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Being stuck and getting unstuck aren’t primarily about needing more data, or even getting answers. They are primarily emotional processes that allow us to ask better questions and free ourselves from the old paradigms that got us stuck in the first place
Making mistakes is essential to discovering new pathways. If we’re on an adventure to what’s new, we expect it. If we’re anxious about protecting what we fear losing, we can’t make mistakes. And we lose out on what could be.
By Serendipity he means putting ourselves in the way of perceiving and taking up previously unconceived possibilities on our way to new paradigms. Stephen Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From” talks a lot about this
By overcoming an “imaginative barrier like the equator” he means the courage (“nerve”) to push past *emotional* barriers that people say we can’t/won’t/shouldn’t do this. Like early explorers risked sailing off the edge of the earth when their maps said the world ended @ equator
The leadership crisis being exposed at all levels of society is a “failure of nerve” that is co-morbid with the pandemic; it is another, long-simmering, even more pervasive pandemic of sorts. At the leadership level, embedded in emotional processes
My experience/expertise is church world. We see the failure of nerve in the strong forces pushing to “get back to normal” by returning to physical worship ASAP. But that’s just a “try harder” answer to the old questions.
Far better is to ask what opportunities lay ahead of us if we take a different path. What if the Church has been far too dependent on gathered/performative aspects like weekend gathered worship, and Covid gives us chance to explore distributed/scattered forms of church?
Practically speaking this means embracing online services, gathering in smaller groups and the like not as temporary coping structures until we can gather again, but as new paradigm best practices for a newly freed, equipped, mobilized church for this changing context
We are seeing the same forces outside the church of course, especially in schools, sports, politics, and wherever people gather: a desire to return to “normal” as if that were wholly desirable. It’s not!
The difference is that the Church is far better equipped to make this paradigmatic shift. Her history as the most agile, adaptable movement (and institution) in human history means she she has done it and can do it again, if her leaders lead that way. Some are. Many are not yet.
This thread quoted, and inspired by, Edwin Friedman’s “A Failure of Nerve,” which I can’t recommend highly enough.
