Importance: 30%
The Big Idea
There are any number of concepts or frameworks, or metaphors that can be helpful when thinking of change and how to do it healthily. What follows are a collection of concepts that I have found helpful when thinking about change.
Mission Mindset
Importance: 10%The Big Idea
As God’s people we have been sent to out to the four corners of the world to proclaim the Gospel and welcome Christ’s children home.
What this means is that the “Mission Trumps”1
In other words, the core guiding principle of what we should do where we should put our money, etc. all comes down to what best furthers and supports our mission.
Footnotes
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Canoeing the Mountains, Bolsinger ↩
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River of Wellbeing
🌱Seed 😁Strongly-Agree📚Definition
Importance: 90%The
The River Of Wellbeing – The left and right side of our brain can be imagined as the two banks of a river, the River of Wellbeing
Link to originalQuote
I have been reading a book by Dr Daniel Sigel, a neuropsychiatrist, and Dr Tina Bryson, a psychotherapist, who specialise in working with children and teenagers. Their book, The whole-brain child: 12 revolutionary strategies to nurture your child’s developing mind, which was a New York Times’ bestseller, explores how a child’s brain functions and matures. Importantly, it explains why children behave the way they do, and why they can appear to be out of control. Sigel and Bryson, offer a new approach to child rearing with 12 key strategies that help healthy brain development, leading to happier and calmer children. It is an interesting read with readily appliable strategies and the next few blog posts are
summaries I have compiled from the book.THE RIVER OF WELLBEING – Part One
The left and right side of our brain can be imagined as the two banks of a river, the ‘River of Wellbeing’ (Siegel & Bryson, 2012), down which we float, day to day, in our own little canoe. When life is going well, when we feel calm and not fazed by changing situations and when we feel we have an understanding of ourselves, our life and those around us, we can sit and enjoy the journey down the river from the calmness the middle affords. All too often though as we travel throughout our day, we find ourselves being pulled closer to either bank of the river and becoming stuck. When this happens, we move further away from emotional and mental health and less able to respond flexibly to challenging situations and difficult thoughts and feelings. The two sides of the river of wellbeing are called: Chaos and Rigidity.
The Bank of Chaos – Right brain
The right side of our brain is focused on emotion, images, personal memories, intuition and gut feelings. It sends and receive signals allowing us to communicate through facial expressions, eye contact, gestures and tone of voice. The right brain is concerned about the meaning and feeling of experiences and relationships and focuses on the big picture. It concerns itself with the context of the situation rather than the content and is strongly connected to our body sensations and input from the lower part of our brain, which combine together to create emotions.
The right brain, highly present in 0-3 year olds, also experiences emotional waves and
floods. When this happens, we find ourselves veering too close to the bank of Chaos, feeling overwhelmed by difficult emotions and body sensations. We can feel out of control, knocked around by the rapids close to the bank or inundated by the crashing emotional waves. At these times, we need the perspective of our left brain to help us handle the emotions we are feeling.Bank of Rigidity – Left brain
The left brain, which comes into the picture around the time children start asking ‘why?’, is interested in cause and effect. It is the logical, literal and linguistic side of the brain, placing things in sequential order and using language to express logic. The left brain gives us order and structure, however it is very literal and can lose perspective. Helpfully, this side of the brain enables us to express emotion in words thus helping us ride the emotional waves coming from the right side.
When we float too close to the bank of Rigidity, we can become inflexible and less able to adapt, negotiate and compromise. We can become too literal, losing perspective of the situation and missing the meaning of putting things into context. We can miss nonverbal cues and only hear the words spoken to us and we try to control everyone and everything. This bank of the river often feels more predictable and seems like a safe place to retreat to when we are feeling emotionally overwhelmed. The flipside to retreating however, is that the right brain and its feelings can often be ignored or denied, and we can find ourselves in an emotional desert. When this happens, we or our children often appear distant with blank expressions, voicing statements like ’I don’t care’.
As luck would have it, we often find ourselves zig-zagging from bank to bank throughout our day, not only dealing with our own situations, but also the zig-zagging of our children who also have their own boat on their own river of wellbeing. Our challenge as parents often results from when our children are not in the flow of their own river and when they are either being too chaotic or too rigid. For example, not sharing a toy – rigidity, losing the plot when another child takes the toy from them – chaos.
How can we as parents help our children move back into the flow of the river, into a state that avoids both chaos and rigidity?
Read Part Two here.
Retrieved from kidsthatgo.com
Structure Preserving Transformation or Smooth Change
Importance: 10%The Big Idea
This change is basically the idea that all life giving change comes from an unfolding process that starts with the current structure of the whole and makes step by step changes to enhance and extend the wholeness. This process respects the current structure and basically seeks to change the least amount of big/strong/living centers in order to maximize the positive effects of the change. Because if you introduce a new strong center but destroy two others you really haven’t improved anything.
Notes that I am reading through and hope to get my hands on a full copy soon: Link to Nature of Order Book 2 Cliff notesChristopher Alexander lays out the process for how he sees structure preserving change come about. - Alexander uses the 15 properties of good centers or the geometry that gives them more life as also the names of structure preserving transformation that injects that particular type of strengthening into the system of centers. This is generally called “unfolding” by Alexander - list of these transformations - The overall way to under stand this is through the process of Differentiation of the whole to get parts. Like a cell divides to grow a baby. This is vital rather than the mechanistic model of adding parts together to make a whole. The whole idea is that we are starting from wholeness and enhancing it rather than assembling it. this preserves the previous structure and enhances it. The process of differentiation - In parallel with differentiation is a cleaning out process Conclusion of the discussion on generated complexity
Link to originalThe Edge of the Wedge
Importance: 10%The Big Idea
”It can be anything, but first it has to be something specific.” Basically the idea that in order for product or project to succeed it needs to start by solving a specific problem with an eye toward expansion. This balances going too deep or being too broad but lands with the edge of the wedge and pushes outward from there.
Article that describes this idea: The Zombcom problem
Link to originalReal Loss
Importance: 10%The Big Idea
No matter how well intentioned or effective. All translation and change brings loss.
From: Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory (Downer Grove: IVP Books, 2015), 120-122.
This is most easily seen in the psalms themselves. No amount of skill can preserve the full poetic quality of each psalm as it is translated into English or any other language. Things are lost in translation. Whether these losses are significant or not, it is important that they be carefully ascertained. This is true on a broader scale with liturgy as well. Any change, no matter how small, will lose something.
This conviction makes it clear that changing and/or generating liturgical forms is not something to be taken lightly. In fact, many argue that the risk of loss is too great to allow for variety in liturgical forms. This project, however, does not agree with this assessment. While loss is real and needs to be appreciated and acknowledged, it should not bind the church from worshiping God with all the skill and talent He has placed within His body.
Rather than dismissing loss, or turning it into a crippling fear, this project seeks to engage tradition thoughtfully to bring to life liturgical forms that help pull people into the depths of Christ’s richness and unlock interaction with our scriptural and churchly heritage.
Link to originalRepristination
🌱Seed 🤢Strongly-Disagree 📚Definition
Importance: 10%The
the unrealistic view that Christians or anyone can go back to living exactly like people from another era by doing the same things or thinking the same way.
An example is going back to a “Christian” America of the 1950s by just having people go to church more, etc.
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