I attended one of those online webinars yesterday. This one was put on by G5 (http://www.g5leadership.com/), an outstanding leadership training company committed to bringing great ideas to organizations. This particular webinar was taught by Bill Taylor, author of Practically Radical. Bill's basic thrust was that organizations who hope to make it in the future must not only be excellent in what they do but radical in how they approach what they do, especially when it comes to ideas about how to interact with people.
Now for the church which carries a 2000 year old idea at its heart, that is pretty radical. But the more I thought about it, each generation of Christianity has known at least one or two radicals who were able to translate the timeless message of Jesus Christ into their context. St. Augustine did it. So did St. Francis, Martin Luther, John Calvin and John Wesley. In more modern times we might look to Bill Hybels or Francis Chan. These people did not reinvent Jesus Christ, they just found a radically new way of communicating him to their generation.
I was especially challenged by Bill's asking if we can look at the world in a Vuja de way. Vuja de is the opposite of Deja vu (Looking at an unfamiliar situation and feeling as though you've been there before). Vuja de involves looking at a familiar situation as though we've never seen it before. Bill's great challenge was not to just look at what others are doing, but to really reflect on what is happening around us in new ways. He also stressed the importance of having whole teams of people do this so that the best ideas emerged.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Jesus Himself was pretty radical. He was deeply respectful of the love of God as revealed in the Old Testament, but He made it new in how he applied it to people that were not particularly religious. It got Him in trouble sometimes, but He launched a world-changing movement. Can we do anything less?
