Re-imagining the Holy Spirit: the emergence of a positive deviance
5 Oct 2009
If postmodernity has brought about some measure of freedom in re-thinking, re-assessing and re-imagining so many issues with respect to ecclesiology (and beyond) – especially in an emerging church-sort-of environment – then surely regarding matters of the Spirit, our pneumatology and charismatology can and should be foundational, as our ecclesiology flows from our pneumatology and missiology.
But let’s point to the elephant in the room: alas, the evidence is thin in emerging church circles, or any church circle for that matter that “matters of the Spirit” are being engaged anew. (In terms of research, there are noted exceptions like Will Bernard’s master’s thesis: Awakening Diversity – Unique Gifts in the Church and Max Turner’s article Spiritual Gifts – Then and Now).
Even among so-called practitioners, the Spirit goes missing as a fundamental element of being the people of God; and though I appreciate the hip endeavours of those like Mark Driscoll in talking about spiritual gifts on his TheResurgence blog, I admit to being nonplussed by the result. In fact, it seems like a regurgitation of what has come before (which I guess can be helpful). Maybe I am just more radical than that, because I think there is more freedom to be explored in which the Spirit calls us; but we seem to be stuck in the old models or fearful of venturing off into the wilderness…but perhaps this is where the Spirit is driving us, just as the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness.
Any new experience of the Spirit or re-newed pneumatology – as Steve Burnhope has pointed to previously – is both “faith seeking understanding” but also “faith-at-work” in “doin’-the-stuff”…as John Wimber quipped: faith is spelled: R-I-S-K; thus, all of this will accord with God’s character, in both emerging/immanent ways and in exceptional/transcendent ways, as we previously witnessed to and mentioned in our last conversation. Also in line with God’s nature, if God is infinite, and if we can agree that the scriptural references to “spiritual gifts” are illustrative and not definitive – representative and not exhaustive – then the spiritual-manifestations or spiritual expressions of charismata – spiritual expressions of the Spirit among us – will equally be of an infinite and wonderful variety, even if we are predisposed to categorize them by referencing those witnessed to in our trusted scripture. I am a biblicist and I revere our sacred scriptures but why, if we really believe these charismata are a representative listing (especially as seen in 1 Corinthians) then why do we not feel free to talk and write about more of them, different ones, a variety of them matching the multi-faceted wisdom of God? Are we still reacting to the Montanists of the first and second century? Or perhaps in rejecting the neo-Montantists of our recent charismatic past (and they are still out there doing their thing…let the reader understand), has the emerging and missional church turned to a re-newed but subtler cessationism (practically) instead of a re-newed pneumatology and experience with the Spirit in what Steve Burnhope referred to as the emerging post-charismatic thrust?
It seems to me that Paul’s emphasis in 1 Corinthians 12 is that the singular (en) and the particular(auto) Spirit of God energizes (energei) all these spiritual expressions – or at least what Paul claims in our sacred scriptures are spiritual expressions of the Spirit’s Presence and Work in our midst – in their collective entirety accord with God’s intention, His purposes and His wisdom; and we need to discern what God is doing and get onto His agenda. This is something Steve Baker helped to clarify for me last week: to get on the Spirit’s global agenda, look and join what He is doing locally. So much of my spirituality nowadays has to do with letting go. I need to let go of my need for control and utter comprehension when it comes to the work of the Spirit. It’s not that I give up trying to see the forest for the trees (because I think this sort of wisdom has a place in our emerging/missional people of God contexts), but the Spirit is working it out on a global/cosmic scale, and while I can look to discern a pattern, I need to trust Him. My starting place is to get on the Father’s agenda, with what He is doing right in front of me…in my own neighborhood. For when we get on His agenda, we are cooperating with His Reign. This is Christ’s ministry and His mission we are but students and learners of Him joining Him in His Way. Thus, this is about discipleship, but equally about leadership. One of the challenges at this point is in leadership…as a friend of mine claimed recently: it’s really difficult be a leader and lead people to follow Someone else.
