Category Archives for "Spirituality"

1 Christian Perfection

Methodism belongs to a Christian theological tradition known as Arminianism, which takes its name from the theologian Arminius, usually contrasted with Calvin.

Calvin was a barrister and never ordained. He was a preacher and insisted upon punctuality, so he sold pocket watches. He made a fortune and founded the first bank in Geneva; an entrepreneur as well as a spiritual leader. John Wesley the founder of Methodism had profound problems with Calvin’s followers.

Arminius’ based his theology on Calvin’s. The main difference, in the public mind, is Calvinists believe in the pre-determined election of believers to salvation. Arminians believe salvation is possible for all believers. Fascinating as this debate may be, I do not intend to pursue it here (sighs of relief all round).

Wesleyan Arminianism

This topic is an aspect of Wesleyan Arminianism called Christian Perfection. This is Methodism’s most radical doctrine. What it means is God’s love can be perfected in any believer; they do not stop sinning, indeed they experience greater awareness of their sins, as their life in prayer and devotion to God develops.

So, the first step the believer takes is justification. They enter a relationship with God and then over a lifetime, grow in faith and expression of God’s love. Notice perfection is not an end state, it is essentially ongoing growth into God’s love.

The invitation is to dig deeper; to study the scriptures, pray regularly and above all practice loving in the world.  Believers are aided in this by God’s grace through the Holy Spirit, who acts as a guide.  Some people argue perfection is solely the work of the Spirit; another debate I shall not pursue here.

Christian perfection implies you dig deep into your own tradition to reach out into the world. This doctrine unites Christians because as we explore our own traditions, the stories told by our fellow believers, we find common ground. Unity is common ground discovered and not something negotiated; we discover it by reaching out to others in love.

Truth as Conversation

Note this is an alternative take on what I wrote in my last post about truth as conversation. There I started with  conversation and suggested it generates new insights. Here the point is dig into your tradition, the deeper you go the more you will find common ground with people in other traditions.

This blog is about building community online and in this sequence of posts, I’m exploring how to equip ourselves for working in community. The Internet enables anarchic free-for-alls, through trolling or unethical marketing. It also enables collaboration around the world through non-hierarchical networks. This is not a new vision and it is at the root of many of the greatest thinkers in all religious faiths.

Building community means we must cultivate the ability to share with those who do not hold to the same beliefs as we do.  Trolling is one example of behaviour where someone is unsure of their beliefs.  The temptation is to get your retaliation in first.  Encounters between people who are sure of their chosen tradition are quite different.  For them an encounter with a new idea is an opportunity for deeper exploration of their own tradition.

We have a long way to go and my next port of call is at a theological idea, incarnation, literally “in the flesh”. A moment’s reflection and you will see this could be highly relevant!

1 Truth as Conversation

As I expected, start writing about spirituality and the subject proliferates! Last time, describing my spiritual roots, I asked “what is truth?” and promised to explore this question in more depth.

Pilate, an officious and brutal man by all accounts, asked this question; perhaps not someone noted for his concern for truth. The exchange appears only in John’s Gospel (18: 37, 38) and Jesus claims he has come to bear witness to the truth “and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice”. “Truth”, says Pilate, “what is that?” and then walks out without waiting for an answer.

Pilate is a bureaucrat; he’s not interested in answering his own question, he is interested in getting himself out of a difficult situation.

But Jesus does not define truth, he is there to bear witness to it. It’s almost as if truth is out there but somehow beyond our grasp. “I’m sure there is such a thing as truth, just don’t ask me to tell you what it is!”

Truth As Conversation

So, how does this work? The answer is conversation. Truth emerges from conversation, see my post about generative conversation, for example. The conversation between Jesus and Pilate is in John’s Gospel, which begins with the words “In the beginning was the Word”. The English word  is logos in Greek. What exactly does logos mean?

It is not possible to convey the nuances of any word in translation. John wrote in common Greek, the Greek spoken by ordinary people. Logos can be translated as word but if you think about it, words take on meanings in conversation. The first line of John’s Gospel could just as accurately be translated “in the beginning there was the Conversation.”

Truth as conversation emerges from various types of conversation, which can be between people, between a person and God (prayer) or between a person and the world (science).

Truth is a journey, a journey that never arrives at a destination. Sometimes the dead hand of religion or politics tries to silence the conversation and we all know where that leads.

Most genuine religious or spiritual leaders understand this and so value hospitality towards those from other traditions because great conversations happen where people of different traditions start talking. Many traditions actively encourage dialogue because it deepens their insights into their own tradition.

Fundamentalists understand truth as something final and complete. They have texts they believe to be true in the superficial sense of being a historic given. They do not understand these texts are given to us specifically for interpretation – when we question scripture, it encourages us to think in a deeper way.

