Tim Ogilvy on Amateur Theology
About Tim Ogilvy
When it comes to amateur theology, Tim is much more comfortable with the word amateur, than he is with theology. He likes to dabble, especially where it intersects with the two things he most likes to write about (but is no expert in): philosophy and psychology. He once did an arts degree, and spent most of it in the bush skiing, climbing and kayaking... but when you do an Outdoor Education major, they call that ‘homework’. He now studies psychology part time, and works four days a week shuffling plastic around a factory floor in the hope some of it might be recycled one of these days. A few weekends a year they let him out of his city cage to do things like white-water raft guiding, hiking, and teaching kayaking
Tim's site: http://amateurtheology.org/author/tim/
a spectrum of approaches to leadership
Posted on November 7, 2007 by Tim Ogilvy
Filed Under Church | 15 Comments
I’m currently re-thinking my beliefs about the role and nature of leadership, and I thought it might be interesting to share some of those ideas here.
While I’ve learned a lot about the values and traits that make ‘good’ leaders from church and family, most of what I’ve learned about the skills and attitudes that make it all happen I’ve learned from being an adventure guide, and studying education and psychology. Sometimes these things dovetail and complement each other, and sometimes they conflict rather badly.
Of particular interest to me at the moment is the interaction between risk, responsibility, and control… and the implications for how we lead as those parameters change. As a member of a fairly liberal church, we aren’t especially ‘hands on’ with our leadership, often preferring to let things find their own way, with love and encouragement… and I think this can be justified with reference to Mathew 20:25-28. On the other hand, there are other circumstances, where we have a duty of care, or where a situation is life-threatening, where an increasingly direct approach to leadership might be mandated. Especially in reference to Mathew 18:6. The diagram below illustrates the need for an adaptive approach, and is based on theory from Kurt Lewin, and Priest and Gass (Effective Leadership in Adventure Programming, 1997).
Some churches, especially larger and more traditional ones seem to find it easy to justify staying at the authoritarian end of the spectrum, even in low risk conditions… but I find this difficult to justify, both in the light of Mathew 20, and because I believe that excessive authoritarian control can stand in the way of young people and even adults moral development (Kohlberg).
The sources of leadership power and social power, and the risks involved in misuse of power, and failure to understand the servant heart of leadership are other very interesting issues, and these ideas all have interesting implications for Christians in leadership… but I’m going to have to do more reading before I can bring a theological angle to that discussion!
the emerging critique of certainty
Posted on September 20, 2007 by Tim Ogilvy
Filed Under Emerging Questions | 6 Comments
Recent reading on this site, and also at Rick’s blog, has got me wondering why emergent thinking appears so threatening to many church leaders, some of whom in their own heyday were considered quite radical themselves. This is just one guy’s perspective (mine) and I’m not too fragile, so feel free to unleash intellectual hell (or careful critique) on me if you feel the urge.
My personal feeling is that postmodernism carries us to CS Lewis’s cliff experience a la pilgrim’s regress. We must, under a postmodern critique reach a kind of spiritual agnosticism that can never be resolved by knowing, critiquing, or analysing, and must instead be solved with beautifully idiotic faith.
To me it was always this simple stupidity of choosing to believe that is why “the simple things confound the wise”. As long as we are determined to “know with certainty” we’re not living by faith, we’re actually just using dissociative mind-tricks to convince ourselves we are certain. Faith must occur in an environment of doubt.
On that basis, however you slice your postmodernism, it must leave you with the agnostic premise: there may be absolutes, but we can never be certain what they are. Then in choosing to put our faith in the best representation and interpretation of the ancient tradition that we can find, we make an honest choice of faith.
To do anything else is not a higher morality or a more stable belief system; it’s simply poor logic, and bad psychology. There’s nothing new under the sun. Modernism constructed an increasingly complex and diverse worldview-cluster based on some assumptions. Post-modernism is mostly just the equal and opposite reaction, the re-questioning of the assumptions.
To me, whoever claims to have a certainty, however strongly they believe it, is likely being self-deceived. We do not have, we never have had certainty. We only believed that we had it.
Those who fight so doggedly, with closed eyes and ears to defend these ‘absolute tenets’ of their faith against what appears to be an unquenchable relativism, do so because when they chose faith, they chose it in a falsely constructed environment of certainty. The psychology of certainty demands the dissociation of any thinking that indicates possible doubt. The story that is told about the certainty comes later and is built to justify the pre-chosen response to ‘cognitive dissonance.’
The problem is that those opposed to the questions raised by emergent’s are genuinely threatened by them… they are at risk of bigger problems if they can’t resolve the tension between question and belief. I think Christ knew the dilemma of certainty when he said to Thomas “You believe because you have seen, but blessed are those who believe, even when they have not seen.”
I’m learning to be compassionate to those who are threatened by an environment of uncertainty… their world does come crashing down, at least for a while, if they accept the truth about doubt.