I also feel like we have in the West - given the cultural environment and formation of consumer-identity – have over-commodified the ’spiritual gifts’ in some of the faith communities I have participated. This commodification can be witnessed in those who market ‘gift-inventories’ – a test that pigeonholes you or perhaps labels your ‘gift/gifts’ and determines how you will serve. This example probably outs my rebellious base nature, but when given this kind of test about 12 years ago – I cheated. It’s actually not that hard to cheat (if you’ve ever taken one of these standardized gifts test, you know what I mean). Whatever I really wanted to be perceived in being strong, I answered positively. Of course, maybe the test-makers were smarter than I and graded the test with that in mind. I also probably needed a good dosage of 1 Corinthians 13 at that point! I admit that all these ’spiritual-gift-inventories’ that more and more churches tend to give to people joining their fellowship move them in some what of a direction toward embracing more of the Spirit and the Spirit’s expressions, yet while moving some distance away from old-school cessationism, I wonder if rather than embracing an all-encompassing Spirit empowerment (in both sacred and what we think of as secular realms) they are embracing a new kind of cessationism? Or at least limiting (rather than expanding) the re-imagining of charismatology and of how the Spirit can move…both in immanent and transcendent aspects…afterall God is the most free Person I know, but this is really consistent with His character.
With Steve Burnhope’s last post, I think we have a great launching point to explore the ministry and work of the Holy Spirit, flowing from the relational and Trinitarian roots. Steve Baker and Jason Coker have surveyed another aspect of how far we have all ready traveled from the old ways of our recent past with the recognition of new ground in our pneumatology in pointing to the redemptive freedom in charismatic interdependence, vice the privatized and eventually atomized independence of some in older charismatic circles. Further, Rodney Neill and Steve Burnhope have also landed here in their conversation regarding manipulation and abuse of power/authority/control that comes with this atomized independence and isolation, as witnessed by them in the shepherding movement. I wonder if Jason Coker’s observations on gift-giving are applicable to our ecclesiology, which is connected to our charismatology and pneumatology: the dark side of gift-giving and relational economies (like the Church) is not “too little” but interestingly “too much”. The virtue of gift-based societies (think through the linkage: pneumatology-charismatology-ecclesiology) is interdependence (the Spirit building us together…or Paul’s image of the Body of Christ) because of our being charismatic in a new and emerging and missional way, and the vice being the ugly independence of isolation, “unknown-ness”, which as we have noted leads to all kinds of abuses and eccentric abberations that manipulate rather than move toward the common good – the common good being Paul’s underlying concern in his “regarding matters of the Spirit” piece in 1 Corinthians. I can hear the echo of our emerging pneumatology as Jason goes on to say: “But, when I receive a gift from you I am obligated to return that gift in some form – generally to the community at large. All gift-giving involves reciprocity, and nobody ever “owns” a gift; gifts must always keep moving in order to maintain their potency. Therefore, gift-giving doesn’t free people from relational obligations like market transactions do, rather, they create new bonds of obligation and loyalty. That is the inherent promise of gift economies: not independence, but a community bound by relational interdependence. In both systems the promises can be perverted to create relationships of dominance and enslavement.” Thus it comes back to the Spirit working in all of us for the good of all of us (i.e., the Missio Dei), therefore we can repeat what Jesus said: it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his works…all for the common good. To me it comes back to something Emerging Grace said in her article Why Charismissional: “Why aren’t charismatics missional? If the function of the Holy Spirit is to reveal the heart of the Father, and the heart of the Father is the reconciliation and restoration of all things, why have we, who claim knowledge and intimacy with the Spirit, missed the missional leading of the Holy Spirit? I am sorry to say that the charismatic church has not represented the function of spiritual gifts very well. While we pursue the supernatural aspect of our inheritance, eagerly desiring the gifts of the Spirit, for the most part, our expression of the gifts has been self-serving. As a friend, I would like to issue this missional call to the charismatic church. Let us open our eyes and hearts to what God is doing.”
Last week, we also began to speak of “thinking local” last week as well, which dovetails nicely with a point of depature and exploration that i would suggest today. Perhaps – in our present emerging and missional context – in seeking to follow the Spirit locally, we can look at insightful discoveries such as ‘positive deviance’ as applied by our discerning of the work and leadership of the Spirit. It seems to me in an emerging- and/or missional-church environment, positive deviance might be quite natural…or naturally supernatural. My friend Kevin Rains was recently exploring positive deviance:
“…positive deviance is a relatively new field of research. The main body of work is coming from a married couple, Jerry and Monique Sternin. The basic idea is to make sustainable and rapid change in difficult contexts by looking for what IS working as opposed to analyzing the problem and coming up with proposals from outside the immediate context. It arose when the Sternins were commisioned to work against starvation in Vietnam. They needed reals solutions, real fast. They decided to look at a small majority of kids and families that seemed to be beating the odds. As they studied these ‘positive deviants’ they discovered they were engaging a few crucial but simple behaviors that others were not like feeding their kids even when they had diarrhea, feeding their kids smaller meals more frequnently, and washing their hands more. As they discerned these simple practices they encouraged and taught others in the villages to mimic these beahaviors. Through this simple process they were able to save thousands of lives.”
