A Metanoiaic Journey

In Romans 12:2, Paul admonishes his readers not to be conformed to the world, but rather to be transformed through the renewing of the mind. In others words, he seems to say that the Metamorphic Journey is first a Metanoiaic Journey. Paul's own thinking was certainly radically transformed. His encounter with the resurrected Jesus called into question many things that Paul had previously known to be obviously true, and turned them upside down. Jesus' crucifixion, for example, changes from being a colossal failure at the hands of the world's powers to a dramatic victory over those same powers; it changes from being the evidence that God has cursed him to the occasion for God to highly exalt him; it changes from being utter foolishness to the power of God unto salvation.

We tend to think of Paul's transformation as being instantaneous. Yet by his own testimony in Galatians, we can see that some significant amounts of time elapsed, during which he was no doubt wrestling with the business of making sense of the world once again. The transformation of his relationships also took some time — he certainly lost the trust of his former associates quite quickly, but it seems to have taken quite some time to gain the trust of his former victims. Their thinking had to undergo some radical transformation also, it seems.

For me, this Metanoiaic Journey continues to be quite a long and involved one, moving through a number of stages. As for many others, it seems that one stage tends to involve a lot of anger and/or frustration at those people and institutions that had had a part in perpetuating what now seems to be a falsehood. This stage is particularly intense if the now questioned former "truth" played a significant role in some loss or pain. It can also involve a lot of frustration towards those around us who just don't seem to "get it" when we try and explain why this universally accepted obvious "truth" isn't really true — frustration that just mounts when they point out the reasons why there really must be some truth there after all.

The reality, of course, is that there is some element of truth hidden away somewhere in every "obvious truth" that turns out not to be either so obvious or so true. The problem is that everything has been so obvious before, that now we no longer know where that nugget of truth resides; just that there is a lot of falseness all around it. Well meaning suggestions that we just take what is good and leave the rest just aren't helpful — they totally miss the point that it's going to take a lot of sorting out, and a lot of reaction against the old notions, before the capacity to recognize just where any residual truth lies is achieved.

Right now for me, there are three well established and widely held "obvious truths" that have long ceased to be either obvious or true, but for which the process of metanoia is still ongoing:

• what works, works: so whenever we get a "good" outcome, we can assume that the process by which it was obtained was good, and simply repeat it to get more good outcomes
• leadership produces results: so we can determine the personal effectiveness of a "leader" by measuring the results obtained against some pre-determined desired outcome
• whatever your issue, the Bible has the answer to your question: so just read the Bible with your question in mind, and pretty soon you'll get the answer

The Focus 3 "Emerging Leaders" material I'm struggling with forces me to engage these three issues, almost at every turn, simply because so much of the material has these three beliefs implicitly in the background. While it forces me to engage the issues, it is not providing any resources with which to do so. Still, I am commited to participating in this project because, quite frankly, it's the only place I can see where the kind of open disclosure necessary for true community is actually taking place.

That leaves me with a dilemma: some of the people with whom I am participating in this course are intimately involved in leadership in this new congregation with which I am now committed (one of them being my wife). My confronting of these issues is inevitably going to call into question some of the leadership processes, choices and directions currently evidenced here. If I am open with these struggles, that is almost certainly going to add to the burden of these leaders — who may very well not be at the point in their journeys where these matters need to be wrestled with — and produce significant relationship strain that they could probably do without. Furthermore, what effect will an open relationship struggle between participants have on this developing community? On the other hand, if I back away from them, what effect will that guardedness have on this developing community? And if I address these matters only outside the leadership circle, do I just end up perpetuating a negative attitude within myself? God knows, there's already too much of that to go around in most churches.

What, then, is the wisest course? I will have to choose soon, either by intention or default, because it isn't going to just go away.