This is why the radical atheists are so profoundly wrong. They make the same mistake as fundamentalists, believing there is one interpretation of any religious text. My religious text may not be what you would choose, if you are an atheist, but my question, is what challenges your beliefs?

Texts from my tradition challenge my beliefs and help me understand my own deeper motivations. Texts from other traditions can help me understand my own; my appreciation of my tradition deepens as I engage with others. It can be harder if you don’t have a book but a book can be an immense barrier if your interpretation is the last word.

Next time I shall show you how my tradition helps me understand the nature of truth.  How have you found conversations leading to deeper understanding?

1 My Spiritual Roots

When writing about spirituality, how do you put into words perceptions that cannot be fully expressed? Perhaps they are incomplete, part of an ongoing story or cannot be expressed in words.  But it is possible to trace back your spiritual roots.

Too often religion comes across in the media (and religious meeting places) as a done deal. “You are one of us and so this is what you believe”. The same can be said of political views.

For example, I’m 61 years old and if someone interviewed me they might define my economic beliefs but I hesitate to say I’m a Keynesian or a Marxist or anything else because I am still exploring. I am not satisfied with most economic models on offer. There’s a lot of good stuff around but I don’t see why I need to adopt some particular view.

The same is true of religion. I became a Methodist in May 1978, when I was 24 years old and before that I wasn’t anything in particular. I went to see my Methodist Minister and asked him what I had to believe. His reply has been immensely influential over the last forty years. “Nothing”.

Stories

Religious faith is ultimately stories. Some will forcefully argue you must believe these stories are true. I have two problems with this. First, I’m called as a practicing Christian not to believe but to tell these stories. Of course, I believe they are worth telling.

My second problem is what do we mean by true? Fundamentalists usually mean  stories are true if they really happened. One day Jesus healed a demoniac by casting demons into a herd of pigs. How many demoniacs were there? Mark’s Gospel tells me there was one but Matthew’s version has two. Which is true in a historic sense? It’s not likely Jesus on separate occasions sent two herds of pigs over cliffs and Mark records one and Matthew the other.

The Gospel writers were not concerned about literal truth. I know why Matthew has two demoniacs. But even if we all agree there was originally one, it does not follow that a herd of pigs was ever stampeded by Jesus.

You know what? It really doesn’t matter whether it really happened. When I tell the story I never ask whether it really happened. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the meaning of the story.

But even that is not the full truth. You see there is not one single plain meaning of scripture. Whatever meaning you favour is your interpretation of the story. There are other interpretations. How many? They are uncountable, effectively infinite. You can always find another.

So, as Pilate asked, what is truth? I’ll return to this question in my next post.

Radical Methodism

So, how would I describe my spiritual roots? The way I see it is you need to be something because you need something to argue with. It is about wrestling with the tradition, not swallowing a party line.

So, I would describe myself as a radical Methodist. Methodism is the body of teaching I wrestle with, my aim is to go deeper into the roots of Methodism. Radical means literally to go to the roots. One thing about the roots of any plant is you find it increasingly difficult, as you look closely, to see where the roots end and soil begins. Radical is not about pulling up the plant but understanding how the plant grows and thrives. I shall return to this in a couple of weeks.

1 Why Spirituality?

Why spirituality? After all, it is not an obvious topic in a blog about community development online.

One obvious, prosaic reason is one of my markets is churches and faith groups. However, this sequence is not solely for the religious.

Spirituality has, for better or worse, become a word used beyond the confines of established religious institutions. Perhaps as more people became estranged from formal religion, they found meaning in spiritual experience.

So, allow me to set out my stall before you decide whether to follow this sequence.

What is spirituality?

My definition in two words is: paying attention. In one word it is: awareness.  As well as their advantage in terms of memorability, these definitions are remarkable because these three words

My Spirituality Sequence

I’m planning to cover three main spirituality topics over the next few months.  (The link takes you to a cornerstone page, listing the posts in this sequence.)  I shall:

This is a basic outline; I’ve no idea where it will take me because that is the nature of spirituality. So, whatever your religious tradition, keep an eye on what I’m writing in this sequence, you never know what I might stumble upon!

2 Humour and Organisations

One simple thing I’ve seen over the years is laughter as a sign of healthy organisations.  Laughter is not always a positive.  It can be cruel and discriminatory.  The excuse the insensitive or exclusive person makes, “I was only joking”, rarely rings true. Genuine laughter makes for an organisation at ease with itself.  So, what is a healthy relationship between humour and organisations?

Tedious Meetings

Look at this way.  I have sat through thousands of meetings and most of them are a complete waste of time.  People sit around a table, poe-faced, grinding their way through a remorseless agenda.

From time to time, someone will climb onto their hobby-horse and take it for a swift canter around the table.  Agenda items return time and again because no-one actually wants to deal with them.  Then someone tells a joke that falls flat.  I’ve been told off for not taking things seriously enough.  I do take losing the will to live very seriously indeed.

