Transformation in theology and mission

“I am making everything new!” 

So proclaims the One who sits on the throne as a new heaven and earth come into being (Revelation 21:5).  The Apostle Paul proclaims (2 Corinthians 5:17):

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! 

The concept of transformation is central to the grand narrative of the Bible. God transforms bondage to freedom, hate to love, alienation to relationship, lost to found, poor to rich, darkness to light, infidelity to faithfulness, injustice to righteousness, and death to life. God has transformed, is transforming, and will transform individuals, families, communities, churches, and nations. The Kingdom of God is all about transformation.

Transformation is qualitative change. The new state is qualitatively different from the old state. It has a quality that the old state did not have.

For several decades my fellow "holy" scribbler, Charles Ringma, has taught a course on Transformational Theology at seminaries in Australia, Canada, and Asia. He recently reflected on this experience, noting dimensions that students struggled with, and raised several important questions about transformational theology. This has stimulated the following post, which mostly reflects on what the social sciences might contribute to this discussion. Here I bring my perspective as a condensed matter physicist with an enduring interest in complex systems and the concept of emergence. I start with several claims (presuppositions) to justify why this perspective is possible and may be useful.

There is a dialectic between our actions and the work of God in the world. We live in a material world that functions in certain ways. The book of Proverbs is all about discerning wisdom: how the world actually works (the physical and moral order) and living accordingly. Acting according to wisdom or folly will produce good or bad outcomes, respectively. This world is both created and fallen, good and bad, of great potential and fundamentally flawed. We are constrained to live and act in this world. We are creatures living in a creation. We have autonomy but are constrained. 

God is sovereign, the Holy Spirit is always working, and God does do miracles (events outside the normal pattern of regularity, such as raising Jesus from the dead, speaking to people's hearts and souls, causing nations to rise and fall). But, arguably most of the time God acts through normal processes associated with human action (speaking, loving, serving, listening, planning, ...). Even God's acts of judgment on Israel and other nations were performed through human agents such as Assyria and Babylon.

If we are concerned with mission as transformation, i.e., acting in ways that promote the transformation that God desires, then we need to observe and learn how the world actually does function. This reality both creates possibilities and imposes constraints. The material world behaves according to the laws of nature, that physics, chemistry, and biology, aim to encode. Are there "laws" of transformation? How does transformation occur in individuals, families, institutions, communities, and nations?

Charles noted that

Many students worked on the assumption that if we get our theology right (orthodoxy) then good strategies and practices will follow in impacting others and our world.

This reflects a common problem that people too often have implicit beliefs (i.e., unstated assumptions that are embedded in a particular worldview or life experience). In this case implicit beliefs about how transformation happens.

Today we know more about answers to the last question above than we ever have before. Scholars in history, sociology, political science, anthropology, and psychology have greatly increased our understanding. This does not mean that we have complete understanding or that all the scholarship in these fields is reliable or sympathetic to the values of the Kingdom of God. But, there is much we can learn from this scholarship to aid us in our journey to partner with God in transformational mission. 

A significant idea is emergence: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Emergence is one of the most important scientific concepts developed in the second half of the twentieth century. It is relevant to physical, biological, human, and social sciences. The possible relevance of emergence to mission has recently been explored in detail by Darren Duerksen and William Dyrness in a recent book, Seeking Church: Emerging Witnesses to the Kingdom. They draw on work by the sociologist Christian Smith. In a recent talk I explored some of these ideas.

An emergent perspective considers a specific entity that we wish to see transformed, whether a human individual or an oppressed community, as a system that is composed of many interacting parts and that, is embedded in an environment of external components. For example, a human individual is not a disembodied spirit but a combination of mind, heart, body, and soul. Furthermore, a person is never an isolated entity but interact with a social network of family, friends, and community, which in turn is embedded in a nation-state and a global economy. If we wish to see an individual come to faith in Christ or to experience healing from trauma, we may need to consider the role of many of these interacting components.

Charles noted that

The greatest overall weakness in papers for the transformation theology course was the treatment of synchronicity. Religious, social, economic, and other factors usually have to combine to bring about significant change. Students tended to operate on the basis that only religious factors were needed.

The characteristics of emergence are as follows. Due to the interactions between the components of the system, new entities can emerge.  The whole system can have properties that are qualitatively different from (and not reducible to) the properties of the individual components. A brain is conscious but a single neuron is not. A dead body has no morality but a living person does. Water is wet but a single water molecule is not. New entities that emerge may be desirable (e.g., a just society or a flourishing church in a slum) or they may not be (e.g., a stock-market crash or a church that becomes a personal empire). Christian Smith, refers to these emergent entities as relational goods and relational evils, respectively.