There are basically 8 steps to the process of positive deviance.
Step 1: Don’t Presume You Have the Answer: Approach the change issue with a beginner’s mind, ready to listen deeply.
Step 2: Don’t Think of It as a Dinner Party: Involve only those that are a part of effecting the change locally, instead of a broad, diverse audience. This is about core momentum…
Step 3: Let Them Do It Themselves: (otherwise known as give-up-your-colonialism) Set up a situation in which people can discover, on their own, a better way to do things. Setting up sacred space is great, but don’t pre-determine where the Spirit is going. Raise questions but the let the group come up with its own answers.
Step 4: Identify Conventional Wisdom: Establish the norms and associated boundaries of activity.
Step 5: Identify and Analyze the Deviants: Allow the positive deviants to emerge as it becomes clear that they have found a better way.
Step 6: Let the Deviants Adopt Deviations On Their Own: Don’t teach new knowledge – encourage new behavior.
Step 7: Track Results and Publicize Them: Post the results, show how they are achieved and let other groups develop their own curiosity about them.
Step 8: Repeat Steps One Through Seven: Make the whole change process cyclical.
Some of these steps of positive deviance have all ready come up in our previous conversations:
- let the Spirit be who the Spirit is, both transcendently, but incarnationally: “In Africa, the Spirit is African…”;
- the tension between knowledge and behaviour, theology and praxis, discipline and freedom, control and authority;
- listen deeply…raise and express good questions;
What do you think?
- have we limited our imagination and what we think about how Jesus expressing Himself through us in terms of charismata?
- have we over-commodified the expressions of the Holy Spirit?
- have you ever taken a spiritual-gifts inventory test? what did you like about it? what did you dislike about it?
- can positive deviance help us on a very practical and local level in re-discovering being charismatic and healping to lead people to follow Someone else?
- are you comfortable with doing a creative exercise? if so, then excluding the spiritual gifts listed in 1 Corinthians, Ephesians and Romans, what are other grace-expressions of God that move through us that you have witnessed?
- Recommedations: But who are the positive deviants we can point toward? In terms of pointing to positive deviants that are doing the stuff and articulating it: see Robby MacAlpine’s Post-Charismatic, Emerging Grace’s article mentioned above: Why Charismissional, or Jason Coker’s blog: pastoralia, or of course, the Deep Church blog with Jason Clark…no link because you are all ready here!
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Comment by James Prescott
10.55 am on 5 Oct 2009
Another interesting post, raising some good points. I do find very interesting the concept of the Spiritual gift ‘iventory list’ and its relationship to ecclesiology. I have been in church environments where one of the first questions you get asked by many is “What is you spiritual gift?” or “What gifts of the Spirit do you have?”, or something similar. Basically your identity ends up being defined by what ’spiritual gifts’ you have, rather than by how God intended and made you to be – not just in terms of talents and gifting, but in persoality and above all character. You can have all the gifts in the world but without the necessary character and wisdom to use them they are worthless. We need to move beyond the idea that its all about gifting, and see that chracter development is equally, if not more important – and that both are work of the spirit.
There is much more I would like to respond to in this post, and hope I will given a bit of time. Thanks again for this post, and this series, its been very helpful.
Comment by steven hamilton
1.06 pm on 5 Oct 2009
indeed, so much is the work of the spirit; thanks for your thoughts james…i look forward to more…
Comment by James Prescott
1.19 pm on 5 Oct 2009
No problem Steven, I’ve really enjoyed your series. I have always thought there is so much more to Jesus, to ecclesiology and all issues surrounding that than what we have been fed or brought up with, in fact the whole role of Church needs to be redefined I think. Rather than highlighting and widening the gap between sacred and everyday – religion – Jesus advocates bring them closer together, so that we find God in the everyday and make God our everyday. Not in a religous legalistic sense, but in a living, creative, organic kind of way – and its the same with the Spirit.
If you want to read more of me feel free to go to my blog (click on my name, you’ll be redirected). I look forward to reading more of your posts too.
Comment by steven hamilton
1.31 pm on 5 Oct 2009
music to my ears mate!
Comment by Jason Clark
8.15 pm on 5 Oct 2009
Thanks Steve, positive deviance sounds similar to Positive Psychology, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology.
