Pastoral Leadership

From quantum physics, chaos theory, and self-organizing systems, pastoral images emerge for leadership. From chemistry and biology come compelling insights about how quanta—and people—relate to each other in meaningful ways. My own favorite gift from these discussions is the resurrection of freedom as a significant philosophical issue, not only in understanding our lives but the Creation. Uncompromising Newtonian arguments about cause and effect, paving the dismal way to determinism and predestination, are unlocked.

This is a serious cracking of the foundation of the intellectual assumptions you and I grew up with, but this cracking and its implications are liberating rather than devastating, renewing not confusing, and joyful rather than painful to all save those so invested in their own truth as to be blind or even abusive of truth anywhere else. Appreciative inquiry sits comfortably in the post-Newtonian world, unshackled from the causes of our woes and encouraging us to freely co-create the world we pause to envision. It proposes a world where achieving peace and justice as a norm for the human family is more than a good idea or an occasional accident of history—it’s a possibility we can make real day by day.

In the church we have a healthy skepticism about any new system that offers to deliver the truth, in whatever form, so it helps to know that AI is not so much a new truth as a new way of approaching the truth, whatever your culture or faith, a new way of knowing what we know and knowing each other. AI pays attention to how adaptive and imitative we are, to how we define and are drawn into the future by the images we put in front of ourselves. So, through a growing, deepening set of relationships, the dialogue focuses on the most promising, appreciated, valuable images available, whatever the context.

An appreciative attitude does not ignore the brokenness, difficulties, or tragedies in life, but seeks to reframe them in reference to the light. My father grew up in the Depression singing the deeply appreciative "Count your blessings, name them one by one…" The poet in Psalm 139 speaks of God discovering light in the darkest, toughest places as a matter of course, and AI aspires to do the same.