Update From River Town

This post refers to an analogy explained in the book, Through the River; Understanding Your Assumptions About Truth. For a brief explanation of the analogy, read the blog post http://throughtheriverbook.blogspot.com/2009/01/through-riverunderstanding-your.html.

The Valley Dwellers have lived on the far side of the river for some time now. The newness is beginning to fade and they are settling into their role in the community. They act as peacemakers and bridges between people. When a Rock Dweller meets an Island Dweller, there is often misunderstanding and frustration. That is where the Valley Dweller is most useful; to guide the conversation in ways that affirm both people’s beliefs about truth, but challenge them to think differently.

It is a liminal time for River Town, but very exciting as well. People are moving from one place to another trying to adjust to what their new way of thinking means for their everyday lives. Sometimes they may move from one place to another while having a storage unit somewhere else. I have heard one person comment that they brought a suitcase along with them. It’s difficult to change your thinking all at once, but over time and with patience it can be done to some degree.

The changes on the rocky shore and sandy islands are significant. The people living on the rocky shore are becoming more polarized with some people holding more strongly to their convictions and others deciding that things are changing and there isn’t much they can do to stop it. In the sense of the latter, there is more tolerance toward the island dwellers. The former are hoping that holding strong will delay the changes that seem inevitable. The rocky shore is still well-populated, but a great many people are moving into the islands.

As time goes on, many more people are leaving the rocky shore to live on the beaches. The rock dwellers know more and more people who are living on the islands and they are even beginning to have the ability to see the world through their lens at times. There is a growing confidence among the island dwellers that they have found the answer to the dilemma they had on the rocky shore, but some are beginning to have questions.

The valley community is growing as some people are coming from the islands to settle in the valley. There is a lot of room to grow with the land spreading out and rising into the mountains. It’s not a perfect life. Problems arise when an unknown gets in the way of immediate decision-making or when an old way of thinking creeps into what they are doing. The silos of the rocky shore make it difficult for the settlers from there to see life as a whole. For those who came from the islands, allowing logic into the discussion is an obstacle as they have for so long been opposed to that way of thinking. Still, the humble approach to learning helps them to work through these challenges with each other.

In this time of great transition, people’s truth lenses are changing. Maybe you have experienced a change in the way you view truth. If so, take a minute to share your story. We would love to hear it.

Leading Through Disagreement

If you are a leader then you have had to negotiate between people on your team who disagree. When there are two people together in a room there will always be moments of disagreement. Very few leaders handle these situations well. In fact, over the years some of the biggest complaints I have heard about leaders is their handling of conflict.

Well, conflict has a lot to do with your Truth Lens (the concept from our book Through the River). The way you understand truth defines how you will negotiate between two people who claim they have the truth on their side. In our book we have three communities along a river. The Rock Dwellers believe that all truth is knowable and that there is one way to view everything. The Island Dwellers believe that truth is personal and they do not try to impose their understanding on people from other islands because their are no bridges. The Valley Dwellers live in community and believe there is truth we can know and truth we are learning. That learning requires humble dialogue.

As you can imagine leaders from these three communities will approach conflict in very different ways:

• Rock Dwellers will assess the two warring factions, weigh the information, side with the one they think is right and negotiate a surrender from the other side. This always leaves the other group defeated and disempowered.
• Island Dwellers will look for a pragmatic solution that gets people working together again without being too concerned about trying to get to the bottom of the situation - since they don't believe that one answer is attainable.
• Valley Dwellers will look for the piece of truth that is known and affirmed in Scripture and then build from there to have those in disagreement process their struggles and learn together. They will sacrificially stand in the middle and create an environment of humble learning because the process is just as important as the resolution.

We believe that Leading from the Valley represents a way forward for leaders who have been beat up and torn down by conflict in their organizations. What do you think of the way your Truth Lens might impact your ability to lead in conflict?

Visualizing Truth

Recently we recieved an email from a "Through the River" reader. This is what she had to say:

"I was conversing with our Music Pastor's wife, and 2 other home school moms and we were talking about your visual picture of world view lens and the River Town. They all got out their blackberries and touch screens and wrote down the title of your book so they could go get their own copy. Because of your explanation I understand so much why were are so focused on world view. At our homeschooling convention - the theme of everything was world view.

I am contemplating teaching a class on your book to highschool students. It is so powerful. Thanks so much for writing it.....I am just so amazed at God's timing....right when I needed a book to explain it visually in a vivid way to Jacob. JT just picked it up today and is reading through it."