The Clique

Another pitfall is the clique.  A group of people run the organisation and have done so for years.  They have no interest in opening up to outsiders.  There may be humour as between friends but not the humour of a group genuinely open to others.  People who get on with one another are likely to get the job done, they should be aware though, they may like each other so much they become closed to outsiders.

Hospitality and Fear

To be light-hearted does not mean you don’t take things seriously.  Hospitality is at the centre.  The stranger should feel welcome and valued.  They may not always agree with the organisation but they will go away with a spring in their step if they receive respectful listening.  A group in good humour knows when to stop laughing, how to pay attention and build up even those they send away empty-handed.

Lack of humour is common where there is fear, where the organisation has taken a place in the hearts of its leaders, where they are clinging to power.  The ironic thing is the power to which they cling is illusory.  People who bully to maintain their place in a twopence halfpenny organisation that’s going nowhere in the real world and every which way in its leaders heads, will find they’ve wasted their time.

In a healthy organisation, people know their limitations, they greet an ironic comment with recognition of our common humanity and not as a threat to their oh so important authority.

Yesterday someone shared a dream project with me.  It might work.  I told him one of my rules of community development: “Most things don’t work”.  He could invest in his dream and the likelihood is it will not work.  But look closely at that phrase.  The fact is the only way you can find the things that do work is to try them.  When you try things, most will not work.  Ironic, but somehow liberating.  Perhaps he will try his idea and perhaps when it fails he’ll remember what I said and smile and be encouraged to try it another way.

0 Can You Sell Spirituality?

The question “Can you sell spirituality?” came up in conversation recently.  The person who asked it plans to provide an online spiritual direction service and worried that asking for money in exchange for her services would in some way be immoral.

I’ve given this some thought and my answer is no you cannot sell spirituality because it is not yours to sell.  It is the same reason “Money can’t buy you love” as the Beatles put in many years ago.  Spirituality and love (are their others?) are of the heart.  They are my responsibility and no-one can sell me a solution to my existentialist angst.

The Wrong Question

Moreover, “Can you sell spirituality?” is the wrong question.  Lots of people have spiritual directors and most of them charge for their service.  I’m not sure how many make a living out of it but it is legitimate to make the charge.  Why?  Because you are selling your time and experience as a service.  It is your time and service that is for sale, not spirituality.

The important thing is integrity.  You need to be clear about what you are selling.  Services such as spiritual direction are obviously open to abuse.  Most spiritual directors are accountable to some sort of support network.  It may be someone selling a course online might not have any accountability and that could lead to exploitation.

But it’s like everything else, if you have put in time and effort to produce something worthwhile, there is no harm in charging for your time and service.  Whether you charge to make a living or to make-a-million is a matter for your conscience.

1 The Immortal Leader

Two weeks ago I wrote about mortality and how it is essential to good community leadership.  We all know we’re going to die.  We may believe it will be in the distant future but it is a future that will perhaps arrive sooner than we think.  We all know this.  So what do I mean by the immortal leader?

The immortal leader lives as if they are never going to die.  Ask them and they will readily concede they will one die one day.  But in practice they are there forever.  Here  are some signs of immortality?

Immortality is a spiritual issue.   A theologian called Walter Wink has written a three-volume book about the Powers (the first volume is to the left).  For Wink demonic possession is where someone allows an organisation to inhabit their being.  In first century Palestinian cosmology, every organisation has an angel that can be healthy or sick.  Sick angels are demons.  We normally read these texts through the twin filters of Medieval demonology and modern horror films and so miss the sophisticated cosmology of this period.

Healthy organisations empower their members and others.  Sick organisations can embody humanity’s vilest tendencies.  Organisations are in principle immortal.  With succession in place they can continue for centuries.  The churches are a good example of this and so are governments.  They have powerful structures in place so when key personnel unexpectedly go missing, the organisation is not threatened.  They can to a degree accommodate their immortals because they are not dependent upon them.

But identification with an organisation is never healthy.  It distorts vision and undermines rational thought.  Immortals never listen because they have already made up their minds.

How might immortals appear online?  Does the Internet extend their power or threaten it?

2 Good Leaders are Mortal

Something said during Citizens’ Organising training in the early 1990s had a profound effect on my community development practice.  At the time there was a lot of enthusiasm about introducing Citizens’ Organising in the UK.  For some reason it never took off and whilst there are still a few citizens’ organisations around they have had little overall impact.

One of the things I remember from the training was one of the characteristics of a community leader is they know their own mortality.  This means not only do they know they are going to die, they are constantly aware of that fact.  At first glance this may seem to be a disadvantage.  My observations over 20 years have found it to be profoundly true.

