Church and business

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The books, Good to Great, How The Mighty Fall and, Tribes offer the business world surprising and proven insight into how organizations work and succeed. There are a few concepts that have stuck out to me a significant. How can these concepts be applied to the spiritual formation of congregations?

The Book Of The Dun Cow revisited

The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin, Jr.

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had to reread this book after Peter Scazzero made reference to it in Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Unleash the Power of Authentic Life in Christ. I love the rhythm of the Liturgy of the Hours as it is prayed in the monastic setting. The power of Chanticleer's Canonical Crows in the fight against evil was not something I saw the first time I read it. That was long before I began my journey with praying the psalms. The book took on a new and richer meaning for me this time around.


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Where were the gifts of the Spirit between the New Testament and 1900?

The Healing Reawakening: Reclaiming Our Lost Inheritance by Francis MacNutt

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had the opportunity to speak with Beth on the phone last night (she was making sure that I wasn’t stranded in London as the hijacked email purported. Thanks). I realized that while she said she was struggling to square MacNutt’s use of scripture, I had glossed over it. Perhaps it was because I have heard similar arguments all my life, but I found when I came to a block quote of scripture I said to myself, “ah that one” and skimmed through it.

Nothing jumped out at me as being way off. There may have been some isogesis evident in his insistence that the open-endedness of Acts made implicit that early church ministry was expected to continue (73). Was that Luke’s intention, or was it simply that he could not yet comment on Paul’s death.

Also the case he built that healing on the Sabbath was specifically a cause of his death seemed a bit of a stretch (43). Surely it was part of it, but Jesus’ conflict with the religious authorities stretched well beyond that. Still the one-sidedness of this argument doesn’t detract from the conclusion that Jesus really valued healing. That is evident in every gospel.

Overall his use of scripture seemed fair, obviously used in service of his point, but not out of context, if without the benefit of higher biblical criticism.

For me, the greatest value in MacNutt’s book is answering the question I have always had, “what happened to the Baptism in the Spirit from the time of the New testament to 1900?” It is, I think, easy for classical Pentecostals to think that they disappeared from the church completely until we came along. That has always been a sad thought to me, and indeed, if it were true, it would lead me to question the validity of our Pentecostal experience.

I appreciate how MacNutt traces both the factors that lead to minimizing the charisms, particularly healing, as well as the remnant of the saints of God who kept the memory alive.

I think he made his case powerfully with me. I fell at times, into reverie, imagining myself praying for the healing of people in my church. I saw myself setting people free from demonic oppression and addictions. It seemed just the thing our village needs.

Repeatedly in the Masters in Spiritual Formation program, I have been faced with the irony that as we study the richness of the various streams of Christianity, God is, at the same time, drawing me deeper into my own.

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A story about "War and Peace"

On the Pratzen Heights, where he had fallen with the flagstaff in his had, lay Prince Andrew Bolkónski bleeding profusely and unconsciously uttering a gentle, piteous and childlike moan.

Toward evening he ceased moaning and became quite still. He did not know how long his unconsciousness lasted. Suddenly he again felt that he was alive and suffering from a burning, lacerating pain in his head.

“Where is it, that lofty sky that I did not know till now, but saw today,” was his first thought. “And I did not know this suffering either,” he thought. “Yes, I did not know anything at all till now. But where am I?”

I love this image of Prince Andrew, having been hit by a cannonball looking upward at the infinite sky sensing something he had never known before. Something above himself, something all embracing.
I remember the first time the infinite blues struck me. I was on a band trip to Kansas city. I was perhaps a bit of a loner. I felt out of place, I wasn’t that great of a sax player. I felt that I always was a detriment to the whole instead of apart of the beautiful sound that it produced. I wandered outside the hotel and sat myself under a tree on a patch a grass where some other kids were talking. I laid my head back, and there it was. For some reason for the first time I had a sense of perspective, I could see how the blue stretched for miles above me. It absorbed me. I stared at it, wondered at it. My breathing slowed and I savored that I was filling myself with that infinity. Infinity embraced me. I too must have been moaning a childlike groan. I remember my reverie being interrupted by a girl asking if I was all right, and if I wanted to join their group. I said, “no, I’m just looking at the sky.”
I wonder if Prince Andrew will catch the spiritual significance of that day like I did. Or like Switchfoot put it in their song 4:12,

You said,
“I’m so sorry I’ve been so down.
I started doubting things could ever turn around.
And I began to believe that all we are is material.
It’s nonsensical.”

So you walk outside and everything’s new
You’re looking at the world with new eyes.
As if you’d never seen a sky before that’s blue
As if you’ve never seen the sky in your whole life

“It would be good,” thought Prince Andrew, glancing at the icon his sister had hung round his neck with such emotion and reverence, “it would be good if everything were as clear and simple as it seems to Mary. How good it would be to know where to seek for help in this life and what to expect after it beyond the grave! How happy and calm I should be if I could now say: ‘Lord, have mercy on me!’… But to whom should I say that? Either to a Power indefinable, incomprehensible, which I not only cannot address, but cannot even express in words—the Great All or Nothing—“ He said to himself, “or to that God who has been sewn into this amulet by Mary! There is nothing certain, nothing at all except the unimportance of everything I understand, and the greatness of something incomprehensible but all important.”

We leave Prince Andrew to die, but I wonder if that is all we shall hear from him, all that he will find in the infinite blue.