It was an exciting day in the Whitsitt house…. Open Source Church came in the mail!
This week only (until April 17, 2011) you can get the book for 30% off if you order through the Alban website.
Thanks to all who have supported me through this process and I hope you would consider buying and writing a review of the book, as well as spreading the word throughout your networks.
On New Years Day, Jan Edmiston, she of A Church for Starving Artists fame, issued “a special challenge” at the end of her post, “How We Will Change Our Minds This Year? [aka The 2011 Love-Your-Enemy Challenge].” If I were a suspicious man, I would have assumed that she was firing a shot across the bow of the SS Metanoia Project. If I were prone to paranoia, I would have thought that she was staring at a picture of me when she was writing.
Alas, I am not paranoid, merely egotistical. And so, when I read her post about how exactly were were going to metanoia (“change our minds”) this year by actually engaging with a member of a group we’ve denigrated in 2010, I read it as the Holy Spirit kicking me in the shorts again.
Great.
A Special Challenge: I would like to hear personally from the person who can have lunch with anyone named “Phelps” from the Westboro Baptist Church this year – especially if your meeting involves prayer.This is not a sarcastic request. I am totally serious and I will feature you as a Guest Blogger AND send you your favorite snack food if you can accomplish this holy feat in 2011. I’m thinking that members of Westboro Baptist are not readers of this blog – but if you are, you cannot have lunch with yourselves. Although I will still send you your favorite snack food AND would like to have a friendly conversation with you over mochas. I will fly to Topeka.
I live 45 minutes from Topeka. 45 minutes.
I have to do this. I mean, I really feel like I have to do this.
I’m close. I write about changing the world through changing minds. I believe that God loves them just as much as me. Oh, and I can’t really stand them. Seriously, they make me angry.
Also, I’m an introvert who has been committed to not arguing for several years now. So what do I do? How do I do this? I need help.
I need you to help me figure out how to approach this. I don’t want to lie to them. I want to be honest. I’m not a fool – they’re aren’t going to change their minds by meeting me so, in essence, this is probably an exercise in futility. But the Gospel is not often about effectiveness. It’s about witness.
So help me out. How do I do this?
Beginning next week, Mondays are going to become the day on which I post as a part of an ongoing series (this is my proactive response to one of my fears that I’ll run out of things to say). My first series, which will last for 16 weeks, will center on the intersection of two areas near and dear to my heart: spiritual practices and personality types.
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When I consider all the things that I have learned that have had an impact on my relationship with others, the recognition of typologies has probably been the most influential. According to Wiktionary, a typology is defined as:
As much as people want to be unique (and we are!) there are still common characteristics that we can use to group certain people together. Some easy typologies around which we can generalize are the differences between women and men, and between introverts and extroverts. But, as helpful as these typologies are, they tend to be a bit limiting due to the fact that there are only two types to compare and contrast. As a result, generalizing about women, for example, can get a person in hot water pretty quickly because not all women reflect the generalization. I prefer typologies with a bit more breadth to them, and my typology of choice is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
The MBTI is a system of 16 different types, composed of a combination of 4 natural preferences and how they interact.
1. Do people wear you out or get you jazzed? (extroversion/introversion)
Contrary to popular opinion, extroverts and introverts are not identifiable by whether or not they are expressive (I happen to be an expressive introvert). Rather, the extroversion/introversion scale identifies whether you gain energy from external activity or internal reflection. An easy (but not exhaustive) test is to ask, “Do you get jazzed or worn out by being with other people?”*
[*Let’s be clear, the question is about energy, not whether or not a person likes other people.]
2. Do you see the forest or the trees? (intuitive/sensing)
When making a decision, do you want to get a sense of the basic flow of the situation or do you want a lot of information? Intuitive types gather information in ways that are very abstract and theoretical, and they tend to connect information to other pieces of information or larger patterns. Sensing types, on the other hand, prefer to gather information which is tangible and concrete – information that is “right here and how.”
3. Do you make decisions with your heart or your head? (feeling/thinking)
Despite conventional wisdom, everyone makes decisions in rational manner. The difference comes in what criteria we use to make our decisions. Feeling types try to make decisions that conform with emotional and relational ideals. What will return balance to the situation? Thinking types, however, make decisions based on logic and consistency. What decision will match the assumed set of rules?
4. Are you organized or spontaneous? (judging/perceiving)
While the ability to plan in a skill that can be learned, this preference is all about your disposition to deviating from a plan. Judging types have an amazing ability to set and agenda and stick to it. Percieving types are the ones who show us there is nothing to fear in going off-script.
For the next 16 weeks I’d like to explore what difference a person’s personality type might make to their practice of spirituality. For instance: As an introverted, intuitive thinker ,I love silent meditation (zazen is my fave), but I know that this form of spiritual practice is quite frustrating for my extroverted, sensing feeler of a wife. I want to find out what kind of practice my be as transformative for her as zazen is for me. It makes me mad to think that some teacher of practice would tell her that she should be able to practice zazen as effective as he does. Given the difference in the temperament of people, that doesn’t compute.
During this series I want to explore four different questions:
As you look forward to this series, what practices have you found important for you?
Now that the book drafting is done, I feel like I need to continue forward with the track I’m on. In the next few weeks, this space is going to transform from a place where I simply post drafts of my writing to a space dedicated to the project of helping bring change to the church, spiritual practice, and theology.
I’d love for you to continue on with me. I plan on making it worth your while.
peace,
landon
Hi. My name is Landon, and I’m writing a book.
It’s a book about “open source church leadership,” which is a fancy way of saying that churches should stop relying on one or two “experts” (usually pastors) and start recognizing that the people God has gathered together in their congregation possess the necessary gifts, skills, and passions to accomplish anything God might have in store for them. (That was a long sentence.)
To break it down more simply: All of us are smarter than one of us.
And this is where you come in.
Yes, this idea is mine and I’ll be the one writing it, but I’m sure that there are things I haven’t thought of, am not aware of, or am deceiving myself about. In the interest of staying true to the book’s theme, I’m going to post on my writing process, structural ideas, and even drafts of the book itself right here on this blog.
Please help me make it better. If you do, I’ll buy you a pony.
Thanks.
(photo by David Turnbull)
landon whitsitt 