Intuitive Leadership: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor, and Chaos (emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith)
EXCERPT FROM CATALOG We live in the midst of an emerging postmodern milieu. This is a new world that seeks to bring the heart and soul and body back into contact and balance with a modern mind that is not just dangerously enlarged but nearly detached. Out of this environment a different imagination is starting to emerge. As it does, a new language set is developing that is artistic, intuitive, prophetic, and poetic. This language set and the new kinds of competencies that are beginning to assert themselves in response to this environment are doing so not in terms defined by the categories and structures of the former world (modernity) but in ways that are new--and, in many cases, ancient.  When the time comes for God to do something new within a culture that has grown stagnant or unresponsive to his movement, God often moves from the margins of that culture. We see this kind of shift illustrated in the narratives of Scripture where more often than not the margins are symbolized by the woman and the child: Moses and his mother, Ruth and Obed, Hannah and Samuel, Mary and Jesus. Because systems and structures rarely surrender their power, the woman and the child are often vulnerable and endangered. They seem insignificant, even bothersome or contemptible, and yet wiser men than I sensed a change in their world two thousand years ago. Rather than sit ensconced within their controlled worlds, they set off to find the source of this change: a babe lying in a manger, on the margins of society.  New wineskins emerge to make space for what is happening as the old often burst, unable to contain what is fresh and new. New systems and structures must emerge to release the kind of imagination and creative thinking I have been describing.