The Missional Network

The cacophony of sounds, opinions, experts and polling data is almost overwhelming. I was listening to one national radio’s technology reporter talk about the phenomenon of twitter and tweeting, realizing how it suggested the desire of people to be in communication with one another, to share something of themselves, irrespective of how simple it was, with others.

We are hungry for communication and conversation. We long to have others who would attend to things about our lives. In this unthinkable world with its cacophony of sounds, how do we communicate with others in ways that our voices are heard and we are able to connect with the stories of others? Recently Jane and I had supper together with a couple who are serving in churches in Vancouver. They were great conversationalists and we look forward to more evenings like that one. Email will help us arrange times and set up connections, but it was the table, the food, the possibility of time to talk and listen well to the other that makes for communication that deepens and changes our lives.

One spoke briefly of research she had done for her doctorate. It involved listening to the conversations of women in the communities where she ministered in the UK. Her interest was in spirituality and spiritual formation. She brought to those interviews with these ordinary, everyday women the reflections of a variety of feminist theologians about women and spirituality. In the interviews, she discovered that while the theologians had been partially correct in their proposals, these women’s stories were telling her much that she would never have known apart from sitting among them and listening to their stories. These women wanted to talk about their experiences and spirituality but had little sense that they had ever been asked or listened to. There is a chorus of voices in our communities and neighborhoods longing to be heard and screaming to be given voice.

Is it possible that these technologies are ways ordinary people are acting like a chorus of voices, screaming to be heard in a confusing and unthinkable world?

This, for me, has so much to do with what the missional journey is about and why we talk about it in terms of moving back into the neighborhood in ways that we learn to ask what God is up to among the ordinary men and women in our communities. I was re-reading Augusto Boal’s amazing book, Theatre of the Oppressed (London: Pluto Press, 2000) about the development of theatre and ways in which it was originally a place for the voice of the people, where, for example, the chorus was itself the voice of the people, screaming out loud the narratives and stories of the ordinary that were always being suppressed. At its beginnings, theatre provided a stage whereby the choruses of the ordinary could be spoken out loud and people could see and hear their own narratives. They were the works of art and creativity. Soon, however, the chorus and the people were shifted off stage; they ceased to be the actors working out the art of theatre in which they learned to shape the drama of their lives. Instead, they became spectators and they were compelled to watch others, the experts, do things for them. This shift from chorus participant to spectator meant that the voices of the ordinary were effectively silenced and our world became populated by the silence of the ordinary and the quiet, screams of the local made quiet before the force of the experts, the idealists, and all the professionals who know what ordinary people need. All this silence. All this acquiescence to the voices of the experts who speak on behalf of the ordinary. Boal’s great gift was to describe a different kind of theatre.

Missional leadership is about a different kind of theatre as well. It’s about learning to become the one who calls forth, calls back into life and gives voice to the screaming voices, the choruses of voices out there in our neighborhoods and communities. This is where the Spirit is out ahead, in front of us. I thank God for long evenings, tables with great food and good wine, where we can be surprised by conversations, where voices can emerge that take us by surprise and move us to places that we could never imagine in the rush of our self imposed busyness. I love the neighborhood where I can sit down at a table on a front lawn and talk with people, amazed by them and their stories as we encounter one another in the ordinariness of an evening and conversation. Such pleasure in relationships and others far exceeds the superficiality of new technologies and social networking.

Check out Augusto Boal’s book.  A very different book but one that compliments what Boal is saying is Laurie Green’s Let’s Do Theology (London: Continuum Books, 1990).