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still have angst over them. Maybe just not as much as I used to.) (In fact, while one of my friends periodically says that I’m “the posterboy for faith” I think it’s more “the posterboy for perseverance.” Maybe they’re really the same, but one emphasizes the concept more than the concrete action. I don’t know, but I suspect neither one is doubt-free or angst-absent.) Anyway, here are key things I’ve concluded …

 

Changing the Paradigm for Theological Training – Part 2: Revising the Core Curriculum (1997)

I wrote the following material in 1997. It comes from “Developing a New Curriculum to Match Training Needs” in Toolkit for Effective 21st-Century Ministry. I am presenting it here pretty much without comment or analysis (that will be in Part 3) and only slight editing to clarify terms. I will say that I do believe that Part 1’s “top 10 list” for revising missional training systems represents a high degree of continuity with what appears here, but is far more scaled down and (hopefully) refined. It’s detailed, but that’s an accurate picture of how my mind works.

 

Veteran’s Day 2011 ~ And “Buddy Poppies”

VFW "Buddy Poppy"®

We grew up in the 1950s and ’60s with the annual sale of those then-familiar red poppies. Veterans from World Wars I and II stood on the street corners, smartly dressed in their uniforms, poppies in one hand and a collection can in the other. It was rare to see people in uniform then, and when you did, it tended to be a mixture of somber celebration. Over the years, various veterans visited our schools to share their stories. Sometimes they showed up in their uniform, sometimes not. Either way, these heroes – our local baker, shoemaker, real estate agent, and others – all of them made history more real to us, with their accounts of surviving the Bataan Death March, or the Battle of the Bulge, or Midway. It would take years before I better understood what those experiences cost them, in terms of their loss and pain and grief.

In my desk drawer, I keep as a reminder one of these bright-red flowers with the green cluster center and sage-colored twist-wrap wire stem. I kept the little paper tag on it. The front of it says, “Buddy” Poppy®. Wear it proudly.” The back says, “Proceeds to the Veteran of Foreign Wars for Veterans Assistance Programs.” You may not have seen one of these before, so I include here a picture of the Buddy Poppy I keep in my drawer. This one is vintage mid-2000s. Somewhere in storage, I’m sure I have one that is decades older …

Conflict is a difficult thing. I believe our hearts naturally long for peace. It’s just part of our God-given design. And yet, things are rarely at peace, and it is the sad irony that war does not bring lasting peace. Still, we have benefited from both obvious and behind-the-scenes service provided by the sacrifices of current members of our military, our veterans, and their families. I am reminded of the inscription at the Philadelphia Vietnam Veterans Memorial: “For those who fought for it, freedom has a flavor the protected will never know.” I will never fully know the meaning of this, but today, I’m adding my thanks for the men and women who have sought to restore hope and to protect the possibilities of freedom for the future.

 

Changing the Paradigm for Theological Training – Part 1: My Top 10 List

Sometimes, things seem to come around full circle, but the cycle takes years or even decades to close the circuit. And that happened to me this week.

I’ve been reading papers and forum discussions posted on The Future of Theological Education, which went live the first of this month. I’d thought a lot about changing the seminary paradigm over the years. So, I decided to write up my current top 10 notions on how I think theological education would be changed to match the emerging holistic, integrative paradigm – in other words, something far more friendly to what I understand as an incarnational and missional ministry approach.

After finishing the first draft, I found archived e-files I’d written 15 years ago on changing the seminary paradigm. The document included what I was then calling a “Toolkit for Effective 21st-Century Ministry.” It was intriguing to compare that with my current list, and to realize that my views now are pretty much refined versions of what they were then. In fact, the curriculum I’m finishing up includes pretty much all the major themes for required how-to courses that I was mulling over in 1997. In Part 1, I’ll give my top 10 list, without a huge amount of detail or discussion. In Part 2, I’ll take a look back at some similar material from 1997, and in Part 3, comment on how I think the situation has changed since the mid-1990s and where it may be headed in the future. I may add other posts if I access intriguing material from 1997 (most of which was typed into program I no longer have access to or translation capability for).

 

Church Planting for Cyborgs – Part 3: Replicants, Cyborgs, an’ Droids, Oh My!

I wrote this three-part riff in response to an article my friend Dr. Linda Bergquist posted at ChurchPlanting.com. Her article, “Out of the Algorithm, Into the Mystery!”, explores some of our tendencies to rely on algorithms – predictable formulas that capture what we’ve learned about past phenomena – instead of to fling ourselves into a different level of faith and to innovate.

Part 1 looked at the problems when we use algorithms as exact formulas and rules, instead of heuristics as more flexible and fuzzy “rules of thumb” for figuring out current situations that aren’t so clear. Part 2 suggested ways that frameworks force us to discuss, discern, and decide our church planting strategies and structures in reliance on the Holy Spirit, where formulas suggest that we passively plug-and-play what someone else has produced somewhere else for whatever reasons. Part 3 poses questions from science fiction that make us think about the essence of being human, and consider what it means to think of church planting humanistically as technology-enhanced cyborgs instead of mechanistically as fully-formulized androids/clones.