What a great testimony to the power of a word picture! It is amazing what can happen when truth takes on different forms. We have been so trained to read truth in arguments and propositions that we fail to remember that God is so much bigger than linear logic. God can use images, imagination, history, art, memories, and the list goes on and on.

We would love to hear from others of you who have read the book. How has God used the visual image of River Town to bring this truth into perspecitve for you?

Why Truth is Important . . . its not what you think!

I listen to certain Christmas songs all year round. Does that surprise you? Well, it certainly surprises me. Sometimes I wonder why I turn my Ipod to these specific songs when they are very much focused on the Christmas season. But as I listen to them I remember why and those songs bring my faith to life. They speak about Truth in a person . . . the Christ.

But thinking about Truth as a person is a very odd thing to do, isn't it?

Ever since Christianity's growth began to challenge the ideas and power structures of their day, the quest for what is "the Truth" has been at the center of wars, nation-building and cultural upheaval. Truth with a capital "T" has been our goal and we have taken extreme measures to discover it, define it and monopolize it.

But how have we defined and understood Truth? For the most part we have done so through a series of propositions. Ideas that are observable and reproducible. We developed the scientific method as a way to document and categorize these ideas as our understanding of our surroundings grew more and more complex.

In reality we have done the same with our faith. We have created volumes full of statements about what we believe and how they impacts our lives and actions. Those volumes become truth with a capital "T" and we use them as foundational for our understanding of truth.

There is definitely a place for this kind of knowing, but I want to stress for you another kind of knowing that is equally important . . . Truth incarnate. In Isaiah 48:17 God says "I am the Lord your God, who teaches you what is best for you, who directs you in the way you should go." We all believe that God is the source of Truth and the one who can direct us and guide us. But that is a pretty comfortable idea since God is this supreme being out there that never became something that we could touch or feel. Never, that is, until Jesus came as the incarnation of God to this Earth to bring salvation and redemption.

All of a sudden truth with a capital "T" has a name, wears sandals, eats fish, has nightmares and eventually died on the cross. That is the idea that I keep coming back to with these Christmas songs. The idea that all that is real, true and right was among us! People like you and me saw the God of the universe in human form and we have records of what He said and what He did. I love how Jesus says in John 14:6, "If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well."

What this means is that the things that Jesus chose to care about represent Truth. The people He spent time with and the stories He shared represent His values and His presentation of God's character to us. Every time I read the Gospels, I am amazed that I am able to see into God's mind through the actions of Jesus.

But if you truly believe that we can see truth with a capital "T" when we look at Jesus, then the next thing that God did is even more amazing. Once Jesus had left the disciples, the Holy Spirit descended and came to live in all those who believed. In fact, thousands of years later, we as Christ-followers still have the blessing and honor of having the Holy Spirit in us.

So does that mean that truth with a capital "T" lives in us . . . you . . . me? Does that mean that when I respond to the Spirit and not to my flesh that I am representing the God of the universe and showing His mind and His heart to others?

If so than our lives are incarnational and our actions can reveal the character, values, ideas, desires of God. And because God's Truth is so much larger than anything we as humans can fully grasp, when we represent God and put aside our sin and selfishness, we are revealing things that God wants others to see and know. Could it be that God might use you to reveal a new idea that fills out what He has already provided through thousands of years of other believers and through His Word?

That changes how I view my preparation for tomorrow. My thoughts, attitudes and actions could be used by God to bring Truth to those around me, or they could be used to satisfy my sin nature and the Prince of Darkness who plagues this world and torments so many.

Will my life be a tool for God to bring Truth into this world?

I cannot think of a question with more practical and immediate implications than this one!

What happened to the common foundation?

I found this great infographic on Informationisbeautiful.net that shows how the Left and Right in US politics view the world. Take a minute to look at it on this screen or click on it to see the full size:



What struck me immediately about this image is that it shows the two sides completely separate. This is classic positivism (or Rock Dweller) thinking. The idea presented here says that you can either be on one side of the fence or another and that a person must select the picture puzzle that they want to build.

But what if at the bottom of this graph was another bar of all the common ideas and beliefs that both groups of people hold dearly within the system? All of a sudden we would see how those same foundational truths supported both perspectives in very different ways. Then it would be much harder to take a position of arrogance and criticism because we would see that the other side's ideas had at least some origins in a common truth.

A common foundation of truth as seen in critical realism (the Valley Dwellers) challenges us to look for foundational truth and then helps us to look at those around us through a posture of humble learning.

Doesn't that sound better than the friction we see around us today?

