Following is a challenging excerpt from the introduction of the new book by Alan Hirsch and Tim Catchim titled "The Permanent Revolution."
The church is equipped by Spirit and gospel to fulfill whatever tasks the Lord has set for us to do: evangelism, discipleship, church planting, servicing the poor, worship, healing, and much more. We are designed to be the world-transforming agents of the kingdom. We are meant to be a permanent revolution, not one that came and went, leaving a codified religion in its wake. That we only seldom realize this truth can be attributed to a bad case of recurring theological amnesia, one that has some seriously detrimental consequences on our capacities to get our mission done. . . .
Part of the amnesia comes for the way we conceive of, and subsequently configure, the church and its ministry. We create a paradigm — a way of perceiving our world, of filtering out what is considered real and unreal, of creating mental models of how things should be. Once established, paradigms in many ways do our thinking for us; that is their purpose. They in turn comprise clusters of what creative thinking expert Roger Martin calls algorithms. An algorithm is a predetermined formula that will produce reliable outcomes when it is consistently applied. Although paradigms help us make sense of our world by giving us ways to interpret it, they also create what is called paradigm blindness: an incapacity to see things from outside that particular perspective or paradigm. And this can account for how people fail to see certain important things that might be glaringly obvious to others. It can also account for many of the problems we in the church now face. But there is another serious downside to algorithms, as Martin so effectively articulates: "What organizations dedicated to running reliable algorithms often fail to realize is that while they reduce the risk of small variations, . . . they increase the risk of being overpowered by the various cataclysmic events that occur, situations when the future no longer resembles the past and whatever algorithm one has used is no longer relevant or useful.
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