Winning or Learning

Big News! The health care reform act has been passed and not without a deep political divide. As much as it is a win in the minds of some, it is also a loss in the sense of that politic divide in this country has just widened. With this bill becoming law, it has galvanized the distrust and resulting chasm among our leaders and the American people. I raise this front page news as a way to introduce a larger conversation about the way we engage in debate.

I was talking with someone yesterday who had recently begun attending our church and she commented on how the church she had just left did things differently and for whatever reason, it tweaked me just a bit. Luckily, I remembered this profound and yet obvious perspective and here it is: I don’t have to have everyone agree with me in order to accept them.

Another way of saying it is that, I can distant myself from my ideas and see others ideas as distant from them – not being mine or their identity. This way, I can respect and enjoy the person while seeing our ideas as second in level of importance and as something that will change over time, anyways.

To develop this a bit further, instead of speaking in absolute terms, I describe my current thinking based upon my present knowledge of the subject and the lens through which I see things. This has been hugely helpful for me because then I don’t corner myself and then have to defend my idea to the death because I started out with an absolute.

By the way, I didn’t change my style of dialogue because I wasn’t good at it. Actually, I’m pretty good at debate especially in the area of religion, the Bible, doctrine, and theology. I have won many debates and yet lost myself in the process and others – not to mention the opportunities to have learned more and grown as a result.

I guess my question to you is if you also have a sense that the way we are talking about issues that matter from the top down seems ineffective largely because it is about winning rather than truly learning. I would love to hear your thoughts on how we can better converse in the workplace, home, and social life about faith, politics, and a million other hot button issues that arise on a daily basis.

Centered and Bounded Set

At the church I pastor, we had a leadership meeting last Sunday night where we talked about this theory called the centered set and bounded set. I drew a circle to represent the bounded set and then for the centered set, I drew a dot and a bunch of arrows represent people at different distances some aiming toward the center and others away.

Centered set thinking, as I understand it, has a center toward which people aim their respective lives, while the bounded set has to do with a set of beliefs or commonalities around which communities form. A bounded set for a church might be their doctrines, ethnic or socioeconomic similarities, or political view. (By the way, this theory applies far more broadly than the church). A centered set church would argue that Jesus is the center and so instead of say preaching about what one must believe, its emphasis would be on following Jesus.

This conversation, as you can imagine, was vibrant with both moments of "ah ha" and some push back. Being the ultimate example of centered set thinking, I blasted that they all must agree with being a centered set person. Kidding aside and hopefully point made, even in our conversation about this, a centered set tone is one that allows for a wrestling through the topic.

We very briefly touched on how this applies to proselytizing or evangelism. The the bounded set, I feel the pressure of getting you to acknowledge the basic doctrines as an outsider and then if you do, then I feel relieved and even excited that you are now "in". In the centered set way of thinking, I no longer have a hard line for those who are in or out. A couple blog posts ago, I told you about my conversation with the Jehovah's Witness and how comfortable it was. In part, I attribute it to the sense that I didn't know where his arrow was pointed. Even though he didn't believe in Jesus the way I do, who knows if the arrow of his life isn't in some way pointed to him.

Once again, I found myself in a conversation with a lady and her boyfriend at Panera. Our conversation started out with the obvious, rain. I mentioned that we were having some leaks at our church. She asked me about the church and off we were to a 30 minute conversation about faith. She hadn't been to church in years but found that she was desirous of a community to do faith with. The centered set idea, though I didn't use that phrase, caught her attention quite a bit and found it to be something she really liked and asking about service times and so on.

I don't know if she will visit or not but it sure was an enjoyable conversation on faith. It makes me wonder how many more unchurched folks would consider faith or church on those terms. I also wonder how the bounded and centered set thinking strikes you.

Materialism, Progress, Capitalism

Before I launch into my new post, I want to add another thought to my conversation with a Jehovah's Witness.

What was pretty new for me in this conversation with a JW was that I was honestly interested in how he understood faith. In the past I had assumed that I already knew everything because I understood their doctrine and could present it as well as they could but I didn't know why they believed it or how they understood faith in God.

The change for me was that I saw this person as a person and not the embodiment of an institution against which I was to fight. He did not represent an overly religious parent, a former abusive, rule-based church, that I was still rebelling against. The other change for me was that I no longer saw my faith as a set of beliefs, superior, more intelligent, more evolved than the rest or more importantly, as the way to heaven.

On to the new post:

I'm reading this book called, The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser in which he argues that what actually detracts from our sense of well being is materialism which abounds in this country. Earlier in the book, he describes the four basic human needs the last one being human need for connection.

There was no surprise to me that what contributes to family, friend relationships and to society meets these needs but what caught my attention was his thoughts on how the results of capitalism fight against it.

I've always been a big fan of capitalism in large part because I got to experience leaving poverty and by age 27 I owned a beautiful home in Woburn. Certainly, being a white male and young at the time puts me in a more advantaged class. But what Kasser pounds away at is that once you have your basic needs met, anything above and beyond that provides no more happiness and actually begins going the other direction as we become more materialistic.

He suggests that we actually lose ourselves in the process of earning more and and more. We think that owning more provides us with a true sense of autonomy, something he describes as a basic human need, when the opposite is true. The more we own, the less we are in touch with our true hunger which is human connection and other more intrinsic desires.

The way to return to this would be for us to do less watching of TV, which bombards us with ads that appeal to materialism, train our children from early on to detect the truth of commercials, to elect politicians that care about equality, to invest in organizations that fight poverty instead of purely seeking monetary returns, to find ways of spending more time with our kids instead of purchasing gifts for them.

He challenges what has been often the unquestioned value and unmitigated push for progress. Is it bad to suggest less consumption? Is it anti-American? Is it a bad thing if we don't return to a pre-recession/depression economic vitality?

What do you think?

My buzzer went off at our condo at about mid morning on Saturday, which never happens. I buzzed my mystery guest in and went to the door totally curious at who might be visiting. A well-dressed gray haired man holding a magazine approached me tentatively offering it along with his scripted intro line.

This Jehovah's Witness began with some questions about faith and then he launched into his mini sermon as I listened patiently. When he then asked if I agreed, I answered nonargumentively about the the way I see things. In fact, I was so comfortable with him because I didn't feel the need to convince him otherwise which I think put him at ease, too. I truly enjoyed him as a person and felt that perhaps there was something we could learn through our conversation.

I could tell when he became uncomfortable with too much agreement or when whatever I said didn't fit with his experience as a JW because he would loop back into his presentation which included: Jesus having been created and therefore not God; the trinity being a lie; the end of the world; only 144,000 making to heaven; and a few other things.

I found it strange to be one on one with a person who insisted on going back to a monologue. Curious, I asked him if what he was doing was trying to convince me and others of his beliefs and that if I believed what he believed, then I was "in". He agreed that this was for the most part true so I thought I would frame the difference in how I understood faith.

For me it was more about following Jesus because, no one could ever really do enough good to get to heaven. I asked him if he noticed any pattern in the way Jesus spoke to people. Jesus seemed to deal with heart issues not offering a new set of beliefs or even specific rules. Instead, he was inviting people to follow him as the new way to God.

He pushed back a bit and suggested that I must have beliefs that I try to convince people to also believe. I told him that I didn't think that people had to believe the same doctrines I held or to believe them in the same way I do in order to get to heaven. For me it was, again, about following Jesus.

How does this strike you?