Truth in a Human Context

I am very excited about the upcoming Lausanne Capetown 2010 conference in South Africa. It is a key moment in the life of the 21st Century global church. You can follow Capetown on twitter at www.twitter.com/capetown2010.

This month the Global Conversation leading up to the event is focused on how our world understands truth. This is a key topic for this century and it needs some fresh thinking. I want to focus on one paragraph from Mark Chan's article in Christianity Today and on the Global Conversation:

"Our common humanity is a good starting place to share the truth of Christ. It is in the safety of genuine friendship, where trust is earned and respected, that we may honestly question assumptions. Christians can learn to sow seeds of subversion in the field of relativism by raising questions about the adequacy of moral relativism as a guide for life."

What I like about his approach is that he is starting from a position of human relationship when he talks about truth. The mistake we make so often is to force truth into an objective and sterile world. The age of modernity pushed this as the ultimate goal. But in making the truth sterile they also made it completely without meaning to humanity. It was a bunch of numbers and facts on a page without any context.

In the context of relationship we can validate the truth that we know and understand and commit to learn the rest of the truth in humble community. Mark did not really go there and I wish he would have taken that next step and challenged people not just to fight against relativism but to actively learn truth together.

One of the great challenges that we run up against in the "fight for truth" today is that people think they have to defend the truth. One of the things that Mindy and I have realized as we wrote the book with Dr. Paul Hiebert about our truth lenses is that the best defense for truth is a strong commitment to learning in community. It provides accountability and it also allows our understanding to be framed by what God is telling people across many backgrounds, cultures and experiences.

As we share about in our book, relativism is a natural progression from the short-comings of modernity. The key challenge I would like to throw out there is that the answer is not to pull people back from the raging river of relativism to the rocky shore of modernity. There is another side to the river where absolute truth can exist within the context of learning in community. That is what will appeal to those tired of being buffeted by the waves of relativism.

Is God bigger than your village?

In Tom Steffen's book "Reconnecting God's Story to Ministry," he shares about the "blinders" that we can have when our worldview shapes our theology.

"Worldviews influence the development of theological categories of convenience; they also automatically create blinders to other themes of the Storybook. All theologies are local theologies, but Western theologies tend to conceive of themselves as containing the fullness of the truth. In fact, many Westerners don't believe that culture impacts ones's questions and interpretations of theology. They argue that one is able to remain cultureless while interpreting Scripture." (pg 87)

This idea of blinders is a significant one. Each worldview has a truth lens, as we talk about in our book, and many times those who hold a certain worldview believe that their understanding of truth is the only acceptable way to view it.

Tom does a wonderful job here jolting us out of that understanding and daring us to think that there could be more than one way to view something as deep and intricate as theology - the study of God. Paul Borthwick described this so well in the introduction to our book when he speaks of an encounter with an Ethiopian Christian and their disagreement. Here is what Paul said,

"We disagreed, but as we walked towards our next meeting, he (the Ethiopian believer) turned and said, "We must have these conversations, for if we do not, we will each end up with our own village God." (pg 4, Through the River)

That is powerful! Because many of us have the tendency to focus on our own beliefs and understandings of truth as the only way to view the world, we become isolated and we make God as small as our understanding and our reality. God is much bigger than a village, but for our comfort and security we confine Him to a space that we understand.

Now the opposite is no option either. Many people swing open the gates of their village and say that God is whatever you want Him to be. This is the prevalent way of viewing truth in our culture today. And those who have a village God fight it with all their might. But the tide is too strong. Why would you ever believe that God is as small as a village when you could set God free to be whatever anyone wants?

So that is where we (and Dr. Paul Hiebert) present a third way. We call it "the truth you know and the truth you are learning." In our book we share how those who have liberated their village God and have now found that a God without any absolutes is no God at all, have another truth lens to consider.

This truth lens we share as an third way is simply that there are absolute truths that we have identified throughout Christian history and can be confirmed within our setting. These are the undeniable truths of the faith. But there is also a huge amount of truth about God that we have not yet understood. That "truth we are learning" is slowly uncovered through our experience with God, through other cultures and through the unfolding of history. Slowly God is revealing more and more of Himself as we engage with other believers and humbly learn together in community.

So what truth lens do you have? Do you believe that all truth is knowable and that your village represents all of what God is? Do you believe that God is everything to all people and that personal experience defines who God is? Or do you believe that there is truth we can know and truth we are learning in community?

What you believe about truth matters? It colors your faith, your relationships and your outreach. Pray about it and share where you are in your journey of truth.

