| Rhett Smith:. Transitioning Life's Journey – Reflections on Writing, Therapy, and Faith | Tag Archive

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The Process of Writing and Creating Literature

August 21, 2008 in Uncategorized with 4 Comments

So true. Found this over at ixthus Agitator

If you are a writer (professionally, or as a hobby), where do you spend most of your time in the graph?

The Ego Driven “Christian Cult of Success”

August 12, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 1 Comment

Parker Palmer is the author of one of my favorite books, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation.

If you have not read it, then you need to stop what you are doing and get in your car and go pick it up. Or stop what you are doing and order it online. I either suggested it or handed it to a lot of my college students and recommend it to everyone.

All that to say, I came across this interview with him at The High Calling (by the way, they have an amazing assorment of great interviews).

And he just says some powerful things about vocation, work, identity, failure, ego, etc. that we all need to hear. I think that not only do we all need to read it and reflect upon it.

But, I’m concerned for those of us in ministry (we who are supposed to be teachers, leaders, modelers, mentors, etc.) who have our identity so tied up in our vocation and have it validated by success and driven by ego.

Interviewer: You’ve said, “The sense of self is very closely tied to what people do.” How does one bring identity into a profession, without losing oneself to that profession?

Parker Palmer: You’re asking, “How do we live open-heartedly in the world without having our hearts broken?” At 68, I have come to a simple conclusion: I have a choice to make.

Either I live with my heart open, investing in my work and taking the risks that come when the expression of my own truth might get me crosswise with people. Or I exist in my work and in the world in a closed-hearted way. To me this choice is a no brainer, because to be in the world in a closed-hearted way is to risk a kind of spiritual death, a death of integrity really. As Thomas Merton said, most of us live lives of self-impersonation. To be in the world as an impersonator of yourself, when selfhood is your birthright gift from God, is an insult to your Creator and certainly a diminishment of yourself. I have learned to choose to be in the world in an open-hearted way, because pain itself is a sign that I’m alive. Being open-hearted is my only chance at the joy that life can bring.

Interviewer: When we start connecting and bringing our identity to work, suddenly there’s a tremendous pressure to avoid failure, because our egos may be tied to our performance. How do we reconcile that?

Parker Palmer: I think ego is strongest when we are not in touch with our own identity as children of God. My ego, or false identity, is the piece that tells me that I’m something special, that I’m not anybody’s child, that I’m the leader of the pack. That’s the piece of me that doesn’t want to fail. The failures I’ve experienced and the pain brought as a result were because I was working heavily out of ego. When one works out of ego, the aim is not to serve your patients or your children. Instead it becomes about winning, looking good, and not being deprived of one’s perks. Identity and integrity rightly understood are the antidote to ego.

It’s baffling and troubling to me that there is this Christian cult of success that I actually think is very ego driven. So many Christians have embraced this cult of success.

You can find the first part of the whole interview here.

Tony Morgan has 5 Questions with Seth Godin

August 4, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 0 Comments

Seth Godin is being twittered about quite a bit these days because of his new, soon to be released book, and his invite only network Tribe.

Tony Morgan has some questions for Seth (and if you don’t read Seth’s blog, you should be):

TONY: First of all, thanks for being my friend on Triiibes.com. I would have been lonely without you. But, since we’re now friends, what makes a good friend…online or otherwise?

SETH: I don’t think “friends” on Facebook and such are really friends. They are mild forms of permission, people who are willing to say, “no, you’re not in my spam folder.” True friends online are people who give before they get. And they’re hard to find!

TONY: I’ve started playing around with Triiibes.com today. It’s invite-only right now, but, on its surface, it looks a lot like several other social-networking sites including LinkedIn and Facebook. What’s the difference?

SETH: The key difference is that I’m trying to build a place where people are talking about ideas, not about each other. That’s a huge shift.

A tribe is not a crowd. A tribe is a group of people with a connection, a purpose and a leader. A key element of a tribe caring about an idea.

TONY: Thanks for agreeing to speak at Catalyst in October. Here’s a dirty little secret…we church leaders think we know a lot about “community” but more and more people are choosing to opt out of our communities. Why do you think that’s happening?

SETH: I worry that we’re confusing faith and religion, and I worry that we may be willing to sacrifice community in exchange for fealty to traditional rules. Faith is never going to go out of style, and community is more important than ever. It’s just got to be relevant.

TONY: Be honest. What scares you most about speaking to a group of church leaders? (Just between you and me, they kind of freak me out.)

