Ways of Knowing

by rbirkey on August 12, 2008

Intuitive Leadership - Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor and Chaos, by Tim Keel

Intuitive Leadership - Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor and Chaos, by Tim Keel

I’m reading a book called “Intuitive Leadership - Embracing a Paradign of Narrative, Metaphor and Chaos” by Tim Keel. In chapter 5, “Being There: grappling with the context of a ‘post’ world” - on page 128, Tim shares this observation:

“As a young Christian, most of what I was taught as “evangelism” was merely apologetics–-a particularly Western way of arguing people into submission by anticipating every possible argument they might come up with and having a rational argument prepared in response… I have found that many Christians, consciously or not, try first to convert postmodern people into a modern, Enlightenment way of thinking before they can share the Good News of Jesus Christ with them. Why? Because we have encoded the gospel in the categories of modernity… [This] … is an incarnational and missional necessity. But the missional context of our world has changed. Postmodern people reject these limited ways of knowing–[because] they leave out too much life and reality. Meanwhile many Christians sit wringing their hands and assume that the God of the cosmos revealed by Jesus Christ is confounded by a postmodern world.”

I found this particular paragraph in the book to resonate strongly with my own experience and outlook on the future. I’m finding the whole book to be like this!

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