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4 minutes

“Oh, you are a [fill in the blank]”

Oh okay, you guys meet in homes and do the house church thing. You’re a house church guy. Do you use the DMM model (Disciple Making Movement) or the MDM model (Movement of Disciple Makers)? And I assume you follow the DBS (Discovery Bible Study) approach like the underground church in India and China?

(…loooooooong sigh…)

I know at this point if I simply say, “no” it might cause a skull fissure based on how deeply categorized I exist in this persons worldview, and I can’t afford to drive him to urgent care because I have a business call in 45 minutes that I shouldn’t miss.

I’ll gently divert the convo instead: “oh, you seem to know a lot about these things, tell me about your experiences…”

You see what just happened here is called paradigmatic thinking, and it’s genuinely damaging Western Christianity.

It’s an effort to neatly fit what we hear, see or experience in life into the paradigms that already exist in our worldview. As soon as there is just enough of a contextual handle to grab onto, we grasp it tight and stuff the whole of the story into a box we can seal and cleanly categorize.

It’s a completely Western way of thinking. It is how we approach teaching, Christianity, business, community, gender, race, and so much more. There is a tendency, if we ask questions at all, to ask only enough to get the handle to surface so we can begin the packaging process.

It is, in a word, a form of dehumanizing. I’m not saying there aren’t good uses for it, but when it comes to Christianity and community, I don’t see a place for it.

Narrative thinking

The opposite of paradigmatic thinking is narrative thinking. Narrative thinking wants to experience the uniqueness of the person in front of them. This is the approach that believes a person’s story could never be easily summarized, and that no other story is truly like it.

It leans into wonder, it peers into the unknown. It asks about the context, the lead, what else was happening, what was being felt under the surface…? Why would someone take that route over another? What wasn’t being said that was more relevant than all that had been said so far? What was happening that could never be put into words?

You see narrative thinking believes in story. It believes we’re all in stories that matter more than colloquial wisdom and epithets, even more than ancient proverbs and the sayings of wise men. When we find a way to see the story, we find a way to pierce the veil into seeing as God sees.

It moves us from our hard positions, our black-and-white, knowledge-of-good-and-evil absolutes into openness, compassion and presence. It destroys category and class, drawing us into a shared humanity where we witness the beauty and power of the heart, why people are where they are, and that Immanuel is still here with us.

People call me a home-church guy now. It’s easier than trying to process why I’d walk away from something I served and lead in for 20 years. Paradigms are nice in that way. Nothing really to think about, and certainly nothing to be challenged by.

But if you do that you miss the story; the loss, the healing, and the love that got me here. You’d miss why we don’t DMM, MDM or DSB; why we still have no name and no leaders, and why we’re fighting for things people don’t even consider.

Oh yea, and why I don’t consider myself a home-church guy.

You’d miss that each person has their own story, their own perspective and experience, and I don’t speak on their behalf. Their stories are wild and beautiful, and wholly different than mine.

It would be easy to miss all of this because, well, we’re home-church people. Just like you’re a [fill in the blank] person. Only, you’re not.

I don’t want to be a paradigm thinker anymore. I want to know the stories. I want to see people the way Jesus does. I want to get lost in the wonder of each person, of how he is weaving our stories together, and how he is present in ways I have never known before.

Because we are all, like him, a people of story.


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