SETH: I don’t like offending people, and it’s easy to offend people when you don’t know as much as they do. This group knows more about what it takes to lead in this way than I ever will. My goal is to push people, but I need to do it from a place of respect. I hope that will come across.

TONY: Just give us a nugget. What’s one surprise we’ll find in your new book?

SETH: Well, I just gave you one. I think faith is critical. I’m not so crazy about religion if it gets in the way of faith.

Do You Love Your Vision of Christian Community More Than Christian Community Itself?

July 29, 2008 in Uncategorized with 2 Comments

Just posted this today over at Leadership Network’s Book Blog.

The issues of "leadership" and "community" are huge topics and hot buzzwords in Church today and one only needs to visit a bookstore to peruse the countless book titles in these areas. Feeling a little overwhelmed I decided to return to a classic book in this area by one of the most amazing theological minds…Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And re-reading this book has reminded me more and more of why I love Bonhoeffer, and the important lessons we can learn from him. Life Together is Bonhoeffers thoughts and reflections during and about his time at Finkenwalde.

Two things to keep in mind as you continue reading this post:

I read this book on my Amazon Kindle. This isn’t a post about the Kindle, but I do want to tell you that I love it. It’s an amazing tool. At this point I only have downloaded the Bible (NIV), Life Together, and Groundswell on it. I’ve also downloaded some sample books and I have been reading blogs on it. It’s quite awesome to go anywhere and have so many books on one unit.
Bonhoeffer says some remarkable things, so this post is going to have a couple of very long quotes. I hope you don’t mind, and I do hope they give you pause for reflection.

One of the more interesting sections of the book is on the topic of community, leadership and "wishful thinking" and it is quite convicting for those of us who are leaders in our Church community, or for those of us who wish our Church was something different than it is. Bonhoeffer says this about our ideas on community:

On innumerable occasions a whole Christian community has been shattered because it has lived on the basis of a wishful image. Certainly serious Christians who are put in a community for the first time will often bring with them a very definite image of what Christian communal life [Zusammenleben] should be, and they will be anxious to realize it. But God’s grace quickly frustrates all such dreams. A great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves, is bond to overwhelm us as surely as God desires to lead us to an understanding of genuine Christian community. By sheer grace God will not permit us to live in a dream world even for a few weeks and to abandon ourselves to those blissful experiences and exalted moods that sweep over us like a wave of rapture. For God is not a God of emotionalism, but the God of truth. Only that community which enters into the experience of this great disillusionment with all its unpleasant and evil appearances begins to be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this moment of disillusionment comes over the individual and the community, the better for both. However, a community that cannot bear and cannot survive such disillusionment, clinging instead to its idealized image, when that should be done away with, loses at the same time the promise of a durable Christian community. Sooner or later it is bound to collapse.

Wow! I would say we are all guilty of wishing our Church community was something different that it is…at least at times.

How often do we lose the chance at a durable Christian community, because instead of weathering the ups-downs, trials and foibles of community we instead try to make it something else and it eventually collapses?

Bonhoeffer then goes on to close out his chapter in this section by saying this:

Every human idealized image that is brought into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be broken up so that genuine community can survive. Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial. (bold emphasis mine)

As leaders in our Church communities do we love our image of the Christian community more than the Christian community itself?

Have we ever paused to stop and reflect upon whether or not our vision and ideas for the community we lead is actually a hindrance to what God wants to accomplish through those in the community?

There are many books out there on Church community and leadership, but if you could only read one book I would recommend this one. No one says so much in such a small book as Bonhoeffer. He will have you stopping on every page and re-reading each section carefully so as not to miss anything, and to be quite sure about what he is saying.

Have you read this book before? What did you think of it?

If you haven’t read it before, are you now interested in reading it? Why?

“The only way to change culture is to make more culture.” Agree or Disagree?

July 17, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 2 Comments

Andy Crouch on culture and his new book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling.

Back in town…

March 30, 2008 in Uncategorized with 0 Comments

I just got back in town after 8 amazing days in Mexico City with some college students from UCLA. We served with two of our partenrs, Amextra and Partners in Hope. That was my second trip with these partners and it has continued to be life changing, especially this one. So I will be posting about the trip, my experiences, the partners we serve with, and some of the challenging theological insights from the trip. So stay tuned.

And I just posted a few minutes ago at Leadership Network book blog, so check it out.

Not that you were waiting, but sorry I haven’t had anything new. I don’t like to ever announce via Facebook, my blog, etc. when I will be out of town for an extensive period of time since I have a wife and baby daughter at home. So it probably just looked like I was lazy.

Talk with you soon…