(I am grateful for the writer Chuck Lowe for this brilliance, which I hope I have not sullied too much.)
You need to make something happen? Here’s what you need:
- A parts list
- Step-by-step instructions
- Hazards to avoid
- Useful techniques for greater efficiency
Apart from the side effect of turning people into automata, this approach was powerful for simple things like recipes, fast-food restaurants, internal combustion engines, mills, factories and much else. The Industrial Revolution (I suggest) was a revolution because of the discovery and application of this power.
It is such a powerful approach that we humans have totally lost control of it and are applying it to everything, particularly complex systems, where it doesn’t work at all. Here is a partial list where it doesn’t work:
- Babies
- Adults
- Children
- Societies
- Economies
- Medicine
- Education
- Business
You get the idea: anything human. I notice (following Chuck Lowe again) how what powered the Industrial Revolution has hijacked the Christian Church, or at least the bits I inhabit. (Perhaps Orthodoxy largely escaped? I don’t know enough. )
Right now, around the world, how many courses are being delivered, how many notes taken, about about how to get the gospel working in lives and churches: evangelistic programmes, discipleship programmes, instructions on how to pray, heal, defeat evil, live well? What colossal percentage of time and energy is wasted delivering and receiving these courses. Because what works for the simple does not work for the complex. Anybody who has spent the shortest time with a toddler knows this.
Abandon it all. What are we supposed to do instead? I think in the Christian sphere it is about the attitudes that flow from a worshipping heart; about love love of God and neighbour; about serving as your passions and circumstances lead and constrain; and about trusting God, the big drummer in the sky, to call the dance.
The first step the world always leaves out is ‘prayer’! God has the plan he wants to follow and it usually isn’t the way we expect. Prayer is a demonstration of humility that we don’t have the perfect solution and we want to participate in the designer’s strategy. (BTW: Don’t be surprised if the only participation required is prayer and God takes care of the rest.)
and maybe following of the beat of the drummer leads you share something you have learned by hosting a workshop…. Whether all courses are a waste of time depends on several things. One of them is whether we accept that human beings are complex and what we take away from a course is not necessarily what the organiser intended. The production-belt model of training may not be all it is cracked up to be, but that doesn’t mean nothing can be gained just because the model is mechanistic.