Mike King

Sacred Life

I collaborated with several others on a book entitled, Sacred Life: Spiritual Practices for Everyday Living that was released this week.  I wrote specifically about the formational role of Pilgrimage.  I am excited about this book because the target audience is late adolescents (ages 16 - 26).

Here is part of Barefoot Publishers  description, "Many ancient Christian practices might not be well known or commonly practiced in your local church. You may have never heard of some of them before, but these spiritual disciplines have been a vital part of the Christian faith for centuries.

As a handbook to the spiritual practices and prayers of the early Church, Sacred Life will challenge you to take part in an experiment in discipline. These spiritual disciplines will allow you to experient God's grace in new and profound ways, moving you forward in the journey to become more like Christ."

A Failure of Nerve

"When things are going really well, watch out." Edwin Friedman.

I have been reading Friedman's book A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix.  Friedman, who died is 1996 was way ahead of his time in applying systems thinking to leadership.  This book is ranked #3 on Amazon's list of Leadership books.  Friedman states that there is an intense environment that exists throughout our culture which is sabotaging leaders who step out to really lead in these turbulent times.  He calls it a "leadership-toxic climate."  Our government, churches, organizations, schools, etc. want "status quo" managers.

"Friedman's insights about our regressed, "seatbelt society," oriented toward safety rather than adventure, help explain the sabotage that leaders constantly face today. Suspicious of the "quick fixes" and instant solutions that sweep through our culture only to give way to the next fad, he argues for strength and self-differentiation as the marks of true leadership. His formula for success is more maturity, not more data; stamina, not technique; and personal responsibility, not empathy."

Here are a few other quips from Friedman;

*    Playfulness can get you out of a rut more successfully than      seriousness.
      
*    Triangles are the plaque in the arteries of communication and stress is the effect of our position in the triangle of our families.
      
*    If you are a leader, expect sabotage.
         
*    The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change.  If you want your child, spouse, client, or boss to shape up, stay connected while changing yourself rather than trying to fix them.

Friedman focuses on the emotional processes that exist within any system - family, church, etc.  He defines the leadership needed for a functional system.  One of the great reminders for me, (which I write about extensively in Presence Centered Youth Ministry but is easy to lose focus on) is the essential activity of a leader to nurture and prioritize their own development and growth.  A true leader is one who is self-differentiated and not unhealthily enmeshed with the group, church or organization they are trying to lead.  Friedman says, "A leader must separate his or her own emotional being from that of his or her followers while still remaining connected.  Vision is basically an emotional rather than a cerebral phenomenon, depending more on a leader's capacity to deal with anxiety than his or her professional training or degree.  A leader needs the capacity not only to accept the solitariness that comes with the territory, but also comes to love it.

Make sense?  Do you accept and love the place where you find yourself seated at the feet of Jesus as an apprentice of the Master?

Surprised by Hope

I have been trying to finish N. T. Wright's book Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church during Holy Week.  A couple of nights ago I was reading the chapter The Strange Story of Easter and I got a bit carried away.  I think I was declaring in a quite loud voice how amazing Wright's word were concerning the "knowing" that occurs through the resurrection of Jesus.  Vicki asked me, "who are you talking to?"  My reply, "I am just blown away by what I'm reading."

Wright states early in this chapter that "the most important decisions we make in life are not made by post-Enlightenment left-brain rationality alone."  He then examines epistemology in the context of how Thomas, Peter and Paul "know" the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  He discusses the fact that Thomas, "like any good historian, wants to see and touch."  Jesus wants him to touch and examine but Thomas moves to a different type of "knowing" which leads him to profess, "My Lord and my God."

Here is a long quote from Surprised by Hope that should have you shouting hallelujah.  This kind of understanding is what the world is looking for...

"If Thomas represents an epistemology of faith, which transcends but also includes historical and scientific knowing, we might suggest that Paul represents at this point an epistemology of hope. In 1 Corinthians 15 he sketches his argument that there will be a future resurrection as part of God’s new creation, the redemption of the entire cosmos as in Romans 8. Hope, for the Christian, is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism. It is a mode of knowing, a mode within which new things are possible, options are not shut down, new creation can happen...

All of which brings us to Peter. Epistemologies of faith and hope, both transcending and including historical and scientific knowing, point on to an epistemology of love—an idea I first met in Bernard Lonergan but that was hardly new with him. The story of John 21 sharpens it up. Peter, famously, has denied Jesus. He has chosen to live with the normal world, where the tyrants win in the end and where it’s better to dissociate yourself from people who get on the wrong side of them. But now, with Easter, Peter is called to live in a new and different world. Where Thomas is called to a new kind of faith and Paul to a radically renewed hope, Peter is called to a new kind of love.