Useful Fictions and Silos

We recently ran into another wonderful review of the book. Dan shares how creating useful fictions and silos for ideas were very powerful ideas for him. Do you know what he means? Take some time to pick up the book and check it out. We will be blogging more about those topics in coming months as well. Here is Dan's review.

Check out some of the reviews posted on Amazon

We are getting some good thoughts posted to Amazon about the book. Here are a few of the positive along with some of the more critical. You can see the full reviews by clicking here. We are so excited to hear people talking about this topic and considering it as something that impacts their lives, faith, relationships and outreach.

"This was a transparent look at the three major ways of looking at truth: Positivism, Instrumentalism, and Critical Realism. It is easy to read and avoids the textbook word use that would normally fill a book on this topic. I thought the authors approached the topic with gentleness and grace and it was not an assault on anyone's point of view." J. TenBrink

"Jon and Mindy Hirst take you through our cultural troubled waters with a canoe and a paddle. They help to identify and avoid serious rapids that impede our understanding of how culture bound we are. This is not an easy canoe trip, but as you cross this river you will learn much about yourself and your assumptions. Give it a hard stroke and you will be rewarded."--Jim Reapsome

"Like anyone who tries to figure out where a story is going before he gets there, I had the positivists and instrumentalists pegged early in the story as positions the authors do not respect very much. Characters from either of these perspectives are, in the book's portrayal, hopeless; they are stuck in their epistemology. It is only the Critical Realists who have hope, life, and healthy relationships. I was, at points, surprised not to find the Critical Realists described as wearing capes, masks, and tights. . . What the Hirsts want is for people, especially Christians, I think, to consider two things: first, that though there is objective, real truth, you don't have a monopoly on it; and second, through communication and community we can all better come to know the truth and life that God offers us." - Not listed

"My criticisms aside, the book does a good job of introducing philosophy in a non-technical way to the layperson. I highly recommend it to any one who is having troubles with family or friends and they don't have the language yet to engage holistically with those people. This book is definitely written with positivists in mind, and seems to have in its purpose a call for positivists to rethink their positions and move "through the river." As one who has already moved through much of the river, the book did not really give me anything fundamentally "new" to chew on (but then again, new is overrated). It did, however, give me a good book to recommend to family and friends who want to learn the beginnings of philosophy and its relation to a holistic approach to God." Daniel Kam

"Epistemology was once a topic confined to the college classroom, but practical issues facing Christians today benefit from a critical look into the way we see the world. After all, those lenses affect the way we relate to other people and share our faith. Through the River is an accessible introduction to the conversation." Ian F. Eastman

Question and Answer on Christian Post

If you want to get some of the basics about the book "Through the River" check out the Q&A that Christian Post published.

30 Days of Truth Teasers

Since we have launched our book, we have been tweeting about truth under the name #TruthTeaser. You can see them all on twitter, but we wanted to share them on the blog as well. These 30 ideas are short but have a lot of kick to them. We have tried to sythesize many of the biggest most critical ideas in the book into these short tweets. We pray that they are helpful in your truth journey.

1. Your assumptions about truth are like glasses that affect everything you see.
2. Some people spend their lives adding truth and subtracting untruth.
3. Some people see truth as a personal matter. They live on islands with no bridges.
4. Some find truth they know and recognize that they are learning the rest in community.
5. If you insist that all truth is knowable then experts are essential.
6. Many arguments have more to do with your truth lens than the truth itself.
7. Personal truth seems freeing but ends in isolation.
8. Humility changes how you interact about truth.
9. Culture wars rise out of a fear that our understanding of truth is losing influence.
10. Personal experience brings new perspectives on the truth we know.
11. Tolerance raises love to the highest position at the expense of truth.
12. Our understanding of truth directly affects our approach to outreach.
13. Math is the language of those who seek to completely understand truth.
14. Relationships are the language of those who believe truth is learned in community.
15. Faith represents what we know, hope what we’re learning and love how truth is lived out.
16. Personal truth is convenient until someone else’s truth collides with mine.
17. We experience a great disturbance when our assumptions about truth fall short.
18. Many of us make certainty the focus of our truth search when clarity would serve us better.
19. When we say “ham sandwich” what do you imagine? What is a true ham sandwich like?
20. When objectivity is the goal, the richness of truth is lost.
21. On the island of personal truth you are one misstep away from the river of relativism.
22. Knowing feels safe, learning feels dangerous. Its easy to settle for some knowledge and give up learning more.
23. Living in community creates the opportunity to see truth as a journey
24. Every new idea can be seen as a threat, as someone else’s or as a new perspective to discover.
25. A picture is an exact image of reality.
26. A collage is thousands of ideas about reality.
27. A montage is thousands of ideas brought together into a whole.
28. Do you view truth as a picture a collage or a montage?
29. Your truth lens is a key part of your worldview.
30. Your view of truth will impact your faith, relationship and outreach.