I wrote a post based on the idea at http://deepchurch.org.uk/2007/05/15/the-wellness-of-church/
If I can cut and paste the core of that here:
‘In the world of psychiatry, students study not just the manifestations and causes of mental dysfunction, but the idea of ‘wellness’, of what helps the well part of a patient become ‘more well’. In the worlds of education, and business, rather than focus on people’s weaknesses, there is the move to explore and develop people’s strengths. In looking at developing countries,debt relief agencies, look for positive attributes for assessment, instead of previous models that just measured the bad ones.
This doesn’t mean you ignore glaring weaknesses and problems inherent to the system you are involved with. What it does mean is your focus stops being ‘what is wrong?’, and becomes ‘what is right?’. Back to a medical example, doctors have had to learn that referring to a pathologist, doesn’t lead to good health.
And with that in mind, I often wonder if we have made the mistake in our assessments of church, in becoming almost pathological. We look at current forms of church, and church in the past, with an eye to the ‘ill health’, the deformations, the things we dislike etc. Then we construct idealisations of church in reaction to this ‘sickness’ diagnosis. Church becomes about ‘not being’, and we measure who we are by what we don’t do, and what we are not. Are we left with any understanding of ‘wellness’ of the church at all?’
Comment by James Prescott
6.23 pm on 6 Oct 2009
Good insight Jase. This reminds me of what you’ve often referred to as ‘Chronlogical Snobbery’, thinking ‘we have it all right now, but back in those days they didn’t’.
We have so much more to learn about Jesus, about church, about God Himself and we will constantly be on a journey of discovery until Jesus comes back. It will never be perfect, but it will improve over time. This is essentially the reason I used the title ‘Evolving Church’ in my blog, because the church is always going to be evolving, adapting, changing over time, because its made up of living beings who are constantly evolving and a culture that is always changing.
There are bad things about past churches, but not all ‘new’ churches are brilliant or get it right either. Its about knowing what we can take from the past and what we can discard, and taking what we do keep and re-interpreting it for today’s world in a creative innovative way, as well as continually discovering new things. Not being afraid to ask questions or take risks and move forward, and it all works together.
The one constant that underlines this all of course is God, whose essential nature and character never changes and is always with us no matter what happens.
I sincerely believe a lot of the church is sick and needs saving, but that’s not to say some have it all right and others don’t, being right isn’t the issue for me, that’s a different agenda based on insecurity. But where people are clearly misinterpreting scripture and using it to manipulate people, or supress a group of people (like women for example), or where they are acting in a way contrary to the nature and character of God there is a righteous anger that comes out, and its not about anyone being right, its finding what is wrong and trying to bring the love and peace of Christ into it.
Church and following Jesus, for me, is about the restoration of all things to how God originally designed them, and its only possible through the cross of Christ. Its about increasing the shalom of God in the world, and bringing heaven closer to earth. In a bigger context, saving the church is essentially saving the people of God, because we are the church. I think when people say that phrase they mean they don’t want the church to continue with its bad public image, with the hypocrisy and scandal in leadership in some churches, with divisions, with a faith that ignores the big issues of social justice and merely fits in with the establishment or convention, and a church of inaction which merely serves itself and tries to seperate the sacred and the common and put itself on a pedastal, rather than do what Jesus shows us, which is to bring Christ into the everyday, and bring heaven to earth by making sacred and everyday the same, in the sense that church and Jesus is part of everyday life, rather than just on Sundays.
Thanks for your post Jase, it got me thinking a lot.
I realize that we all do need to be careful that we don’t get on our high horses and shout out how wrong people are, and its not right to think that we are suddenly going to take away all the churches’ problems with one fell swoop, and niave to think others may not arise – we are human after all. It can be hard to separate our opinions, which may be strongly held, between our desire/need to be right (which is an easy temptation), and what is right, and between what we think God wants and what God actually wants.
We need to distinguish between these, and we need to be careful before making rash judgements or decisions about issues.
Comment by steven hamilton
12.14 pm on 6 Oct 2009
yes, that does very similar, indeed, and i love to ‘wellness’ focus.
this pathological tendency of focusing on “not being” strips the power and significance from our faith communities, and i think blinds us…especially to how Jesus was: Jesus was ‘for sinners” not ‘against’, He spoke to the wellness and really ‘infected’ them with His righteousness.
i think this can be seen even in our post-charismatic-ness with the focus becoming pathologically-centered on what we have been calling in our conversation here ‘exotic manifestations’ and the hype and the eventual cynicism and almost delight at the frailty of humanity witnessed in such cases as recently in Florida with todd bentley, et al. it’s almost like the news-cycle here i america, mostly ‘negative coverage’ (meaning news of disaster and death)…our challenge is how do we re-discover wellness, or point to the positive deviants for those looking, because they usually are not hyped, less exotic yet still frail and following Jesus.
