31 Oct 2011
Lets be troublemakers
Leeanne has just finished reading “The Irresistible Revolution” by Shane Claiborne.
I read it last Christmas and it had a significant impact on me but I have a terrible memory so can only remember fragments and the general theme. I think I need to read it again.
It has interested me to watch Leeanne engage with the book, and at the end say “That’s the kind of Christianity I want to be part of”.
In flicking through the book I came across a quote that jumped off the page:
Christians should be troublemakers, creators of uncertainty, agents of a dimension incompatible with society. (French theologian, Jaques Ellul).
The Apostle Paul put it this way:
And so I insist – and God backs me up on this – that there be no going along with the crowd, the empty-headed, mindless crowd. They’ve refused for so long to deal with God that they’ve lost touch not only with God but with reality itself. They can’t think straight anymore. (Eph 4:17-18 MSG)
It has been interesting to watch the movement I am part of, Fusion, in the transition it is going through and the temptation in transition to reach for safety and security…. to reach for normalcy.
I was interested to read what Management Guru, Jim Collins, said about organisations that have been established to change the world that reach for the “normal”:
We must reject the idea -well intentioned, but dead wrong – that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become “more like a business”. Most businesses – like most of anything else in life – fall somewhere between mediocre and good. Few are great. When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness. So then, why would we want to import the practices of mediocrity into the social sectors?
So apparently in almost all areas of life there is a tug to be part of the pack, a tug to mediocrity. It’s safer that way.
It reminds me of my favorite quote from Seneca:
A ship in a harbor is safe. But that’s not what ships are built for.
Viva La Revolution!