Prime Time America Interview

If you want a 15 minute introduction to our book, our interview on Prime Time America is a great way to take a first step into understanding your Truth Lens.

Here are the instructions on how to download it:
Go to: http://www.moodyradio.org/brd_programarchive.aspx?id=31100 and scroll down to September 17. Listen to the "part 1" audio at minute 20 and you will be there.

When Humility Becomes Tolerance

We were on WMUZ in Detroit today and the show's host Bob Dutko asked a very good question. I'm going to paraphrase the idea. He wanted to know the line between humility that leads to learning and truth and tolerance that leads to relativism and a destruction of truth. Great question.

The reason it is such a good question is that the line is very thin. In our book we talk about three truth lenses (ways to understand truth) that define most people in America today. Most of modernity focused on people who live on the rocky shore. They believe truth is completely knowable. However in the past 75 years or so people have gotten frustrated with this way of viewing truth. They moved to the islands because they wanted to allow for personal truth and they rejected the idea that logic and reason were enough. The Island Dwellers defined tolerance. They said that we can know truth but it is personal. This means that my truth is not something that can be transfered to you but is only applicable to me. In that situation there is no sharing or learning. All we can do is "live and let live."

But the islands became places of isolation so people moved to the far shore where people built a community that understood truth and had a foundation but realized that much of God's truth was not yet known. The Valley Dwellers focused on the truth they know and the truth they are learning. On the Far Shore, a common foundation of truth makes it so that you can learn together in humility. It is not "live and let live" it is "live and learn." In this community humility creates a posture where we can admit when we are wrong, set aside preconcieved ideas and allow others to help us see truth more fully in the context of relationship.

So the Islands allow for tolerance and the Valley focuses on humility. Both groups might use the same language, but their motives or reasons for what they say are very different. When you are interacting about our foundation of truth, Island dwellers will try to say that the discussion doesn't matter and people can believe whatever they want. I know, I was one. But Valley Dwellers will validate truth, discuss it, understand it and then move on to deeper things that they desire to know about their world, their faith and their God.

So as you are on your truth journey, be looking out for the fine line between humility and tolerance and be serious about pointing out the differences.

Truth Tweets

Our book is arriving next week and will be on Amazon to purchase by September 1. We are very excited and our desire is to help you get your hands around what it means to understand your assumptions about truth. We believe it will transform your faith, relationships and outreach.

But we wanted to make it super simple. So we are launching a 30 Truth Tweets on our Twitter Feed. Starting September 1 you can receive one Truth Tweet each day that will give you a small insight into our book.

If you are on Twitter, go ahead and follow our feed so you won't miss a single day! www.twitter.com/generousmind

Why Foundations Are Important

"We recognize that the taller and more expansive a leader's dream,

the deeper the foundation must be."

- Kouzes and Posner in "Credibility"

In a world that lives from minute to minute on cable news, your appearance and ability to act like you are in control are of huge value. But as Kouze and Posner so powerfully share in their book on credibility, the true measure of your impact and effectiveness does not come from your ability to put on a good performance. It comes from deep within.

The problem with "deep within" is that it is messy, complicated and hard to sell in a 5 minute news segment. But that doesn't really matter does it? In the end the foundational things in your life are much more critical to your faith, relationships and outreach than your ability to put on a good show.

Our book "Through the River" is about some of those deeper things. It is about a part of your worldview that defines how you understand truth. It is not easy to put in a box and you can't explain it in a 50 second elevator speech, but it changes everything about how you view the world. These assumptions about truth are called your epistemology - we use the term "truth lens" to bring it down to earth.

Your truth lens is what you use to define truth in every part of your life. It is foundational. How you view truth will shape your faith, the way you view other people and the way that you act out your faith in evangelism and service.

Now your truth lens isn't the only foundational thing you need to be finding out about . . . but it is a very important one. As you explore your truth lens, you will begin to understand why you struggle to get along with Uncle Joe, why you believe the way you do about a certain social issue and why you approach outreach a certain way.

Our effort in this book is to help you be aware of the truth lenses that are most prevalent in the Western world today and to help you decide which one will help you serve God most effectively.

I know you are too busy to learn about your truth lens . . . that's ok. Take time anyway. You will find that as you invest in the foundations, other things make much more sense. Your life can be lived much more on purpose and your impact is exponentially increased. Lets build some foundations together!