Here I go back to Wittgenstein once more... for a famous and haunting aphorism: "It is love that believes the resurrection." "Simon, son of John," says Jesus, "do you love me?"  There is a whole world in that question, a world of personal invitation and challenge, of the remaking of a human being after disloyalty and disaster, of the refashioning of epistemology itself, the question of how we know things, to correspond to the new ontology, the question of what reality consists of. The reality that is the resurrection cannot simply be "known" from within the old world of decay and denial, of tyrants and torture, of disobedience and death. But that’s the point. To repeat: the resurrection is not, as it were, a highly peculiar event within the present world (though it is that as well); it is, principally, the defining event of the new creation, the world that is being born with Jesus. If we are even to glimpse this new world, let alone enter it, we will need a different kind of knowing, a knowing that involves us in a new ways, an epistemology that draws out from not just the cool appraisal of detached quasi-scientific research but also that whole-person engagement and involvement for which the best shorthand is "love," in the full Johannine sense of agape. My sense, from talking to some scientific colleagues, is that, though it’s hard to describe, something like this is already at work when the scientist devotes himself or herself to the subject matter so completely that the birth of new hypotheses comes about not so much through an abstract brain (a computer made of meat?) crunching data but through a soft and mysterious symbiosis of knower and known, of lover and beloved.

The skeptic will at once suggest that this is a way of collapsing the truth of Easter once more into mere subjectivism. Not so. Just because it takes agape to believe the resurrection, that doesn’t mean that all that happened was that Peter and the others felt their hearts strangely warmed. Precisely because it is love we are talking about, it must have a correlative reality in the world outside the lover. Love is the deepest mode of knowing because it is love that, while completely engaging with reality other than itself, affirms and celebrates that other-than-self reality. This is the point at which much modernist epistemology breaks down. The sterile antithesis of "objective" and "subjective," where we say that things are either objectively true (and can be perceived as such by a dispassionate observer) or subjectively true (and so of no use as an account of the real, public world), is overcome by the epistemology of love, which is called into being as the necessary mode of knowing for those who will live in the new public world, the world launched at Easter, the world in which Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn’t.

That is why, though the historical arguments for Jesus’s bodily resurrection are truly strong, we must never suppose that they will do more than bring people to the questions faced by Thomas, Paul and Peter, the questions of faith, hope, and love. We cannot use a supposedly objective historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like lighting a candle to see whether the sun had risen. What the candles of historical scholarship will do is to show that the room has been disturbed, that it doesn’t look like it did last night, and that would-be normal explanations for this won’t do. Maybe, we think after the historical arguments have done their work, maybe morning has come and the world has woken up. But to investigate whether this is so, we must take the risk and open the curtains to the rising sun. When we do so, we won’t rely on the candles anymore, not because we don’t believe in evidence and argument but because they will have been overtaken by the larger reality from which they borrow, to which they point, and in which they will find a new and larger home. All knowing is a gift from God, historical and scientific knowing no less than that of faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love." -     N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, pg. 72-74

I read this and it affirms the unique ways that I personally interact with the world of faith that I live in.  Wright explains this so beautifully and frees faith from life-sucking forensic formulas that so many in the church insist are the only way of "knowing" what we know.  The reality that I desire to lay down my life to follow the Lord Jesus Christ comes from a knowing so much deeper than the strength of historical arguments alone.

Yes, HE IS RISEN.

The Innocent Man

While in Jamaica I consumed John Grisham’s book The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town.  This book is Grisham's first non-fiction.  The focus of the book is Ron Williamson who was wrongly convicted of murder and sent to death row.  I have read several of Grisham’s fiction novels which are captivating.  This true story was just as fascinating as his fictional works.  Grisham is an amazing story teller.

2nd Printing

I just received Congratulations from InterVarsity Press for Presence Centered Youth Ministry going into its 2nd printing.  They told me that their plan was to have to do a 2nd printing before 12 months - so doing it at 5 months is very good news.  This makes me excited because everyday I get to hear stories from youth workers who are sharing their hearts with me about the ways Presence Centered Youth Ministry has impacted and helped them with their own spirituality and their thinking about the spiritual formation of young people.

Presence Centered featured on The Prayer Leader Blog

Phil Miglioratti of The Prayer Leader Ministry and Blog reviewed Presence Centered Youth Ministry here.   This week I did a blog interview here on adolescents and prayer.