It leads to a practice citizens’ organisations call ‘sloughing’, where no-one occupies a permanent leadership role.  (The word slough (pronounced “sluff”, is usually used of snakes shedding their skins.)  When someone vacates a leadership role it is to occupy a new role, thus extending their experience of leadership and vacates a place for someone else to fill and extend theirs.  Good leaders share knowledge and experience because they cannot know they will be around for sure.  Their role is to pass on leadership, not to build their own power base.

In June 1997 I traveled the UK visiting economic development projects.  I visited only one place twice. On my first visit to Moss Side in Manchester my host, then chair of their development trust, was moving into a new office.  He was a Church of England vicar and had just retired.  He was moving into the vestry of a local church from where he could continue to support the work of the Trust.  I found he was someone who had taken the basic tenets of leadership to heart and so agreed to visit again in a couple of weeks to continue the conversation and visit the trust.

One year later I was writing a report and wanted to refer to my visits to Moss Side.  I needed more information and so I phoned my contact.  A woman answered the phone and told me he’d been incapacitated by a stroke.  She had taken on his work.

What was impressive was she knew who I was (she must have had some record of his contacts) and was able to answer my questions.  It was as if I had met her first.  She told me my first contact had prepared her for his own departure.  He knew he would not last forever and so he made sure his work would continue in his absence.

Next Friday I’ll explore what happens when leaders forget they are mortal.

1 Generosity of Spirit

Generosity is essential if you want to be successful online.

If you are promoting a cause, you are a teacher.  This applies as much online as it does in real life; whether you make a living from teaching or not.  It applies even if you are not qualified.

These days in the UK, we are told, schools are really businesses.  Most of my life they’ve been a part of the statutory sector.  I’m not sure I’m happy with this change but a lot depends on the teachers.  If a teacher is a business person, it is probably OK.  The prospect of business people running schools is far worse than the prospect of teachers becoming business people.

I was listening to a headteacher this week.  She was discussing how to attract and retain high quality staff.  This is a headache in most places; in my neck of woods, a disadvantaged area, schools have real problems.

Look, she said, (I paraphrase) the thing is you help teachers develop.  When teachers from your school become better qualified and move onto become deputies and head teachers, this attracts new teachers to your school.  Of course, if someone does well, they may move on but that’s OK.  Many will stay on if the school looks after them and the ones who leave enhance the school’s reputation and that will attract more high quality teachers.

Not only does this show good business sense but it is also good for the school.

And it’s also good for your online presence.  If you:

• care about people by offering good content, in time you will find people follow you.
• have something to sell, they are more likely to buy it.
• run a campaign, they’re more likely to join in.

The headteacher spoke a lot about values but never once mentioned generosity.  That’s the value I saw in her talk.

Do you have favourite websites that show similar generosity of spirit?

0 Two Ways We Understand Wealth

I’ve decided to hold back the answers to the Christmas Puzzles until a few more people have attempted them.

Today I shall follow-up an earlier post about Spirituality in Marketing.  In that post, I mention progress with a book, and I want to capture a part of the conversation. Many people in the voluntary and community sectors have reservations about marketing and accumulation of wealth.  Such scepticism is admirable!  We should be suspicious of any sales pitch.

But if we are going to re-build our communities we need to explore all the options available to us.  Given the failure of grants as an approach to community development, a failure I’ve written about elsewhere, see the posts in the position category, we don’t have too many other options.

Two Ways to Understand Wealth

One problem is, when we talk about wealth we confuse two different ways of understanding it.  So, here they are:

1. Personal wealth is where the focus is on the amount of money I have accumulated and the power I have using it.  The issue here is accountability.  We can all think of examples of (usually new) millionaires who lose all their money in a few years, through gambling or similar.  There are also those who salt away their wealth in off-shore tax havens.  They move their money out of the community, into places where it is no longer accessible.  The immensely wealthy, the 1% targeted by the Occupy movement, use their wealth to buy assets and lend them back to businesses at very high interest rates.  We don’t normally see this happening because it happens out of sight.  But we see its effects in low wages and unsustainable behaviour, damaging to the environment.
2. Social wealth is where there is some degree of accountability.  The focus is on money as it circulates in the local economy.  If I purchase from local traders and do not spend money in large chains and if local people do the same, then many people benefit from the same pound as it circulates.  Furthermore, I might find opportunities to invest my profit in other enterprises, thus growing the local economy.

Obviously the same person can experience both approaches to wealth but at least by being clear there are these two approaches, we can all be aware of how we spend and accumulate income.

Perhaps we could re-examine John Wesley’s three point economic plan.  In the eighteenth century, he traveled the UK, preaching to the new industrial poor.  His advice to entrepreneurs was “earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can”.  By save he meant not accumulation in bank accounts but spending money wisely, so that you have an excess than can be given to people in need.

This approach allows the wealthy scope to grow successful and ethical businesses.  Is it something we need to revisit?