Quantitative change can lead to qualitative change. Changing the temperature of the water in the pipes from plus one degree Celsius to minus one degree Celsius will lead to the water undergoing a transition from the liquid to the solid state, i.e., freezing and expanding, and bursting your water pipes. Last year in Chile, a 30-peso (four-cent) rise in the price of peak-hour metro tickets led to social upheaval and a plan to write a new constitution for the country.

Emergent phenomena are hard to predict, even for simple physical systems where scientists have an excellent knowledge of the components and their interactions. Hence, it should not be surprising that it is very hard to predict how society and the economy will behave. For example, economists cannot agree on an answer to the simple question, "Can government "stimulus" spending actually prevent an economic recession?"

Central to describing and understanding emergent phenomena are a range of scales in time, space, and numbers of components. For example, transformation of a society can be viewed at the scale of individuals, families, neighbourhoods, cities, and nations. Insight and discernment are required to decide which of these scales may be most significant, and thus key to our understanding and action.

I now give a specific example to illustrate how emergent phenomena are hard to predict and often surprising. 

The emergence of social segregation

Many churches are very homogeneous with regard to the demographics of members. Many Christians do not have many non-Christian friends? Why is that?Segregation is a common social phenomenon: groups of people clump together in spatial regions (or relational connectivity) with those similar to them. Like attracts like. Examples range from ethnic ghettos and teenage cliques to "echo chambers" on the internet.

In 1971 Thomas Schelling published a landmark paper in the social sciences. The motivation for his work was to understand how racially segregated neighbourhoods emerged in cities in the USA, but the ideas are applicable to a wide range of phenomena. Schelling's work surprised many because using a simple model he showed how small individual preferences for similarity can lead to large-scale segregation. 

A major conclusion is that motives at the individual level are not the same as the outcomes at the macro level.  This idea provided the title for an influential book Micromotives and Macrobehavior, that Schelling published in 1978.  People may be very tolerant of diversity (e.g. only have a preference that 30 per cent of their neighbours be like them) but collectively this results in them living in very segregated neighbourhoods.

Practical implications for transformative mission

An emergent perspective should lead to humility. It emphasises how much we do not understand rather than deluding ourselves that we do understand what we are doing and what the outcome will be.

The systems we are interested in, communities of people, are complex. They are hard to describe, understand, and predict. Yet, many of us, and the organisations that we are involved in, have a simple mechanical view of these systems and how transformation will happen. Study at this seminary and you will become a successful pastor. Give money to this family in the slum and it will lift them out of poverty. Preach the Gospel and people will become disciples of Jesus. Elect Christian politicians and society will become more Christian.

Humility means a willingness to learn from others: community members, non-Christian social scientists, team members, and those with a different perspective than our own.

Humility should lead to realistic expectations about the likely outcomes from our actions. On the one hand, we want to proceed by faith that God will do great things "far more than we can ask or imagine." On the other hand, we are constrained by our ignorance, limited resources, and the fallen nature of our world. Suppose, we proceed with the hubris that we actually know what we are doing and that our actions must produce the outcome that we naively believe will follow. Except by the mercy and generosity of God, our efforts will "fail" because they go against the way that the world actually works. This will lead to disappointment, disillusionment, and despair. Countless activists have been burnt out and quit and organisations collapsed because they had unrealistic expectations and did not see the outcomes that they assumed would happen. A humble emergent perspective can lead to a long-term view that makes initiatives sustainable, both at the individual and institutional level.

Most complex systems are adaptive. In response to perturbations, they adapt and re-organise. This is the basis of the law of unintended consequences. Organisations need to be adaptive. One approach is Action Research where action leads to reflection which leads to action.

An emergent perspective on transformation is against the common narrative that great leaders are heroic individuals who have the vision and know the strategy and tactics to get there. As they are immersed in their surrounding corporate culture most Christian organisations embrace this view of leadership. The origins of this narrative are not Biblical but rather the theory of management that arose from the military success of the USA in World War II and of the auto industry in the following two decades. Two experts on organisational development, Gervase Bushe and Robert Marshak, state that

The “visionary leader” narrative and performance mindset that predominate in theories and practices of “Change Leadership” are no longer effective in an environment of multi-dimensional diversity marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

Instead, they advocate an alternative leadership model that starts from the perspective that organisations are emergent and their behaviour is hard to control and predict. Leaders need to find ways to harness the self-organisational and adaptive tendency of organisations. This might be done by influencing the conversations that take place within the organisation, encouraging employees to come up with their own solutions to problems, and creating a culture and structures that are sensitive to the tension between efficiency and innovation.

Obviously, this emergent perspective on leadership and organisational development has important implications for how any organisation selects and promotes leaders, how those leaders act, and what policies and procedures are embraced.