The Great Omission

One of my favorite authors and thinkers is Dallas Willard.  His book The Divine Conspiracy had a very transformational impact on my life.  In a lot of ways the Divine Conspiracy of taking life with Jesus serious in the here and now has made my life more complex but also more fulfilling and joyful.

I recently finished another book by Dallas - The Great Omission.  This book is about reclaiming Jesus' teachings on discipleship.  While reading this book I realized how much Willard has influenced my thinking, especially when I compared the content of The Great Omission with my recent book Presence Centered Youth Ministry. 

Here is one of hundreds of great thoughts from Dallas, "The reason for the recent abrupt emergence of the spiritual formation terminology into religious life is, I believe, a growing suspicion or realization that we have not done well with the reality and the need.  We have counted on preaching, teaching, and knowledge or information to form faith in the hearer and have counted on faith to form the inner life and outward behavior of the Christian.  But, for whatever reason, this strategy has not turned out well.  The result is that we have multitudes of professing Christians who well may be ready to die but obviously are not ready to live, and can hardly get along with themselves, much less others."

A Review from YouthWorker Journal

                                                   Presence-Centered Youth Ministry: Guiding Students into Spiritual Formation by Mike King  Intervarsity Press, 2006, 192 pp., $15.00, www.ivpress.com

Much of what Mike King writes resonated with me in powerful ways.  His frustration with the manipulations and games and focus on programs that have typified much of the youth ministry he had been a part of during 30 years of ministry is an encouraging thing to read.  Without being critical, he is able to point out many of the flaws in his own thinking in the past and how God has redirected him to a philosophy of ministry where the youth worker is a spiritual guide.   

Toward that end, he builds a powerful case through Scripture and personal experience  to the value of this model.  In addition, he includes ideas and suggestions for practically living out the role of spiritual guide as opposed to being a program leader and activities director. I loved it!

This is something I would certainly recommend to any youth worker for both personal growth and as a training tool for volunteers and/or interns. - MM

Folmsbee

Chris Folmsbee is the President of Sonlife and a good friend.  Chris spoke at the general session of the National YouthWorkers Convention in Cincinnati and has a new book coming out called A New Kind of Youth Ministry.  Here is a statement from Chris about Presence Centered Youth Ministry (sorry, another shameless plug). 

"Since my general session in Cincinnati at the NYWC I have had a bunch of people emailing me asking about a resource that I might recommend to help encourage students to enter into the presence of God. Well, I have just finished reading my friend Mike King’s most recent book, Presence-Centered Youth Ministry and I would strongly encourage that as a resource." Chris Folmsbee - NKOYM Blog

The Real Mary

  A couple of months ago I decided to read Scot McKnight's book The Real Mary: Why Evangelical Christians Can Embrace the Mother of Jesus during the week before Christmas and top it off by seeing the movie The Nativity after finishing the book.  This was a very good plan.  I must say that the book was better than the movie, although the book definitely enhanced the impact of the movie. 

McKnight's Real Mary is a wonderful devotional book.  The theologically astute person who has examined the doctrinal issues surrounding the Mary of scripture and church history will not find any new groundbreaking theological issues to consider in this book.  However, all should be inspired by McKnight's writing which is well organized and passionate.  I finished the book loving Mary more deeply and more amazed with our Lord Jesus Christ.

Particularly helpful for the typical evangelical believer is McKnight's exploration of the canonical texts which reference or involve Mary (what they say and what they don't say about Mary).  The highlight is McKnight's focus on Mary's Magnificat.  For those who have distanced themselves from Mary because of a fear of catholicism, this book is very helpful in examining what issues like Immaculate Conception, Perpetual Virginity, Glorious Assumption and Mary Devotion really mean both as "official church dogma" and in practical applications.  McKnight does a great job debunking harmful myths that have led to a less than biblical view of Mary and an improper attitude toward the mother of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. 

I finished the book yesterday.  Last night Vicki and Jessica; Jamie and Lea Ann Roach (brother-in-law and sister) with my three nieces and one nephew; and I went to the movie The Nativity.  Of course, having been to Israel twenty times, I get a little tripped up by unrealistic details like Joseph and Mary stopping at the Sea of Galilee on the way from Nazareth to Bethlehem (bad trip planning) and the mismatched topography of the journey along the Jordan River, etc.  Also, there was the common assumption that all the details in the birth narratives happened within a few hour period as opposed to the reality that they may have played out over a period of months, even years.  I know it is only a two hour movie.  Anyway, the whole movie was worth the final scenes of devotion as the assembly of characters gathered at the nativity and, I must admit (not surprising to those who know me well) I was overcome with emotion as the movie closed with narration of Mary's Magnificat (impacted by my devotional reading of The Real Mary).