one positive deviant i would point to that i forgot to add on my recommendations would be the mustard seed with mike bishop: http://www.whatischurch.com/mustardseed/
Comment by matybigfro
1.41 pm on 6 Oct 2009
I’ve been meaning to dive into this Holy spirit series but have been so busy this is the first post i’ve got to read fully and there is so much to chew on. In my lunch break here otherwise I would deffinatly want to wrestle with some of those questions left at the end, but just quickly the last one about positive deviants. Ever since seeing this series start I’ve been reminded of a talk I heard at Greenbelt called ‘the thoughtful charismatic’ by Simon Hall which was really a call for some of the values of a place like Greenbelt to affect the charismatic movement and vice versa. It seemed to have a similar heart to this series in recovering the need for the charismatics and the charismatic view of the spirit for those who seek the kingdom as well as desire to see a real desire for the kingdom in those who seek to be charismatic.
Comment by Jason Coker
6.30 am on 7 Oct 2009
Steve,
Wow, there’s so much here. I feel like this topic is expanding at an alarmingly rapid rate – which is perhaps a positive indicator that a fresh inquiry into Pneumatology has widespread implications. That’s good news! Some thoughts:
I would agree we’ve limited our imagination – I think we still have much to explore in terms of what the Spirit is doing in terms of racial reconciliation, women’s issues, forgiveness in a political context, economics, and (at the risk of seeming puritanical) sexual wholeness.
Still, I think more so than limiting the realms in which we look for the Spirit at work, we tend more frequently to contain the Holy Spirit entirely. I think there’s a “wildness” to the Spirit – indeed, to God on the whole – that we’re very uncomfortable with. To be blunt, I don’t think, by and large, we’re willing to “Go wherever the father goes and do whatever the father does.” In my view revealing that to us is not only what the Spirit is largely doing, it is also what it means most to be “missional.” Personally, I think we’d rather know and approve well ahead of time what God is up to before we commit to it. But…that’s not Christ’s example, is it?
In the U.S. we’ve commodified everything. In a market-based society there’s simply no alternative to commodification if you care about being publicly recognized as successful. Let’s face it, most of us care about being recognized. I know I do.
In my experience spiritual gifts inventories are largely useless because they’re entirely based on a person’s experience. People who have successful experience teaching are indicated as “teachers.” If you have no experience, you have no indicators (in which case you’re just guessing – and, by extension, so is the test).
I think a healthy community is a far better “living” spiritual gifts inventory. One of the things I’ve noticed about genuine leaders over the years is that they are often able to intuit a person’s gifts and potential – even if that person is very young (I’ll bet most of us had a leader call out our gifts when we weren’t even aware of them). Good leaders who hear from God have a knack for looking at people and “seeing” what’s there when other (especially that person) don’t. Parent’s (who are simply another kind of leader) often can do the same thing with their children. I’ve known many parents who could tell you what their children’s spiritual gifts were at a very young age.
I think this indicates something about the role of the spirit-filled community in the formation of individuals – which then of course loops back to form the community in turn. There is a very tangible cycle of intuition/proclamation/experimentation/ reflection/intuition that strongly resembles praxis. Again, I point back to the reciprocal life of gifts; I think the economy of the spirit is an economy of gift-giving.
Positive Deviance reminds me of Affirmative Inquiry. When I was on staff at a larger church in Ohio we experimented with Affirmative Inquiry among our larger leadership circle (approximately 50 leaders) as a means of discerning what God was leading the entire church toward. I was a way of trying to move away from the dominant senior pastor model. It was an interesting experiment, but very difficult and with mixed results.
I’m flattered that you pointed toward our little church plant community as an example of positive deviants. I think we’ve stumbled on some promising possibilities, but we have a long way to go before I could begin to say we’ve succeeded. I might also recommend Jason Evans and The Ecclesia Collective as well as Mark Van Steenwick and Missio-Dei. I can think of several others, but along with Kevin Rains (who Steve mentions above) all these folks have long term experience finding fresh expressions that seem to make a real difference.
Comment by steven hamilton
11.58 am on 7 Oct 2009
thanks for the links to ecclesia collective and missio-dei!
i think you are right in terms of the freedom and “wildness” of the Spirit…it feels dangerous…and maybe that is what we need…for the church to re-discover the wild…
i’m really resonating with the “reciprocal life of gifts”…
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